Mumbai, India – Hours after Hindu nationalist groups staged a protest demanding the removal of 17th-century Mughal emperor Aurangzeb’s tomb, communal violence broke out in the Indian city of Nagpur, Maharashtra. On the evening of March 17, five civilians and at least 33 policemen were injured as multiple incidents of arson and stone-pelting were reported, forcing police to impose a curfew in parts of the city.

Nagpur is not, however, where the longest-reigning Mughal emperor is buried. Aurangzeb’s tomb lies 500 km westwards, in a district named after him, Aurangabad, until its renaming in 2023 as Chhatrapati Sambhajinagar, after the second Maratha warrior king, who was tortured and killed by the former in 1689.        

Muslim men subsequently arrested for stone-pelting were not defending the emperor’s tomb. Instead, they were reacting to an incident earlier in the day when Hindutva activists burned a green ‘chadar’—a replica of a holy carpet sometimes offered at shrines—believing Quranic verses were printed on the fabric.  

Bollywood fuelled hate

Addressing the state legislature on March 18, Maharashtra chief minister Devendra Fadnavis said popular anger against Aurangzeb, widely denounced by Indians for his desecration of Hindu temples and his orthodox Islamic state, had been stoked afresh by Bollywood.

Its latest historical offering, Chhaava, is a biopic on Chhatrapati Sambhaji, son of Maratha warrior king Chhatrapati Shivaji, founder of the Maratha empire. 

Chhaava, literally translated as lion cub, is the highest-grossing Bollywood film of the year, crossing $86 million (Rs 750 crore) at box office collections in just over a month.

The Vicky Kaushal-starrer joins a growing list of Bollywood films that have blurred the line between historical storytelling and outright propaganda. Productions like The Kashmir Files, The Sabarmati Report, Article 370, and Swatantrya Veer Savarkar have peddled exaggerated or one-sided narratives, reinforcing ideologies and amplifying divisive political rhetoric.

When The Kerala Story released in 2023, its trailer claimed that more than 32,000 women from Kerala had joined Daesh, a number later revised to only three.  

The same Islamophobic thread ran through The Kashmir Files, set against the exodus of Hindu Kashmiri Pandits from the Muslim-dominated and militancy-hit Kashmir valley in the 1990s. Its portrayal was “provocative and one-sided” enough for Singapore to ban the film.  

In India, no less than Prime Minister Narendra Modi recommended watching the movie, and Hindu hardline activists in multiple cities, including Agra, Hyderabad and Bhatkal, held demonstrations demanding its screening.

Elsewhere, cinema-goers were recorded threatening to boycott Muslim-owned businesses en masse or chanting ‘Jai Shri Ram’. Once a devotional greeting meaning ‘victory to Ram’, the chant has recently been repurposed as a slogan of Hindu nationalist aggression. 

Rewriting history

Bollywood’s nationalist epics do more than just reframe history—they erase complexity, turning nuanced figures into simplistic heroes and villains. Chhaava, like Samrat Prithviraj (2022) and Swatantrya Veer Savarkar (2024), promotes a hyper-nationalist version of the past: Hindu rulers are depicted as noble warriors, while Muslim rulers are cast as oppressors — the aim set to polarise communities. 

Designed to normalise everyday bigotry against India’s 160 million Muslims, the portrayals—and audiences’ hysterical reception—of hyper-valorised Hindu heroes discard not just nuance but also any inconvenient truths.    

Hindutva leaders across Maharashtra, including Chief Minister Fadnavis, have now vowed action against any disrespect to Chhatrapati Sambhaji Maharaj.

Sambhaji is lionised in Chhava’s narrative as a perfect leader. Yet, M.S. Golwalkar, an early leader of the Hindu far-right Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), called him unfit to rule. Even Veer Savarkar, one of Hindutva’s most celebrated figures, wrote about Sambhaji’s alleged flaws.

Similarly, Aurangzeb—reviled by large sections of Indian society—spent his later years in austerity, sewing prayer caps and choosing a simple grave near the Sufi shrine of Zaynuddin Shirazi as an act of piety. The resting place of Shirazi, and of Aurangzeb, is in Khultabad, a fortified town dotted with the pretty white domes of dozens of the mystic Sufi saints’ tombs. 

Contemporary filmography finds it simpler, and more profitable in a sharply polarised society, to replace multiple, nuanced and complex narratives with linear stories, with no room for Hindu heroes’ culpability or fallibility, safely locating criminality and violence elsewhere.

And because Bollywood is such a powerful driver of cultural mores, this battle over the politics of remembering clouds how—and indeed, whether—we comprehend and navigate historical tragedies or use them as point-scoring tools. 

Aurangzeb died in the year 1707, more than a hundred years before the British vanquished the Marathas in 1818. The civilisational resentment of today’s Hindutva leaders did not prompt Maratha rulers of the 18th and 19th centuries to dig up the emperor’s grave.

Hate as a business model  

The demand to demolish Aurangzeb’s tomb, a protected site under the Archaeological Survey of India, is not new, but on March 9, Maharashtra’s chief minister openly supported it—albeit “through legal process.” A week prior, a Muslim legislator was suspended for merely stating that Aurangzeb was not a cruel ruler.

Providing context for these discussions were rallies by Hindu organisations, apparently prompted by the film Chhaava, asking for the tomb to be removed. Speaking at some of these rallies was BJP legislator from the southern state of Telangana, T Raja Singh, a key polarising figure in several BJP campaigns with a clutch of hate speech cases filed against him.

On March 20, the ASI erected a tin-sheet barrier on two sides of the tomb structure in Khultabad even as police stepped up security at the site. Two days before the Nagpur violence, activists of Hindutva group Vishwa Hindu Parishad had threatened to remove the tomb “like we observed during the Ram Janmabhoomi movement”, a reference to the destruction of the Babri Masjid (mosque) in Ayodhya in 1992, by Hindu mobs.   

Meanwhile, the Maharashtra police asked platforms to take down nearly 140 social media posts aimed at inciting communal unrest. Among the 65 people arrested since Tuesday were eight members of Hindu outfits VHP and Bajrang Dal.    

The Nagpur violence is not an isolated incident but is instead part of a system that thrives on religious polarisation, where films stoke historical grievances, politicians amplify them, and street-level provocations turn them into violence.

In this feedback loop, cinematic spectacle and street-level provocations cross paths to co-opt Bollywood, manufacture enemies and forever sully our conceptions of nationhood and belonging.