On January 18, 1933, Joseph Goebbels went to watch the film Der Rebell (The Rebel) with his mentor, Adolf Hitler, and upon returning, Goebbels, greatly impressed with how the film moved the audience, wrote in his diary, “Here you really see what can be done with the film as an artistic medium when it is really understood.” Shortly thereafter, Goebbels was appointed “minister of popular entertainment and propaganda” in the Nazi government, and films remained an important focus of his work. David Stewart Hull, in his book Film in the Third Reich, traces the transformation of German films during the Nazi era from critically acclaimed art to hate mongering propaganda. The parallels that emerge in contemporary Bollywood cinema with German films in the 1930s under the Nazi Party are stark and deeply disturbing.
Propaganda Through Films: Kashmir To Udaipur Files
Udaipur Files is just one film. A lot more films are in the making, one worse than the other. There is a need to pause and reflect on where we are heading
As the controversy surrounding the film Udaipur Files courses its way through the judicial system, perhaps the moment is ripe to step back and see where our films are headed. There has been an increase in particular varieties of films over the course of the last decade. The first variety is hyper-nationalistic films glorifying the army, police and security agencies. Films in this genre include war films like Uri: The Surgical Strike (2019), Bhuj: The Pride of India (2021) and The Ghazi Attack (2017), which was based on submarine warfare, among others. Such films have always been produced, albeit not as frequently, and these films are otherwise unobjectionable, but are still relevant to the discussion here because coincidentally, the early days of Nazi power saw an increase in the production of nationalistic films, particularly war films, depicting German heroism in an exaggerated form. These included war films like Berge in Flammen (The Doomed Battalion, 1931), Der Rebell (The Rebel, 1932) and a drama on submarine warfare during the First World War called Morgenrot (Dawn, 1933), which were publicly watched by Hitler and Goebbels and recommended by them to audiences.
The second variety are films about historical events that present dubious and coloured narratives of history, with bold advertising stating that they are ‘based on true events’ and a fleeting disclaimer at the beginning of the film that basically says that they are works of fiction and may not be held to any standard of fidelity to historical facts. Notable films of this variety in the last decade include Kesari (2019), Tanhaji: The Unsung Warrior (2020) and Chhaava (2025), which distort historical facts to introduce Islamophobic elements into history. Then there are the more obvious propaganda films taking creative liberties with more recent events such as Indu Sarkar (2017), The Accidental Prime Minister (2019), PM Narendra Modi (2019), Main Atal Hoon (2024), Swatantrya Veer Savarkar (2024) and Article 370 (2024) among others. This phenomenon is interesting because we find a spate of propaganda films like S.A.-Mann Brand (1933), Hitlerjunge Quex (1933) and Hans Westmar (1933) in Nazi Germany, which were heavily fictionalised biographies of contemporary figures in the Nazi Party. Incidentally, in an amusing turn of irony, the film Hans Westmar, based on the life of Horst Wessel, the author of the party anthem, was banned by the Nazi Party itself because it was too close to the truth of the inglorious life of its subject, who was a pimp murdered in a street brawl. The film was then modified to make it more suitably heroic and was released again.
The last variety of films promoted by the Nazi Party was anti-Semitic films, which demonised Jews and showed them to be a vile, scheming and filthy lot having no loyalty to their country and maintaining lecherous designs on ‘German’ women. Some films like Robert and Bertram (1939) were fictional, having Jewish villains bringing out the worst stereotypes of the Jewish community, but still more problematic were the films that claimed to be based on true events and were distortions of recent history. Films in this category included Jud Süß (1940), a film based on the life of a financier in the court of a German duke in the 1700s who caused the ruin of the duchy and was hanged after a public revolt; Die Rothschild Aktien von Waterloo (The Rothschild’s Shares in Waterloo, 1940), which traced the history of the Rothschilds, a prominent Jewish European family; and, the ‘documentary’ film, Der ewige Jude (The Eternal Jew, 1940) depicting the lives of Jewish people. There were reports of people coming out of theatres after watching Jud Süß beating up Jews on the streets, including an incident in Vienna in which an old Jewish man was lynched to death outside a theatre by a Hitler Youth band after watching the film. Not only were these films publicly endorsed by Hitler as well as Goebbels and senior functionaries of the Nazi Party, they were later re-released and played in towns and cities wherever Jews were being rounded up to be taken to the concentration camps, so that their ‘German’ neighbours would be disinclined to help them.
It is the reflection of this last category of films in recent Bollywood productions that is the most disturbing. While films like 72 Hoorain (2019) and Hamare Baarah (2024) use fiction as a tool to embellish the worst stereotypes about Indian Muslims just as Robert and Bertram did of Jews, still more dangerous are films like The Kashmir Files (2022), The Kerala Story (2023) and now Udaipur Files, which claim to be based on true events. The Kashmir Files, which grossly exaggerated the facts and incidents around the unfortunate killings and ethnic cleansing of Kashmiri Pandits from the Kashmir Valley in the 1990s, was publicly endorsed and recommended by the Prime Minister, sitting chief ministers and the senior leadership of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). The film was giving tax exemption by various BJP-ruled state governments, free tickets were distributed by the BJP leadership, e-rickshaws around theatres were paid to ferry movie-goers without charging them and in a bizarre and unprecedented move, the Madhya Pradesh government is alleged to have given leave from work to policemen in the state to watch the film. Expressions of hate and incidents of violence were reported, which were connected to the screening of the film, including a full-fledged communal riot reported in Khargone in Madhya Pradesh following a Ram Navami procession with a tableau themed around the movie.
The producers of Udaipur Files stated in court that the trailer of the film had ‘by mistake’ carried scenes from the uncensored version of the film.
The Kerala Story seemed to have borrowed the narrative and elements from the life of Hadiya aka Akhila, a homeopathy student from Kerala whom the Supreme Court rescued from captivity by its judgement in the Shafin Jahan vs Asokan K.M case. The Kerala High Court had confined Hadiya to the forced custody of her father, Asokan, questioning her sanity in light of her life choices of converting to Islam and marrying a Muslim man, Shafin Jahan. The Supreme Court overturned the judgement after it interviewed Hadiya and found instead of a woman who had lost her grip on her senses, an enlightened, educated and empowered woman who challenged the authority of the court to question her life choices. The Kerala Story used elements that appear borrowed from her life, but turned the narrative on its head, depicting Shalini, a nursing student, as being the victim of an international Muslim conspiracy to convert Hindu and Christian women and send them to fight for the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS). Incidentally, these were the exact arguments made in the Hadiya case, where Senior Advocate Shyam Divan, appearing on behalf of her father, had unsuccessfully argued that Hadiya was the victim of an international conspiracy, who had been ‘psychologically kidnapped’ by her Muslim influencers and there was a plan afoot to send her to Syria. The film claimed this to be the true story of 32,000 Hindu and Christian girls in Kerala, but this claim was edited out when petitions were filed before the Supreme Court asking for a ban on the film. The petitions still remain pending, awaiting final hearing, while the film has run its course through the theatres as well as the hearts and minds of its audiences. Incidentally, the Prime Minister, several chief ministers, cabinet ministers and senior BJP leaders endorsed this film too claiming The Kerala Story ‘exposed the terror conspiracy in Kerala’.
Udaipur Files, from its trailer, is a mishmash of various recent events, all of which are sub judice before courts in the country. The Kanhaiya Lal murder case, Nupur Sharma’s statements on TV disparaging Prophet Muhammad—which caused an international furore till she was asked by the Supreme Court to publicly apologise, and concerning which a criminal matter is still pending against her—and the civil suits filed by some Hindus claiming that the Gyanvapi Mosque in Varanasi is actually a temple, all find a place in the film amidst the worst kind of Islamophobic tropes, with its Muslim protagonists depicting the most vile and base traits of human character, which are then generalised by the dialogues to the entire community.
Thankfully, where we stand on a different footing from Nazi Germany is that in India, any film that qualifies as hate speech, far from having legal protection, is criminalised under our laws and resort can be taken to the judicial system to protect the rights of the targeted individuals/groups by banning the film and even initiating criminal prosecution against the filmmakers. In our constitutional framework, unlike countries like the US, the freedom of expression is not absolute and is subject to well-defined restrictions that can be imposed on the grounds of sovereignty, security and integrity of India, its friendly relations with foreign states, public order, decency or morality, contempt of court, defamation and incitement to an offence. In defining the contours of the freedom of expression in relation to films, the Supreme Court, in the case of producer K. A. Abbas in 1971, had held that the treatment of films must be different from other forms of art because of the instant appeal of films, their versatility and realism. “The motion picture is able to stir up emotions more deeply than any other product of art,” the apex court acknowledged. The Ministry of Information and Broadcasting issued a notification in 1991 under the Cinematograph Act, 1952, prescribing the standards to be adhered to by the Central Board for Film Certification (CBFC) while certifying films for public exhibition. The directive casts a positive obligation on the filmmaker to be ‘responsible’ and ‘sensitive’ to the values and standards of society, and a duty on the CBFC to ensure that films contemptuous of racial, religious or other groups, or which promote communal attitudes, endanger public order, defame individuals or groups or that desensitise or dehumanise people are not shown. In doing so, the CBFC is directed to look at a film in its entirety from the point of view of its overall impact.
The producers of Udaipur Files stated in court that the trailer of the film had ‘by mistake’ carried scenes from the uncensored version of the film. Meanwhile, the CBFC appeared in court and indicated that it has made 55 cuts before granting Udaipur Files an ‘A’ certificate. What now remains to be seen by the courts is whether these cuts are sufficient to alter the overall openly communal narrative of the film. Whether replacing ‘Musalmano’ with ‘in logon’—while referring to bearded men with kohl in their eyes and wearing skullcaps—will remove the prejudice against Muslims in the minds of the audience; whether changing the name of Gyanvapi Masjid to Varanasi Masjid means the movie is no longer about a communally sensitive case pending in court; and, whether removing the offensive statement by the thinly disguised ‘Nutan Sharma’, but retaining her justification of her statement in the TV debate will not disturb public order and India’s relations with the Islamic world—the way the original controversy had—are some of the questions before the court.
The answer to these questions will emerge in the next few days. But Udaipur Files is just one film. A lot more are in the making, one worse than the other. There is a need to pause and reflect on where we are heading. The next step in Nazi Germany was the abolition of criticism of art, including films, by law in 1936. Thankfully, we still have this freedom in India. We may as well exercise it while we can.
(Views expressed are personal)
In Jungle Raj, Outlook’s August 1 issue, we explored why the Bihar elections matter so much. Our reporters delved into the state’s caste equations, governance records, electoral controversies and national ambitions, along with taking a hard look at the law and order situation— all of which make the 2025 Bihar Assembly elections one of the most consequential state polls of this electoral cycle. The article appeared as 'Kashmir To Udaipur: Files & Lies'.
Saiyyad Mohammad Nizamuddin Pasha is a Delhi-based lawyer.