The huge national hate campaign forcing Malayalam film Empuraan to make 24 cuts after release is yet another demonstration of the fact that the cultural space in India now can accord freedom of speech only when it is in sync with the official ideology.

Freedom of expression has always been subject to depredations from all political parties but what is distinct in the last decade is the unprecedented nature of the attacks (seen in the killings of right-wing critics Narendra Dabholkar, Govind Pansare, M. M. Kalburgi and Gauri Lankesh) and that these go beyond the political realm and stem from a deeply solidifying religious majoritarian cultural common sense. What Empuraan, a technically superior but otherwise cinematically poor work of art, does is to disturb this, even if it is done in a politically superficial and formulaic manner.

Nevertheless, this has powerfully threatened the majoritarian common sense, provoking virulent reactions. An article in the RSS mouthpiece Organiser calls the film an “anti-Hindu and anti-Bharat narrative,” which is repeated across the Hindu nationalist ecosphere. The commercial Indian film industry, especially Bollywood, has become weak-kneed in front of the ruling dispensation to such an extent that not only has it abstained from remotely criticising the ruling government, but is producing blatant propagandist films extolling the ruling ideology. In this climate of grave pusillanimity, Empuraan’s depiction of Gujarat “riots” becomes arguably the bravest act by a mainstream Indian big-budget film.

Ironically, Hindu nationalist supporters demand complexity and nuance in Empuraan, when the BJP governments have promoted films like the Kerala Story (among over 20 recent propaganda films), with claims of a staggering 32,000 women from Kerala being converted to Islam and recruited to the Islamic State, when the actual number was three. The Supreme Court intervened to note that the claim was not factual. The demand for Empuraan, which shows the Godhra Sabarmati Express train fire which killed 59 Hindu Karsevaks, to be more explicit by showing a Muslim mob burning the coach, is based on a commonly held and dangerously wrong Hindu nationalist assumption. Which is, the riots that followed were a justifiable moral “reaction” of ordinary citizens to the “action” of the tragic train killings, rather than punishing the accused by law.

The fundamental problem with the discourse around Emupraan stems from the above misconception. But it was, in actuality, as has been documented copiously in media reports and academic research, majoritarian mobs attacking a religious minority with the condonation or approval of authorities, thus making it a pogrom. Hence, scholar Ashutosh Varshney, who has extensively studied Hindu-Muslim violence, terms Gujarat 2002 as the “first full-blooded pogrom in independent India” (he calls the 1984 Sikh massacre a semi-pogrom).

A false equivalence cannot be drawn between a Muslim mob killing 59 Hindus and a retaliatory pogrom which killed 1,100 people (including 200 Hindus) — with unofficial estimates at 2,000 — and displaced 1,00,000 Muslims to refugee camps. The film resists this false equivalence. The present generation may not know that Maya Kodnani, a Cabinet Minister in Gujarat, was initially sentenced to 28 years after the courts termed her the “kingpin” of a mob that killed 97 people. She was later acquitted in 2018, but Babu Bajrangi, Bajrang Dal leader, convicted for the same crime, was not (a similar figure is Empuraan’s antagonist). While Hindu nationalist supporters are aghast at the depiction of the rape of a woman, evoking Bilkis Bano, in the film, it is only recently that the Gujarat government shockingly released the convicts who had gangraped Bano and killed seven family members including her child. One of the convicts, on release, appeared on stage with a BJP MP and MLA. The Supreme Court had to step in to rule the remission as unlawful and send the convicts back to jail.

The demand that the Godhra accused be shown in the film must be considered against the fact that the case is among the most contentious, with different official commissions coming to different conclusions. Thirty-one people were convicted. But the Gujarat High Court ruled in 2017 that it was not a case of terrorism (despite 15 years of right-wing propaganda claiming so, and even the recent propagandist film Sabarmati Report calling it “India’s 9/11”) and commuted all the death sentences. Critically, the Supreme Court has yet to give a final verdict on the petitions of the convicted prisoners, 23 years later.

When the outrage against Empuraan claims that it vilifies the “entire Hindu community” (Organiser), the film, unlike Hindutva propaganda films which universally demonise Muslims, portrays a Hindu woman who loses her life protecting Muslims under attack, features a Hindu woman protagonist, and against the claims of “whitewashing Islamic terrorism” depicts Islamist terror training camps in Pakistan and children being saved from other camps.

‘Majoritarian logic’

While the threats to freedom of expression have been nationwide, Empuraan’s cuts are unprecedented in Kerala, where all political ideologies have been ruthlessly critiqued in films, including in Empuraan, where especially the Communist party has been mocked. As the episode shows, Kerala is not immune to the sway of religious majoritarian logic. This logic is aided by the secular opposition’s double standards, for instance, when the Left silently intimidated a film critical of it (written by the same scriptwriter of Empuraan), a tactic now taken to a new, brazen, societal level by the Right. The muted response of the Malayalam film industry to the current controversy is telling.

The spectacular growth of Hindutva in Kerala’s civil society has been hidden from outside due to its poor electoral record, which itself has seen a drastic shift with the BJP-led NDA’s parliamentary vote share increasing from 6.5% to nearly 20% in 15 years. This growth seeks to craft a new politics, like incorporating the Christian community into the majoritarian logic. Another Organiser article claimed that Empuraan is also against Christianity and Jesus Christ.

Empuraan rightly hints at the global shadow networks and mafias influencing domestic politics, but ultimately, its critique of the communalist scourge is not sufficiently invested in democratic politics with individual revenge and violence tropes, which might in fact reinforce the majoritarian logic. Of course, to expect beyond this from a film that seeks a pan-India massified audience, and in the process losing what is unique to Malayalam cinema, is wishful.

The Czech writer Milan Kundera, resisting Communist state authoritarianism, had written, “the struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting.” Empuraan’s sole contribution is to place in popular memory what is being rapidly erased as a part of the majoritarian logic.

Nissim Mannathukkaren is with Dalhousie University, Canada, and is on X @nmannathukkaren