Indian as well as world cinema has always borrowed from history. In the context of India, from early nationalist films to post-Independence social dramas, film-makers have drawn upon the past both as a backdrop as well as a reservoir of meaning. In doing so, they have shaped popular understanding of historical events, often simplifying, sometimes romanticising, yet broadly remaining within the realm of interpretation. What we are witnessing today, however, is a more disquieting shift and that is the movement from interpreting history to manufacturing it. This shift goes beyond aesthetics; it is epistemic. It compels us to revisit insights from historiography, the discipline that studies how history is written, constructed, and even contested. Historians have long reminded us that history is not so much a passive chronicle of facts but an active engagement with evidence, perspective, and context. Yet even within this interpretative framework, a crucial distinction has always been maintained between interpretation and invention. While the former stretches evidence, the latter abandons it completely.
The French historian, Marc Bloch, described history as the “science of men in time”, insisting on critical scrutiny of sources and an openness to complexity. E.H. Carr, in his understated way, reminded us that in historians choosing their facts, the choices must remain anchored in a dialogue with evidence. Today, however, some cinematic narratives appear to have dispensed with this obligation altogether.
One needs to consider the growing genre of historical spectacle where characters are sculpted less from archival traces and more from present-day prejudices and anxieties. Films like Padmaavat reimagine medieval encounters in ways that privilege aesthetic grandeur over historical nuance, often flattening complex socio-political realities into binaries of virtue and villainy. Similarly, Tanhaji: The Unsung Warrior transforms a layered Maratha-Mughal conflict into a sharply polarised narrative where historical actors are stripped of ambiguity and recast as civilisational archetypes.
This tendency is also evident in Samrat Prithviraj where Prithviraj Chauhan is transformed into a near-mythic symbol of resistance. While heroism is central to cinema, such portrayals erase historical complexity and reduce the past to a moral fable. The real figure, shaped by political alliances and contingencies, is replaced by a simplified icon. As a result, history ceases to invite inquiry and, instead, becomes a tool for pronouncement. In emotions overtaking evidence, cinema risks turning collective memory into a one-dimensional narrative. This shift limits critical engagement with the past, reinforcing selective, often ideological, interpretations of history.
The problem is not fictionalisation per se. Counterfactual imagination — asking ‘what if?’ — has long been a legitimate narrative device in fictional representation. But what we are encountering today is not counterfactual curiosity; it is narrative finality wherein the viewer is not invited to question but to absorb, not to reflect but to uncritically believe it as the truth. This is not to single out individual films for criticism but to underline a pattern: the increasing confidence with which cinema claims authority over the past.
Historiography, in contrast, thrives on plurality, and that should take us to the work of Ranajit Guha and the Subaltern Studies Collective that sought to recover voices excluded from elite narratives. Their intervention involved unsettling the very idea of a singular, authoritative past and was not about replacing one orthodoxy with another. Yet much of contemporary cinema appears to be moving in the opposite direction, compressing multiplicity into a singular, emotionally-charged storyline.
One might argue that cinema has always taken liberties and, indeed, even classics have dramatised history. But there is a difference between dramatisation and distortion. When The Kashmir Files presents a deeply tragic and complex chapter through a lens that many scholars have criticised as selective and unidimensional, it raises questions about representation as well as the film-makers’ intent. Likewise, The Kerala Story claims to depict lived realities but has been widely debated for its contested factual premises and sweeping generalisations. The concern here is with the transformation of selective narratives into claims of documentary truth and not merely cinematic exaggeration.
Even films that are not strictly historical in the conventional sense, such as Dhurandhar, participate in this broader ecosystem of narrative construction where contemporary anxieties are projected backward or outward, often blurring the lines among fact, fiction, and ideological suggestion. The result is a cinematic language that appears to draw legitimacy from history while simultaneously reshaping it to fit contemporary imperatives. Internationally, this phenomenon is not new: films like Braveheart have long been critiqued for historical inaccuracies that reshape public memory, turning cinematic fiction into perceived fact. Yet, what distinguishes the current moment is the convergence of cinema with a wider political and cultural climate where narratives about the past are not merely stories but instruments of mobilisation.
The concern deepens in societies marked by diversity and layered identities. Historical memory in such contexts is lived, contested, and often fragile. Cinema, in presenting a monolithic version of the past, risks hardening identities and deepening fault lines. Communities cease to be participants in a shared, if contested, history. Instead they are recast and mobilised as protagonists and antagonists in a dramatised civilisational conflict. The past, instead of being a site of inquiry, becomes an instrument of mobilisation.
The American historian, Hayden White, argued that narratives derive their force not only from facts but from their structure and emotional resonance. Cinema, with its visual immediacy and immersive storytelling, amplifies this effect manifold. For many, especially in an age where reading habits are in decline, film becomes the first, and often the only, encounter with history.
This raises a fundamental question: who gets to tell the past, and with what responsibility? As film-makers increasingly come to assume the role of historians without the discipline of method, they blur the boundary between storytelling and knowledge production. This blurring becomes particularly troubling when it aligns with contemporary political currents where selective histories are mobilised to legitimise present-day agendas. The space for any other kind of historical storytelling — be it around progressive figures or social and political events whose commemoration is inconvenient to the incumbent regime — remains hostage to censorship tussles.
Cinema can illuminate the past, but only if it approaches it with humility: not as the final word but as a participant in a larger, more complex conversation. The challenge is not to curtail cinema but to contextualise it, to recognise it as interpretation rather than authority. It must remain one voice among many, not the definitive account of the past. Only then can we preserve both creative liberty and the integrity of historical understanding.
This also calls for a broader cultural response, one that revitalises historical literacy through critical engagement and not just not rote memorisation. Students must be encouraged to see history not as an ongoing, evolving conversation shaped by evidence, interpretation, and debate and not as a closed archive of settled facts.
What is equally important is the need to nurture diversity within cinematic storytelling. In a context where multiple narratives coexist, they interrogate and challenge one another, preventing any single version from acquiring unchallenged authority. Such plurality enriches both art and understanding. A plural cinematic culture becomes an extension of a plural historiography. Here, the State has a vital and constructive role to play, not as a censor but as an enabler by supporting institutions, encouraging independent voices, and fostering conditions where complexity, rather than conformity, can truly thrive. History, as historiography reminds us, is never a closed text but a continuous dialogue between past and present, evidence and interpretation, memory and meaning. When this dialogue is reduced to a monologue, however visually compelling, it diminishes both history and society.
Manoj Kumar Jha is member of Parliament (Rajya Sabha), Rashtriya Janata Dal