The Revolution Will Be Brahminized: RRR and the Reinvention of Empire

When I watched the RRR it was a stunning movie, with all the powerful sound beats, music, songs and aesthetics and fights and everything, to be honest I liked the movie. But then one day I was thinking “What is cinema without politics?” and I again rewatched the film to see between the frames and characters; how every character and scene has been shown as it also included a tribal community (Gond Tribe). That's the time I saw the Upper caste fantasy cinema which eventually legitimizes the erasure of anti-caste Revolutionary History.

When SS Rajamouli's RRR swept global awards circuits—capturing a Golden Globe and an Oscar for "Naatu Naatu"—Western critics celebrated its spectacular action sequences and anti-colonial narrative. Yet beneath the film's progressive veneer lies a dangerous ideological project which is the systematic erasure of anti-caste revolutionary history through upper-caste epistemological frameworks. The film transforms two radical anti-landlord revolutionaries into a Brahminical Hindu fantasy, actively reinforcing the very hierarchies these historical figures fought against.

"The film transforms two radical anti-landlord revolutionaries into a Brahminical Hindu fantasy, actively reinforcing the very hierarchies these historical figures fought against."

The Violence of Historical Distortion

At the heart of RRR lies a profound act of historical violence. The film's climactic scene crystallizes this erasure: Komaram Bheem, played by NTR Jr., begs or asks his upper-caste "brother" Alluri Sitarama Raju—whose caste location is made visually explicit through the he wears—"Give me an education, brother." Ram Charan's character then condescends to write "Jal, Jangal, Zameen" in Devanagari script, as if teaching Bheem his own revolutionary slogan.

This scene represents epistemological violence of the most insidious kind. The historical Komaram Bheem (1901-1940), the Gond tribal leader who coined the revolutionary slogan "Jal, Jangal, Zameen" and led a decade-long guerrilla campaign against feudal Nizams and upper-caste zamindars, was not the illiterate "noble savage" as RRR Director Rajamouli depicts. Historical records document that Bheem worked at a printing press in Chanda where a local publisher named Vitoba gave him shelter. During this period, Bheem learned to read and write English, Hindi, and Urdu, operated within regional railway distribution networks, and wrote petitions to the Nizams demanding regional autonomy for Adivasi communities.

Anthropologist Christoph von Fürer-Haimendorf described the historical Komaram as "an intelligent young man able to read and write." Yet Rajamouli reduces this educated revolutionary leader to someone who must literally beg for literacy from an upper-caste savior. The film invisibilizes the long intellectual tradition of the Gond community, preserved in their literature, science, and art – an erasure that serves the film's Brahminical logic that is that the Adivasi’s or Dalit’s political consciousness must originate from upper-caste benevolence rather than indigenous resistance.

Structural Caste Politics: Tollywood's Oligopoly

The casting itself constitutes representational violence. Director SS Rajamouli belongs to the Kamma caste, as does lead actor NTR Jr., while Ram Charan belongs to the Kapu caste – both dominant agricultural castes that historically exploited the very Adivasi communities Komaram Bheem organized against. The decision to cast NTR Jr., grandson of a former Andhra Pradesh chief minister and member of the dominant Kamma caste, to play a Gond tribal leader perpetuates Tollywood's caste oligopoly that systematically excludes Dalits and Adivasis from creative positions.

This exclusion is structural, not accidental. Kamma and Kapu castes dominate Telugu cinema, having invested agricultural profits from the Green Revolution into film production during the 1960s. While Dalits and Adivasis provide essential labor behind the scenes, they remain barred from acting, directing, or producing. The collaboration between supposedly "rival" Kamma and Kapu families for RRR reveals how dominant castes unify to maintain industry control, even as their fan bases engage in sectarian battles.

Brahminical Epistemology: Cinema as Restoration, Not Reconstitution

Dr. BR Ambedkar's 1942 vision of cinema as "reconstitution" rather than "restoration" provides the theoretical framework to decode RRR's ideological project. In a rare 1942 interview with Filmindia magazine, Ambedkar warned against cinema's role in spreading Hindu mythology and superstition, criticizing producers for "mythological stupidities" rather than depicting marginalized communities as "self-reliant" agents "demanding the Rights of Men." He envisioned cinema's potential to reconstitute a liberating culture in place of Brahminical asceticism, challenging the very foundations of caste epistemology.

Rajamouli's visual language does precisely what Ambedkar warned against. Drawing from Hindu epics like the Ramayana and Mahabharata – texts foundational to caste ideology where tribals are depicted as demons and non-humans – the film reproduces colonial-era civilizing missions. When Ram "teaches" Bheem to read, RRR enacts the same paternalistic education that British colonizers and Brahmin elites used to justify caste-based educational apartheid. The scene reproduces upper-castes as knowledge-givers and Adivasis as knowledge-receivers – the essence of epistemological violence.

But it doesn't stop here. The symbolic violence extends to the film's appropriation of Adivasi resistance. When Alluri writes "Jal, Jangal, Zameen" in Devanagari script on a white flag, he not only appropriates Bheem's own slogan but desecrates a sacred Gond symbol while using a language that has been a colonizing force for the erasure of Adivasi knowledge and culture. The imposition of Hindi and Hinduism has been key to the violent process of assimilating Adivasis into the Indian nation-state which we are seeing right now in the nation as well, a project that continues through formal education systems designed to estrange Adivasis from themselves.

Global Casteism: The Politics of Caste Laundering

RRR's international success raises urgent questions about how Western audiences legitimize casteist narratives. The film's anti-British stance provides progressive cover while its anti-Adivasi caste logic remains invisible to international viewers schooled in recognizing racism but lacking frameworks for identifying casteism. This constitutes "caste laundering" – exporting Brahminical ideology through cinema's supposedly "universal" language.

Western critics who celebrated RRR as a triumph of representation failed to recognize that every choice in the film is deeply steeped in and informed by a privileged upper-caste lens and framework that brutally reinforces the invisible Brahmanical hierarchy. The film's two leads are reduced to little more than the names and aesthetics of the real historical figures. At every turn, Rajamouli de-specifies and decontextualizes, wrapping everything in a casteist, status-quo-affirming lens – what critics aptly term a "casteist Hindu wash of history and the independence struggle."

The film's ending makes its Hindu nationalist politics clear. Its montage of Indian "freedom fighters" deliberately excludes key figures: India's first Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru, Muslim revolutionaries like Tipu Sultan who actually fought the British, and B.R. Ambedkar, the Dalit leader who wrote India's constitution. Instead, the credits showcase figures aligned with Hindu nationalist ideology, including Chhatrapati Shivaji, a Maratha king who died centuries before India's independence struggle but has been adopted as a Hindu nationalist icon.

Cinema, Caste, and Historical Truth

RRR's global acclaim demonstrates how majoritarian cinema can legitimize historical erasure on an international scale. The film does not simply misrepresent two revolutionaries – it actively produces a Brahminical epistemology that positions upper-caste actors, directors, and narratives as natural inheritors of all revolutionary history, including explicitly anti-landlord, anti-caste struggles.

When Komaram Bheem's educated, politically sophisticated resistance is transformed into illiterate simplicity requiring upper-caste tutelage, we witness not creative license but ideological violence. RRR manages to depict Adivasis as "compatriots instead of enemies" and considers this generous enough, never questioning the fundamental Brahminical hierarchy that positions them as eternal students to upper-caste teachers.

As activists, writers, poets, thinkers and scholars committed to anti-caste epistemologies, we must develop frameworks that enable global audiences to recognize caste as they recognize race – not as an Indian peculiarity but as a system of oppression that operates through cultural production or every means generally, including cinema and art forms. Only then can we prevent films from using progressive anti-colonial aesthetics to smuggle regressive caste ideologies onto the world stage, legitimizing the very hierarchies that revolutionaries like Komaram Bheem spent their lives fighting to dismantle.