Celluloid Empires and Tribal Erasures: Reading RRR Through a Postcolonial Lens

Popular cinema rarely just entertains  it also manufactures consent. Two pieces I engaged with this week make that case from opposite corners of the world.This blog essay, "Heroes or Hegemons? The Celluloid Empire of Rambo and Bond in America's Geopolitical Narrative," traces how the Rambo and James Bond franchises turned Cold War policy into heroic spectacle, normalizing American military and cultural dominance as simply "how the world works." His companion pre-print, "Reimagining Resistance: The Appropriation of Tribal Heroes in Rajamouli's RRR," turns the same critical lens inward, arguing that S.S. Rajamouli's 2022 blockbuster lifts two Adivasi revolutionaries Alluri Sitarama Raju and Komaram Bheem out of their specific struggles over jal, jangal, zameen (water, forest, land) and re-casts them as generic anti-British nationalists. Read together, the two essays suggest that the machinery of cinematic myth-making is remarkably consistent, whether it is Hollywood exporting American exceptionalism or Tollywood exporting Indian nationalism: both flatten local, material struggles into an emotionally satisfying but politically convenient story.

Hegemony as a Cinematic Technique

Antonio Gramsci's concept of hegemony  domination achieved not through force but through consent, by making a particular worldview feel like natural common sense is the connective tissue between the two texts. Barad shows that Rambo III recast the Soviet-Afghan war as "a moral crusade against communism," and that Bond films from The Living Daylights to Tomorrow Never Dies quietly aligned entertainment with US foreign-policy interests. Nobody watching these films feels propagandized; that is precisely the point. The ideology arrives disguised as adventure.

RRR performs a structurally identical move, only the target is domestic rather than foreign. Raju's actual opposition to the 1882 Madras Forest Act and Bheem's fight against the Nizam of Hyderabad were rooted in concrete, ongoing material claims the right to forest, water, and land. Rajamouli's film borrows their names and their charisma but relocates their fight onto the safer, more unifying terrain of the freedom struggle against the British. It is a shift from what Homi Bhabha might call the "local" and "minor" narrative of subaltern resistance to the "grand narrative" of the nation-state. The tribal hero becomes a nationalist icon; the specific becomes the general; and, crucially, the present-day relevance of the original struggle land grabs, deforestation, corporate encroachment  quietly disappears from the frame.

Whose Common Sense Is This?

This is where Gayatri Spivak's question "Can the subaltern speak?" becomes unavoidable. In RRR, the answer is: not on their own terms. Raju and Bheem speak, but only the lines the nationalist script has written for them. Their historical fight for jal, jangal, zameen is subsumed into a story that lets the postcolonial Indian state  which has, as Barad notes, become one of the very agents of displacement it once resisted  bask in the glow of anti-colonial heroism without confronting its own complicity in ongoing dispossession. Annie Zaidi's description of displacement, quoted in Barad's essay, captures precisely what the film leaves out: displacement "is about losing a river... losing the grass that your herds grazed on... losing the right to protest." RRR gives audiences catharsis; it does not give the represented communities a voice in their own contemporary struggles.

A Counter-Narrative: Kantara

If RRR shows appropriation, Rishab Shetty's Kannada film Kantara (2022) offers a useful point of contrast. Where RRR subordinates land and forest rights to nationalist spectacle, Kantara keeps the conflict local and unresolved: a Kambala wrestler and his community resist a forest officer and a scheming landlord who want to seize communal land, and the film insists through the figure of the Bhoota deity possession  that indigenous cosmology and land rights cannot be separated or translated into the state's bureaucratic or nationalist categories. It does not fully escape romanticizing tribal spirituality for mainstream consumption, but it refuses the move Barad criticizes in RRR: it does not let land conflict dissolve into anti-colonial triumphalism. The postcolonial critique, then, is not simply "cinema misrepresents tribal resistance," but that some films displace the specific into the national, while others imperfectly hold the specific in view.

From Screen to Street

The stakes of this critique are not academic. The same jal, jangal, zameen framework that RRR borrows and abandons is being invoked right now by communities resisting the Ken-Betwa river-linking project, which threatens to submerge parts of the Panna Tiger Reserve and displace Adivasi villages in Madhya Pradesh and Uttar Pradesh. It echoes in the Ladakh protests demanding Sixth Schedule protections against unregulated industrial and military expansion into a fragile Himalayan ecology, and in Manipur, where ethnic conflict is entangled with land, forest, and resource contestation between communities. In each case, the people on the ground are asking exactly the questions Raju and Bheem asked who owns the water, the forest, the land and getting, at best, ambivalent attention from a national media apparatus more comfortable with heroic nostalgia than present-tense accountability.

Why This Still Matters

Barad's own comparison across Hollywood and Tollywood matters because it resists the temptation — visible in commentary like Palki Sharma's call for Bollywood to build its own "soft power" to simply swap one hegemon's toolkit for another's flag. A postcolonial critique worth its name does not ask India to out-market America; it asks why any national cinema finds it easier to celebrate resistance in the past tense than to sit with it in the present. Popular film's power to manufacture common sense is real, and precisely because it is real, the question of whose history gets simplified and whose ongoing fight gets erased in the process deserves more scrutiny than the applause at the end of the movie usually allows.

 When the Forest Becomes a Battlefield: Postcolonial Studies, Climate Change, and Kantara

Introduction

Postcolonial studies has always asked one basic question: what happens to people and cultures after empire leaves, but its damage stays behind? For a long time, this question was mostly about politics, language, and identity. But today, as the planet heats up and forests, rivers, and hills disappear under mining projects and dams, postcolonial scholars are asking a new version of the same question: who pays the price for the environmental crisis, and why are the answers so often the same as they were under colonial rule?

This is exactly the argument Dilip Barad makes in his article "Postcolonial Studies in the Anthropocene: Bridging Perspectives for a Sustainable Future." Barad brings together thinkers like Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Dipesh Chakrabarty, Vandana Shiva, and Rob Nixon to show that environmental destruction is not separate from colonial history — it is a continuation of it. In this blog, I want to unpack his main ideas in simple terms, and then connect them to a film that captures this same struggle beautifully: Kantara.

What the Article Says

The central point is that colonialism was never just about ruling people it was also about controlling land, forests, water, and resources. Even after countries became politically independent, this pattern did not stop. He calls this "internal colonialism": a situation where a country's own government and corporations now do what foreign colonizers once did  taking land from indigenous and rural communities in the name of "development."

He gives strong examples. The Narmada Bachao Andolan in India fought against big dams that displaced thousands of tribal families along the Narmada river. In central India, tribal communities like the Ho, the Santhals, and the Gonds have resisted mining companies digging up iron and bauxite from their ancestral lands, a resistance that goes back centuries, long before it became linked to Maoist movements. Barad also brings in Ken Saro-Wiwa, the Nigerian activist who was executed after protesting oil companies destroying his community's land in the Niger Delta. These are not isolated incidents. They are, as Barad argues using Marx's idea of "primitive accumulation" and David Harvey's idea of "accumulation by dispossession," part of a repeating pattern: wealth for a few, dispossession for many, and nature treated as something to be extracted, not respected.

One idea I found especially useful is Rob Nixon's concept of "spatial amnesia." This is the tendency, mostly in Western environmental writing, to imagine wilderness as empty and untouched, ignoring the fact that indigenous people have always lived there. This "empty land" myth erases real histories of displacement. Barad connects this to why postcolonial critics have long been suspicious of mainstream environmentalism because it sometimes talks about "saving nature" while ignoring the people who are already part of that nature.

Finally, Barad brings in Dipesh Chakrabarty's idea of the Anthropocene, the age where humans have become powerful enough to change the entire planet's climate. Chakrabarty suggests we need a "new universalism" based on "species thinking" meaning we should think of ourselves as one species facing a shared crisis, without forgetting the deep inequalities of history that got us here.

The Disproportionate Burden on Colonized Peoples

Before turning to the film, it is worth spelling out clearly why colonized and formerly colonized peoples bear the heaviest weight of climate change and ecological damage, even though they contributed the least to causing it.

Colonial economies were built around extraction: colonizers took raw materials, minerals, timber, and cash crops from colonies and shipped them elsewhere, while the industrial pollution and carbon emissions of that whole process happened mostly in the colonizing nations. In other words, the wealth and the emissions were separated from each other. The former colonies did the resource-giving; the colonizers did the resource-burning and industrializing. That historical gap has never really closed. Today, wealthy former colonial powers are still the largest historical emitters of greenhouse gases, while the Global South, home to most formerly colonized nations, faces the harshest and most immediate consequences: rising sea levels swallowing coastal villages, unpredictable monsoons ruining farming communities, droughts pushing pastoral communities into crisis, and mining or dam projects continuing to displace indigenous groups in the name of "growth."

Barad's article captures this same imbalance through Chakrabarty, who reminds us that although climate change is often described as a shared crisis for the whole human species, it is not experienced equally. Chakrabarty himself admits that climate disasters can strike the rich too, but in practice, wealthier nations and communities have far more resources to adapt: better infrastructure, insurance, technology, and the ability to simply move away from danger. Formerly colonized communities, already weakened economically by centuries of extraction, usually do not have these safety nets. This is why Barad insists that postcolonial studies cannot treat the environmental crisis as a purely ecological problem it is also a problem of unfinished colonial history repeating itself in a new form, whether through internal colonialism, mining companies, or "development" projects that displace the same communities all over again.

A Postcolonial Reading of Kantara

Kantara (2022), the Kannada film that became a nationwide hit, tells the story of a small village in coastal Karnataka whose people follow the Bhoota Kola tradition a folk ritual where local deities are believed to possess dancers and speak on behalf of the community. The film's real conflict, though, is about land. A forest officer tries to enforce official forest boundaries, while a local landlord's family tries to reclaim land that was once "gifted" to the villagers by a king generations ago, a gift that is now being quietly taken back.

Watched through Barad's article, Kantara is a textbook example of internal colonialism. The state forest department, meant to "protect" the forest, ends up threatening the villagers' traditional access to it — echoing exactly what Barad describes about conservation efforts displacing indigenous communities in the name of environmental protection. The forest officer Murali is not a foreign colonizer, but he represents the same bureaucratic, top-down logic: land and forest managed by paperwork and law, disconnected from the people who actually live with it and depend on it. This is internal colonialism in its purest form — the machinery of the state doing to its own citizens what empire once did to colonies.

At the same time, the film pushes back against the "spatial amnesia" Nixon describes. The forest in Kantara is never shown as empty wilderness waiting to be conquered or preserved from a distance. It is alive with memory, myth, and daily life. The Bhoota Kola ritual itself insists that humans, gods, and nature are bound together — nobody can simply "own" the land, because it belongs to a larger moral order. This is very close to what Vandana Shiva argues about pre-colonial and indigenous relationships with nature: not romantic or perfect, but built on interdependence rather than extraction.

The film's climax, where the protective deity possesses the hero to defend the forest and the village's rights, can be read as a symbolic form of resistance — not unlike the real-world resistance of the Narmada Bachao Andolan or the tribal movements Barad describes. Of course, Kantara uses myth and spectacle rather than direct political protest, but the underlying message is the same: land is not just an economic resource, it is identity, history, and survival.

It is also worth noticing who is actually vulnerable in Kantara. The village community has no legal paperwork to prove their claim to the land, no political power to negotiate with the forest department, and no financial cushion if they lose access to the forest that feeds and sustains them. Their entire way of life, farming, grazing cattle, festivals, and ritual, is tied directly to that land, so any disruption to it is not a minor inconvenience but an existential threat. Compare this to the landlord's family or the state officials in the film, who have legal documents, institutional backing, and the option to simply walk away unaffected either way. This imbalance mirrors exactly the disproportionate vulnerability described earlier: those with the least historical power and the fewest resources are the ones left most exposed when land and ecology are contested, while those with institutional and economic power remain relatively insulated from the consequences.

Broader Reflections

What Barad's article and Kantara both show is that the climate crisis cannot be separated from questions of justice and history. It is not enough to ask "how do we save the environment" without also asking "whose environment, and at whose cost has it already been damaged?" Colonized and formerly colonized communities are almost always the first to lose their land and the last to be consulted about it, whether the threat comes from a colonial company two hundred years ago or a mining corporation today.

For postcolonial studies, this means the field cannot stay limited to literature and history alone. It must also engage with ecology, indigenous rights, and global capitalism, exactly as Barad suggests. Films like Kantara matter because they bring these theoretical ideas to ordinary audiences in an emotional, accessible form, reminding us that behind every "development project" or "conservation policy," there are real communities whose stories are still being written and still being ignored.

References:

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/376374708_POSTCOLONIAL_STUDIES_IN_THE_ANTHROPOCENE_BRIDGING_PERSPECTIVES_FOR_A_SUSTAINABLE_FUTURE

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