ostly drowned out amidst enormous international acclaim, the scattered dissenting voices that greeted last year’s Telegu blockbuster tended to place its historic fantasia within the disquieting context of present-day Hindu nationalism. Front-facing as an anti-colonial action movie with the British Empire as the villain, the film imagined a friendship between Alluri Sitarama Raju and Komaram Bheem, two real-life freedom fighters from vastly different backgrounds, positioning the upper-caste Raju as the educated senior partner of the duo while Bheem, a lower-caste Muslim, was depicted as something closer to a noble savage. To the film’s critics, this dynamic, if not directly aligned with the far-right Hindutva movement, at the very least refocused history through an upper-caste, Hindu gaze. None of this was particularly apparent to a Western viewer like me, who mostly saw two loveable guys with “dudes rock” chemistry.
