Cast: Ulka Gupta, Aditi Bhatia, Aishwarya Ojha, Sumit Gahlawat, Arjan Singh Aujla, Yuktam Kholsa, Alka Amin Directed by: Kamakhya Nar...
Cast: Ulka Gupta, Aditi Bhatia, Aishwarya Ojha, Sumit Gahlawat, Arjan Singh Aujla, Yuktam Kholsa, Alka Amin
Directed by: Kamakhya Narayan Singh
The third tenure of the BJP as
the central government and as the dominant and only “nationalist” party in
India has seen an uprising in communal violence, vigilantism, and bigotry. The
Kerala Story was released a couple of months before the party’s third tenure
started, subtly hinting at what’s to come. The following year we got films such
as Bastar: The Naxal Story, Article 370, Swatantrya
Veer Savarkar, Razakar, and Jahangir National
University to name a few, blatantly propagating their ideologies
(right-wing bigotry): whilst The Kashmir Files tried to be somewhat subtle with
its propaganda, these aforementioned films didn’t even care enough to try. Cut
to 2026, already looking like a fabulous year for right-wing propaganda.
Let’s get this out of the way:
The Kerala Story 2 Goes Beyond isn’t about Kerala — it’s more about UP
than about anyplace else. Yet the producers and the director chose to use the
name “Kerala” in the title, unabashedly trying to create communal division;
none of the 30 victims present at the release event were from Kerala either.
The Kerala Story 2 Goes Beyond,
directed by Kamakhya Narayan Singh, isn’t subtle with its ideology (one would
be led to assume that subtly is an unheard foreign concept for him), in fact,
it wears it on its sleeve proudly: all the Muslims are bad and all the Hindus are good and innocent. The film, eventually, is the
visualization of a bunch of angry tweets aiming to spread hate against Muslims
(who else can be credited for this achievement except the ruling party?), and
anything that doesn’t align with the Hindutva-nationalist ideology.
The film attempts to create hostility against both Islam and feminism (two of
the biggest threats to the Hindutva-nationalist samaj).
Looking over the fact that Love
Jihad is a conspiracy theory, (cf. Global Network on Extremism and
Technology: Mapping Hindutva Discourse in India; Gender and
Language, Volume 17, Number 3 (University of Toronto Press: Love-jihad),
trying really hard to at least, that fact that the film (if it can even be
considered a film) is poorly made is unavoidable. Politics aside, the film’s
only accomplishment would be that it had a coherent narrative (an implausible
one). The direction felt extremely imbecilic, in turn making the narrative and
the performances feel very bound to the ideology it was conceived to serve.
The performances are what made
this film entertaining to a certain extent: it’s unintentionally funny. The
dialogues are exceptionally moronic, and the emotions the actors emulate while
performing are the furthest thing from reality, their expressions the cherry on
top. The narrative feels like the lectures on morality we’ve all heard at least
once in your life (told by the most immoral person you know), which follows a
very Sadeian formula: she tries to take control of her life, she falls into
trouble, painting women’s autonomy as something inherently dangerous to the
Hindu community all over India, and the women who are “stupid enough” to
want the freedom to make their own decisions as kids throwing
tantrums for candy who need to be taught better. The film feels less like a
film and feels more like a state sponsored PSA not at all based in reality.
Violence against women is a real
issue, and the film acknowledges that — it becomes woke out of the blue for a
singular scene, featuring the schoolgirl and her mother — but then proceeds to
overlook that and paint its portrayal of the violence women face (like Majnu
Bhai in Welcome painting the donkey on top of the horse) to
further spread its ideology. The film (intentionally) fails to recognize that
women are coerced into doing things in the majority of marriages in the world,
irrespective of the religion; the film tries to cement the narrative of
“feminism = bad, patriarchy = good” that the right-wing user base of X has been
trying to do for so long (succeeding in lots of ways), while taking the line
“batenge to katenge” from X and the dozen Hindu-nationalist groups in India.
The final sequence of the film
features the “bulldozer action”, a serious human rights violation, with this
ultra-Hindu-nationalist speech in the background over a “Har Har Mahadev” song,
while we see one of the Muslim men’s house being demolished by the bulldozer,
which is assisted by a crowd. After the house is broken down, Neha finds the
idol of Radha and Krishna that her mother had given her and that she’d
forgotten there. At first glance, it seems like a simple scene, but it actually
points to another famous conspiracy theory of there being a Hindu temple
underneath every mosque, or piece of Mughal architecture. Of course, this
entire scene was created for the cathartic release of the audience dumb enough
to be swayed by a film like this, taking the already high propagative sermon
even higher.
The Kerala Story 2
Goes Beyond is blatantly a state-sponsored and hate mongering
incompetently made piece of propaganda.
Three young Indian women across different states choose love over tradition, only to become trapped. Their parallel lives show how romance and rebellion transform into control and silence, turning love into a weapon that destroys freedom.
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