Perpetrators Are Victims: We Are Seeing the Age of Sanitised History

With the CBFC recommending 12 changes and cuts to the film Phule, it seems we are not far from a future where Brahmins are portrayed as victims of the caste system.

The trend we are witnessing follows an Orwellian script: War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength.

This aversion to truth serves a dangerous agenda. Historically, the untouchables suffered the most brutal oppression during the Peshwa rule. When Savitribai Phule walked the streets of Pune to teach young girls, she was met with hostility – stoned and shamed by the Brahmins and their supporters. Even Anandibai Joshi, often celebrated as India’s first woman doctor, faced resistance from her own Brahmin community for seeking education.

So why this sudden attempt at historical denial? Why this newspeak?

Consider a scene from the 2019 biopic Anandi Gopal: when Anandi chooses to pursue education, her Brahmin neighbours – Soman, Godse, and others – throw garbage into her home, accusing her of defiling society by stepping beyond prescribed norms. Interestingly, this portrayal didn’t provoke objections (perhaps because it dealt with tensions within the same community, revealing volumes about the selective sensitivities of the CBFC).

So what has changed now? Why is the CBFC, along with sections of the Brahmin community, suddenly afraid of a scene showing a Brahmin boy throwing a stone at Savitribai? 

The censor board causes harm to the society not just by what it allows, but by what it chooses to cut or conveniently ‘reinterpret’.

When historical truths are sanitised to maintain comfort, censorship shifts from regulation to active collusion. It stops being neutral and becomes part of the problem. The CBFC should be a fair and independent body that supports free expression, not a tool used to protect dominant and powerful groups. Often, the most important art is the kind that makes us uncomfortable.

When Chaava depicted the undeniable fact of Mughal emperor Aurangzeb committing atrocities against Chhatrapati Sambhaji Maharaj, no one feared it would incite hatred toward Muslims today. Then why this anxiety around Phule? Do they worry that showing a Brahmin child attacking Savitribai will provoke anger toward Brahmins today? The reaction to Chaava stoked Hindu-Muslim tensions – now the fear is that Phule might augment the Brahmin-Bahujan divide. Is that why history is being whitewashed? The intent here is not to juxtapose Chaava with Phule. As such Chaava offers a limited portrayal of Chhatrapati Sambhaji Maharaj—focusing heavily on his torture while sidelining his intellect, compassion, and depth. In doing so, it misses the opportunity to present a fuller historical picture. One possible source of anxiety around Phule might be that it disrupts the Hindus versus Muslims debate and poses a threat to the Hindu consolidation that was deliberately generated after the release of Chaava.

We must remember: when injustice against one group is normalised, it threatens justice for all. As Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. said, “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.” Just as Chaava has been misappropriated in contemporary times to fuel anti-Muslim sentiment through communal interpretations, Phule too carries the potential to be instrumentalised in ways that generate anti-Brahmin sentiment by emphasising their role as historical oppressors. Selectively invoking or erasing history to serve contemporary politics is a perilous game. History is messy, uncomfortable, and rarely convenient – but it must be told honestly.

The Phule controversy has shattered the myth of castelessness in Indian society.

Also read: Anurag Kashyap is Right. Indians Need to Confront the Uncomfortable Truth About Caste

Filmmaker Anurag Kashyap recently called out this glaring hypocrisy. A case in point is Anant Mahadevan, the director of Phule, who, in an attempt to defuse backlash, stated: “I’m a staunch Brahmin. Why would I malign my community?” But that statement only underscores the deeper problem. In a society where individuals proudly flaunt their “Brahmin genes”, they cannot then disown their community’s historical wrongdoings. You can’t cherry-pick pride and disavow guilt. If we only preserve flattering narratives, we are no longer historians – we become propagandists.

At its core, this controversy reveals a deep discomfort within the Brahmin community about confronting their past. Had there been genuine efforts at moral or spiritual reparations – if not material ones – since independence, such resistance to truth-telling wouldn’t be this fierce. Acknowledging the persistence of caste-based prejudice and discrimination would be a powerful first step.

Activist Thenmozhi Soundararajan, in The Trauma of Caste, offers tools for this kind of reckoning – worksheets rooted in Equality Labs’ Unlearning Caste Supremacy workshop. But unfortunately, such transformative tools remain confined to the marginalised. Had the reparation processes begun post-independence, perhaps today’s truth-tellers wouldn’t be met with censorship but with solidarity. But it is never too late!

Shweta Ahire teaches at a college in Thane. Views expressed are personal.

This piece was first published on The India Cable – a premium newsletter from The Wire & Galileo Ideas – and has been updated and republished here. To subscribe to The India Cable, click here.

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