Bollywood, Digitality, and Post-Truth: Manufacturing Hindu Nationalist Histories

The post-truth era employs a politics of polarization that extends beyond news and social media into cultural mediums, particularly commercial cinema. This paper explores how in recent years, Bollywood, which can be categorised as mainstream Hindi language cinema, has increasingly functioned as a site for what Antonio Gramsci conceptualized as ‘cultural hegemony’, the subtle, normalized reproduction of dominant ideological values through popular culture. With special emphasis on historical ‘period’ films such as Chhaava (2025) and Padmaavat (2019), it argues how such films mythologize the past to align with a monolithic Hindu nationalist identity, reframing India as an imagined Hindu nation. Such ideological messaging, when delivered through fictionalized ‘historical’ films, becomes difficult to challenge, as it can be contested as artistic expression, thus avoiding direct accountability. By glorifying Hindu monarchs while casting their Muslim counterparts as antagonists, these films deploy selective cultural memory to reclaim and reframe majoritarian history as a long-suppressed truth. While overtly political works such as The Kashmir Files (2022) and The Kerala Story (2023) explicitly narrativize recent history by reinforcing majoritarian anxieties about Muslim identities as existential threats to Hindus, subtle embedding of cultural indoctrination through historical films ensures that ideological messaging circulates not as propaganda but as entertainment, reinforcing hegemonic narratives through spectacle and emotion rather than factual accuracy. This paper extends Gramscian notions of hegemony and Stuart Hall’s reading on media to the current age of the internet. It explores how in the digital age, algorithmic recommendation systems amplify the reach of such content, curating personalized feeds that repeatedly expose viewers to ideologically aligned material. This process fosters cultural echo chambers, where repetition normalizes one-dimensional depictions of history and marginalizes counter-narratives. The paper argues that Bollywood’s historical epics function not merely as cinematic products but as instruments within a hybrid cultural–digital sphere, where profit-driven technological platforms and a Hindu-centric state converge to algorithmically shape public memory, consolidate majoritarian identity politics, and naturalize hegemonic power. By understanding the ways in which history is manipulated in print, film media and digital media at large, the paper finally suggests the need for alternative models of history that blend academic and popular history.