“The Surgical Strike that shook The Mughal Empire”

The trailer for Tanhaji: The Unsung Warrior (Dir. Om Raut, 2020) has an inter-title that claims the 1670 Battle of Sinhagad between Maratha soldiers and the Mughal army was a “surgical strike that shook the Mughal Empire”. The anachronistic reference is not lost to the audience, who would obviously be reminded of the 2016 surgical strikes against militant launch pads across the Line of Control in Pakistan-occupied Kashmir, solidified in public memory by the hugely successful film based on it, Uri: The Surgical Strike (Dir. Aditya Dhar, 2019). The film's success, months before the elections in India, made the surgical strike a key political brag for the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), the Hindu nationalist ruling party, before their triumphant return to power. Tanhaji is not the only film that manipulates history by vilifying Islamic rulers of India and glorifying Hindu ones, and drives a wedge within the already precarious questions of belonging within the nation. There are multiple other period dramas that have either been released or have been announced which follow this trend. This chapter explores this trend in contemporary Hindi screen cultures and understands the challenges posed upon questions of belonging by this evacuation of certain kinds of histories from the frame of representation.