Postcolonial Critique: Reading Rambo, Bond, and the Politics of Empire's Afterlife
Framing the Critique: Beyond Description into Interrogation
Barad's article performs valuable diagnostic work it correctly identifies that Hollywood functions as a soft-power apparatus and how specific mechanisms (ideology projection, cultural hegemony, economic dominance, perception management) operate across the Rambo and Bond franchises. But the analysis remains largely at the level of description: it catalogs effects without fully excavating the deeper colonial epistemology that makes these effects possible in the first place.
A postcolonial critique asks a different order of question. It does not simply ask "how does Hollywood project American power?" It asks: what inherited colonial structures of seeing, knowing, and narrating the non-Western world does this projection depend on and reproduce? Soft power, in this sense, is not ideologically neutral machinery that just happens to serve American interests in the twentieth century; it is the continuation, in a new political register, of a much older imperial project of representation. What follows extends Barad's argument using Edward Said, Homi Bhabha, Gayatri Spivak, and Frantz Fanon, applied in detail to Rambo, Bond, and comparative examples.
Orientalism Repackaged: The Cold War as Colonial Fantasy
Edward Said's Orientalism (1978) argues that the West did not simply observe the East it invented it, constructing a body of knowledge and imagery in which the "Orient" is rendered timeless, irrational, exotic, dangerous, and fundamentally in need of Western guidance or control. This constructed Orient tells us more about Western anxieties and self-image than about the actual societies it claims to represent. Said's framework is arguably the missing theoretical center of Barad's essay, and applying it in detail to Rambo III is revealing.
Rambo III and the Landscape as Blank Canvas
In Rambo III, Afghanistan is rendered almost entirely as topography rather than society: sweeping desert vistas, ancient ruins, tribal villages a backdrop of timeless, pre-modern authenticity against which Rambo's hyper-modern American body becomes legible as heroic. The Mujahideen are granted some individual characterization (unlike the Vietnamese in the earlier films), but their worth within the narrative is strictly instrumental: they matter to the extent that they assist, admire, or fight alongside Rambo. Crucially, the film never engages with the internal politics of Afghan resistance the ethnic, tribal, and ideological divisions among Mujahideen factions that would, within a decade, fracture Afghanistan into civil war and eventually produce the Taliban. Said would call this a classic Orientalist move: flattening internal difference into a single, legible "tribal" essence, comprehensible only through its relationship to the Western hero at its center.
This matters historically, too the same American political imagination that produced Rambo III's celebratory framing of the Mujahideen was, in reality, arming groups whose ideological descendants the U.S. would later fight in the War on Terror. The film's Orientalist simplification isn't just an aesthetic failure; it mirrors and perhaps helped normalize a real geopolitical miscalculation.
Bond and the Residue of British Imperial Anxiety
Bond's relationship to Orientalism is layered differently, because Bond is not merely a Cold War warrior he is imperial nostalgia in a tuxedo, a fantasy figure invented in 1953 (Fleming's Casino Royale) at almost the exact historical moment Britain was losing its empire (India in 1947, Suez in 1956, decolonization accelerating through the 1960s). Bond allows Britain to imagine itself still central to world affairs, still capable of unilateral heroism on foreign soil, even as its actual imperial power was collapsing.
- Dr. No (1962) is instructive here: the villain is explicitly coded through a lineage of "Eurasian" menace — a mixed-race figure whose danger is partly constructed through racialized anxiety about miscegenation and hidden foreign infiltration, tropes lifted almost directly from early-twentieth-century "yellow peril" fiction (Sax Rohmer's Fu Manchu novels are a direct ancestor). Jamaica, the film's setting, is rendered as a site of British authority restored through Bond's intervention, even though Jamaica was, at the time of filming, on the very cusp of independence (achieved in 1962, the same year the film released). The timing is almost too on-the-nose: Bond re-asserts British control over a colonial space at the exact historical moment that control was ending in reality.
- The Living Daylights (1987), as Barad notes, echoes Rambo III's Afghan-Soviet framing — but does so through Bond's characteristically cooler, more procedural heroism, which lends the intervention an air of professional competence rather than raw militarism. This is itself ideologically significant: Bond's polish suggests that Western intervention is not just morally righteous (as in Rambo) but technically superior — a different register of the same hegemonic claim.
The Villain as Racialized Other: Constructing Legible Enemies
A postcolonial lens demands close attention to how villainy itself is constructed along racial and civilizational lines a dimension Barad's article gestures toward but doesn't fully unpack.
Rambo: First Blood Part II and the Erasure of Vietnamese Subjectivity
In this film, Vietnamese characters exist almost exclusively in two registers: treacherous captors/torturers, or mute prisoners-of-war to be rescued. They are denied interiority, historical grievance, or political motive remarkable given that the actual Vietnam War was, from the Vietnamese perspective, a war of national liberation against first French and then American intervention. The film's central fantasy an American soldier "allowed" to go back and win the war his own government wouldn't let him win is only emotionally coherent because Vietnamese suffering and perspective have been evacuated from the frame entirely. The war's colonial genealogy (French Indochina, the First Indochina War, Ho Chi Minh's anti-colonial nationalism predating any Cold War framing) disappears completely, replaced by a purely American psychodrama of betrayal and redemption staged, ironically, on Vietnamese soil, using Vietnamese bodies as scenery.
Bond's Racialized Villain Lineage
Beyond Dr. No, this pattern recurs across the franchise: The Man with the Golden Gun (1974) stages its action substantially in Southeast Asia, with Bond navigating "exotic" locales as a tourist-adventurer; Live and Let Die (1973) draws on Blaxploitation-adjacent imagery and Caribbean voodoo tropes for its villain's aesthetic, constructing Black and Caribbean culture as inherently sinister and criminal. Across these examples, a structural pattern emerges: the non-Western world is legible on screen only as threat, victim, or exotic backdrop never as a site of autonomous political will or complex interiority. This is precisely the colonial epistemology Said identified: knowledge of the non-Western world produced for Western consumption, about the non-Western world, but essentially never by it or for it.
Bhabha's Mimicry and Ambivalence: The Conditional Native
Homi Bhabha's concept of colonial mimicry, developed in The Location of Culture (1994), describes how colonial power demands that the colonized become "almost the same, but not quite" as the colonizer adopting the colonizer's language, values, and manners, while remaining permanently marked as not fully equal. Crucially, Bhabha also identifies ambivalence: mimicry is never fully stable, because the "almost-but-not-quite" native is simultaneously desired (as proof of the colonizer's civilizing success) and feared (as a mocking, destabilizing double).
Applying Mimicry to Rambo III
The Mujahideen fighters in Rambo III are approvingly framed only insofar as they mirror Rambo's own values loyalty, warrior codes, stoic endurance, anti-communism. Their heroism is legible to American audiences precisely because it has been pre-filtered through recognizably American frontier-masculinity tropes (the noble warrior, the code of honor). This is mimicry functioning as a precondition for sympathy: the postcolonial subject becomes worthy of the audience's investment only once he resembles what the West already recognizes and validates as heroic. Afghan resistance, in other words, is rendered intelligible only by being translated into an American idiom.
RRR as an Inversion — But Not an Escape
RRR (2022) offers a fascinating structural inversion of this dynamic. Here, the British colonizers are unambiguously villainous, and Indian resistance is glorified through hyper-masculine, near-superhuman spectacle. A surface reading might celebrate this as decolonial correction finally, the formerly colonized nation gets to be the hero of its own story. But a postcolonial critique cannot stop there. RRR borrows its entire aesthetic grammar from Hollywood action cinema: slow-motion heroics, CGI-driven spectacle, a rescue-and-revenge plot structure strikingly similar to Rambo's own (a captured companion, a daring extraction, climactic violent retribution). This raises the exact question Barad poses toward Bollywood at the end of his article: is RRR resisting the hegemonic form, or simply redirecting the same hegemonic techniques toward a different nationalist project?
This is Bhabha's ambivalence in action, but inverted: rather than the colonized mimicking the colonizer to gain approval, RRR mimics Hollywood's spectacle-grammar to gain global market legibility and prestige (it very deliberately courted, and won, international recognition including an Academy Award for "Naatu Naatu"). The nationalism on display is genuine and historically grounded, but the cinematic technology of feeling through which that nationalism is delivered to global audiences remains substantially Hollywood's.
Spivak: Can the Subaltern Speak — or Only Be Spoken For?
Gayatri Spivak's famous question, "Can the Subaltern Speak?" (1988), interrogates whether colonized or marginalized subjects can ever represent themselves within structures of discourse built by and for the colonizer or whether even sympathetic representation inevitably speaks for them, substituting the representer's voice for their own.
This question sharpens the critique of both franchises. The Afghan Mujahideen in Rambo III and The Living Daylights never narrate their own struggle in their own political terms on screen their resistance is always mediated through, validated by, and ultimately about the Western hero's presence among them. Even RRR, for all its nationalist energy, is directed by S.S. Rajamouli through a mainstream commercial lens that mythologizes historical figures (Komaram Bheem and Alluri Sitarama Raju never actually met in history) into a buddy-action spectacle designed primarily for entertainment and global crossover appeal raising the question of whether even a nominally "own-voice" anti-colonial narrative can escape subordinating historical political complexity to the demands of spectacle and myth.
Fanon and the Violence of Redemption
Frantz Fanon's writing on colonial violence particularly in The Wretched of the Earth (1961) argues that violence in colonial and anti-colonial contexts is never merely narrative device; it is entangled with dignity, humiliation, and the reclamation of selfhood denied by colonial subjugation.
Read through Fanon, Rambo: First Blood Part II's central fantasy becomes newly legible: it is a displacement of national humiliation onto an individual body, resolved through renewed violence against the same Vietnamese population America had already devastated in the actual war. The film does not process Vietnam's layered colonial and postcolonial history French colonization, Cold War proxy conflict, Vietnamese self-determination it collapses all of it into a personal revenge narrative that restores American self-image at Vietnamese subjectivity's continued expense. In Fanonian terms, this is violence deployed not to liberate the colonized but to repair the psychic wound of the colonizer a profound inversion of Fanon's original framework, in which violence was theorized as a tool of the oppressed's liberation, not the empire's self-soothing.
The Limits of "Soft Power" as an Analytic Framework
This is where I'd most directly push back on or extend Barad's central term. "Soft power" (Joseph Nye's original formulation) describes effect: the capacity to shape others' preferences through attraction rather than coercion. It is fundamentally a political science concept, concerned with outcomes does the world come to admire and align with America?
A postcolonial critique insists on a different question: not just whether these films persuade global audiences to admire America, but whether they structure the very categories through which audiences learn to perceive the non-Western world at all as threat, victim, backdrop, or raw material for a Western hero's arc. This is closer to what Said calls epistemic violence: not persuasion but the production of the very frameworks within which persuasion becomes possible or even necessary. Soft power operates at the level of opinion; epistemic violence operates at the level of perception itself it shapes what can be seen, thought, and said about the non-Western world before any argument even begins. Barad's article identifies the former with real precision; a postcolonial reading insists we cannot fully understand these films without naming the latter.
Broader Implications: Postcolonial Thought in Today's Globalized World
Why This Matters Beyond Film Studies
At first glance, analyzing Rambo, Bond, and RRR might seem like a narrow exercise old action movies, a recent Indian blockbuster, some theory names attached. But the deeper point of postcolonial analysis is that these films are case studies in something much bigger: how power today rarely announces itself through armies and flags alone. It moves through stories, images, and entertainment things we consume for pleasure, without noticing we're also absorbing a worldview. Understanding this is not just useful for reading old Cold War movies. It's essential for understanding how power works right now, in 2026, in a world of streaming platforms, global box offices, and algorithm-driven content.
In simple terms: postcolonial thought asks us to notice who gets to tell the story, and whose story gets told as if it were just "the truth." That question hasn't gone away just because colonial empires formally ended. It has just changed shape.
From Formal Empire to Cultural Empire
One of the most important ideas in postcolonial studies is that colonialism didn't simply end when countries gained political independence (India in 1947, most of Africa through the 1950s–60s, and so on). What changed was the method of control, not necessarily the underlying relationship of who has power over whom.
- In the colonial era, control worked through direct rule armies, administrators, laws written by the colonizer.
- Today, much of that control works through culture, media, and narrative what postcolonial thinkers sometimes call "neocolonialism" or, following Gramsci, cultural hegemony.
Rambo and Bond are perfect examples of this shift already happening mid-century: America didn't need to formally colonize Vietnam or Afghanistan to shape how the world understood those conflicts it just needed Hollywood. This is the throughline connecting a 1985 action film to how global power operates today: whoever controls the story controls the meaning of events, even without controlling the territory.
The Globalized World Didn't End This — It Multiplied It
Here's where it gets more complex, and more relevant to your world right now. In today's globalized media landscape, it's not just America telling stories about everyone else anymore. Multiple countries have built their own versions of Hollywood's soft-power machine. This is both progress and a new problem.
Example: China's "Wolf Warrior" Cinema
Films like Wolf Warrior 2 (2017) and The Battle at Lake Changjin (2021) are, in effect, China's answer to Rambo — patriotic action films where Chinese heroes rescue civilians abroad and defeat Western (often implicitly American) villains. These films are wildly popular domestically and are understood by scholars as deliberate instruments of Chinese soft power, echoing almost exactly the mechanisms Barad identifies in Hollywood: projecting ideology, building cultural pride, and shaping global perception of Chinese strength.
The postcolonial insight here is important: the tools of cultural hegemony aren't uniquely American or Western they're available to any power big enough to build a film industry and a global distribution system. This means postcolonial critique can't just be "the West is bad, everyone else is good." It has to look at the structure of the storytelling the rescue plot, the heroic nationalism, the villain-coding of the outsider no matter which country is now using it.
Example: RRR and the Bollywood/Tollywood Question
This is exactly why RRR is such a useful case for you as a student. It won global acclaim, including an Oscar, precisely by using Hollywood-style spectacle to tell an anti-colonial story. That's genuinely meaningful it means non-Western industries are no longer just consumers of Hollywood's grammar, they're using it to fight back narratively. But the postcolonial question doesn't disappear just because the politics flipped: is this decolonization, or is it colonization's storytelling toolkit being used by a new owner? Scholars are genuinely divided on this, and that divide is itself a useful thing for you to sit with as a master's-level thinker postcolonial theory doesn't always give clean answers.
Streaming Platforms: The New Empire of Distribution
Here's a dimension that didn't exist when Rambo and Bond were made, but matters enormously today: who controls the platform that decides what gets seen globally?
Netflix, Amazon Prime, and Disney+ don't just distribute American content anymore they actively fund and promote non-Western content (Korean dramas, Indian films, Nigerian "Nollywood" productions) because it's profitable to appear global. This looks like progress more voices reaching more audiences. But postcolonial scholars raise a sharper question: even when the content is non-Western, the infrastructure, the algorithm, and the profit still flow back to a handful of American corporations. A Korean drama or a Nigerian film reaching global audiences through Netflix is still passing through a distribution system designed, owned, and monetized in Los Angeles or Seattle.
This is what some scholars call platform imperialism a very current, very real extension of the same core postcolonial question Said and Gramsci were asking decades ago, just moved from film studios to server farms and recommendation algorithms.
The Limits and Power of "Talking Back"
A genuinely important part of postcolonial thought today is recognizing that formerly colonized nations and peoples are not passive anymore they are actively producing counter-narratives, and some of them are extraordinarily successful.
- K-pop and Korean cinema (Parasite, Squid Game) have arguably built South Korea's own soft-power empire one built not on military rescue narratives, but on aesthetic innovation and social critique, showing that soft power doesn't have to copy the Rambo formula to be globally effective.
- Nollywood (Nigeria's film industry) is now one of the largest film industries in the world by output, telling African stories for African and diaspora audiences largely outside Hollywood's narrative grammar entirely.
- RRR, as discussed, represents India using the spectacle of Hollywood to tell an explicitly anti-colonial story, forcing global audiences (including American ones) to watch British colonizers as villains for once.
This matters for your understanding of postcolonial thought because it shows the theory evolving in real time: early postcolonial theory (Said, Fanon) was largely about diagnosing domination. Contemporary postcolonial thought increasingly has to grapple with genuine counter-power while still asking whether that counter-power fully escapes the structures it's reacting against, or just relocates them.
Why This Matters for You, Practically
As a master's-level student, the payoff of this analysis isn't just "here's another way to read old action movies." It's a transferable critical skill:
- Whenever you encounter a story film, news report, textbook, political speech ask who is centered and who is instrumentalized. Rambo centers Rambo; the Afghans exist to validate him. This pattern repeats constantly, in journalism about conflict zones, in humanitarian marketing, in how "rescue" narratives get told about any crisis abroad.
- Notice when "representation" is offered as a solution without asking who controls the terms of representation. More diverse content on Netflix isn't automatically decolonization if the platform, algorithm, and profit structure remain unchanged.
- Hold two things at once: genuine cultural resistance is happening (RRR, Nollywood, K-drama) AND it doesn't automatically escape the deeper structures (spectacle, nationalism, market logic) it's working within. Good postcolonial analysis resists both naive celebration and total cynicism.
Applying the Theoretical Framework: A Postcolonial Reading of RRR (2022)
Why This Film
Of all the films discussed so far, S.S. Rajamouli's RRR (2022) offers the richest test case for applying the theoretical framework from Barad's article and our class discussion precisely because it sits at the exact fault line Barad identifies at the end of his own piece. Barad asks whether Bollywood (and by extension, other non-Western industries) should replicate Hollywood's soft-power model or resist it. RRR doesn't answer that question cleanly it does both at once, which is exactly what makes it so useful for applying Said, Gramsci, Bhabha, and Fanon in detail.
Quick context: RRR is a Telugu-language epic that fictionalizes two real Indian revolutionaries Komaram Bheem and Alluri Sitarama Raju who, in reality, never met, but who the film imagines as close friends fighting (separately, then together) against British colonial rule in the 1920s. It became a global phenomenon, won the Academy Award for Best Original Song ("Naatu Naatu"), and was widely celebrated in the West as a thrilling, "finally-someone-else-is-the-hero" anti-colonial spectacle.
Applying Gramsci: Whose "Common Sense" Does the Film Build?
Gramsci's cultural hegemony asks: what worldview does this text make feel natural, rather than argued for?
RRR builds a very clear common sense: British colonial officials are cartoonishly cruel and morally bankrupt (the villain, Governor Scott Buxton, whips a child for singing an Indian song), while Bheem and Raju are physically superhuman, morally pure, and driven by love for their people. There is no ambiguity, no complexity in the colonizer's position the film doesn't ask the audience to think about colonialism, it makes the audience feel its wrongness instantly and viscerally, through spectacle rather than argument.
This is Gramscian hegemony-building in reverse: instead of naturalizing the colonizer's worldview (as Rambo does for America), RRR naturalizes an anti-colonial worldview so totally that it becomes unquestionable "common sense" for the three-hour runtime. That's genuinely valuable but a Gramscian reading also asks us to notice that replacing one totalizing common sense with an opposite one is still a totalizing common sense. The film doesn't invite critical reflection on colonialism's complexity (economic structures, collaborationist elites, regional divisions within India itself) it replaces complexity with clarity, the same technique Rambo uses, just aimed at a different target.
Applying Said: Does the Film Escape Orientalism, or Just Reverse It?
Said's Orientalism describes the West constructing the East as exotic, timeless, and reducible to Western fantasy. Does RRR, made by Indian filmmakers about Indian history, escape this?
Partially but not entirely, and in an interesting way. RRR was made with significant awareness of its potential global, especially Western, audience. Its aesthetic choices the hyper-stylized slow motion, the CGI animal fight sequences, the almost superhero-movie visual grammar are calibrated to be legible and thrilling to an international audience raised on Marvel and Hollywood action cinema. In this sense, the film performs a kind of self-Orientalizing spectacle: it presents Indian history and mythology (Bheem's connection to tribal, animist tradition; Raju's connection to Hindu mythological imagery, invoking Rama) in a maximalist, exoticized register partly designed for outside consumption and marvel.
This doesn't mean the film is dishonest or bad but a Said-influenced reading asks us to notice that even anti-colonial storytelling can be shaped by an awareness of the colonizer's gaze, packaging itself for legibility and spectacle-value to the very audience it's nominally resisting. The film resists Orientalism's content (India is not backward, India is heroic) while partially retaining Orientalism's form (India as spectacle, as maximalist "more-than-real" exoticism).
Applying Bhabha: Mimicry in Reverse
Bhabha's mimicry describes the colonized adopting the colonizer's forms to gain legibility and approval. In RRR, I'd argue we see a structural mimicry at the level of genre, even while the film's politics invert colonial mimicry's usual direction.
The film's entire narrative architecture a captured companion needing rescue, a buddy-heroism dynamic, a climactic revenge-and-liberation sequence, even down to specific shot compositions (slow-motion walk toward camera, explosions framed heroically) is recognizably drawn from Hollywood action cinema, the same grammar that built Rambo's heroism. RRR doesn't just tell an anti-colonial story; it tells that story using the cinematic language colonial and neo-colonial cinema built.
This is Bhabha's "almost the same, but not quite" turned inside out: rather than the colonized subject mimicking the colonizer to seek approval within colonial society, RRR mimics Hollywood's cinematic technology to seek approval and market success within global cinema, which remains substantially organized around Hollywood's aesthetic dominance (the Oscar win is itself proof of this the film needed validation from precisely the institution most associated with American soft power to be recognized as a global triumph).
Applying Fanon: Violence as Reclaimed Dignity With a Twist
Fanon argued that anti-colonial violence carries a different meaning than colonial violence: for the colonized, it is not aggression but the reclamation of dignity and selfhood denied by subjugation. This is where RRR actually aligns most cleanly, and most powerfully, with postcolonial theory more so than Rambo's violence, which (as I argued earlier) is colonial self-repair disguised as heroism.
When Bheem and Raju finally turn violence against their British oppressors most explicitly in the film's climax, where Raju, having been tortured and whipped nearly to death, rises to exact retribution the film stages exactly the psychological function Fanon describes: violence as the mechanism through which a colonized people reclaims the humanity that colonialism systematically denied them. Unlike Rambo, whose violence repairs American national pride at Vietnamese expense, Raju and Bheem's violence is direct: it targets the actual apparatus of their own oppression, not a displaced substitute enemy.
This is the genuine postcolonial achievement of the film and it's worth taking seriously rather than only critiquing. Fanon insisted that colonized peoples telling their own liberation story, on their own terms, through violence that reclaims rather than displaces, matters. RRR does this in a way Rambo structurally cannot, because Rambo's violence was never actually anti-imperial it was imperial self-soothing wearing anti-imperial costume.
Applying Spivak: Does Bheem and Raju's Story Let the Subaltern Speak?
Spivak's question is the hardest one to answer affirmatively here. Komaram Bheem, in particular, represents a tribal (Adivasi) leader a subaltern figure even within Indian society, historically marginalized not just by British colonialism but by caste and regional hierarchies within India itself. Does RRR let him "speak" in Spivak's sense, or does it, too, speak for him mythologizing him into a superhuman action icon whose actual tribal political context (land rights, forest rights, the specific grievances of the Gond people he represented) is almost entirely subordinated to spectacle?
This is a genuinely important limit of the film, and a place where a rigorous postcolonial reading has to resist simple celebration. Bheem's real historical struggle was specifically about tribal land and forest rights against both British colonial administration and, later, the postcolonial Indian state itself a detail the film almost entirely omits in favor of a generalized anti-British buddy narrative. In Spivak's terms, even a film centering a subaltern figure can still fail to let him speak on his own specific political terms, subordinating his particular history to a more universally marketable anti-colonial spectacle.
Synthesis: What This Application Reveals
Applying the full framework to a single film, rather than scattering examples across several, reveals something the Rambo/Bond comparison alone couldn't show as clearly: postcolonial critique isn't a checklist where a film either "passes" or "fails." RRR simultaneously:
- Succeeds by Fanon's standard genuine anti-colonial violence as reclaimed dignity, told from the colonized perspective
- Partially succeeds, partially fails by Gramsci's and Said's standards it replaces one hegemonic common sense with another, and partly Orientalizes itself for global consumption
- Reveals ambivalence by Bhabha's standard using the colonizer's own cinematic grammar to tell an anti-colonial story
- Falls short by Spivak's standard subordinating Bheem's specific subaltern political history to a more marketable universal spectacle
This is, I'd argue, the correct and most sophisticated postcolonial conclusion available to us as graduate-level analysis: not "is this film good or bad for postcolonial politics," but "where exactly does this film's resistance succeed, and where does it remain captured by the very structures it's resisting?" That question applied film by film, framework by framework is what postcolonial theory actually trains us to do, and RRR is unusually rich because it gives a different answer depending on which theorist's lens you apply.
Article 2
Postcolonial Studies and Climate Change: A Detailed Introduction to the Politics of Appropriating Tribal Resistance in RRR
Situating the Problem: Cinema, History, and the Politics of Borrowed Legitimacy
When popular cinema reaches into history to tell a story of resistance, it performs a double operation: it honors a real struggle by bringing it to mass attention, while simultaneously reshaping that struggle to fit the demands of spectacle, market, and ideology. This double operation commemoration entangled with distortion sits at the heart of Dilip Barad's pre-print article, "Reimagining Resistance: The Appropriation of Tribal Heroes in Rajamouli's RRR" (Department of English, Maharaja Krishnakumarsinhji Bhavnagar University, Gujarat). Barad's central claim is precise and consequential: RRR takes two historically distinct Adivasi (tribal) leaders Alluri Sitarama Raju and Komaram Bheem and appropriates their specific, localized struggles for land, water, and forest rights, converting them into generalized icons of nationalist resistance against the British Raj.
This is not a minor curatorial choice. As Barad argues, the substitution of a specific ecological and indigenous struggle for a generalized anti-colonial nationalism has real consequences: it produces a more commercially satisfying epic while erasing precisely the dimension of Raju's and Bheem's legacies that remains most urgent today the ongoing, unresolved fight over land, water, and forests that continues to define Adivasi life in postcolonial India. This introduction will establish, in detail, the historical basis of Barad's critique, its theoretical stakes for postcolonial studies, and its direct resonance with three live contemporary struggles: the Ken-Betwa River Linking Project, the Ladakh protests, and the Manipur protests each of which demonstrates that the "jal, jangal, zameen" struggle Raju and Bheem embodied did not end with independence; it merely changed its adversary.
Recovering the Specific History the Film Dissolves
A rigorous postcolonial reading must begin, as Barad does, by restoring the historical specificity that RRR's nationalist framing smooths over. This specificity matters because postcolonial critique is fundamentally concerned with who gets to narrate whose history, and on whose terms and generalization is itself a form of narrative power.
Alluri Sitarama Raju led resistance not against an abstract, undifferentiated "British Empire," but very specifically against the consequences of the 1882 Madras Forest Act colonial legislation that reclassified forest land as state property, stripping Adivasi communities of customary rights to hunt, cultivate, and gather within forests their communities had inhabited for generations. Raju's rebellion (the Rampa Rebellion, 1922–24) was, at its core, a forest-rights insurgency a direct confrontation with the colonial state's assertion of ownership over land indigenous communities considered their own by inheritance and custom, not by legal title.
Komaram Bheem, meanwhile, resisted a different power entirely: the Nizam of Hyderabad, a princely ruler operating under, but distinct from, direct British colonial administration. Bheem's struggle is most powerfully condensed in his slogan "Jal, Jangal, Zameen" (Water, Forest, Land) a phrase that has since become one of the most enduring rallying cries of India's indigenous rights movement, invoked by Adivasi activists across the country to this day, decades after Bheem's death.
Rajamouli's RRR fuses these two distinct men, distinct adversaries, and distinct causes into a single, unified anti-British buddy narrative a narrative choice Barad identifies as the film's central act of appropriation. The two men, who in historical fact never met, become cinematic brothers-in-arms against a single, simplified colonial villain. This is a more emotionally efficient story but efficiency, in postcolonial terms, is rarely innocent. What is lost in the compression is precisely the specificity of what was being fought for, and why that fight has not actually concluded.
Central Thesis: Nationalism as a Narrative that Forecloses the Present
The deepest move in Barad's argument is not simply historical correction it is a critique of what nationalist narrative does to time. By framing Raju's and Bheem's struggles as resolved chapters in the story of independence, RRR implicitly tells its audience: this fight is over, the British are gone, the heroes won. But insists this is precisely false for the communities Raju and Bheem represented. The specific resources they fought over land, water, forests remain under active, ongoing threat, not from foreign colonizers now, but from domestic industrialization, deforestation, and the expansion of corporate interests within independent India itself.
here reinforces this argument by citing Annie Zaidi's description of displacement from her book Known Turf, in which Zaidi insists that "displacement" is a dangerously inadequate word it is not simply movement from one place to another, but the loss of a river, of clean water, of grazing land, of cattle, of honey and herbs, and ultimately of "the right to protest when somebody in a uniform shows up to set fire to your home." This citation is theoretically significant: it reframes displacement not as a historical event completed in the colonial past, but as a continuous, embodied, present-tense condition experienced by indigenous communities right now. Barad's use of Zaidi effectively collapses the temporal distance the film's nationalist framing tries to establish reminding readers that the "then" of Raju and Bheem's resistance and the "now" of contemporary Adivasi dispossession are not separated by history at all, but are part of a single, unbroken continuum of struggle.
The Postcolonial Stakes: Does Independence End Dispossession, or Relocate It?
This is where film critique opens directly onto one of postcolonial theory's foundational questions: does formal decolonization actually dismantle the structures colonialism built, or does it simply transfer control of those structures to new, domestic hands?
Scholars of postcolonial and subaltern studies from Ranajit Guha's foundational work on peasant insurgency in colonial India to more contemporary environmental-justice scholarship have long argued that the postcolonial state frequently inherits and continues colonial-era logics of resource extraction and land classification, even while claiming political legitimacy as the opposite of colonial rule. The 1882 Madras Forest Act that Raju resisted was not repealed and forgotten after 1947 India's postcolonial forest governance framework substantially retained colonial-era categories of "reserved forest" and state ownership, categories that continue to structure land conflicts with Adivasi communities to this day.
In this light, Raju's and Bheem's adversaries were never simply "the British" as an ethnic or national category they were a specific legal and administrative apparatus of land control. That apparatus has outlived the colonizers who built it. RRR's choice to stage their resistance purely as anti-British nationalism therefore performs a subtle but consequential act of historical closure: it allows the postcolonial Indian state to inherit the heroism of Raju and Bheem's resistance without inheriting any accountability for the continuation of the very dispossession they resisted.
Contemporary Echoes: Ken-Betwa, Ladakh, and Manipur as Living "Jal, Jangal, Zameen" Struggles
To fully grasp what is at stake in critique, it is essential to place RRR's narrative choices beside movements happening in India today movements that demonstrate, with striking clarity, that the specific struggle Raju and Bheem embodied did not end in the twentieth century.
The Ken-Betwa River Linking Project
The Ken-Betwa Link Project India's first major implementation of its long-debated interlinking-of-rivers scheme involves damming and diverting river water between the Ken and Betwa rivers in central India, a process that submerges substantial forest land, including large portions of the Panna Tiger Reserve, and displaces Adivasi and other forest-dependent communities from ancestral land. Affected communities and environmental activists have specifically invoked the language of loss of forest, loss of water access, and loss of livelihood the exact vocabulary of "jal, jangal, zameen" in their opposition. Here, the adversary is not a colonial administration but the postcolonial developmental state, acting in the name of national infrastructure and water security, yet reproducing the identical structure of dispossession: state authority overriding indigenous land claims in the name of a larger national project.
The Ladakh Protests
Ladakh's ongoing protest movement most visibly associated with activist Sonam Wangchuk's hunger strikes and marches centers on demands for Sixth Schedule constitutional protections, which would restrict the ability of outside industrial, mining, and real-estate interests to acquire and exploit Ladakh's land without local consent. Central to the movement is anxiety over Ladakh's fragile high-altitude ecology, its limited water resources, and the risk that unregulated industrial expansion will damage glacial water systems that sustain the entire region. This is, again, a jal-jangal-zameen struggle in essentially direct form except now explicitly framed through the vocabulary of climate vulnerability, showing how the environmental dimension Barad argues RRR sidesteps has, in reality, become even more urgent and more explicitly politicized in the years since Raju and Bheem's time.
The Manipur Protests
The unrest in Manipur encompassing ethnic conflict between Meitei and Kuki-Zo communities, alongside long-standing disputes over forest land classification, reserved forest boundaries, and tribal versus non-tribal land rights reflects the continued volatility of colonial-era land categorization systems. Much of the conflict traces back to unresolved questions about which communities hold legitimate claim to forest and hill land under frameworks substantially inherited from British administrative categories. As in Raju's Rampa Rebellion, the fight is fundamentally about who has the legal and customary right to land and forest — a question colonialism left unresolved and independence did not settle, but merely re-inscribed within a new set of state institutions.
The Common Thread
Across all three movements, the same structural pattern recurs: a postcolonial state or state-sanctioned economic project, acting through the inherited administrative and legal machinery of colonial land governance, comes into conflict with indigenous or regional communities defending land, water, and forest against dispossession. This is precisely the continuity Barad argues RRR had the opportunity to illuminate — and precisely the continuity its nationalist framing instead obscures.
Postcolonial Critique: The Politics of Appropriating Tribal Resistance in RRR
Framing the Critique
article performs essential recovery work restoring the specific historical struggles (forest rights under the Madras Forest Act, the Nizam's rule, "Jal, Jangal, Zameen") that RRR's nationalist framing dissolves into generic anti-British heroism. But a postcolonial reading can push this critique further, into territory Barad's article opens but doesn't fully theorize: what kind of appropriation is happening here, and whose interests does it ultimately serve? My own critique extends Barad's argument using Spivak's subaltern theory, Fanon's writing on national consciousness, and eco-critical postcolonial thought, using RRR alongside other films that stage or mis-stage indigenous and subaltern resistance.
Spivak: The Subaltern Speaks Through the Film, But Not As Themselves
Gayatri Spivak's essay "Can the Subaltern Speak?" argues that even sympathetic representations of marginalized subjects tend to speak for them rather than let them speak substituting the representer's voice, categories, and purposes for the subaltern's own. This is the sharpest lens for reading what RRR does to Komaram Bheem specifically.
Bheem was a Gond Adivasi leader whose politics were rooted in a subaltern position even within Indian society his struggle was not against a foreign, external power alone, but against systems of land control (the Nizam's state, later inherited by postcolonial land law) that marginalized tribal communities within India's own political order. When RRR absorbs Bheem into a unified anti-British nationalist narrative, it does something quietly significant: it moves him from being a subaltern voice speaking against multiple, layered structures of power (princely state, colonial law, later the postcolonial state) into being a symbol that speaks for the majoritarian nation-state's foundational myth "we all fought the British together." Bheem's specific grievance against a non-British ruler (the Nizam) is folded into an anti-British story, which is historically imprecise in a way that is not incidental it is exactly what allows the postcolonial state to claim his heroism without inheriting his critique.
Comparative example — Newton (2017): Amit Masurkar's Newton offers an instructive contrast. Rather than mythologizing Adivasi resistance into spectacle, the film follows an election official conducting voting in a Maoist-affected tribal region of Chhattisgarh, and quietly reveals how the postcolonial Indian state's own bureaucratic and security apparatus continues to marginalize and endanger the very tribal communities it claims to enfranchise. Newton lets the contradictions of postcolonial governance remain uncomfortable and unresolved it refuses the mythic clarity RRR offers, and in doing so, arguably comes closer to letting subaltern precarity "speak" on its own terms, rather than being absorbed into a triumphant national story.
Fanon: The Pitfalls of National Consciousness
Frantz Fanon, in The Wretched of the Earth, warned specifically about what happens after anti-colonial victory he argued that a newly independent nation's elite frequently constructs a national consciousness that celebrates the fact of liberation while quietly stepping into the very structures of extraction and control the colonizer once occupied. Fanon called this danger the transformation of nationalism into "a crude and empty shell," where the rhetoric of liberation is preserved while its substance real redistribution of land, resources, and power to the people who fought for it is abandoned.
This is precisely the danger Barad's article gestures toward when it notes that today's displacement of Adivasi communities (via Ken-Betwa, industrialization, deforestation) is driven "not by foreign rulers but by domestic and global corporate interests." RRR, in Fanonian terms, performs the first half of decolonization's ideal narrative defeat of the colonizer while remaining entirely silent on the second half Fanon insisted was the real test of liberation: did power and resources actually return to the people, or merely change hands among elites? By ending its story at 1920s colonial defeat rather than tracing the thread forward to contemporary Adivasi dispossession under the Indian state itself, the film performs exactly the kind of national myth-making Fanon warned would allow independence to become hollow for the very communities whose resistance made it possible.
Comparative example — Avatar (2009): James Cameron's Avatar, often read as an indigenous-resistance allegory (the Na'vi resisting human/corporate extraction of "unobtanium"), is instructive by contrast for a different reason: it stages indigenous resistance entirely through a white protagonist (Jake Sully) who must become indigenous enough to lead the resistance himself a structure Bhabha's mimicry framework would immediately flag. RRR avoids this particular trap (its heroes are themselves the historical Adivasi/tribal figures), which is a genuine strength relative to Hollywood's pattern but it replaces the "white savior" problem with a subtler one: the nationalist absorption problem, where indigenous specificity is flattened not by a white outsider-hero, but by majoritarian national mythology itself.
Eco-Critical Postcolonialism: Environment as the Missing Political Subject
A specifically eco-critical postcolonial lens drawing on scholars like Rob Nixon, who coined the term "slow violence" to describe environmental harm that unfolds gradually and invisibly, disproportionately affecting the poor and marginalized sharpens Barad's argument considerably. Nixon's concept is directly relevant: the destruction of forest and water systems that Adivasi communities depend on is not a single dramatic event (like a British soldier's bullet) but a slow, cumulative, often invisible violence deforestation, river diversion, industrial encroachment that doesn't lend itself easily to cinematic spectacle.
This is, I'd argue, the deeper structural reason RRR chooses colonial nationalism over environmental justice as its frame: slow violence is cinematically difficult. A British villain can be defeated in a climactic battle; a river diversion project or decades of deforestation cannot be "defeated" in a single triumphant sequence. RRR's narrative choice is not just ideologically convenient — it may also reflect a genre-level limitation: mainstream action cinema is built for spectacular, resolvable conflict, not the slow, structural, often unresolved violence that actually defines contemporary indigenous struggles like Ken-Betwa, Ladakh, and Manipur.
Comparative example — Kantara (2022): This Kannada film offers a useful counter-case. Kantara centers a forest-dwelling community's spiritual and material relationship to land, staging a direct contemporary conflict between villagers and a forest officer over land rights closer in spirit to what Barad suggests RRR could have been. Yet Kantara has itself been critiqued for romanticizing tribal spirituality in ways that risk exoticizing indigenous belief systems for mainstream consumption showing that even films that do center contemporary land struggle are not automatically free of appropriation; they simply appropriate along a different axis (spiritual/aesthetic rather than nationalist).
Synthesis: Appropriation as Structural, Not Just Intentional
The postcolonial point worth emphasizing, beyond Barad's own conclusion, is that this appropriation is not necessarily a matter of Rajamouli's individual intent or ill will it is structural. Mainstream commercial cinema, whether Hollywood, Bollywood, or Tollywood, is built on narrative conventions (clear villains, resolvable conflict, spectacular climax, unifying emotional catharsis) that are simply better suited to nationalist triumph than to the slow, ongoing, structurally embedded injustice of land and forest dispossession. This means the "missed opportunity" Barad identifies isn't just a choice Rajamouli could have easily made differently it reflects a deeper tension between the grammar of commercial spectacle and the grammar of ongoing subaltern struggle, one that recurs across Avatar, Kantara, and RRR alike, in different forms.
Connecting Back to Ken-Betwa, Ladakh, and Manipur
This structural critique matters directly for reading Ken-Betwa, Ladakh, and Manipur as living struggles: each involves exactly the kind of "slow violence" river diversion, ecological fragility, land classification disputes that resists cinematic spectacle, and therefore resists the kind of mass visibility RRR achieved for Raju and Bheem's nationalist legacy. The postcolonial tragedy Barad's article ultimately points toward is this: the version of Raju and Bheem's story that became a global blockbuster is precisely the version least useful to the communities still fighting the struggles Raju and Bheem actually died for.
Broader Implications: Postcolonial Thought, Climate Change, and the Global Politics of Resistance Narratives
Why a Film Critique Becomes a Question About Power Itself
At this point, it's worth stepping back and asking: why does it matter, at a master's level of analysis, whether a Telugu action epic gets Komaram Bheem's specific enemy right? The answer is that RRR is not really an isolated case it is a small, visible example of a much larger and more urgent global pattern: the way narratives of resistance get produced, circulated, and consumed in ways that can either fuel real political struggle or quietly absorb and neutralize it. Understanding this pattern in one film teaches us to recognize it everywhere in climate summits, in corporate sustainability marketing, in how "indigenous wisdom" gets referenced in global development discourse. This is the real payoff of postcolonial analysis: it's not really about films at all. It's about learning to notice when power borrows the language of resistance while leaving the structure of dispossession untouched.
From Colonial Extraction to "Green" Extraction
One of the most important developments in postcolonial thought over the last two decades is its convergence with environmental and climate justice scholarship because the same extractive logic that defined colonialism (take resources from the periphery, benefit the center) has simply found new justifications in the era of climate change.
This is directly visible in the very struggles Barad's article gestures toward:
- The Ken-Betwa River Linking Project is justified in the language of national water security and even, ironically, drought mitigation a climate-adaptation framing used to justify submerging tribal forest land.
- Large-scale solar and mining projects in ecologically fragile regions like Ladakh are increasingly justified through the language of the green energy transition meaning that the same land and communities once threatened by colonial forest law, and later by industrial development, are now threatened by projects framed as solutions to climate change itself.
This is what postcolonial-ecological scholars call "green colonialism" or "green grabbing" the appropriation of indigenous and rural land not for traditional resource extraction, but explicitly in the name of environmental sustainability. It's a genuinely disorienting development: the very crisis (climate change) that should, in theory, validate indigenous ecological knowledge and land stewardship is instead being used to justify a new round of displacement, often by governments and corporations claiming to be part of the climate solution. Raju and Bheem's colonial-era enemy said, "this forest belongs to the Crown." Today's version sometimes says, "this land is needed for the nation's clean energy future." The vocabulary changes; the structure of dispossession does not.
Global Indigenous Resistance as a Connected, Not Isolated, Phenomenon
A second major implication is that postcolonial thought today increasingly insists that struggles like Ken-Betwa, Ladakh, and Manipur are not isolated Indian domestic issues they are part of a global pattern of indigenous and land-based resistance that connects directly to movements far outside India:
- Standing Rock (USA, 2016–17) the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe's resistance to the Dakota Access Pipeline was, structurally, an almost identical struggle to Ken-Betwa: indigenous land and water rights versus a state-backed infrastructure project justified through national economic interest.
- The Amazon (Brazil) indigenous resistance to deforestation and mining in the Amazon rainforest mirrors Adivasi resistance to forest clearance in central India almost exactly, down to the specific vocabulary of water, forest, and ancestral land.
- Mapuche resistance (Chile) indigenous land reclamation struggles against forestry corporations echo the same jal-jangal-zameen logic in a completely different hemisphere.
This global pattern matters for postcolonial thought because it reframes what might look like scattered, local protests as evidence of a single, worldwide structural conflict: indigenous and land-connected communities, on one side, against state-and-corporate development logics that trace their lineage directly back to colonial-era resource extraction, on the other. Seen this way, Raju and Bheem's specific 1920s struggle against British forest law and Nizami rule becomes part of the same historical throughline as Standing Rock, the Amazon, and Ken-Betwa
not because the details are identical, but because the underlying logic of who gets to claim land, and on what authority, has never actually been resolved by decolonization anywhere in the world.
Global Cinema's Double Role: Visibility and Dilution
This is where returning to RRR specifically becomes valuable again. Global streaming and global box office success mean that Indian, Nigerian, Korean, and other non-Western cinemas are, for the first time at this scale, capable of putting their own historical resistance narratives in front of massive international audiences something largely impossible a generation ago, when Hollywood held near-total control over global cinematic distribution (recall Barad's original Rambo/Bond article on precisely this dominance).
This is genuine progress. RRR introduced Alluri Sitarama Raju and Komaram Bheem's names to millions of viewers worldwide who had never heard of them. But the same global visibility machine that made this possible Netflix, international box office, the Academy Awards rewards precisely the kind of narrative simplification and spectacle that Barad critiques. In other words: the very mechanism that gives postcolonial resistance stories global visibility is often the same mechanism that flattens and dilutes their specific political content. This is a genuine bind, not a simple failure of individual filmmakers: to reach a global audience at all, complex, slow, structurally embedded struggles like forest rights or river displacement often have to be compressed into something spectacular, resolvable, and emotionally triumphant exactly what Rob Nixon's concept of "slow violence" tells us doesn't compress well.
What This Means for How We "Consume" Resistance Today
Perhaps the sharpest implication of this whole analysis, for you as a student living in this globalized media environment, is this: in a world where resistance stories are increasingly available as global entertainment, audiences can now "experience" solidarity with indigenous struggle through a three-hour spectacle, then move on without that experience translating into any actual engagement with the ongoing, unresolved version of that struggle happening in the present. Watching RRR and feeling moved by Raju and Bheem's fictional triumph over the British is not the same as knowing about, or supporting, the Adivasi communities currently resisting displacement at Ken-Betwa. The film can, without any bad intention on anyone's part, function as a kind of narrative closure that substitutes for actual political awareness audiences leave the theater feeling that resistance succeeded, precisely at the moment when the real version of that resistance most needs contemporary attention and support.
This is, I would argue, the single most important postcolonial insight your analysis of Barad's two articles has built toward across this conversation: the danger is not simply that Hollywood (or now, Tollywood) tells self-serving stories it's that global audiences have been trained to expect resistance narratives that resolve, when the actual histories of colonialism's aftermath, land rights, and climate justice are defined precisely by their lack of resolution.
Applying the Theoretical Framework: A Postcolonial Reading of Jai Bhim (2021)
Why This Film
Of the films available for comparison, T. J. Gnanavel's Jai Bhim (2021) offers the sharpest test case for applying the framework built across Barad's two articles because unlike RRR, it refuses the nationalist-spectacle resolution Barad critiques, and instead stays inside the slow, unresolved, structurally embedded version of subaltern struggle that "Jal, Jangal, Zameen" actually names. Where RRR absorbs Raju and Bheem's specific fight into anti-British nationalism, Jai Bhim does something almost the opposite: it takes a real case of tribal injustice and refuses to let the audience leave with false closure.
Quick context: Based on a real 1993 case, Jai Bhim follows Rajakannu and Sengeni, members of the Irular community a nomadic, forest-dwelling Adivasi group historically criminalized under colonial-era "Criminal Tribes" legislation after Rajakannu is falsely accused of theft, taken into police custody, tortured, and killed. His wife Sengeni, pregnant and illiterate, fights through the postcolonial Indian legal system, aided by a lawyer (based on real-life Justice K. Chandru), to secure justice.
Applying Spivak: Does Sengeni "Speak," or Is She Spoken For?
Spivak's question can the subaltern speak? is almost literalized in this film's plot. Sengeni is a woman from a community with no political voice, no land title, no formal literacy, and a colonial-era legal label ("criminal tribe") still shaping how police and courts perceive her community. The film's central tension is precisely whether the legal system will let her speak as herself, or whether her case will only be legible through a mediator the lawyer, Chandru who translates her experience into the language of constitutional rights the court can recognize.
This is Spivak's dilemma made structural: Sengeni's grief and demand for justice are real, but the film is honest that she cannot access the legal system's language of habeas corpus, custodial evidence, or constitutional writ on her own terms she needs an educated, upper-caste-coded intermediary to make her subalternity legible to state power. Unlike RRR, which resolves Bheem's subalternity into unmediated heroic action (he simply defeats his enemies with superhuman strength), Jai Bhim insists on showing the actual mechanics of mediation the fact that subaltern justice, in the postcolonial present, still requires translation through elite institutional channels. This is a more honest, more theoretically rigorous engagement with Spivak's problem than RRR offers, precisely because it refuses spectacle as a substitute for structural critique.
Applying Fanon: The Postcolonial State as the New Adversary
Fanon's warning about the "pitfalls of national consciousness" that a new nation's elite can inherit colonial structures of control even while claiming liberation is the film's entire premise. The villains of Jai Bhim are not foreign colonizers; they are Indian police officers, operating within institutions substantially inherited from colonial-era policing structures, including the specific legal category of "denotified tribes" communities the British colonial state formally labeled "criminal" under the Criminal Tribes Act of 1871, a label that, though officially repealed in 1952, continued (and still continues) to shape how police profile and target these communities.
This is precisely the continuity Barad's RRR article gestures toward but the film itself never shows: the specific colonial-era apparatus (forest law for Raju, criminal-tribe classification for communities like the Irular) did not disappear at independence it was absorbed into postcolonial state practice, and continues to structure violence against indigenous and nomadic communities today. Jai Bhim stages exactly the "domestic and global corporate interests" and "domestic" structures of dispossession Barad argues RRR sidesteps except here it's policing and custodial violence rather than river or forest displacement specifically, but the underlying Fanonian logic is identical: liberation from colonial rule did not liberate this community from the structures colonialism built to control it.
Applying Nixon's "Slow Violence": A Structural Contrast with RRR
Rob Nixon's concept of slow violence harm that is gradual, cumulative, and often invisible to spectacular narrative is where Jai Bhim most clearly resonates with, and improves on, the framework Barad applies to RRR. The violence in Jai Bhim is not a single dramatic battle resolved in one climactic sequence; it is custodial torture, institutional neglect, years of legal delay, and a community's accumulated distrust of state authority built over generations of criminalization. The film's courtroom-drama structure slow, procedural, frequently frustrating mirrors the actual temporality of subaltern struggle far more honestly than RRR's spectacular, resolvable action sequences.
This is precisely the structural point I raised in the previous critique: mainstream spectacle cinema is often ill-suited to represent slow violence, which is part of why RRR defaults to nationalist spectacle over ongoing land-rights struggle. Jai Bhim proves this isn't an absolute limitation of cinema itself it demonstrates that a mainstream, commercially successful film (it was one of the most-watched Indian films globally on its release) can sustain slow, procedural, non-triumphant narrative and still reach a mass audience. This matters theoretically: it suggests Barad's "missed opportunity" critique of RRR is not a naive demand for cinema to do something cinema structurally cannot do Jai Bhim shows the alternative was genuinely possible.
Applying Gramsci: Whose Common Sense Does the Film Build?
Where RRR builds a comforting common sense (colonialism is defeated, the nation is unified and heroic), Jai Bhim builds a far more destabilizing common sense: it asks mainstream, largely non-Adivasi Indian audiences to recognize that the state institutions they trust police, in particular actively participate in caste- and tribe-based violence against communities still carrying colonial-era criminal labels. This is Gramscian counter-hegemony in a much more direct form than RRR attempts: rather than replacing one totalizing national myth (British villainy) with another (nationalist unity), Jai Bhim asks its audience to hold discomfort about their own present-day state and society, rather than displacing all injustice onto a defeated colonial past.
Applying Bhabha: Mimicry and the Limits of Legal Inclusion
Bhabha's mimicry framework illuminates the film's central irony: Sengeni's path to justice runs entirely through learning to make her claim legible within the colonizer-inherited legal system habeas corpus, constitutional writ, courtroom procedure categories inherited directly from British common law. Her justice is only achievable by operating within, not outside, the very institutional architecture built during colonial rule. This is mimicry's ambivalence exactly as Bhabha describes it: the system offers genuine justice (Rajakannu's case did result in a real legal victory and compensation), but only on terms that require the subaltern subject to become legible within a framework she did not build and does not control.
Synthesis: What This Application Reveals
Applying the full framework to Jai Bhim rather than RRR reveals something important about the limits and possibilities of postcolonial cinema:
- Succeeds by Fanon's and Nixon's standards it names the postcolonial state itself, not a defeated foreign colonizer, as the site of ongoing structural violence, and sustains slow, non-spectacular narrative time
- Complicates Spivak's question productively showing subaltern voice as always mediated, without pretending that mediation is either fully just or simply an act of unmediated heroism
- Builds genuine counter-hegemony (Gramsci) rather than replacing one national myth with another, it destabilizes audience trust in present-day state institutions
- Remains caught in Bhabha's mimicry bind justice is only accessible through the colonizer-inherited legal system's own categories and language
Why This Comparison Matters for the Larger Argument
Reading Jai Bhim against RRR demonstrates precisely the distinction Barad's article implicitly calls for but doesn't have space to develop: the difference between a film that uses tribal resistance as material for nationalist spectacle, and a film that stays with the ongoing, unresolved, structurally embedded nature of subaltern struggle in the postcolonial present. RRR asks audiences to feel triumphant about a resolved past. Jai Bhim asks audiences to sit with an unresolved present and in doing so, comes far closer to honoring the actual, unfinished legacy of "Jal, Jangal, Zameen" that Raju and Bheem's real history, and movements like Ken-Betwa, Ladakh, and Manipur today, continue to demand.
References:
Barad, Dilip. “Heroes or Hegemons? The Celluloid Empire of Rambo and Bond in America’s Geopolitical Narrative.” ResearchGate, Aug. 2024, https://www.researchgate.net/publication/383415195_Heroes_or_Hegemons_The_Celluloid_Empire_of_Rambo_and_Bond_in_America%27s_Geopolitical_Narrative. Accessed 28 Aug. 2026.
Barad, Dilip. “Reimagining Resistance: The Appropriation of Tribal Heroes in Rajamouli’s RRR.” ResearchGate, Aug. 2024, doi:10.13140/RG.2.2.30146.80329. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/383603395_Reimagining_Resistance_The_Appropriation_of_Tribal_Heroes_in_Rajamouli%27s_RRR. Accessed 28 Aug. 2026.
