How Chhaava, Bollywood’s latest Hindutva history film, is making things worse for school teachers

For over two decades, a school teacher saw her students’ interest in history dwindle as their fascination for science and technology grew. Eventually, she made peace with children calling her subject “drab”. So, when Chhaava, Bollywood’s latest offering of dramatised Hindutva history, released in theatres across the country on February 14, she was caught off guard by their enthusiastic reaction to it.

However, this interest was warped by the film’s slanted portrayal of Indian medieval history. “For the first time we saw Aurangzeb live,” she recalled her students saying when she discussed it in class. “Miss, is this what the Mughals have done in our country?”

Chhaava tells the story of the second Maratha king Sambhaji and his late-17th-century wars against the Mughal empire. Its gory portrayal of Sambhaji’s torture and execution has sparked off extreme reactions, including deadly rioting in Nagpur. Sensing that the cinematic depiction of Mughal emperor Aurangzeb’s supposed cruelty had strongly influenced her students, she cautioned them against deducing anything about an entire dynasty from one movie.

“Akbar was the first Mughal ruler who waived off a pilgrim tax for the Hindus,” she said, reminding them that the history of the dynasty was varied. Even then, some ninth standard students influenced by the movie shouted slogans of “Jai Bhawani” and “Jai Shri Ram” in school the very next day.

“That really shocked me,” she told Scroll later, requesting anonymity to discuss the sensitive issue. “At such a tender age, they are so highly influenced by the movie.”

Chhaava was only the latest Bollywood to present a Hindutva view of history. Scroll contacted eight teachers in Mumbai, Bengaluru, Kolkata and Delhi to ask them how this was influencing how they taught history to school children. Most of them expressed helplessness in the face of historically inaccurate films and their negative influence on young students.

Some said they were adopting new methods to combat it but the history syllabi designed by Indian school education boards comes in the way.

Influencing young minds

All the teachers Scroll spoke to shared the worry that many students are taking away the wrong ideas about Indian history from these films. Part of the blame for this, they said, is on the way Indian boards plan history teaching across a child’s school life.

In most Indian schools, medieval history is taught during the middle school years, to children between the ages of 10 and 14. This period is a core focus for Hindutva supporters, given the fact that large parts of the subcontinent were ruled by Muslim kings and emperors at this time. In recent years, Bollywood filmmakers have selectively dipped into this period of history to churn out films in sync with Hindutva talking points.

However, children aged 10-14 barely possess the ability to grasp the complex factors at play when studying the medieval period, teachers argued. By the time they develop a real interest in it, their syllabus moves into the modern era and most teachers don’t have the bandwidth to cater to their curiosity. Questions about the medieval period that spring up in their minds after watching these films largely remain unanswered.

As a result, children often lack the critical tools required to watch Hindutva Bollywood history without being influenced by its slanted portrayals.

Some teachers said they try to address these questions but there is little space given in the Indian education system to ideas that go beyond exams. “In the tenth standard, students mostly focus on trying to get their marks in board exams,” said Krystle Ann Vaz, who teaches history at Mumbai’s Sacred Heart school. “There is too much to do in a limited time. You can’t really go into great detail.”

Another high school teacher from the Mumbai added: “Many children wanted to discuss Ayodhya but I have my limitations. Our syllabus is totally the opposite of what the present world is showcasing.”

Dangers of an online world

Besides Chhaava, the teachers brought up other examples of films belonging to the same genre, such as Article 370 and Padmaavat, which also influenced their students and led to classroom discussions. Samyukta Ninan, a history teacher at Delhi’s Bluebells School International, said she empathised with children because they are being “bombarded” with such films.

She remembered her students being captivated by 14th century Delhi Sultanate ruler Alauddin Khilji’s character for “days and days” after Padmaavat released in 2018. “A lot of it was propaganda but kids don’t realise that,” she said. “It becomes so real for them that these kids don’t even want to question it. You have to tell them that what you see on screen is not real. This has become very challenging for us as educators.”

Most teachers agreed that good cinema could be a powerful way to spark a child’s curiosity and nudge them to find out more. Recognising the power of celluloid, Oindrila Gooptu, who is at Kolkata’s La Martiniere for Boys school, while her students teaching about the revolt of 1857 has for years recommended that they watch Satyajit Ray’s Shatranj Ke Khilari and Shyam Benegal’s Junoon.

However, today, even more than movies, social media might play an outsized influence when it comes to a child’s perception of history. One teacher, who retired from a South Delhi school last year, expressed concern about the online flood of short videos making false claims, such as those claiming that Akbar was defeated by Maharana Pratap in the battle of Haldighati.

“If all the wrong stories are going around on TikTok and Instagram reels, children will not understand,” she said. “Students being young minds don’t have the maturity to understand that this is all wrong.”

This teacher observed that the political climate meant that her students were taking a black-and-white view of history, eager to demonise many elements of India’s past. “Older students had a more open mind,” she noted. “Today’s students believe everything that happened in the past was wrong. They argued with me.”

Battling a deluge

Elite private schools that are certified by international boards might be best placed to counter Bollywood’s misinformation on history, teachers say. That is because their system privileges developing critical thinking skills in their students and allows teachers considerable leeway to innovate as they impart lessons.

Bhavana Jain, who teaches at a Cambridge International Education board school in Bengaluru, uses logical exercises to help students “break down” a film to discern the filmmaker’s “message” and form their own opinions about it.

“You understand how much fact, how much myth, how much storytelling has happened in the film,” she said, explaining her classroom teaching method. “Then you are able to consume it much more logically and not be swayed by it.”

Samyukta Ninan, who also teaches at a Cambridge International Education board school, began taking her students to a Harappan excavation site in Haryana because she was “mortified” by what they were learning about the Indus Valley civilisation from the 2016 film Mohenjo Daro.

However, most Indian teachers work in schools that do not allow such freedom. They face different challenges if they try to improvise out-of-the-box solutions.

In 2023, the National Council of Educational Research and Training, which publishes text books for the Union government’s Central Board of Secondary Education, decided to drop a chapter on Partition from the twelfth standard syllabus. As a history teacher, Kolkata-based Sukanya Mukherjee felt she simply could not ignore the topic.

So she showed her students video testimonies of Partition survivors and explained that the widespread sexual violence seen during that period was principally about men’s power over women regardless of the religion they belong to. The students grasped the complexity of the issue but it did not sit well with some parents.

“There were people who were not happy,” she said. “They felt that this could distort their ideas of religion. So, in a subtle manner, we [teachers] were informed that we have to be careful. These pressures are also there on the teacher.”

The end of history

Some teachers blamed Bollywood for turning historical films into a formula: throw in fancy designer clothing and lavish sets to make a successful film whether or not it sticks to the facts. However, not everyone was despondent at the trend as they hoped that the films would help students “emotionally connect” with a subject otherwise seen as boring.

“It is a good thing actually,” said Vaz from Mumbai, talking about history in films. “Sometimes politics gets mixed with it to create unrest but I wouldn’t blame the movies.”

Even as it thrives in politics and cinema, ironically, history is not a popular subject in school given its relatively not-so-lucrative career prospects. Sometimes, teachers have to “advertise and advocate” for history to fill up their classrooms.

Even those who choose history as their subject in elite private schools and receive relatively better training are rarely able to pursue the subject in college. Teachers spoke of ex-students who had to abandon their interest in history because their parents refused to fund a college education in the discipline.

In this “age of technology”, parents do noy see value og engaging with the past, explained one teacher. What bothers the teachers the most is that these attitudes have now found a way into children’s behaviour towards one another.

“There is this hierarchy that exists,” said Jain, the Bengaluru-based teacher. “Humanities students are looked down upon and become the butt of all jokes. You can see that division in the class.”

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