A day after the teaser release of controversial film Razakar: A Silent Genocide of Hyderabad, bankrolled by Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) leader Gudur Narayana Reddy, Telangana’s Information Technology Minister KT Rama Rao (KTR) has alleged that the BJP is using the film to instigate “communal violence and polarisation for their political propaganda” in Telangana. The Bharat Rashtra Samithi (BRS) leader on Monday, September 18 said he would take up the matter with the censor board. The film Razakar claims to tell the story of the eponymous Muslim paramilitary troupe, which was used to wreak havoc while Hyderabad’s last Nizam Osman Ali Khan attempted to stay as an independent state’s ruler during India’s independence.
Despite the makers’ claims that the film is only attempting to implicate the Razakars for their adverse role in history, the film’s teaser which released on Sunday is being accused of typecasting and villainising the Muslim community as a whole. Discussing the trailer, KTR said, “Some intellectually bankrupt jokers of the BJP are doing their best to instigate communal violence and polarisation in Telangana.” He also said the Telangana police would be asked to ensure that the state’s law and order situation isn’t affected because of the film.
The trailer starts with a scroll which reads, “15 August 1947. India got Independence. But Hyderabad did not.” The scroll is followed by scenes of violence, showing bearded Muslim men claiming to use the conflict of partition to churn Hyderabad into ‘Turkistan’. The trailer shows Razakars, the Nizam’s Muslim paramilitary troupe, forcibly shaving off the moustache of Hindu men and coercing them to convert to Islam.
The trailer’s voiceover speaks of how the Razakars wanted to abolish Telugu and enforce Urdu and Farsi, followed by gruesome scenes of a Hindu man’s tongue getting cut off, and several dead people hanging from the branches of a large tree. One scene in particular shows a Muslim officer of the troupe, tugging and dislodging the thread of an elderly Brahmin man.
After the trailer was released, several filmgoers took to social media to call it blatantly Islamophobic, alleging that the trailer was creating hatred between communities by presenting a no-nuance narrative of the events that took place before Hyderabad was amalgamated into India. The film has also been accused of following in the footsteps of the likes of The Kashmir Files and The Kerala Story, both of which have been widely criticised for basing their accounts on stereotypes that paint Muslims as villains.
The villainy of Hyderabad’s Razakars during the tumult of 1947-48 is a well documented chapter in the history of the erstwhile princely state. Read a detailed piece by Yunus Lasania which speaks about the catastrophic period in history which ended with the massacre of thousands of Muslims, as estimated by the Pandit Sunderlal Commission of Enquiry, cannot be ‘fictionalised’ into convenient binaries.
Read: A movie on Razakars' violent history in BJP's arsenal for Telangana
Read: Razakars came in the day, ‘they’ at night: Telangana women recall the police action