From Jal, Jangal, Zameen to the Flag: Rethinking Raju and Bheem After Reading Barad Sir's Article
Myth vs Reality: When Cinema Reshapes Historical Resistance
Introduction
The first time I watched RRR, I mostly took it for what it looked like on the surface, a big, loud, emotional story about two friends fighting the British together. I remember feeling proud during the interval scene. I did not stop to ask who Raju and Bheem actually were before the film turned them into fictional friends. It was only after reading Barad sir's article, "Reimagining Resistance: The Appropriation of Tribal Heroes in Rajamouli's RRR," that I started noticing what the film had quietly left out. His article does not really ask whether RRR is entertaining. It asks something harder: what happens to the historical memory of Alluri Sitarama Raju and Komaram Bheem when their local, land based struggles get folded into one large anti British story.
This blog is my attempt to sit with that question. RRR is not simply right or wrong in how it uses these two men. It does something more complicated than that. It takes two figures whose resistance was rooted in specific fights over forest access, water and land, and turns them into symbols of a shared national struggle. That gives them visibility on a scale they never had before. It also moves their story away from the very things, jal, jangal, zameen, that made their resistance meaningful to the communities they belonged to. That shift, from the specific to the general, from land to nation, is what I want to trace here.
Film Myth Versus Historical Struggle: The Gap Between Cinema and Reality
What Barad Sir's Article Made Me See
Before reading the article, I did not know much about the real Raju or the real Bheem beyond what the film shows. Barad sir fills in that gap. He explains that Raju's resistance grew out of his opposition to British forest policy, particularly the 1882 Madras Forest Act, which cut off Adivasi communities from their traditional forest habitats. Bheem is remembered differently, through his struggle against the Nizam of Hyderabad, tied closely to the slogan "Jal, Jangal, Zameen," water, forest, land.
What struck me most is how Barad sir frames the film's central move. RRR reimagines these two men as united freedom fighters against the British Raj, shifting attention away from their specific, localized battles toward a broader nationalist narrative. He argues this shift causes the film to overlook the ongoing struggles of displacement and environmental degradation that still affect indigenous communities in India. After reading this, I could not watch the film the same way. The problem was not that the film had lied about history. It had fictionalized it, which is fairly normal for popular cinema. What bothered me was noticing how easily the specific material struggles behind these two names had disappeared into a much more comfortable, unifying story.
History vs. Cinematic Legend: The Transformation of Tribal Heroes
From Local Resistance to National Myth
It helps to be honest about what RRR actually is. It is not a documentary and does not claim to be one. The friendship between Raju and Bheem in the film is fictional. There is no historical record of the two men meeting, let alone fighting side by side against the British. So the more useful question is not whether this is accurate. It is what this fictional unity allows the film to say, and what it stops us from seeing.
By placing Raju and Bheem on the same side of a fight against colonial rule, the film creates something emotionally powerful. Two regional heroes from two different struggles stand together as one idea of resistance. That is a real achievement in storytelling terms, and it introduces both figures to audiences who might otherwise never hear their names. But this unity is built on a kind of flattening. Raju's fight was about forest rights and colonial law. Bheem's fight was about land, water and resistance to a local ruler, not primarily the British. When the film brings them together mainly as anti British fighters, it borrows the most nationally recognizable frame, colonialism versus India, even though that frame was not really the shape of either man's actual struggle. Does uniting two different histories under one banner honour them, or does it quietly erase the specific reasons their communities remember them? I keep going back and forth on this.
Jal, Jangal, Zameen
This is where I think Barad sir's argument matters most, and also where it is hardest to hold onto while watching a big commercial film. "Jal, Jangal, Zameen" is not just a slogan naming three resources. For many indigenous communities, water, forest and land are tied to livelihood, identity, memory, even spiritual life. Losing access to a forest is not just losing wood or grazing space. It can mean losing an entire way of organizing community life. Barad sir connects this phrase directly to Bheem's historical struggle, and reading it this way helped me understand why reducing his resistance to "fighting the British" feels like such a loss.
In the film, Bheem is shown as strong, loyal, and deeply committed to saving a child taken by the British. That is a moving personal story, but it is a personal story, not a story about land or forest rights. The ecological and material dimension of his resistance, the actual jal, jangal, zameen, barely appears on screen in any direct way. I do not think this was done to hide anything on purpose. Spectacle driven cinema probably finds it easier to tell a story about rescuing a child than a story about forest policy. Either way, the effect is the same. The material struggle moves to the background and an emotional, individual struggle takes its place.
Video: RRR - The Making of a National Epic
Appropriation and the Question of Who Speaks
The word "appropriation" in Barad sir's title does not necessarily mean the film steals or insults tribal history. I read it as pointing to something more specific: a mainstream, big budget film takes historical figures who belonged to particular regional and tribal memories and reorganizes them to serve a different, larger purpose, in this case a pan Indian nationalist story with global commercial appeal.
This raises a question I keep returning to. Who gets to represent the subaltern hero, and what does that representation actually give back? RRR was written and directed within a large commercial film industry, using Raju's and Bheem's names to tell a story shaped mainly around spectacle and national pride. The film gives both figures enormous visibility. Probably more people know their names today because of RRR than because of any history textbook. But visibility is not the same as political voice. The film does not ask viewers to think about forest rights, Adivasi land struggles, or the Nizam's rule in any real detail. It asks them to feel proud of two brave men fighting a foreign empire. That, I think, is the paradox at the centre of the film. A marginalized regional history becomes widely celebrated while the specific political demands connected to that history stay almost invisible.
Foundations of Indigenous Resistance: Land, Water, Forest
Spectacle, Nationalism and Popular Cinema
I do not want to call RRR propaganda in a simple sense. That would be too easy an answer, and Barad sir's article does not make that claim either. What feels more accurate is that the film works through what I would call a nationalist cinematic imagination, a way of telling history that uses music, action, friendship and larger than life heroism to make resistance feel emotionally simple and satisfying.
This matters because spectacle is not neutral. When Raju and Bheem are shown as almost superhuman, fighting impossible odds together, the audience is invited to feel a kind of collective pride that does not require much political understanding. The British are villains, the heroes are noble, and the nation is the natural home for their resistance. It is a very old pattern in popular cinema. It turns complicated histories into emotional common sense. I think that is genuinely part of why the film succeeded so widely. But it also means the harder, less cinematic parts of Raju's and Bheem's stories, colonial forest law, local rulers, land struggles, do not fit easily into this kind of storytelling. So they mostly get left out.
RRR and the Question of Soft Power
Barad sir has written about this pattern outside the RRR article too, and I think it is worth bringing in here. In a separate blog post, "Rambo and Bond in America's Geopolitical Narrative," he looks at how the Rambo and James Bond franchises worked as tools of American soft power during and after the Cold War. He points out that films like Rambo III and The Living Daylights framed the Soviet-Afghan War as a moral crusade, positioned American or Western characters as the moral center of the story, and normalized a pro-Western worldview across a global audience, all while keeping the entertainment value high enough that most viewers never noticed the ideology doing its work.
What caught my attention in that piece is Barad sir's response to Palki Sharma, a media commentator he cites, who argues that Bollywood should learn from Hollywood and use its own films to project India's narrative on the world stage. Barad sir does not simply agree with her. He asks whether Bollywood, or Indian cinema more broadly, should really copy this hegemonic model, or whether it should instead question and resist that kind of narrative altogether.
I think RRR sits right in the middle of that question. It is not an American film promoting Western foreign policy, but it does something structurally similar to what Rambo and Bond did. It takes a real historical conflict, simplifies the sides into heroes and villains, and uses spectacle to build a strong emotional attachment to one national identity. Raju and Bheem, like Rambo, become larger than life figures whose personal courage stands in for the courage of an entire nation. Read next to Barad sir's Rambo and Bond piece, RRR starts to look less like an isolated case and more like part of a wider pattern in popular cinema everywhere, where soft power and national pride get built through the same tools of music, heroism and spectacle, regardless of which country's history is being told. This does not cancel out the concerns raised in his RRR article. If anything, it makes them feel less like a problem specific to one film and more like a question about what popular cinema tends to do with history in general.
What Is Lost
If I try to sum up what disappears in this transformation, it comes down to specificity. Raju's resistance to the Madras Forest Act, and what that act meant for Adivasi access to forest land, is barely present in the film's version of him. Bheem's fight for water, forest and land against the Nizam becomes, in the film, mostly a fight against the British instead, which was not the main direction of his actual historical struggle. Barad sir's article is clear about this cost. The nationalist framing overlooks the specific fights for land, water and forest rights that actually defined these men's legacies.
What is lost here is not just historical accuracy. It is the connection between these two names and a struggle that is still going on. Once Raju and Bheem become symbols of "fighting for the nation," it becomes easy to celebrate them without asking whether the nation, after independence, has actually protected the land, water and forest rights they were associated with.
Displacement and Environmental Justice
Barad sir's article uses a quotation from writer Annie Zaidi that stayed with me. She describes displacement not simply as movement from one place to another, but as the loss of a river, of safe drinking water, of grazing land, of cattle, of herbs and honey, and even of the right to protest when authority arrives to take these things away. Reading this made me realize how narrow my own understanding of "displacement" had been. I had mostly thought of it as people being physically relocated. Zaidi's description, as Barad sir uses it, shows that displacement is really about losing an entire relationship with a place.
This matters for how I now read RRR. If the original struggles of Raju and Bheem were about protecting exactly these things, rivers, forests, grazing land, community life, then reducing their story mainly to "resisting the British" leaves out the material meaning of what they were resisting for. These forms of displacement did not end with colonial rule, and that gap between the film's story and the present reality feels important to sit with.
Rethinking Displacement: Beyond Physical Movement to Loss of Relationship
A Contemporary Example: The Ken Betwa Project
I want to be careful here, because I do not want to turn this blog into a news report, and Barad sir's article does not mention this project directly. But one contemporary case helped me understand why his argument still holds up: the Ken Betwa River Linking Project in Madhya Pradesh.
The project involves building a large dam on the Ken river and a canal connecting it to the Betwa, mainly to provide irrigation and drinking water to the Bundelkhand region. Reports on the project describe thousands of hectares of forest land inside the Panna Tiger Reserve going under submergence, and villages along the Ken river facing loss of land and livelihood to the reservoir. Farmers in the affected area have formed local groups to raise concerns about losing their homes and fields, even as the project has moved ahead with government clearances.
I am not claiming a direct link between this project and the history of Raju or Bheem. What I am saying is that it shows the same structure Barad sir's article points to in relation to RRR. A large national or state level project, framed as "development" or "national benefit," or in the film's case, "the nation's freedom," often moves forward with less attention paid to the specific communities whose land, water and forest access are directly affected. The question the film raises about celebrating tribal resistance while overlooking present day tribal struggles feels very real when I look at an example like this.
Ken Betwa River Linking Project: Development vs. Displacement
Can Popular Cinema Still Be a Space of Resistance?
I do not think the answer is to dismiss RRR. A film like this reaches far more people than an academic article ever could, including me before I read Barad sir's work. In that sense it does open a door. It makes people curious enough to search for who Raju and Bheem really were, even if the film itself does not answer that question fully.
But popular cinema, by its nature, tends to simplify in order to reach a wide audience. It can create visibility while still avoiding the more uncomfortable, specific political demands attached to a figure's history. RRR can be both things at once, a film that introduces tribal heroes to a mass audience, and a film whose version of resistance quietly leaves out the land, water and forest struggles that made these men significant to their own communities in the first place.
Conclusion
Reading RRR alongside Barad sir's article has left me with a more layered sense of what appropriation can mean. It is not always about erasing history outright. Sometimes it is about scale, moving a story from local to national, from land to flag, from a specific community's fight to a broad, shared feeling of pride. This movement is not without value. It gives Raju and Bheem visibility they did not have before, and it introduces their names to people who might otherwise never encounter them. But it also asks us, as viewers, to do some of the remaining work ourselves. If the film gives us the heroes without their specific struggles over jal, jangal and zameen, then the work of recovering those struggles, and noticing how they continue today, is left with us. That is the question I am left with. Not whether RRR told history "correctly," but whether we are willing to look past the spectacle it offers and ask what it made easier not to see.
Memory vs. Mythology in Cinema: The Question of What We Choose to See
Video: RRR - Behind the Spectacle
📚 Works Cited
Barad, Dilip. "Reimagining Resistance: The Appropriation of Tribal Heroes in Rajamouli's RRR." Dilip Barad's Blog, 2024.
https://doi.org/10.13140/RG.2.2.30146.80329
Barad, Dilip. "Rambo and Bond in America's Geopolitical Narrative." Dilip Barad's Blog, 26 Aug. 2024.
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/383415195_Heroes_or_Hegemons_The_Celluloid_Empire_of_Rambo_and_Bond_in_America's_Geopolitical_Narrative
RRR. Directed by S. S. Rajamouli, performances by N. T. Rama Rao Jr. and Ram Charan, DVV Entertainment, 2022.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RRR_(film)
"Ecocide at Ken-Betwa." India Today, 17 July 2017.
"Ken-Betwa Project to Cause 'Large-Scale' Deforestation." The Tribune, 2024
This analysis examines RRR through the critical framework developed by Prof. Dilip Barad, exploring how the film transforms local, land-based tribal resistance into a unified national narrative, and what is gained and lost in that transformation from jal, jangal, zameen to the flag.
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