Heroes, Hegemons, and the Land: Reimagining Resistance in RRR
Introduction: Cinema as a Political Archive
Popular cinema is not merely entertainment. Its heroes, villains, landscapes, costumes, music, and action sequences teach viewers how to imagine power. The two assigned articles invite us to examine this political work of cinema from two connected directions. Dilip Barad’s “Heroes or Hegemons? The Celluloid Empire of Rambo and Bond in America’s Geopolitical Narrative” studies the way popular franchises transform military and geopolitical power into attractive stories of individual heroism. According to Barad, Rambo and James Bond operate as instruments of soft power: they project the United States and the wider West as defenders of freedom, normalize Western geopolitical interests, and circulate a pro-Western worldview through global entertainment [1].
Barad’s “Reimagining Resistance” applies a similar critical method to S. S. Rajamouli’s RRR. The article recognizes the film’s emotional power and celebration of Indian resistance, but argues that the film reimagines Alluri Sitarama Raju and Komaram Bheem as a unified nationalist pair and thereby reduces the specific Adivasi histories behind them [2]. Reading both articles together produces a central question: when cinema represents resistance, does it challenge hegemony, or can it create another hegemonic narrative by speaking for communities whose histories are more complex than the film allows?
My argument is that RRR both resists and reproduces hegemonic storytelling. It reverses the colonial action-film structure by making Indian revolutionaries the agents of liberation and the British empire the object of critique. At the same time, it absorbs distinct tribal struggles into a spectacular story of national unity. The film is therefore politically meaningful but incomplete. It opens an important space for anti-colonial pride, yet it underplays the continuing struggles over land, water, forests, displacement, and environmental justice that gave Raju’s and Bheem’s resistance its material force.
The Celluloid Empire: Rambo, Bond, and Geopolitical Common Sense
Barad’s first article explains how action franchises can make geopolitical ideology feel like ordinary entertainment. In Rambo: First Blood Part II, the United States is represented as a wounded but morally justified nation seeking redemption after Vietnam. Vietnamese characters become villains or obstacles, while the American soldier becomes the person who reveals the truth and restores justice. In Rambo III, the setting shifts to Afghanistan, where Rambo aids the Mujahideen against Soviet forces. The film presents American involvement as a moral crusade against communism and positions the United States as a global liberator.
The James Bond series produces a related narrative through a British rather than American hero. The Living Daylights also uses Afghanistan and the conflict with the Soviet Union, while Licence to Kill reflects Western anxieties about drug cartels and Tomorrow Never Dies explores the political power of media and information. Although Bond’s missions are fictional, the ideological structure is familiar: the Western hero enters a dangerous foreign space, understands the crisis better than local actors, and uses exceptional violence to restore order.
This is why Barad calls such cinema a “celluloid empire.” The films do not need to announce themselves as political propaganda. Their influence operates through pleasure, repetition, identification, international distribution, and the prestige of the heroic body. They project ideology by presenting Western power as freedom; they create cultural hegemony by making Western values appear universal; they reinforce economic influence through the global success of Western cultural products; and they shape perceptions by representing military and intelligence agencies as competent and legitimate. A postcolonial critique must therefore ask who is allowed to become the hero, whose violence is called liberation, and whose political complexity is reduced to the background.
RRR and the Challenge to the Colonial Gaze
At first sight, RRR offers a powerful alternative to the Western geopolitical narrative described above. Instead of a white hero entering the Global South to save it, the film places Indian revolutionaries at the centre. The British colonial state is not treated as a neutral administrative system. It is shown as a structure of racial hierarchy, surveillance, kidnapping, and physical violence. The opening abduction of Malli, a Gond child, establishes the logic of colonial possession: the governor’s wife treats the child’s musical and artistic ability as an object that can be collected, just as empire collects land, labour, natural resources, and cultural objects.
The film’s spectacular action sequences turn anti-colonial resistance into a collective emotional experience. Bheem enters Delhi to rescue Malli, while Raju appears to serve the colonial police so that he can obtain weapons for the revolution. Their friendship creates a fantasy of unity across region, language, and political experience. Their individual strengths become greater when joined together, and the film suggests that liberation requires solidarity rather than isolated heroism.
The “Naatu Naatu” sequence extends this challenge to the cultural sphere. The Indian dancers’ energy defeats a colonial party’s assumption that European manners represent refinement and Indian bodies represent primitiveness. The scene is entertaining, but it also reverses the colonial gaze: the British spectators become the ones who cannot understand the cultural power before them.
In this respect, RRR does something that Rambo and Bond usually do not. It does not ask Indian audiences to admire the foreign power that enters their world. It imagines the colonized as historical agents and gives them spectacular narrative authority. Its global success also complicates the direction of cultural flow. A Telugu-language film can travel through international platforms and become an important global visual narrative without being produced from a Hollywood centre.
Appropriation and the Problem of Nationalist Unity
However, an anti-colonial film is not automatically a decolonial film. Barad’s RRR article points out that the historical Raju and Bheem did not simply fight one common enemy in one unified national movement. Alluri Sitarama Raju led the Rampa rebellion against British forest restrictions associated with the 1882 Madras Forest Act. Those policies restricted Adivasi access to forests and disrupted podu cultivation, movement, and livelihood. Komaram Bheem, a Gond leader, fought the Nizam and local forms of exploitation in the region that is now Telangana. His political memory is associated with the phrase “Jal, Jangal, Zameen”—water, forest, land—which expresses a material relationship between indigenous communities, territory, and survival [2].
RRR transforms these distinct histories into a fictional friendship between two superhuman figures. Rajamouli has openly framed the meeting as an imagined episode in a gap in their biographies, and this creative liberty is not itself a problem. Historical fiction can invent meetings in order to explore political possibilities. The problem arises when invention replaces specificity. The film’s larger nationalist message makes Raju and Bheem symbols of one united India, but it gives less attention to the different communities, political structures, and land-based claims represented by their histories. Bheem’s “Jal, Jangal, Zameen” becomes part of a patriotic vocabulary rather than the centre of an ongoing struggle over who controls natural resources.
This is appropriation in a complicated sense. The film appropriates tribal heroes not to support British imperialism, but to build a national epic. It makes Adivasi figures available as symbols of national pride, while the particular politics of Adivasi sovereignty can become less visible. Nationalism can honour indigenous heroes from the past and still ignore indigenous communities in the present, especially when the state or corporations describe forests, rivers, and mineral-rich land as resources for development.
From Historical Resistance to Climate Justice
Barad’s most valuable criticism is that RRR misses an opportunity to connect anti-colonial history with contemporary environmental struggles. Displacement is not only the physical relocation of people. It can mean losing a river, access to clean water, fertile land, cattle, forests, herbs, livelihood, cultural memory, and the right to protest when an authority destroys a home [2]. This definition changes how we should read the forest in RRR. The forest is not simply a dramatic setting where Bheem arrives with animals. It is a living political and ecological world.
The relevance of this argument can be seen in the contemporary Ken–Betwa River Linking Project. Down To Earth reports that the project, centred on the proposed Daudhan dam in Bundelkhand, has raised environmental and social concerns because of its location inside the Panna Tiger Reserve and its effects on villages in Chhatarpur and Panna. Affected tribal residents have demanded fair rehabilitation, resettlement, and compensation, while environmental critics have questioned the loss of forests and wildlife habitat [3]. The dispute demonstrates why “Jal, Jangal, Zameen” must not remain only a cinematic slogan. Development can be presented as national progress while producing the same forms of dispossession against which indigenous leaders historically fought.
A postcolonial climate perspective therefore asks who has the authority to define progress. Colonial powers extracted resources for imperial profit. Postcolonial governments may extract them for national development. Corporations may extract them for global markets. The political language changes, but a community can still be asked to sacrifice its land for someone else’s future. If a film celebrates resistance only as the defeat of a foreign ruler, it risks making the postcolonial state appear innocent. A fuller representation would ask how colonial patterns survive through dams, mines, industrial corridors, forests converted into commercial property, and the displacement of people who are then described as obstacles to development.
Conclusion: Accountable Postcolonial Cinema
Barad’s article on Rambo and Bond teaches us to examine who controls the camera, who becomes the moral centre, and how entertainment turns geopolitical interests into common sense. His article on RRR extends that method by asking what happens when a postcolonial film represents indigenous resistance through a nationalist spectacle. RRR is valuable because it rejects the old imperial story in which liberation must be delivered by a Western hero. It places Indian anti-colonial agency at the centre and demonstrates the global power of Telugu cinema.
Yet the film also shows that challenging one hegemony does not eliminate the responsibility to question another. By merging Raju and Bheem into a single friendship, RRR makes resistance emotionally accessible but historically less specific. It celebrates tribal heroes while leaving the contemporary politics of land, water, forest, displacement, and climate justice largely outside the frame. The film’s greatest lesson is therefore about representation itself. A narrative can recover erased heroes and still erase the political conditions that made them significant.
Postcolonial cinema should not simply imitate Hollywood’s celluloid empire by replacing one heroic centre with another. It should create more accountable forms of storytelling: forms that preserve indigenous specificity, recognize subaltern agency, connect historical memory to present struggles, and ask who pays for national development. The deepest meaning of resistance lies not only in defeating a colonial officer on screen. It lies in defending water, forests, land, memory, community, and the right of marginalized people to define their own futures.
Works Cited
Barad, Dilip. “Heroes or Hegemons? The Celluloid Empire of Rambo and Bond in America’s Geopolitical Narrative.” Dilip Barad | Teacher Blog, 26 Aug. 2024, blog.dilipbarad.com.
Barad, Dilip. “Reimagining Resistance: The Appropriation of Tribal Heroes in Rajamouli’s RRR.” Dilip Barad | Teacher Blog, 31 Aug. 2024, blog.dilipbarad.com.
Johnson, Jessica. “RRR (Rise, Roar, Revolt).” Education About Asia, vol. 28, no. 2, 2023, educationaboutasia.org.
Parekh, Dhruval, and Bhagirath. “Ken-Betwa Link Leaves Tribal Families Fighting for Fair Compensation.” Down To Earth, 8 July 2026, downtoearth.org.in.
Rajamouli, S. S., director. RRR (Rise, Roar, Revolt). Performances by N. T. Rama Rao Jr., Ram Charan, Ajay Devgn, and Alia Bhatt, DVV Entertainment, 2022.
The News Minute Staff. “Who Were Sitarama Raju and Komaram Bheem, the Real-Life Heroes Shown in RRR?” The News Minute, 25 Mar. 2022, thenewsminute.com.
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