Despite the recently released film L2: Empuraan enjoying the support of a significant portion of Kerala’s population – with even chief minister Pinarayi Vijayan, known for his indifference to cinema, attending a screening as a show of solidarity against the hate campaign – Mohanlal’s capitulation to the Sangh parivar agenda speaks volumes about the contemporary metastases of fascist forces.This is not a critique founded on the ideological moorings of the lead actor or the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh affiliations of the scriptwriter or the director’s family members – the three belonging to the Malayali Shudra segment of the traditional varna hierarchy – though their ties to the organisation are undeniable. It is well known that through gestures both grand and subtle – from invoking the Manusmriti on Women’s Day to championing nationalist rhetoric during the Jawaharlal Nehru University controversy, from a cordial meeting with Prime Minister Narendra Modi to enthusiastically embracing pandemic-era symbolic acts – Mohanlal has time and again aligned himself with narratives that echo the cadence of Hindutva politics. Murali Gopy’s lineage bears the imprint of a more direct connection with his father, the legendary New Wave actor Bharat Gopy, aligning with the BJP in his later years. Director and actor Prithviraj Sukumaran’s mother, Mallika Sukumaran, went further still – campaigning for BJP’s Rajeev Chandrasekhar in the last general elections and, just days ago, candidly admitting her long-standing acquaintance with the RSS leadership of a bygone era.Bharat Gopy. Photo: IMDbWhile feminism has rightly taught us that the personal is political, to judge a film solely on the political leanings of its creators or their families is both reductive and ironically fascistic – mirroring the very tactics of vilification that fascism thrives on. The political affiliations or ideological moorings of the filmmaker or their family members are not cited merely as biographical trivia. Rather, they are used to foreground the complex and contradictory social reality of Kerala – a state often hailed for its progressive ethos and left-liberal leanings, yet home to a wide spectrum of ideological positions within even a single family. It is through such intimate and everyday proximity to right-wing thought that one begins to understand how the film’s underlying message – that the right wing in India is no deep state – could take narrative shape. The filmmakers’ ideological positioning seems inseparable from the familial and cultural milieu they inhabit, where right-wing sympathies are neither exceptional nor clandestine but embedded within kinship and memory.However, one must also understand that the film’s complicity in authoritarianism extends beyond mere personal affiliations. My critique is not of its makers’ political inheritance but of the film’s intrinsic failure: It offers neither intellectual depth nor a meaningful strategy to counter fascism. Instead, it peddles a sinister vision – one where retributive violence is celebrated as resistance.Elsewhere, the deep state. Here, only the stateThe film portrays the struggle between two instruments of violence: the state and the deep state. The former is stripped of all pretence, revealed in its rawest form – it is the Hindutva state, birthed in the inferno of the 2002 Gujarat carnage. This Hindu state, the film suggests, is not cloaked in subterfuge. It wears its brutality openly, revelling in its own orgy of murder, torture, bloodshed and rape.Mohanlal in a still from ‘L2: Empuraan’.Opposing the blundering, self-assured Hindutva state is a spectral, transnational force – the deep state – embodied in Kureishi Ab’raam, which is the name of both Mohanlal’s character and the organisation he belongs to. Kureishi Ab’raam operates as a singular presence and the mastermind behind a vast, elusive nexus of arms dealers and power brokers spanning continents. This shadowy network does not merely include him; it is controlled by him. Once known as Stephen Nedumpalli, a politician from Kerala, Kureishi Ab’raam has shed his past identity, slipping into the corridors of global influence. As the film nears its climax, a North Indian politician dismissively calls him a Malabari – a slur often used to diminish Malayalis – yet in doing so, unwittingly acknowledges the force he has become. Unlike the reckless, brash dominion of Hindutva, which trumpets its violence as a war cry, this unseen hand punishes and dethrones with chilling efficiency, striking not in rage but with the quiet inevitability of judgment. To the world’s most savage regimes, he is not a rival but a reminder that they are mere pieces on a far grander chessboard, and he, the unseen player, is always several moves ahead.This ex-politician is more than just a man – he is Lucifer incarnate, a fallen angel who has cast off not only his Christian past but faith itself. He has understood what few dare to: that the Son of God has failed, and in that failure lies a revelation. The divine edict, ‘vengeance is mine; I shall repay it’, has been inverted. In a world dictated by techno-military hegemony and artificially constructed nationalist-religious fervour, waiting for divine retribution is the mark of the powerless. The ultimate weapon of Christ – love – proves a futile relic in a transactional world, and so Lucifer chooses the only path left: vengeance, not as divine justice, but as human will forged in fire.It is hardly surprising that this cynical monster – true to the fascist playbook – is exalted as the ultimate saviour, a messianic force cloaked in shadows. He alone is imagined as the last line of defence, shielding the nation from the blood-drenched hands of Hindutva puppeteers, rescuing Kerala’s fragile exceptionalism from their ruthless grip, and intercepting the terrified woman, Priyadarshini (Manju Warrier), in her desperate flight from the same marauding forces. He emerges as the avenger of the voiceless, the guardian of Adivasis caught in the lethal nexus of unchecked “development” and the Hindutva machine. Even secularism itself, bloodied and gasping, is entrusted to his hands—those same hands that deliver vengeance with precise, deliberate strokes.Above all, he is the saviour of the victim and the unseen hand guiding Zayed Masood’s (Prithviraj Sukumaran) vengeance. As a child, Masood beheld the inferno of 2002, his innocence consumed in its devouring flames. Later, the jihadists would tell him that every Hindutva atrocity is but an echo of a deeper betrayal – the Indian nation-state’s foundational treachery against its Muslim minority. But the ex-politician, the shadowy Illuminati, pulls him from the grip of radicalism – not to quell his fury, but to refine it. He does not promise justice; he promises something more pure and absolute – revenge.When Masood strikes at his enemies with Kureishi Ab’raam, his wrath does not merely fall upon men but upon the state itself, for the state is no abstraction, no faceless entity – it is the sum of those who orchestrated the carnage. The state, in other words, is the Hindu state, and the Hindu state is nothing more than the collective will of those who commit atrocities in the name of Hindutva. The film, however, refuses to show how this Hindutva state also operates as a deep state. It makes as though its violence were an accident of history rather than the calculated exertion of a power that has long ruled in plain sight. It skirts the more unsettling truth—that in India, a certain organisation has, for almost a century, functioned as deep state in everything but name, never needing the formality of membership to wield its influence. Here, the film’s ideological allegiance is at its most transparent: for it, the deep state is real, but only elsewhere, never here.A still from ‘L2: Empuraan’.This displacement is reinforced in the very name of its shadowy mastermind: Kureishi Ab’raam. It invokes two foundational figures of the Semitic prophetic tradition – Abraham, the patriarch, and Mohammed, the final prophet, who belonged to the Kureishi tribe. In doing so, the film conjures the idea of a transnational, even mythic, order, a hidden force that moves beyond the nation-state. The deep state exists, but it is an abstraction woven into the fabric of history, an entity that operates from the outside. India, by contrast, is rendered whole, unfractured – its violence, though staggering, is framed as something visible, direct, never the work of unseen hands. Everything is safe. There is only the state. No deep state.Fighting Fascism with Fascism Empuraan, a crude, almost adolescent indulgence in sentimental revenge fantasy – whether born of laughable naïveté or calculated profiteering – is now being heralded as a valiant strike against Hindutva fascism! And the most wide-eyed of the so-called anti-fascists, brimming with earnest delusion, believe that the film’s unfiltered depiction of the Gujarat carnage – its orgies of slaughter, the unspeakable violation of a pregnant woman – has somehow, according to some Malayalam social media handles, awakened a sense of shame in the very people who were guilty of committing it. They truly think a militaristic, hyper-nationalist, testosterone-fuelled political machine would be crippled by moral reflection. That it would shudder in guilt at the mention of murder and rape! If anything, the film serves as a fresh shot of adrenaline for them – a “golden opportunity” (like the Sabarimala issue) to fortify their ranks. What better way to consolidate the base than by stoking the primal fear of a jihadi assassin lurking in the shadows, poised to strike down their beloved leader? A masterstroke of diversion, this carefully curated anxiety can sweep away inconvenient truths: the quiet erasure of corporate debt while ordinary citizens drown in it, the kleptocrats who plunder and flee with impunity, and the obscene tax cuts for the super-rich while the poor are squeezed dry through indirect levies.It silences the questions that truly matter – social justice, the public’s loss of faith in the judiciary, the unshakable grip of the savarna male in the courts, the looming storm of delimitation, the insidious dismantling of public education under the guise of reform, and the systematic exposure of their propaganda machine by Grok. But why stop there? The relentless privatisation of national assets, the quiet strangulation of labour rights, the blatant deployment of state machinery to crush dissent, the unending epidemic of caste and gender-based violence – all are conveniently drowned out in this manufactured hysteria.No one talks about how entire communities are being systematically disenfranchised through legal gymnastics. No one questions how surveillance is turning citizens into suspects and how universities are being reduced to echo chambers of propaganda. The dismal state of the environment? The collapse of agrarian economies? The silencing of journalists and the jailing of activists? None of it matters when the air is thick with the orchestrated paranoia of a looming Islamic threat.If anything, this fabricated anxiety is a guaranteed electoral bonanza – one that will not only pay dividends in the North but will also ensure that the public remains too hypnotised by fear to ask who is truly robbing them blind. Ah, the ever-misunderstood right-wing! While some well-meaning souls believe the right-wing uproar is a desperate attempt to silence the fearless anti-fascist warriors of the film fraternity, the reality is far more cunning. They don’t want to ban the film – just ask Vijeesh Vettam, the BJP district committee member from Thrissur, who was promptly expelled for daring to seek a legal ban. His plea, citing the film’s references to the 2002 Gujarat riots as a threat to communal harmony, was not only a deviation from the agenda – it was a misstep. Because the real play here isn’t censorship; it’s amplification. They want you to watch it, absorb it, and unknowingly march in sync with their narrative. Outrage is their marketing strategy; controversy is their sharpest PR tool. And the filmmakers, ever so obliging, have danced to their tune, dutifully following the right-wing playbook page by page.And those who have marched straight into the trap, playing their designated roles to perfection, are now hailed as valiant warriors against fascism. Their shrewd, cold-blooded business strategy (they have censored the film by effecting 24 cuts) – whether in conscious collusion with Hindutva’s desperate need for a grand distraction or simply aligned by profit-driven convenience – is paraded as a strategy of making the Sangh machinery toothless. But strip away the theatrical bravado, and what remains is nothing more than the Malayali Shudra privilege at its most commercially astute.Still unconvinced? Imagine, for a moment, three Muslim or three Adivasi/Dalit filmmakers attempting to craft a spectacle like this – spinning, with the same reckless abandon, a violent revenge fantasy in which a Lashkar-e-Taiba-trained Jihadi assassinates the supreme leader of the state. Would it be celebrated as a bold strike against fascism? Your guess is as good as mine.Aspiring for new mastersWhat the Malayali Shudra revenge fantasy, draped in the illusion of an ultimate saviour, truly conceals is this: There is no ultimate saviour. Every desperate yearning for one, every cinematic fabrication of a lone redeemer, is merely the latest mutation of the same fevered imagination that once conjured Narendra Modi or Donald Trump as messianic figures. It is the raw material of fascist dreamwork – an endless cycle of strongman worship, where salvation is always promised through brute force, never through justice.But fascism is not vanquished by another avatar of authoritarian retribution. Its only true antidote lies in social, political, and economic justice – in a world where power is dismantled, not concentrated; where social diversity is not mere tokenism, but a lived reality; where democracy breathes not through hollow slogans, but through a fundamental ethic of care. True resistance is not in fantasies of violent deliverance but in the radical, unwavering insistence that the other – whoever they may be – is not an enemy to be crushed but a fellow human to be embraced.Unlike Phule’s anti-caste radicalism or Kancha Ilaiah’s intellectual assertion of Shudra identity, the Malayali Shudra occupies a more ambiguous space within the social order. Shaped by the peculiar history of Kerala – where the Nairs, despite their Shudra status, have exercised considerable cultural and political influence – the Malayali Shudra imagination does not always align with the revolutionary consciousness seen in Phule’s Maharashtra or Ilaiah’s Andhra. Instead, it often operates within the framework of dominant caste narratives, negotiating its space through accommodation rather than outright resistance. This explains why even seemingly subversive cultural productions, such as Empuraan, ultimately remain tethered to hegemonic structures rather than offering a radical break from them.Anilkumar Payyappilly Vijayan is an Associate Professor of English at Government Arts and Science College, Pathiripala, Palakkad. Under the name a/nil, he is the author of The Absent Color: Poems. A/nil’s book, Is There a Dalit Way of Thinking? is forthcoming from Navayana.
