By Amit Kumar Sharma, Professor of Sociology, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi
A Cinema Speaking From Within
Something has been shifting in Indian cinema for several years now, and the films that most clearly mark that shift are not always the ones critics are most comfortable celebrating. Sandeep Reddy Vanga’s Animal (2023) and Vignesh Raja’s Kara(2026) are, on the surface, very different films — one a blood-drenched, operatic fever dream about a tycoon’s son who turns the vocabulary of toxic masculinity into a war cry; the other a grounded, melancholic period heist about a reformed thief fighting to save his family’s land from a predatory financial system. Yet placed in conversation with each other, they reveal something significant about the current state of Indian storytelling: a visible, urgent, sometimes unsettling attempt to speak from within rather than gaze outward for validation, to locate Indian manhood, family, land, and justice inside a civilizational inheritance that does not require a Western audience to ratify it. Whether one celebrates this tendency or regards it with alarm, it demands serious critical attention.
The Two Films: What They Are and What They Do
Animal, written and directed by Sandeep Reddy Vanga and released on the 1st of December 2023, follows Ranvijay Singh, played with terrifying commitment by Ranbir Kapoor, the estranged son of a powerful industrialist played by Anil Kapoor. Ranvijay is a man whose entire psychology has been sculpted by paternal neglect — a father who was physically present throughout his childhood but emotionally absent, absorbed by the building of an empire at the cost of the son who idolized him. The film tracks Ranvijay’s return from the margins of the family into its violent center, as an assassination attempt on his father unlocks in him a ferocity that the film does not condemn so much as mythologize. Animal offers a caricature of chest-thumping masculinity — equal parts James Bond, Godfather, Hercules, and Leatherface — in which the protagonist uses a concept of innate alpha supremacy to defend everything from picking unnecessary fights to serial infidelity, and the film always agrees he is in the right. It runs for over three hours. Despite deeply mixed critical reception, it became a massive commercial phenomenon, grossing over ₹900 crore worldwide and becoming the highest-grossing A-rated Indian film of all time. The gap between what critics made of the film and what audiences made of it is itself one of the most important cultural data points of recent Indian cinema.
Kara, by contrast, is a film that earns its violence through restraint. Set in Ramanathapuram in 1991, during the weeks when the Gulf War was sending economic tremors through India’s coastal communities, Vignesh Raja builds his story carefully, brick by brick, around Karasaami — a man known simply as Kara — who has already paid his dues to a criminal past and is trying, with real effort and real love, to live a quiet life. The predatory loans that a local bank has wrapped around his family’s ancestral land make that life impossible to sustain. Vignesh Raja puts his protagonist on the wrong side of the law and derives suspense from a deceptively simple question: will he be able to get away? But terms like “good” and “bad” don’t apply in a Vignesh Raja film. Everyone has an agenda, and everyone wants to accomplish something. The circumstances, though, are different. Where Animal announces itself at maximum volume from its opening frame, Kara earns its eruptions through accumulation — through the slow, suffocating documentation of what it costs an ordinary man to be a good man in a system designed to punish precisely that.
The Colonial Inheritance: What Indian Cinema Was Born Into
To understand what is new about this cinema, one must understand what it is pushing against — and that requires going back to the conditions under which Indian cinema came into existence. Indian film was born under British colonial rule, and the censorship apparatus that governed it was designed, among other purposes, to police what could and could not be said about power, sovereignty, and native identity. Dadasaheb Phalke’s early mythologicals were acts of cultural assertion, films that placed gods and heroes of the subcontinent at the center of the frame at a moment when colonialism insisted on their marginality. But the structure of censorship, along with the deeper cultural pressures of the colonial encounter, shaped Indian cinema in ways that persisted long after independence.
The concept of Orientalism, as Edward Said formulated it, describes not merely a set of stereotypes but an entire epistemological structure through which the West produced knowledge about the East in ways that served colonial power. The East was framed as sensual, irrational, mystical, despotic, and timeless — incapable of self-governance, requiring the rational intervention of the West to become modern. In cinematic terms, this manifested as a specific set of images: the Indian man as either effeminate and spiritual or barbarically violent; the Indian woman as oppressed and in need of liberation; Indian society as a field of primitive custom awaiting the arrival of progress. Post-colonial Indian cinema did not simply escape these structures by achieving independence from British rule. It often internalized them, partly because the educated elites who dominated cultural production had themselves been formed by colonial education, and partly because the international film festival circuit — the primary route to global prestige — rewarded work that confirmed rather than challenged Western expectations of what Indian cinema should look like and say.
The “parallel cinema” movement of the 1970s and 1980s, for all its genuine achievements, drew heavily from European neorealism and socialist realism. Satyajit Ray, whose gifts as a filmmaker are beyond dispute, produced work that was often received in the West as confirmatory evidence of India’s “authentic” poverty and spirituality — precisely the Orientalist categories the movement believed it was critiquing. Even Bollywood’s commercial mainstream, in its blend of Hollywood romance templates with indigenous melodrama, frequently operated within a hybrid frame that placed Western narrative forms above indigenous ones by treating them as the neutral, universal grammar into which Indian content could be poured. The legacy of all this is a cinema that has often gazed outward for validation, measuring itself against standards set elsewhere, and internalizing a split between the “traditional” and the “modern” that is itself a colonial construction.
What Animal Asserts: The Father Wound as Civilizational Wound
Animal is, among other things, a film about what happens to a society when the transmission of authority between generations breaks down. Ranvijay’s obsession with his father is not merely a psychological pathology in the clinical sense; it is a metaphor for a post-colonial elite that built institutional power at the cost of cultural continuity, that became wealthy and modern at the price of severing the bonds — emotional, ceremonial, dharmic — that held together the civilizational inheritance it was supposed to steward. Balbir Singh, the father, is not an evil man. He is a man who chose the language of material accumulation over the language of presence, and the film reads his absent fatherhood as a civilizational failure: the betrayal of the son who needed not money but initiation, not success but recognition.
Vanga’s response to this failure is deliberately, provocatively extreme. Ranvijay does not seek therapy. He does not develop self-awareness or emotional literacy in the manner of a liberal coming-of-age narrative. He becomes a predator, and the film frames predation — the protection of kin through absolute, undiscriminating force — as a recovery of something primal that modernity, with its Western-inflected ideals of emotional restraint and rational problem-solving, had pathologized out of existence. This is the film’s central, most contested argument, and it is an argument that Western critical frameworks are poorly equipped to engage with on its own terms. The success of Animal highlights a larger trend in Indian cinema where a particular brand of storytelling, pandering to a pan-Indian audience, tends to portray its male protagonists as the flagbearers of a certain kind of masculinity — demigods who ride high on their embrace of hyper-violence, films that have also managed to bring audiences back to theatres in greater numbers than ever seen before. The audience that poured into cinemas to watch Ranvijay Singh massacre his enemies was not, or not only, watching a spectacle. It was watching a fantasy of unmediated agency at a moment when the cultural mediation demanded by liberal modernity feels, to large numbers of Indian men, like a foreign imposition rather than a genuine ethical achievement.
This does not mean the film is above criticism. Somewhere in Animal’s cinematic brilliances lurks a director who is upset about being called a male chauvinist for his previous work, so enraged that he moulds his protagonist in an image that perpetuates narrow ideals of strength, control, and dominance — an alpha male syndrome that offers a hierarchical view of relationships where dominance is valued over cooperation and understanding. The film’s treatment of women is not merely politically incorrect; it is philosophically incoherent within its own civilizational claims. The great female figures of Indian epic tradition — Draupadi, Sita, Kali, Durga — are not passive recipients of male protection. They are agents, warriors, and moral forces in their own right. Animal’s women, by contrast, are props in Ranvijay’s mythology, which suggests that the film’s reclamation of the “native” is more selective than its advocates acknowledge — it reclaims what flatters a certain male fantasy and quietly discards the rest. The film risks doing precisely what it accuses liberal cinema of doing: imposing a particular cultural lens — in this case, the lens of contemporary manosphere ideology, which is itself a product of Western digital culture — onto a civilizational inheritance it claims to honour.
What Kara Asserts: The Dharmic Hero and the Violence of the Dispossessed
Kara makes its civilizational argument more quietly and, ultimately, more coherently. Vignesh Raja is not interested in spectacle for its own sake. He is interested in the moral archaeology of a particular kind of violence — the violence that emerges not from strength but from the exhaustion of every other option available to a man who has already tried to be good. Kara’s return to crime is not a liberation. It is a grief. The film’s understanding of violence is tragic in the precise classical sense: the protagonist is destroyed not by his vices but by his virtues, by the very loyalty and love that the system has learned to weaponize against men like him.
The ancestral land at the heart of the film’s conflict is not merely a plot device. In the Indian civilizational imagination — and in the Tamil regional imagination in particular — land is not property in the modern legal sense. It is identity. It is continuity. It is the physical substrate of a family’s relationship to its dead and its unborn, to the generations that cleared and tilled and were buried in that earth. When a bank converts this relationship into a loan document and a repayment schedule, it is not merely engaging in a financial transaction. It is committing a symbolic violence of the deepest kind — erasing the civilizational meaning of place and replacing it with the abstract arithmetic of capital. Kara’s heist is, in this reading, not a crime. It is an attempt to restore a sacred relationship that a colonial-era financial structure had legally severed.
This reading aligns Kara with a tradition of Indian heroic narrative that has always been sceptical of legality as a measure of legitimacy. In the Ramayana and the Mahabharata, dharma frequently requires transgression of the law as it is written. The hero who steals to restore justice, who breaks the king’s command to honour a higher obligation — this is not an anomaly in the Indian narrative tradition but one of its central recurring figures. What Vignesh Raja does, at his best in this film, is translate this archetype into the specific historical and material conditions of post-liberalisation rural Tamil Nadu, grounding the mythic in the documentary, the eternal in the particular. The 1991 backdrop is not nostalgia. It is precision.
The Contrast That Defines the Comparison
Placed side by side, Animal and Kara reveal two different answers to the same civilizational question: what does it mean for Indian cinema to speak from its own inheritance rather than through the borrowed grammar of Western genre? Animal’s answer is maximalist and transgressive — burn down the liberal constraints, unleash the primal, make the audience feel the raw energy of a masculinity that does not apologize for itself. The risk of this approach, and it is a significant risk, is that in rejecting one set of alien conceptual frameworks — the liberal progressive vocabulary of gender equity and emotional intelligence — it inadvertently imports another: the global manosphere’s mythology of the alpha male, which is no more native to Indian soil than the Western feminism it claims to oppose. Ranvijay Singh speaks the language of Andrew Tate as much as he speaks the language of Arjuna, and the film does not always seem aware of the difference.
Kara’s answer is more disciplined and more durably rooted. Its violence is contextualised within a web of social relationships — family, community, land, debt, guilt — that gives it moral weight without glamourizing it. Its protagonist does not celebrate his own transgression; he mourns it. And the film’s engagement with colonial-era economic structures — the predatory finance that continued the extraction of rural surplus long after the British left — is substantive rather than decorative. Where Animal uses the civilizational frame as a license for excess, Kara uses it as a framework for critique. Both impulses are present in a cinema undergoing decolonisation. The first impulse is reactive, taking the form of aggression toward the frameworks being rejected. The second is constructive, taking the form of a careful recovery of alternative values and narrative structures. Both are necessary stages in a cultural process that does not proceed in a straight line.
Pan-Indian Cinema and the Architecture of Assertion
Neither of these films exists in isolation. They are part of a broader movement in which the South Indian film industries — Telugu, Tamil, Kannada, Malayalam — have moved from regional significance to pan-Indian cultural centrality, carried partly by the streaming revolution that removed language barriers, and partly by a generation of filmmakers who are technically sophisticated enough to compete with any cinema in the world and confident enough to insist on stories rooted in the specific textures of their own cultures. Baahubali, KGF, RRR, Kantara — these are films that drew vast audiences precisely because they did not apologize for their mythic ambition or their cultural specificity. They demonstrated that stories emerging from the soil of India’s civilizational inheritance could achieve the scale and visceral impact that had previously been associated only with Hollywood franchise filmmaking.
Animal and Kara are downstream of this shift, though they each process it differently. Animal brings it into the Hindi film industry’s commercial mainstream, which has a history of domesticating and diluting regional energies for a metropolitan audience. That it did so without dilution — that it arrived at ₹900 crore without softening any of its most confrontational elements — is itself a cultural event. Kara keeps the Tamil specificity intact, maintaining the regional cultural grammar — the Ramanathapuram landscape, the theistic undertow, the specific class dynamics of Gulf-dependent coastal communities — even as it reaches for themes of national resonance. Vignesh Raja’s Kara is two movies rolled into one: a rural thriller about financial exploitation with the backdrop of the Gulf War and its impact, and a father-son emotional thread. The grey shades of both Dhanush and Suraj Venjaramoodu help the movie. In their combination of technical ambition and cultural rootedness, both films exemplify what the new civilizational cinema is trying to be.
The Limits and the Stakes
Any honest account of this tendency must acknowledge its dangers. The decolonial impulse, when it goes unchecked, can become its own form of cultural nationalism — one that romanticizes the inheritance it claims to recover, suppressing the internal contradictions, the caste hierarchies, the gender violence, the economic exploitation that have always been part of the civilization alongside the epics and the dharma. Animal comes perilously close to this, presenting a vision of Indian masculinity that excludes and demeans women in ways that no citation from the Mahabharata can justify. Kara, for all its virtues, also sanitizes its protagonist in its final act, pulling back from the moral complexity it had so carefully constructed and retreating into a more comfortable narrative of redemption — a retreat that is itself a kind of timidity, a failure of civilizational nerve at the last moment.
The emergence of a genuinely new Indian cinema — one that has fully absorbed and processed its colonial inheritance, that speaks from within the civilization without either apologizing for it or idealizing it, that can hold complexity and critique alongside pride and assertion — is still in process. Animal and Kara are not that cinema’s completion. They are its early symptoms, its first significant manifestations in the current phase. They show us where the energy is, where the unresolved questions are, and where the work of honest reckoning remains to be done.
Conclusion: The Soil Speaks, Imperfectly
What both films ultimately share, beyond all their differences of tone, geography, and ideological conviction, is the refusal to be embarrassed by their own Indian-ness. They do not soften their stories for a global audience that might find the violence excessive or the family dynamics regressive. They trust that the experiences they are dramatising — the father wound, the lost land, the choices that poverty forces upon dignity, the love that expresses itself as ferocity — are not exotic or backward but universal in the only way that matters: true to life as it is actually lived by real people in a real civilization. This is not a small thing. For most of the history of Indian cinema, the pressure to mediate, to translate, to make the native legible to an external gaze has been enormous. The fact that some of the most commercially and culturally powerful films in contemporary India are films that have dispensed entirely with that anxiety represents a genuine shift in the conditions under which Indian stories are told.
Whether the cinema that emerges from this shift is a great cinema — whether it achieves the full moral and aesthetic complexity that the civilizational claims it makes demand — depends on what the next generation of Indian filmmakers does with the permission that Animal and Kara, in their very different ways, have helped to create. The soil has been tilled. What grows from it now is the real question.
Bibliography
Sharma, Amit Kumar. Indology, Sociology and Culture in India. Delhi: Shooin Publications, 2024.
Sharma, Amit Kumar. Sociology of Cinema and Culture in India. Delhi: Shooin Publications, 2024.
