This week, I revisited Baahubali in light of my earlier conversation about RRR and the troubling politics in the work of S. S. Rajamouli. I found a critical essay titled “The Problem With Baahubali’s Casteist, Supremacist Logic” in The Quint that argues the film normalizes hierarchy and caste-based supremacy. The writer claims the film portrays its fair-skinned heroes and heroines as civilized defenders of order, while dark-skinned tribal villains evoke “savage” barbarism. That contrast signals a clear racial and caste gradient embedded in the fantasy world. The article helped me see how spectacle and visual design in Baahubali do more than create fantasy: they reinforce a social order that treats inequality as natural.
The critique points out how the “tribal” Kalakeyas appear as monstrous, dark-skinned, and “other,” while protagonists align with Aryan-supremacist tropes. The film reportedly uses a harsh invented language for the Kalakeyas, modeled after Tamil, to imply primitiveness. Even female characters like the warrior heroine and the queen mother end up having their power defined by caste or by their role in supporting male lineage. Watching Baahubali again with this context made me realize how visuals, casting, and narrative all shape viewers’ sympathies toward “civilized” rulers and away from the “barbaric” outsiders.
The article does not engage much with the economic or production-side politics behind Baahubali, though that would be a valuable angle. Still, as someone from a Telugu background who has admired Rajamouli’s films for years without noticing casteism, I find this critique important. It provides a lens to question what I once accepted as mythic or heroic spectacle. After our class discussion of RRR’s politics, this piece shows that Baahubali too deserves scrutiny: behind its grandeur lies an inherited hierarchy that cinema packages in the name of myth and entertainment.
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