Kantara

The drums do not begin so much as they take hold of you, slow and insistent. Threading through the body while fire gathers at the edges of the forest and a man trembles, stills, then becomes something else entirely. In the Bhoota Kola sequence that frames Kantara, there is no clean line between performer and deity and no safe distance between the audience and the ritual, because the camera does not stand apart but moves with it, breathes with it, and presses close enough that you are pulled into its presence.

It is this closeness that makes Kantara so difficult to situate within the familiar stories of Indian cinema, where religion is often rendered as something aestheticised and made legible for a broad audience. Here, what emerges is something far less willing to be smoothed over, a form of worship that is rooted in land and resists being translated into the institutional forms of Hinduism that dominate the mainstream. In this sense, the film is not merely about faith but about the persistence of ways of knowing that have long been pushed to the margins, including Adivasi and caste-marked practices, and forms of spirituality that remain inseparable from the land itself. Its success, alongside Kantara Chapter 1, signals a shift in Indian cinema toward stories that are willing to engage with the political and cultural weight of belief.

What Kantara does with land is refuse its reduction into property within state-backed systems of ownership and capitalist logics of possession, instead insisting on it as a site of authority that exceeds both. The forest is not simply where the story unfolds but where power is located and contested. Where the terms of belonging are determined not by legal ownership but by a relationship that is spiritual, historical, and deeply embedded in Animism, which understands land as something inhabited and negotiated with, that holds agency and cannot be cleanly separated from the people who live within it. This becomes most visible in the conflict between the state and the community. Bureaucratic claims to land appear hollow when set against a system of belief in which the daiva is the ultimate authority. What is being challenged is the very framework through which modern governance attempts to define and regulate land.

This reconfiguration of power is inseparable from the film’s use of body, because possession in Kantara operates as a transformation that collapses distance between human and divine, making the body the site through which authority is both expressed and enacted. In doing so, the film resists the detached spectatorship that often characterises cinematic encounters with religion by forcing the viewer into an experience that is sensory, immediate, and difficult to contain within a purely visual framework. The ritual does not allow for observation from a distance because it implicates the viewer in its intensity, and in this way the film aligns itself with a form of embodied spectatorship where meaning is produced through what is felt, so that the act of watching becomes entangled with the act of witnessing something that exceeds representation.

At the same time, the film’s engagement with caste operates through this tension between visibility and erasure, because while it does not always name caste explicitly, it situates its narrative within practices and hierarchies that are historically marked by caste distinctions. In doing so, it disrupts the dominant cinematic portrayal of Hinduism as a unified and sanitised system by foregrounding forms of worship that are often associated with lower-caste and Adivasi communities, and that have been marginalised or appropriated within broader religious narratives. What emerges is a subtle but pointed critique of the way institutional Hinduism has sought to absorb these practices in order to maintain a more uniform and upper-caste image of religion. As a result, Kantara becomes a space in which these tensions are made visible even when they are not directly articulated, and where the persistence of local ritual stands in opposition to the hierarchies that have historically sought to contain it.

Kantara Chapter 1 introduces a different kind of ambition by attempting to extend this world backward into history and outward into myth. In doing so, it raises a tension between what is lived and what is narrated. The act of giving origin stories to practices that are experienced as ongoing and embodied risks, transforms them into something more fixed and more easily legible within a cinematic framework that privileges coherence and scale. Where the first film allows the daiva to remain partially unknowable and therefore powerful, the prequel’s impulse to historicise and mythologise may render that same force more abstract, shifting it from something that is encountered in the present to something that is explained through the past.

This shift also brings into focus the question of spectacle, because as the narrative expands, the rituals that once felt intimate and locally grounded are placed within a broader visual and narrative scale that aligns more closely with epic storytelling. While this expansion has the potential to deepen the cultural and historical context of the traditions being represented, it also risks repositioning them as objects of consumption for a wider audience that may not share the same relationship to the land or the practices themselves. In this sense, the prequel sits within a larger tension between authenticity and commodification. The very success of Kantara creates the conditions for its own transformation into something more marketable and more universally accessible. The question that lingers is whether forms of Animist-rooted spirituality can retain their specificity and their political weight when translated into a cinematic language that increasingly demands scale and spectacle.

The success of Kantara cannot be understood in isolation from the broader transformation taking place within Indian cinema, where regional industries are no longer operating at the margins but are increasingly shaping the centre, where the film reportedly grossed over ₹409 crore. Alongside the fact that regional films now account for roughly 60% of the box office while Hindi cinema has dropped closer to 40%, this signals a shift in cultural authority that reflects changing audience desires, rather than a temporary disruption. What these numbers also reveal is a growing fatigue with a parallel stream of Hindi cinema that has, in recent years, aligned itself more visibly with the ideological contours of the current political moment. In this zone, films function less as spaces of ambiguity and more as vehicles for a kind of state-adjacent nationalism that simplifies history and identity into easily consumable narratives, often reinforcing majoritarian visions of culture that sit comfortably within the broader media ecosystem surrounding Modi’s governance.

Within this landscape, regional cinema begins to take on a different kind of significance, because it offers a form of storytelling that resists both homogenisation and overt ideological scripting, allowing for representations of land, caste, and spirituality that are not always easily folded into a singular national narrative. This shift can be understood as a movement toward recognition, where audiences are responding to films that allow them to see their own worlds reflected back without mediation or dilution, whether that is through dialect and landscape or through the presence of caste histories and land-based spiritual practices that have long been excluded from mainstream representation. In this sense, regional films such as Kantara do more than provide an alternative to Bollywood. They unsettle the conditions under which cultural meaning is produced by refusing to align themselves fully with either market-driven universality or the increasingly visible pull of propaganda-oriented storytelling, and instead remain grounded in the specificity and political texture of the communities they emerge from.

The force of Kantara does not lie in nostalgia or in a simple return to tradition but in the way it insists that these practices have never disappeared and were never meant to be contained within the categories that mainstream cinema and institutional religion have tried to impose on them. What the film reveals is a continuing presence that exists in the relationship between land, body, and belief. The ritual does not belong to history and it does not resolve into myth, because it continues to unfold in the present.

In this sense, the broader shift within Indian cinema is not simply about diversification or the rise of regional industries but about a reorientation toward forms of storytelling that are willing to remain situated within the complexities of local worlds, where identity is not abstract and where spirituality cannot be separated from the land that sustains it. What Kantara offers is a form of reclamation that resists being translated into something more palatable. In doing so it suggests that cinema can become a space where ways of knowing that have long been marginalised are not only made visible but are allowed to retain their depth and their power.