Midway through the recently released trailer for Vivek Agnihotri’s The Bengal Files, two words boldly stand out: “True Story”. The disclaimer does not read “based on a true story” or “inspired by real events,” but is a definitive declaration of Truth, with a capital T.
The label is ironic. If Agnihotri’s past works (The Kashmir Files, The Tashkent Files) are any indication, truth is usually the first casualty in all his films. The Kerala Story originally claimed that 32,000 women from Kerala had been converted and recruited by ISIS—a figure so fantastical that Agnihotri quietly revised the trailer to describe it instead as “the true stories of three young girls” after massive backlash and fact-checking.
The second is artistic merit, no matter how many times he calls (and includes in the trailers) his own films as “cinematic masterpieces.”
But beyond the technicalities of film grammar, Agnihotri referring to his version of the 1946 Calcutta Riots as the Real Story is an assertion of monopoly over historical memory, a proclamation that he alone can and will deliver the “real” version of what happened during the deadly 'Week of the Long Knives'.
He is attempting to sculpt Bengal’s memory into a weapon for present-day schismatic politics.
Trailer to a Flawed Narrative
One look at the trailer of The Bengal Files reveals the predictable pattern of melodramatised falsehoods peddled in Agnihotri's servings of the "truth". Much like in The Kerala Story where three became 32,000, The Bengal Files relies on made-up statistics to make divisive points that can become especially dangerous in a pre-poll season.
It peddles the fantasy that if minorities form 10 percent of the population, they automatically become a “vote bank,” and if they reach 30 percent, they inevitably demand a separate state.
This cloaking of arithmetic mumbo jumbo as demographic truth is nothing but an attempt to paint the complex socio-political and religious mozaic of early 20th century colonial and post-colonial Bengal in the binaries of Hindu and Muslim.
Unsurprisingly, The Bengal Files has already generated uproar in Bengal’s political landscape. It is not so easy to morph the collective memory of a state that takes pride in learning and knowing of its murky history in an attempt to learn from it rather than exploit it.
The Trinamool Congress has called the film pre-election propaganda, but that can be said about Agnihotri’s entire recent filmography. More revealing, however, is the response of those whose lives and families are implicated in the narrative.
The Calcutta Riots, also remembered as the Great Calcutta Killings, broke out in August 1946 after the Muslim League called for Direct Action Day to demand the creation of Pakistan.
For four days, the city was engulfed in violence which soon spread to surrounding regions of Noakhali, Tipperah (Comilla), Bihar, and Punjab. Thousands were killed, Hindus and Muslims alike, as political rivalries, colonial policies of divide-and-rule, and the acute economic devastation of Bengal (still reeling from the famine of 1943) converged into a combustible eruption.
Since the trailer dropped, actor Saswata Chatterjee has been facing flak for associating with Agnihotri's film. In an interview in wake of the row, the actor said that he's not a historian and that as "just an actor", it was not his place to decide if the film is factually accurate or not.
Historians, however, have long noted that to understand these riots, one must consider multiple layers: British negligence, Muslim League mobilisations, Hindu Mahasabha counter-mobilisations, the rise of street gangs among caste Hindus, the collapse of urban order, and the desperate struggles of the poor, in the backdrop of excruciating, engineered famines. To isolate it as a Hindu-versus-Muslim morality play is to flatten an extraordinarily complex event into a communal caricature—something Agnihotri is absolutely not above. In fact, he has earned his millions doing just that.
The Mixed Legacy of Gopal 'Patha' Mukherjee
Another character spotlighted by the discourse around the upcoming film is the controversial Gopal “Patha” Mukherjee, now being crudely dubbed by some as the great 'Hindu butcher of Bengal who massacred Muslims'. It is exactly the kind of narrative that his kin, and a majority of those who survived the communal violence before and after Partition in Bengal, have avoided thus far.
Nearly three decades ago, in 1997, journalist Andrew Whitehead tracked down an elderly Patha, a once-feared ganglord of Calcutta. He had been nicknamed “Patha” (the Bengali word for goat) because his family ran a meat shop on College Street. The fact that he was a Brahmin butcher is perhaps an indicator of the complex class-religion-caste identity of Bengal.
According to an archival piece by The Indian Express, when Patha met Whitehead, he was a grandfatherly figure with rimmed spectacles, a neat topknot, and a white beard—a visage more saintly than sinister.
Whitehead’s probes revealed a man who had never repented. Patha boasted that in 1946, when Calcutta burned, he ordered his boys to kill ten Muslims for every Hindu murdered.
He relished recounting his access to American pistols bought (sometimes bribed) off Allied soldiers during the Second World War. Even Gandhi’s much-fabled miracle of Calcutta, when hardened men surrendered arms at his feet, could not soften Patha’s resolve. He flatly refused, insisting that even a nail bloodied in violence could not be given up: “With these arms I saved the women of my area, I saved the people. I will not surrender them.”
Patha’s family has publicly objected to his potential misrepresentation in the upcoming film. Far from being a communal hatemonger, they insist, Patha’s actions were motivated by a desire to save lives, not inflame hatred. In recent interviews, his family has claimed that Patha saved the lives of many Muslims in his neighbourhood during the violence and that he was not a bigot who could be painted with the same Hindu-Muslim binary. The family has, in fact, sent a legal notice to Agnihotri for turning their kin into a caricature of anti-Muslim bigotry.
Bengal’s Memory of Violence
Bengal has had a peculiar relationship with communal violence. The contradictions of Patha’s legacy encapsulate the moral ambiguity of the riots themselves: a self-styled saviour whose rescue missions were drenched in retaliatory blood.
But unlike in other parts of India, where Partition memory often calcified into sectarian grievance, Bengal largely developed a culture of downplaying what happened in the past, and instead choosing to focus on a future where better things are a possibility.
Even Mamata Banerjee—often accused by detractors of “appeasement,” of the “others” and “outsiders”—resisted deploying communal memory as a weapon.
Bengal has historically chosen symbolic reconciliation over vengeance.
Agnihotri’s film not only wants to undo this ethos but ride a current wave of divisive politics that has been washing over Bengal, worryingly enough, by weaponising memory.
Cinema: From Catharsis to Weaponisation
In 2019, filmmaker Ritwik Ghatak’s family—including actor Parambrata Chatterjee—slammed the BJP youth wing for using clips from his Partition films to promote the Citizenship Amendment Act. They called it a gross distortion of Ghatak’s secular vision, insisting his cinema of refugee pain could never be weaponised to justify divisive politics.
Ghatak’s films dealt with the wounds of Partition through a Marxist lens—focusing on displacement, grief, and the tearing apart of families rather than religious binaries.
Similarly, Satyajit Ray and Mrinal Sen’s cinema examined Bengal’s troubled times—famine, Naxalism, urban disillusionment—always through a humanist lens that foregrounded ordinary lives over sectarian fault lines.
It bears noting that Bengali cinema has rarely, if ever, shown communal violence with ulterior agendas. Some have argued that vacuum creates fertile ground for a film like The Bengal Files. Because communal grief has long been repressed in Bengal’s public memory and never given full catharsis, a film that claims to finally “express” that grief, however distorted, carries dangerous potency.
Viewers who may never have seen their family traumas represented onscreen could feel recognition in Agnihotri’s manipulations, mistaking propaganda for therapy.
The right wing understands this power. Its failed attempts to appropriate Ghatak, laughable to most Bengalis, were nonetheless instructive: cultural memory is a political battleground. If you can reshape the stories people tell themselves about their past, you can reshape their political choices in the present.
Agnihotri’s attempt here is dangerously simple. His attack is on Bengal’s unique way of coping with Partition trauma—through symbolic acts of solidarity. He wants instead a narrative of perpetual Hindu victimhood and this film is his invitation to embrace sectarian anger.
To tell Bengalis that they must now view 1946 not as a tragedy of a people divided, but as a Hindu genocide demanding political redress, is to fundamentally alter the emotional architecture of Bengal’s politics. It is also a blatant attempt to rewrite history.
In a sane world, the combination of laughably wooden dialogues, overripe theatrics, Anupam Kher and Pallavi Joshi hamming it up, should have been enough to consign The Bengal Files to the bargain bin of bad cinema. But for an audience already marinated in hate, clumsy acting or screenplay is no deterrent.
The legitimisation of Agnihotri’s work—whether through a National Award or the current political dispensation's dogged amplification—means these films don’t simply fade into obscurity. People are not ignoring them.
So, we cannot either. We must engage, even if watching any bit of such cinema greys our brain cells faster that one can say 'True Story'.
(The author is an independent film, TV, and pop culture journalist who has been feeding into the great sucking maw of the internet since 2010. This is an opinion piece. The views expressed above are the author’s own. The Quint neither endorses nor is responsible for them.)