Viral nationalism: Right wing media and the aesthetics of distributed participation

Introduction

In March 2022, strange scenes of disquiet at Indian cinema theaters began to be reported on social media. On Twitter (now X), videos of individuals at theaters giving speeches about patriotism, calls for the annihilation of ‘anti-national’ elements, as well as Islamophobic slogans were being shared widely. The occasion was the screening of The Kashmir Files, a propaganda film directed by right-wing idealogue, Vivek Agnihotri. The film is set in the context of Jammu & Kashmir (J&K), a geopolitically volatile region at the heart of the dispute between India and Pakistan, where many indigenous Kashmiris ‘do not identify with India’ and have been vying for a free Kashmir (Kaul, 2018: 127). The film explores the turbulence in Kashmir in the 1990s, when Kashmiri Pandits–ethnically Kashmiri upper-caste Hindus — ‘faced killing and persecution’, thereafter migrating out of the state (Zia, 2020: 366; see also Bhan et al., 2020: 285). The reasons for this turbulence originate in the fraught reorganization of South Asia in the mid-twentieth century that has generated friction among diverse ethnicities rattled by several years of colonialism erupting in (although not limited to), the violent partition of India and Pakistan. This ‘unfinished agenda of decolonization’ (Datta, 2016: 3) has wedged a divide between the Kashmiri Pandit community who historically occupied an elite political position, and the Kashmiri Muslim majority who were also thrust into the chaos of postcolonial readjustment, exacerbated by Kashmir's precarious border position between India and Pakistan.

Scholarship on experiences of both the Kashmiri Pandit and Muslim communities has shown that this complex sociopolitical history led to a majority of the former aligning with the Indian state, rather than siding with demands for a separate Kashmir (Bhan et al., 2018; Datta, 2016; Duschinski, 2018; Mangiarotti, 2023; Zia 2019; Zutshi, 2014). Scholars have noted that the killing of several Kashmiri Pandits in the late 1980s-early 1990s, led to a general atmosphere of fear. Alongside political engineering, this resulted in the migration of many Kashmiri Pandits from the region, although some did choose to stay behind (Datta, 2016: 3; Menon and Nigam, 2007: 157; Zia, 2019: 60). Significantly, the issue of Kashmir and Kashmiri Pandits is an important tool in the electoral agenda of the now-ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), as the complete assimilation of Kashmir was deemed integral for the constitution of a Hindu rashtra (nation) (Mangiarotti, 2023: 136). Article 370 of the Indian constitution that granted autonomous status to the state of Jammu & Kashmir (J&K) was vociferously supported by the Hindu right from the very beginning, starting with the advocacy from the Bharatiya Jana Sangh, the predecessor of the current BJP (Bhatnagar, 2023: 558). Demands for, and the subsequent abrogation of Article 370, not only sought to reject the ‘special’ autonomous status of the state, but also ‘to change the religion-based demographics in J&K in favor of the Hindu community’ (Bhatia and Gajjala, 2020: 6287). The emergence of a film like The Kashmir Files must be read in the context of this political backdrop. The film had been released at a moment ripe for right-wing mobilization–apart from the public discourse against Article 370, hyper-nationalist rhetoric was at its peak following the 2019 protests against the exclusionary Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA) that grants citizenship to non-Muslim immigrants from neighboring countries fleeing persecution, as well as several years of right-wing mobilization against secularism, the left, and of course, Muslims (Bhatia and Gajjala, 2020).

While this forms the historical backdrop that informs the reception and success of the film, The Kashmir Files falls within a spectrum of changes taking place in the entertainment sector following the ascension of the right-wing government to power in 2014. As one article in The New Yorker notes, this includes the appointment of BJP supporters into positions of power in institutions such as the Film and Television Institute of India (FTII) and the Central Board of Film Certification (CBFC), as well as social media- and physical- attacks on filmmakers and film-sets, which have had a chilling effect. In contrast, Bollywood is now awash with ‘movies and TV shows that align with the B.J.P.'s politics’ (Subramanian, 2022). The release of more recent films such as The Kerala Story (Dir. Sudipto Sen, 2023), Article 370 (Dir. Aditya Suhas Jambhale, 2024), Swatantrya Veer Savarkar (Dir. Randeep Hooda, 2024) and Jahangir National University (Dir. Vinay Sharma, 2024) point towards the viability of such propaganda films, although it is noteworthy that not all right-leaning films have found the same measure of success. While The Kerala Story and Article 370 have done well at the box office, films like Jahangir National University and Savarkar have not. In case of The Kashmir Files, one major factor contributing to its success is the affective mobilization of the memory of Kashmiri Pandit displacement, which as its flipside portrays ‘the Muslim community as the villainous other’ (Ghosh, 2023: 5).

The Kashmir Files is not the first of Agnihotri's films to have been picked up by the Hindu-right on a large scale. In 2016, the filmmaker made Buddha in a Traffic Jam–a propaganda film directed against left-wing ideology and critical thought. In 2018, he wrote about his experiences of making the film in the book Urban Naxals: The Making of Buddha in a Traffic Jam. While Buddha in a Traffic Jam was not as commercially successful as The Kashmir Files, the term ‘Urban Naxals’ was soon picked up by right-wing rhetoric across the country. In both cases, the allure of the fictional narrative spilled out of the diegetic world to the physical spaces of theaters and streets, as well as the virtual space of television channels and social media. Social media and viral circulation have as much to do with these films’ success as the plotlines and performances. Demonstrating a transmedia aesthetic that ties together fictional narrative, social media rhetoric, and physical displays of patriotism, such instances of cinema's collision with other networked media demonstrate how in convergent, collaborative, and interactive networks, the aesthetic of the art object (in this case, film) moves beyond its intended frame (the screen). Rather, such ‘networked imaginaries’ (Jagoda, 2016: 3), facilitate acts of repeated circulation, fragmentation, and de/re-contextualization, that produce a distributed, affective form of populist participation that can be described as viral nationalism. Thus, while the contexts and texts examined in this paper are rooted in the geopolitics and the cultural industries of India, the broader relationship between aesthetics, ideology, and political affect in networked ecologies, go beyond one film, or one national context.

The normalization of right-wing ideology as common sense, and the relationship between reproducible media and public affect was predicted by Walter Benjamin in his 1935 essay ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’ (Benjamin, 2007). For Benjamin, mechanical reproduction is double-edged–while it democratizes access to art (previously belonging to the sacred and the elite realms), it also facilitates the exploitation of art for mass persuasion. The digital amplifies this relationship by packaging aesthetic objects into viral ideological packets to be distributed and acted upon. Alongside reproduction and mass circulation, distribution is now a core driving force in the aestheticization of politics. Henry Jenkins has discussed the importance of convergence in this new media landscape, as it signals media flows across platforms, the collusion between different industries, and the participatory behaviour of audiences (Jenkins, 2008: 2–3). The obverse of this is distribution. By this, I do not simply mean the supply of media across platforms, but rather that by tapping into inter-textual, relayable, and replayable elements, media now distribute the potential for affectual, participatory engagement through their very design. Consequently, we must consider media forms not simply as singular objects that generate meaning (and feeling) as enclosed texts. Neither can we assume that participatory politics is a simple side-effect of ideologically motivated circulation.

Since the 1990s, India has seen the unfolding of this ideological drama in its older media landscape, with television serials, amateur VHS productions, print media, and cinema embedding the tenets of Hindutva (Hindu right-wing ideology) as standardized religiosity within large swathes of the Indian populace (Brosius, 2005; Rajagopal, 2004). In the ecology of the semiotic web and convergent media, such overlaps between right-wing populist rhetoric and media aesthetics marshal a ‘distributed affective politics’ that works through ‘unprecedented “viral intensities” (the accumulation of social media actions around particular content)’ (Ghosh, 2020). Extending this further, I ask: what does this ‘distributed affective politics’ do to media beyond what we consider ‘social media’? How are audiovisual forms such as film subject to the same ‘viral intensities’? How might we consider distribution itself as an aesthetic in this convergent ecology? Such questions have deep, aesthetic implications. I draw here, on Martin Jay's summation of Hannah Arendt's proposition that aesthetics is the ‘building of a sensus communis through using persuasive skills’—i.e., the entrenchment of belief as common sense, through judgment (Jay, 1992: 55). Viral circulation, repetition, remediation, and remixing are digital tools of persuasion. Mark Deuze (2006) points out that these are general principles of digital culture and can be seen in a variety of participatory practices such as marketing, influencer culture, and fan-creations. Together, such practices signal a new (media) aestheticization of politics that cuts across ideological lines. The tools of the digital are simultaneously aesthetic and political.

Populism, of course, is not strictly a right-wing tendency. Scholars have pointed out that there is an ambiguous ‘no man's land’ between left- and right-wing populisms (Laclau, 2005: 87), and that rather than an ideology or a regime, populism is a ‘way of doing politics’ that adapts to temporal and cultural contexts (Mouffe, 2019: 11). This ‘way’ of doing politics includes performative and aesthetic forms and repertoires that are adaptable to both left- and right-wing populisms. Right-wing technocultures build the sensus communis by using the same rhetoric of democratization inherent in the discourse of digital technology-as-progress. If it is ‘people’ (the abstract ‘we’ of populist rhetoric) who participate, then participation must be inherently democratic–or so the logic goes. In what follows, I first delve into an overview of new and emerging work on populist aesthetics to lay the ground for my analysis. In the subsequent section, I chart the mechanics of convergent/distributed aesthetics through an analysis of The Kashmir Files and its reception on social media and in physical spaces such as theaters. In the final, concluding section, I show how similar modalities can be seen at work in other media objects/clusters and offer some thoughts on how such an approach might be of analytical use in right-wing media contexts more broadly.

Mapping populist aesthetics

Recent scholarship on populism and aesthetics has focused closely on questions of performance, spectacle, and visuality. Such scholarship is usually anchored in the figure of the populist leader and the crowd in a rally. In these approaches, populist aesthetics is conceived as operating through performative repertoires through which ‘taste’ and ‘style’ rise to the surface of public discourse. Benjamin Moffit writes about populist styles as ‘repertoires of embodied, symbolically mediated performance’ that impact both governance and everyday life (Moffit, 2016: 42), while Pierre Ostiguy (2017) describes populism as the ‘flaunting of the low.’ According to Ostiguy, ‘low’ politics has little to do with the socially lower classes. Rather, ‘low’ refers to transgressive ways of doing politics that can be flaunted by those who may hail from socially and economically ‘higher’ classes–case in point, Donald Trump (Ostiguy, 2017: 76). What is flaunted varies across locations but follows the same script in which there is a majority that feels sidelined by a ‘nefarious, resented minority’ (Ostiguy, 2017: 76). Such rhetoric can also be seen in the Indian context–for instance, the popular Hindutva refrain of ‘Hindu khatre mein hai’ (Hindus are in danger) is often used to justify right-wing violence. Other scholars echo similar thoughts. Bohdana Kurylo for example, sees the discourse of securitization as being central to populist aesthetic–i.e., in its pursuit of power, populist performance uses the crisis narrative to ‘provoke scandals, agitation and indignation’ against its radical Other (Kurylo, 2022: 139). In such theorizations, it is the populist leader who becomes the engine of action.

While not incorrect, what is missing in these accounts of populist aesthetic is the specificity of media forms. Johannes Voelz’s and Oded Erez’s work on populism comes close to bridging this gap. In the first of two essays on the aesthetics of populism, Voelz argues that Trumpian populism–particularly Trump's rallies–are indeed performative as they rely on the call and response between the demagogue and the crowd. But simultaneously, such populist rallies are themselves media events (Voelz, 2018: 216). That is, while a ‘temporary community’ emanates from the space of the rally, the fact that the rallies are filmed, replayable and relayable, generates what he calls (following Arendt) a ‘populist space of appearance,’ created by media technology and media/culture industries (Voelz, 2018: 222–223). Here, populist aesthetic is an effect of the virtual–it exists because it has been articulated and because it can be circulated. While Voelz’s focus is still on the singular figure of the populist leader, his conceptualization of populism as an aesthetic, moves beyond just style and begins to consider media technologies and genres, as well as their affective power.

In his analysis of the populist appeal of Israeli right-wing politician Miri Regev, Erez suggests that Regev's ‘flaunting of the low’ shows a keen understanding of formats such as reality television and popular music–significant, because of his position as Minister of Culture and Sport (2015–2020). While not disavowing style and performance, Erez’s analysis is also keenly aware of the ‘viral packaging made sensible’ by media technology (Erez, 2022: 304). What Erez calls the ‘aesthetic agenda of contemporary populism’ (Erez, 2022: 309) depends as much on media industries and platforms, as it does on performative style, and socio-cultural articulations of identity. In a strictly social media context, Megan Zahay's (2022) work on alt-right media vlogs shows how the repetition of (gendered) performative codes in platformed video content becomes central to the creation of an alt-right ‘trad wife’ aesthetic. Zahay's analysis astutely points out that it is the combination of familiar codes of traditional femininity, alt-right rhetoric, and a careful use of the ‘visual aspects of social media,’ that ensures the rise of such content to the surface of right-wing populist discourse (Zahay, 2022: 172). Locating the aesthetic of right-wing populist media then, requires us to pay equal attention to the diegetic, and the extra-diegetic voice of the media content.

Extending this logic, I argue that in an era of media convergence, our analytical lens must shift from the traditional understanding of aesthetics as that which pertains to the singular object and address a more expansive range of objects that resonate with each other within a space of convergent circulation. This includes the gestural, the performative and the representational, but also the circulatory and the inter-textual. If cinema is an expression of right-wing populist sentiment, it exists in a populist space of appearance alongside other circulating material. Rather than using the populist leader as the anchor for the crowd, such populist projects emphasize the formation of ‘affective formations and lateral relations’ through means such as bots, trolls and volunteer-action to ‘shape memory and attention (noopower) and stabilize feelings and beliefs’ (Hoyng, 2020: 998). Thus, locating the populist ‘voice’ of a film in a right-wing digital ecology requires us to turn to a notion of aesthetics that is already networked, even if the film itself does not represent digital networks or is not presented only through digital networks–case in point, The Kashmir Files.

Convergent aesthetics and populist signifiers

At one level The Kashmir Files is simple in its plot construction and filled with stereotyped, caricatural representations that one critic has described as ‘crude, manipulative and violent propaganda’ (The Hindu, 2022). The aesthetic of contemporary propaganda takes shape in a context of an intertextual, networked political environment. Aesthetics is more than mere form–it is the ability of a media object to affect the viewer/audience. Such films’ affective force lies in their ability to mobilize intertextual references through a host of threatening signifiers–populist signifiers that circulate across texts, objects, and platforms. In relation to The Kashmir Files, I focus mainly on two such signifiers—‘urban Naxals’ and ‘love jihad,’ both of which have a mediated life outside of the film's text.

While the term ‘urban Naxal’ has now become commonplace in Indian right-wing rhetoric and news reportage, it emerged in the context of Agnihotri's 2016 film, Buddha in a Traffic Jam. This film's release and circulation provoked protests in prominent educational institutions such as Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU), and Jadavpur University–both bastions of left-leaning student activism in the country, and frequent targets of the Hindu right since the BJP's rise to power in 2014. In response to protests in Jadavpur, Agnihotri called protestors covert Naxalites, referring to the Maoist revolutionary groups that take their name from the 1967 Naxalbari Uprising, espousing an armed struggle against ‘caste discrimination, for labour rights and land rights,’ including those of caste-oppressed and indigenous tribal communities (Shah, 2019: 21). In the first essay in a two-part feature in the online right-wing magazine Swarajya, Agnihotri describes urban Naxalsas the ‘“invisible enemies” of India’ many of whom are ‘urban intellectuals, influencers, or activists of importance’ (Agnihotri, 2017).

In his 2018 memoir, he mentions that such figures engage in what American conservative author William S. Lind calls ‘fourth generation warfare’—a decentralized combination of genocidal war acts, psychological indoctrination, and media manipulation (Agnihotri, 2018: Ch. 14). The truth value of such statements is less significant than their articulation in a right-radicalized environment, where they create significant rhetorical force through circulation. As Agnihotri notes, the pushback against Buddha in a Traffic Jam proved to be a blessing in disguise, with a shadow army of supporters ‘promoting it through unconventional channels [with] over a million organic views on YouTube in no time’ (Agnihotri, 2018: Epilogue).

Indeed, in the years that have followed, ‘urban Naxal’ has become a term that has been increasingly deployed to target activists and academics who are critical of the right-wing government. Anthropologist Alpa Shah notes that the nomenclature has facilitated the ‘filing of legal charges of sedition and terrorism against them and detention in conditions under which bail was nearly impossible’ (Shah, 2022: 576). Contrary to Agnihotri's allegation that mainstream media has been ignoring this so-called nexus, the term has been totally embraced by not just right-wing politicians and activists but also by mainstream news channels, leading to its subsequent normalization in the everyday vocabulary of contemporary India. This aligns with Rohan Kalyan's conceptualization of eventocracy, where ‘news media no longer “represents” political life […] but actively comes to shape it’ (Kalyan, 2020: 7). Thus, ‘urban Naxal’ emerges as a populist signifier that, even when representationally absent, is always already activated in the background of contemporary Hindutva discourse and has tangible impact on the lives of those it sticks to. This signifier and its representational counterparts in film and media are activated by constant circulation on traditional media outlets such as television news, as well as social media ‘chatter’.

Arguably, The Kashmir Files is an extension of this larger ideological project. The film switches between the early 1990s and the contemporary as it recounts the travails of a Kashmiri pandit family through the figures of two men–the grandfather Pushkar Nath Pandit (Anupam Kher) and the grandson Krishna Pandit (Darshan Kumar), who have lost the rest of the family to violence. While the film ostensibly embarks on an historical mission to uncover the truth of what happened to Kashmiri pandits in the 1990s, its major goals are to discredit dissident thought and spaces of intellectual inquiry, as well as legitimize the abrogation of Article 370. The film does this through narrative and editing, through intertextual and sonic strategy–making references to words, events and images that have gained currency in the recent past.

Consider a scene from one of the film's early contemporary sequences–the protagonist, Krishna is a gullible student at a public university where he is brainwashed by the charismatic professor, Radhika Menon (a thinly veiled reference to well-known scholar Nivedita Menon, a feminist scholar and a faculty member at JNU). In our first encounter with Radhika (played by Pallavi Joshi), she is shown delivering a speech about freedom–chants of azadi (‘freedom’) abound from the student body in a reference to the public talks and teach-outs that are part of JNU's intellectual culture, which have come to the forefront of national attention since 2016 in what has since then been called the JNU ‘sedition row.’ The original event was a protest against the conviction and execution of Afzal Guru for his alleged involvement in the 2001 Parliament attacks. But the event was manipulated by right-wing bodies and the national media to portray the institution as anti-India (Danyal, 2018; Mankekar and Carlan, 2019). The fictional Radhika's speech is followed by slogans from students chanting back ‘azadi.’ These slogans recall then-JNU student union president, Kanhaiya Kumar's famous ‘azadi speech’ as well as the alleged ‘bharat ke tukde tukde’ (‘India in many pieces’) slogans that were reported by many mainstream channels, which led to the arrest of student activists including Kumar and Umar Khalid–it is also telling that ‘tukde tukde gang’ is another phrase that has come to the fore in similar fashion (Danyal, 2018).

The azadi slogans in the university follow a scene in the 1990s where Kashmiri Muslims are shown rallying in the streets for azadi, shortly before we are shown the brutal murder of Kashmiri Pandits. This switch between the azadi slogans in the contemporary and the 1990s renders every instance of the term's utterance anti-national. The word azadi itself is signifier that elicits hyper-nationalist response in India, as any speech aligning with it risks ‘severe consequences […] ranging from vilification, litigation and intimidation to outright abuse and violence’ (Kaul, 2018: 127). Here, the scene, and one could argue, the entire film works through a network of signifiers that have gained currency in the recent past because of the convergent logics of news production and (dis)information dissemination—24/7 news, and social media included.

One other major signifier that we encounter in the film becomes important for understanding the film's aesthetic of distributed participation–the discourse of ‘love jihad,’ a right-wing conspiracy theory dating back to the 1920s, in which it is alleged that unsuspecting Hindu women are being romantically ensnared and then converted by Muslim men, subsequently leading to a rise in Muslim population (Gupta, 2009; Iwanek, 2016). This narrative of sexual threat, and the corollary villainization of Muslim men is on blatant display in The Kashmir Files. More than once in the film we see terrorists threatening Kashmiri Pandit families with kidnapping and conversion of womenfolk, and in one scene we see a rally in the street chanting ‘Kashmir will become Pakistan, without Hindu men, with Hindu women!’ In one particularly gruesome scene, Krishna's mother is shown publicly stripped and her body ripped apart by a sawmill. In an allegorical reference to ‘bharat ke tukde tukde’ (making pieces out of India), the body of the Kashmiri pandit mother, is equated with the body of the ‘injured’ Hindu nation, while her soon-to-be-shot elder son is forced to watch the act.

That the film ends with this scene of violence (followed only by a brief scene in which almost all witnesses to the act are shot dead) is not insignificant. The film offers no other narrative solution to the political issue it picks up, but rather ends by eliciting through gore and violent sentimentality, a call to revenge. As Nitasha Kaul writes, the film thus, equates Kashmiri history and politics with Hindutva's Islamophobic agenda, while ignoring that ‘tens of thousands of Kashmiri Muslims have also been killed or subjected to enforced disappearance, rape or torture’ (Kaul, 2022). In this narrative, all (Kashmiri) Muslims are violent aggressors, and any form of dissent is equated with the ‘urban Naxal.’ As subsequent events have shown, these narratives were in full bloom in the film's reception. Combined with the exploitative nature of the ending scene, the film becomes an affective call to action, resonating with Meghan Sutherland's proposition that ‘the political logic of populism can overlap with the distinctly institutionalist logic of spectacle in a single aesthetic production of “the people”’ (Sutherland, 2012: 336). The film's aesthetic circuit, thus, is almost incomplete without the participation of its audiences in rituals of affective display.

In the wake of the film's release, a number of videos were shared showing audiences riled up, delivering speeches, even crying. One of these from Madhya Pradesh shows Swami Jitendranand, an associate of Hindutva provocateur Yati Narsinghanand telling children after a screening to stay away from Muslims just as one needs to stay away from the coronavirus (Mojo Story, 2022)—not a throwaway association given the epidemiological turn in Islamophobic narratives during the pandemic in India (Baishya, 2022a) (Figure 1). One particularly virulent speech comes from what seems to be an ordinary member of the movie-going public. Clad in a T-shirt and shorts, the young man stands up, presumably spontaneously, and begins speaking: ‘if every (Hindu) boy marries a Muslim girl, then within three generations their population will drop […] we are sitting here watching a film they are reproducing there […] Jai Shri Ram’ (@alishan_jafri, 2022). Others in the audience clap, chant back Jai Shri Ram (glory to Lord Ram), and Bharat mata ki jai (hail mother India). Coming presumably at the end of the screening, this is a spilling over of the encoded love jihad narrative from the film screen to the theater's audiences. The film ends, but its affective resonance lingers as shared intensities after the lights turn on.

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Figure 1.

Comparing Muslims to the coronavirus after a screening. (YouTube Screenshot).

Similar scenes were found elsewhere–in another a man echoes— ‘I hate the seculars […] Even today these traitors swarm our streets. Stop trading with these traitors, don’t marry your sisters and daughters into their families’ (sab dekh raha hai binod, 2022). In another, the audience chants: ‘desh ke gaddaro ko, goli maro saalo ko’ (@zoo_bear, 2022)— ‘shoot them, these traitors who betray the nation’—words infamously chanted by BJP leader Kapil Mishra in 2019 in reference to those who were protesting against the Citizenship Amendment Bill (The Indian Express, 2019) (Figure 2). Yet others show the audience crying and hugging each other in solidarity (Lehren TV, 2022), or speaking to news crews displaying anger, tears, shouting, hooting or a combination of all of these (Background Stories, 2022; DIL'HI SE, 2022) (Figures 3 and 4).

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Figure 2.

Video of violent slogans being raised at a theater after a screening (Twitter screenshot).

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Figure 3.

Video of crowds thronging and hooting outside a theater screening The Kashmir Files (YouTube screenshot).

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Figure 4.

Moments from post-screening reactions showing audience members crying (YouTube screenshot).

Such affective and rhetorical displays outside of cinematic performance form an extra-diegetic counterpart to the film's aesthetic strategies. Not only do they facilitate the creation of what Voelz calls the ‘temporary community’, the theater itself becomes a populist ‘space of appearance’ (Voelz, 2018: 222–223), where claims to citizenship and demands for violence and action can be made by those who position themselves as the minoritized majority— ‘the people’. Resonating with Kurylo's conceptualization of populism, the film spectacularizes the discourse of security through an appeal to emotions ranging from ‘fear and anger to a sense of belonging and love with the leader’ (Kurylo, 2022: 140). In this case, the ‘leader’ is not a single public figure, but a set of ideological propositions that hang in the background (again, chants of ‘Bharatiya Janata Party Zindabad’— ‘Long Live BJP’ in the theater lend credence to this). There is one last element we must consider in order to close this affective circuit, and that is social media/fragmented video itself. The videos that circulate are not ‘raw’, but often edited to include text and music. Writing about such videos, S.V. Srinivas has suggested that the genre of reaction videos and, more specifically, ‘theater reaction’ videos transform the cinema going public into a ‘camera-aware public’ (Srinivas, 2023). In what he calls the demonstrative public sphere generated by social media platforms, ‘spectacular media events […] invite and incite individuals to become a part of a collective, and to script themselves into newsworthy stories and worthy causes.’ This goes beyond ideological and party lines and can be seen in South Indian fan-practices in theaters that have now extended elsewhere into India, and across digital spaces (Srinivas, 2023).

In case of The Kashmir Files’ reaction/response videos, the affective intensities of such fan-practices are channeled into platformed political participation. While some videos are from amateur video creator channels on YouTube, others are uploaded by both Hindutva supporters and detractors on platforms such as Twitter. For yet others, it is often hard to pinpoint who the creators are, as the mix of professional and volunteered political labor makes it unclear ‘where state-led propaganda activities end and individual ones begin’ (Woolley, 2023: 93). Nonetheless, they are not merely spontaneous performances–they are media objects themselves, often featuring pathos ridden music and sometimes, even slow-motion effects. The deployment of media-aware techniques in these videos shows a keen understanding of the affective power of audiovisual forms. Their viral circulation on social media and accumulation of value reflects Bishnupriya Ghosh's (2020) postulation that the semantic web and its affordances of multimedia articulations, sharing and viral circulation form the ‘affective-technological basis of media populisms.’

As elsewhere, the production and circulation of such content on digital platforms are now commonplace strategies of political mobilization in the Indian right-wing ecosphere. But many of the videos sourced for this analysis were shared by secular and liberal critics of the right-wing. Even in those, it is not surprising to see hyper-nationalist and Islamophobic comments and reactions. Comments, likes and shares attract more engagement, no matter the content (or intent) of the original utterance. A full analysis of such metrics would possibly reveal more about themes and patterns. Such content is indeed shared over multiple platforms–Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and WhatsApp (the last one requiring one to be privy to private right-wing activist groups)—both by detractors and supporters. What is unique in this case, is not material distribution over social media alone, but the distribution of affect between platforms and physical spaces–hence, the focus on frameworks of affect in this paper that can ‘help us see what numbers cannot’ (Baym, 2013). In this framework, the mass-effect of circulation (i.e., the perception that something is viral) matters as much as individual utterances and their attendant metrics. In this kind of ‘viral nationalism’ the potentials of affective politics are actualized in the focusing of attention towards- and perpetuation of- violence, no matter the provenance of the utterance.

Beyond the theater, for example, the film's visual iconography has been mobilized most infamously in April 2022, at a religious procession in the city of Khargone in the state of Madhya Pradesh, where a tableau of the sawmill scene from the film led to organized violence against Muslims. According to one report, the tableau used a mannequin, logs and a bicycle wheel to recreate the gruesome scene, alongside a banner with a close-up of Anupam Kher from the film stating (in translation), ‘Wake up Hindus, lest other states in India become Kashmir’ (Sharma, 2022). It also featured mix of ‘the woman's sobs from the film with a music track featuring belligerent cries of “Jai Shri Ram” and “Har Har Mahadev”’ [in translation: ‘glory to Lord Ram’ and ‘Hail Lord Shiva’ respectively] (@KashifKakvi, 2022; Sharma 2022) (Figure 5). Such ‘remixing’ in political action showcases the convergence between cinema, physical rallies and other audiovisual/digital forms such as music-video that have been used for similar transmission of affect (Baishya, 2022b). It also demonstrates the ‘ongoing remediation of nationalism as visceral and viral’ (Mankekar and Carlan, 2019: 203), the movement of viral action, convergence and remixing between on- and off-line spaces, and the intricate overlaps between affect and aesthetic.

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Figure 5.

The Kashmir Files tableau at the Khargone rally preceding the violence (Twitter screenshot).

Such affect/aesthetic overlaps are less a matter of ‘what something is’ and more ‘how it affects, and how it is affected by, other things’ (Gregg and Seigworth, 2010: 14, emphasis in original). In contemporary digital populism, this is a matter of representation, but also design–the structures of cinematic storytelling and those of mediated engagement (on- and off- line) are interwoven into each other. Such designs marshal crowds into (media) publics, as audiences are subsumed into the very structures whereby stories are told, and messages are perpetuated (‘engagement’ and ‘interactivity’ are terms that encapsulate this very well). This is not altogether new insofar as digital media in toto are considered; but it is what separates the new (media) populisms from the old. What this inaugurates then, is a bridge between three elements–viral circulation, right-wing rhetoric, and ‘the people’—whether that last element is imagined as a physical or digital collective. In fact, the aesthetic appeal of films such as The Kashmir Files would be incomplete without affective displays in physical space as well as web-facilitated viral circulation. This triadic relationship creates an image of the ‘we’ and the ‘will of the people.’ This is an aesthetic arrangement that meshes bodily affects (disgust, anger, tears) with cinematic narrative and the affordances of social-media platforms. In this emergent architecture, all media (and space) can erupt with the same viral logics of social media, with the nation as its most potent platform.

Conclusion

The Kashmir Files was a media-event endorsed by the ruling party. According to reports, several states declared the film tax-free driving down ticket rates (Poddar, 2022), and free ticket schemes were also floated to help popularize the film (Farooqui, 2022). But this is certainly not the only case in which such mechanisms can be observed. Tax breaks and open political endorsement of certain film narratives as historical truth are now commonplace in the Indian scene (Kumar, 2023). Simultaneously, the aesthetics of distributed participation is also now part and parcel of cinema's deployment in the Hindutva machinery. Populist signifiers such as ‘love jihad’ have emerged as the affective core of other films such as The Kerala Story, which was released with clear support of the BJP (The Hindu, 2023), as well as right-leaning news channels such as Times Now that aired segments about the film's unveiling of ‘ideological conversion’ (Times Now, 2023).

It is worth mentioning here that given India's linguistic diversity and the presence of strong regional media industries, the reception of these films and their mobilization of affect for political agendas does not play out in quite the same way across the country, especially in places where there is a resistance to the hegemony of Hindi. This goes beyond just cinema–in southern India for instance, the ‘south’ emerges ‘not just as a market but as a distinctive cultural and political territory’ that both content creators and platforms such as YouTube must account for (Mohan and Punathambekar, 2019: 321). Nonetheless, such formations are always in flux–what is crucial is that the media-event of The Kashmir Files demonstrated the potential for success in this blueprint. For example, in a different political context, the 2022 Malayalam film Malikappuram (Dir. Vishnu Sasi Shankar) used similar mechanics of on- and off-line right-wing mobilization tapping into a controversy around women's entry into the Sabarimala temple (Mini, 2024). Clearly, as such cases show, cinematic discourse (and practice) is now subject to the same ‘viral intensities’ as social media posts, hashtags, memes, short videos, and sensational leaks.

My central contention is that in the contemporary digital ecology, aesthetics must be understood as being already networked rather than something belonging to a singular art-object. What we encounter, more often than not, is an ‘aesthetic effect’. Similar to the ‘positive network effect’ that Terry Flew describes as the condition ‘whereby the more users are on the platform the more important it is to be on the platform’ (Flew, 2019: 6), the aesthetic effect too is a matter of networks–the more ‘the people’ invest affectively in an issue or an object, the greater its intensity and power. Right-wing populism today is intricately mediated, and works through appropriation, remixing, and co-creation. Further, as Kalyan accurately observes, it is not just the content, events or issues that are important for emergent, global forms of fascism and hyper-nationalism, ‘but rather the public's attention itself’ (Kalyan, 2020: 6–7).

Examples abound outside of the Indian context across media forms. In other scenarios, a Japanese manga like Attack on Titan is appropriated by the alt-right on 4chan and elsewhere (Amin, 2020), white supremacists use videogames to indoctrinate and recruit their foot soldiers (Condis, 2020), and Neo-Nazis in Sweden create and appropriate memes mixing xenophobic imagery and imaginaries of execution with comical themes to veer people towards their agendas (Askanius, 2021). The particularities of the national and cultural contexts in these examples differ, but in all of them ideological-aesthetic objects transmit affect over networks. This is a powerful aesthetic distributed between the representational plane of the media-text, user-generated content around it, and the political rhetoric that it draws on and contributes to. This distributed aesthetic assemblage packages stories and narratives into viral capsules of ideological signifiers whereby public reception of media-texts transforms into affective displays of rage and revenge. Populist aesthetic here is augmented by the affordances of networked politics, ecologies of hate speech and disinformation, and by the constant threat of erupting violence. In turn, ‘nationalism’, the great virtue of the populist right is also transformed into viral nationalism—‘viral’ in all senses of the term.