From Jal, Jangal, Zameen to Environmental Justice: Tribal Resistance, RRR, and the Unfinished Postcolonial Struggle
Introduction
Popular cinema is not merely a form of entertainment. It is also a cultural space in which histories are remembered, identities are constructed, ideologies are circulated, and political meanings are produced. Films can transform complex historical conflicts into emotionally powerful stories that reach audiences far beyond academic histories. In this sense, cinema can become an important site for examining postcolonial questions: Who is represented as a hero? Whose history is remembered? Who has the authority to represent resistance? And what happens when a local or indigenous struggle is transformed into a national story?
S. S. Rajamouli's RRR (2022) provides an especially significant example. The film brings together two historically important figures, Alluri Sitarama Raju and Komaram Bheem, and imaginatively presents them as friends and revolutionary comrades fighting British colonial rule. The film's spectacular action, emotional narrative, and nationalist symbolism transform tribal resistance into a cinematic celebration of Indian freedom. Yet the historical struggles of these figures were more complex than the film suggests. Komaram Bheem, for example, is remembered for his struggle against the oppressive structures associated with the Nizam of Hyderabad and for the principle of Jal, Jangal, Zameen—water, forest, and land. Alluri Sitarama Raju's resistance was also deeply connected with the rights and livelihood of forest-dwelling communities.
Dilip Barad's article, “Reimagining Resistance: The Appropriation of Tribal Heroes in Rajamouli's RRR,” provides an important framework for understanding this transformation. Barad argues that RRR(2022)appropriates these historical tribal heroes and reframes them as nationalistic symbols fighting British colonialism. Although the film successfully creates a compelling narrative of unity and resistance, Barad argues that it overlooks the specific struggles for land, water, and forest rights that shaped the historical legacies of Raju and Bheem. He therefore connects the film to contemporary questions of displacement, environmental degradation, and indigenous rights.
This essay extends Barad's argument by connecting RRR to contemporary struggles such as the tribal resistance surrounding the Ken–Betwa River Linking Project in Madhya Pradesh, the movement in Ladakh for statehood and Sixth Schedule protections, and conflicts over indigenous land and political identity in Manipur. These examples demonstrate that the problems associated with tribal resistance did not disappear with the end of British colonialism. Instead, postcolonial societies continue to negotiate questions of land, resources, development, political representation, and cultural autonomy.
RRR and the Appropriation of Tribal Resistance
RRR is constructed around an imaginative historical encounter between Alluri Sitarama Raju and Komaram Bheem. The two men never historically met, but Rajamouli brings them together to create a spectacular narrative of friendship and anti-colonial solidarity. This fictional meeting is important because it transforms two distinct histories into a single national mythology.
The film presents Raju as a revolutionary figure who initially appears to serve the British colonial administration but is secretly preparing to rebel against it. Bheem, meanwhile, enters the colonial world in search of Malli, a young tribal girl taken from her family by British officials. Their individual struggles eventually merge into a collective confrontation with colonial power.
This transformation has an obvious political appeal. The film constructs an image of India in which different communities unite against the colonial enemy. The friendship between Raju and Bheem becomes a metaphor for national unity. The spectacular climax converts individual resistance into a collective anti-colonial struggle.
However, Barad asks us to look beyond this nationalist surface. The problem is not that RRR represents tribal heroes; rather, the problem is how their histories are represented. Barad argues that the film shifts attention away from the localized struggles over land, forests, and natural resources and places these figures within a broader nationalist narrative.
This can be understood through the postcolonial concept of appropriation. Appropriation occurs when the history, culture, symbols, or resistance of a marginalized community is incorporated into a dominant narrative. In RRR, tribal resistance becomes part of the mythology of Indian nationalism. The tribal hero is no longer represented primarily through the specific demands of his community; instead, he becomes a symbol of the nation.
This creates a paradox. On one hand, RRR makes tribal heroes visible to a massive popular audience. On the other hand, the process of popularization may simplify the political meaning of their resistance. The question therefore becomes: Are tribal heroes being remembered on their own terms, or are they being remembered because their stories can be incorporated into a larger nationalist narrative?
From Colonialism to Postcolonial Development
A postcolonial reading should not understand colonialism only as a historical period that ended in 1947. Postcolonial theory also examines how structures of domination, unequal power, resource extraction, and marginalization can survive in new forms after formal colonial rule.
This is particularly important in relation to indigenous communities. Colonial forest policies frequently treated forests as resources belonging to the state rather than as living spaces connected to the livelihood and cultural identity of forest communities. Scholarship on forest governance in India has shown how forest reservation and centralized control often ignored customary relationships between forest-dwelling communities and their ancestral lands.
Barad's discussion of RRR brings this history into the contemporary moment. If the historical resistance of Raju and Bheem was connected with land and forests, then contemporary development projects affecting those same resources must also be understood as part of the continuing history of indigenous resistance.
This is where the concept of Jal, Jangal, Zameen becomes particularly significant. It is not simply a historical slogan. It represents a broader claim to environmental resources, cultural belonging, livelihood, and self-determination.
Ken–Betwa: When Development Becomes a Question of Displacement
The Ken–Betwa River Linking Project provides a powerful contemporary example through which Barad's argument can be extended. The project is presented by the government as a major development initiative intended to improve irrigation, drinking-water availability, and regional development in Bundelkhand.
However, development is never politically neutral. A project that promises benefits to a region can simultaneously create costs for particular communities. The question is therefore not simply whether development is necessary, but who receives its benefits and who bears its consequences.
In 2026, tribal communities and other project-affected residents in Chhatarpur, Madhya Pradesh, launched renewed protests against the Ken–Betwa project. The agitation was particularly notable for the participation of tribal women and for forms of protest including Jal Satyagraha, Chita Satyagraha, and symbolic Faansi Satyagraha. Protesters raised concerns about displacement, rehabilitation, compensation, and the loss of land and livelihood.
The protests are particularly relevant to RRR because they reveal the difference between cinematic resistance and lived resistance.
In RRR, Bheem's relationship with nature and his community is transformed into spectacular cinematic imagery. The film's forests become the stage for heroic action. In the Ken–Betwa struggle, however, the river and land are not cinematic scenery. They are connected to livelihood, memory, community, and survival.
This difference exposes an important limitation of popular cinema. A film can celebrate a tribal hero while remaining distant from the material conditions that make tribal resistance necessary in the first place.
The Ken–Betwa protest therefore gives new meaning to Bheem's Jal, Jangal, Zameen. The struggle is no longer simply about a heroic tribal figure fighting an historical oppressor. It becomes a contemporary question: Who has the right to decide what happens to a river, a forest, or ancestral land?
The government has also presented its own position, emphasizing the developmental benefits of the project and rehabilitation measures for affected families. Therefore, a responsible postcolonial analysis should not reduce the issue to a simple binary between “government” and “tribals.” Instead, it should examine the unequal power involved in defining development, displacement, compensation, and public interest.
Ladakh: Ecology, Identity, and Political Autonomy
The situation in Ladakh offers another way of extending Barad's argument. The Ladakh protests have focused particularly on demands for statehood and inclusion under the Sixth Schedule of the Constitution, along with concerns about environmental protection, cultural identity, political representation, and local autonomy.
In September 2025, protests surrounding these demands became particularly intense, with clashes resulting in deaths and injuries. The Government of India has subsequently emphasized negotiations with representatives from Ladakh and pointed to measures including increased Scheduled Tribe reservations and other administrative reforms.
The Ladakh movement is different from the Ken–Betwa struggle, but the two share an important postcolonial concern: the question of who should have political authority over a region and its resources.
Ladakh's ecological fragility makes questions of development especially significant. Infrastructure, tourism, militarization, resource management, and climate change can affect the region's environmental and cultural future. Consequently, demands for greater political autonomy can also be understood as demands for greater participation in decisions affecting land, ecology, culture, and livelihoods.
This connects with Barad's criticism of RRR. If indigenous resistance is reduced to a historical story of fighting colonial rulers, contemporary struggles for autonomy disappear from the narrative. Yet the Ladakh movement demonstrates that postcolonial freedom involves more than national independence. It also involves the right of communities to participate meaningfully in decisions concerning their own future.
Manipur: Indigenous Identity and the Politics of Land
Manipur further complicates the discussion because its contemporary conflicts involve multiple communities, competing claims to land, ethnic identity, political representation, and security. The violence that erupted in 2023 was connected to disputes involving tribal rights and questions surrounding land and affirmative action. Human Rights Watch has documented how tribal communities protested against a Manipur High Court order concerning Scheduled Tribe status and land-related protections for the Meitei community; the order was subsequently revoked.
The continuing tensions demonstrate how questions of land can become inseparable from questions of identity and political survival. In 2025, for example, Naga organizations in Manipur protested against what they described as unauthorized road construction through ancestral lands, while also raising concerns about territorial identity and security.
Manipur therefore warns us against treating “tribal resistance” as if it were a single, unified category. There are different indigenous communities with different histories, interests, and political demands. A postcolonial approach must listen to these differences rather than placing all marginalized communities into one romantic category of the “tribal.”
This is another limitation of RRR. The film creates a powerful symbolic unity between Raju and Bheem. But historical and contemporary indigenous politics are rarely so simple. Communities may experience different forms of marginalization, and their interests may sometimes conflict with one another.
Consequently, postcolonial criticism must do two things simultaneously: recognize structural marginalization and preserve the specificity of different communities and histories.
Cinema, Nationalism, and the Subaltern
The central question raised by RRR is therefore not whether nationalism is good or bad. Instead, the important question is how nationalism absorbs subaltern histories.
The film gives tribal resistance a place within the national imagination. This is valuable because mainstream Indian cinema has often marginalized indigenous histories. However, when resistance becomes national mythology, there is a danger that the original political demands of marginalized communities may disappear.
The subaltern, in postcolonial theory, refers broadly to groups whose voices and political agency have historically been marginalized within dominant structures of power. The problem is not simply that the subaltern is absent from representation. The deeper problem is that the subaltern may be represented by others.
In RRR, audiences receive a spectacular representation of Bheem. But the real question is whether the historical and contemporary political meanings of Bheem's resistance survive this representation.
Barad's article is significant precisely because it encourages us to ask this question. He does not simply criticize RRR for fictionalizing history. Instead, he asks what the film's fictionalization does to the political meaning of tribal resistance.
From Representation to Environmental Justice
The most important contribution of Barad's argument is that it connects postcolonialism with environmental justice. Traditional approaches to postcolonial literature often concentrate on empire, identity, language, nationalism, and cultural domination. Contemporary postcolonial studies, however, increasingly recognize that environmental destruction and displacement are also connected to histories of colonial and capitalist power.
For indigenous communities, land is rarely merely property. It can be simultaneously home, livelihood, cultural memory, spiritual space, and collective identity. Therefore, displacement cannot be understood simply as physical relocation.
The Ken–Betwa protests make this particularly visible. The protesters' use of water itself as a site of resistance is symbolically powerful. Jal Satyagraha turns the resource being contested into the medium of political protest. The river is no longer an object of development policy; it becomes an active symbol of community identity and resistance.
This gives new significance to RRR. The film asks audiences to remember tribal heroes who resisted colonial authority. Contemporary environmental movements ask audiences to consider whether the values associated with those heroes are still being defended.
The Danger and Possibility of Popular Cinema
Popular cinema has a contradictory relationship with postcolonial politics. It can erase historical complexity, romanticize resistance, and convert political struggles into spectacle. At the same time, it can also make marginalized histories visible to audiences that may never encounter them in academic texts.
RRR therefore should not simply be dismissed as an inaccurate historical film. Its significance lies in the fact that it brings tribal figures into the center of mainstream popular culture. Millions of viewers encounter Bheem and Raju through the film's emotional and spectacular narrative.
The challenge is what audiences do after the film ends.
If viewers remember Bheem only as a heroic symbol of Indian nationalism, the film's representation remains limited. If viewers begin asking about the historical meaning of Jal, Jangal, Zameen, contemporary displacement, indigenous rights, and environmental justice, then the film can become a starting point for deeper political reflection.
This is where academic criticism becomes important. Postcolonial criticism can move from representation to reality. It can ask what is shown, what is hidden, who speaks, who is spoken for, and how historical resistance is transformed by popular culture.
Conclusion
Dilip Barad's “Reimagining Resistance: The Appropriation of Tribal Heroes in Rajamouli's RRR” provides a valuable framework for understanding the relationship between popular cinema and postcolonial politics. The article demonstrates that RRR transforms the historically specific struggles of Alluri Sitarama Raju and Komaram Bheem into a spectacular nationalist narrative of anti-British resistance. While this makes tribal resistance visible within mainstream cinema, it also risks reducing the political and environmental dimensions of their struggles.
Reading RRR alongside contemporary struggles in Ken–Betwa, Ladakh, and Manipur reveals that the history represented by the film is not finished. The Ken–Betwa protests demonstrate continuing conflicts over land, water, displacement, and rehabilitation. The Ladakh movement highlights the relationship between ecological vulnerability, cultural identity, and political autonomy. Manipur demonstrates how land, ethnicity, indigenous identity, and political representation can become deeply interconnected.
These movements also prevent us from romanticizing the category of “tribal resistance.” Contemporary indigenous communities are not merely symbolic descendants of cinematic heroes. They are political actors with diverse and sometimes conflicting demands.
Ultimately, RRR invites us to remember resistance, but contemporary movements compel us to rethink what resistance means today. The real legacy of figures such as Komaram Bheem should not be confined to spectacular images of rebellion. It should also encourage us to consider the continuing significance of Jal, Jangal, Zameen.
The most productive postcolonial reading of RRR, therefore, is neither complete celebration nor complete rejection. Instead, it is a critical engagement with the politics of representation. The film opens the door to tribal history, but postcolonial criticism must ask what lies beyond that door. If cinema can transform tribal resistance into national memory, it can also become a starting point for questioning contemporary forms of displacement, environmental injustice, and unequal power.
The movement from RRR to Ken–Betwa, Ladakh, and Manipur ultimately reveals an unfinished postcolonial question: political independence may have ended colonial rule, but freedom remains incomplete wherever communities lack meaningful control over their land, resources, environment, identity, and political future.
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