A film does not seek office.

It does not control a police force.

It does not negotiate treaties or draft laws.

At best, a film rearranges emotion. At worst, it disturbs memory.

And yet, again and again, certain films provoke reactions that resemble political emergencies rather than cultural disagreements. Reviews turn into moral trials. Silence replaces debate. Zero stars are awarded before audiences arrive. Discomfort is framed as danger. Criticism quietly mutates into calls for control.

Why?

Why does cinema, arguably the least coercive public act, so often trigger panic among those who otherwise dismiss films as “just entertainment”?

The answer lies not in ideology, but in ownership.

The Hidden Class That Owns the Story

Every society has elites. But not all elites rule through force or wealth. Some rule through something far more subtle: narrative control.

These are the people who decide which stories feel legitimate, which emotions are acceptable, which histories are safe to remember, which identities must constantly apologise.

They may not govern countries, but they govern meaning. They govern our stories and therefore our worldview and politics.

Call them Narrative Zamindars.

Like the zamindars of old, they do not till the land themselves. They inherit control over it. Only here, the land is not physical. It is mental. It is the shared space of thought, memory, emotion, and moral reflex. It is what we might call mindshare.

Most people live inside this mindshare without ever realising it.

Narrative Capitalism: The Rent You Don’t See

Narrative Zamindars extract rent, but not in money.

They extract psychological rent.

This rent is paid as guilt for feeling pride

shame for remembering history

anxiety for holding certain beliefs

constant self-doubt about identity

The majority become tenants in stories they did not write, governed by frames they did not choose. They work inside these narratives, argue inside them, even rebel inside them, never realising the boundaries were set long before they entered the conversation.

This is a form of capitalism almost nobody names: Narrative Capitalism.

Its genius lies in invisibility. People sense manipulation, but lack the language to describe it. They feel something is off, but cannot explain why. That confusion itself becomes a kind of rent.

When Tenants Start Telling Their Own Stories

For decades, Narrative Zamindars dictated narratives on political ideas like democracy, socialism, equality, gender politics, caste, and even international conflicts such as the American-led Iraq war, Naxalism, or Kashmir. They had the language, the ecosystem, and the technology. Narrative power was expensive, and exclusivity protected it.

That monopoly has eroded.

Today, the once-voiceless masses use the same devices, access many of the same platforms, and inhabit the same digital spaces as a Narrative Zamindar living in South Delhi, Malabar Hill, Alipore, Adyar, or Indiranagar. Information no longer requires permission. Commentary no longer needs pedigree. A young person in a small town can follow global conflicts, question power, and speak publicly without waiting for validation.

But one domain still remains different.

Cinema.

Films still demand capital, distribution, prestige, and institutional clearance. More importantly, cinema still shapes emotion at scale. It does not merely inform. It imprints.

Cinema is the last fort where narrative ownership can still be defended.

And that is why any breach, however small, provokes panic.

Narrative Monopoly Syndrome

The reaction we see today is not ideological disagreement. It is Narrative Monopoly Syndrome, the institutional and psychological shock that occurs when long-held control over storytelling begins to slip.

It follows a predictable pattern.

When facts cannot be disproved, intentions are attacked.

When a film connects with audiences, it is labelled dangerous.

When success is undeniable, silence replaces critique.

When monopoly weakens, moral outrage intensifies.

This is not about whether a film is good or bad. It is about who is allowed to shape collective memory.

A Brief Context: From Disruption to Aftershock

This pattern did not begin recently. It has a history.

It first became visible when films began questioning the separation between street-level violence and elite narrative sanctuaries. It intensified when cinema forced uncomfortable reckonings with long-softened histories. And it resurfaces each time a film threatens to redistribute narrative ownership away from custodians and toward the people themselves.

The specific titles change. The reaction does not.

What rattles Narrative Zamindars is not controversy. It is displacement.

The first clear disruption came with Buddha in a Traffic Jam, which challenged the comfortable separation between street-level extremism and elite narrative sanctuaries. The reaction was immediate and disproportionate, not because the film sought power, but because it threatened exposure. This was the beginning of an end.

The rupture peaked with The Kashmir Files. Unlike earlier films, it did not merely question a narrative. It overturned it. It forced a reckoning with a history long softened, reframed, or bypassed. The response followed the script of Narrative Monopoly Syndrome: silence where debate was expected, moral labelling where factual refutation failed, and an insistence that the problem lay not in content but in intent.

What we are witnessing today around Dhurandhar is not an isolated controversy. It is an aftershock. The same reflexes, the same vocabulary, the same panic, replayed because the underlying displacement remains unresolved.

Why Films Matter More Than Politics

Politics changes governments.

Films change how people feel about themselves.

A law can be repealed.

A story, once internalised, cannot.

That is why cinema matters so deeply in modern societies. It does not argue. It normalises. It does not persuade. It reframes.

And when reframing escapes elite control, it feels existential.

The Turning of the Table

What we are witnessing today is not cultural decline. It is redistribution.

For the first time, large sections of society are no longer waiting for validation to speak. They are learning the language of narrative. They are attaching memory to commerce. They are discovering that cultural power, once thought inherited, is in fact contestable.

To Narrative Zamindars, this feels like chaos.

In reality, it is democracy arriving late, imperfect, but finally uninvited, into the realm they guarded most carefully: the story of who we are.

Now imagine what happens with artificial intelligence, when teenagers, the landless, the unheard begin telling their stories raw, real, rebellious, without fear of peer approval, social hierarchy, or inherited templates. Imagine narratives freed from old gatekeepers altogether.

Once people begin telling that story themselves, no amount of outrage can make them tenants again in the world of Narrative Capitalism.

That will not be the end.

It will be the end of a beginning.

(The article was published on vivekagnihotri.substack.com on december 14 and has been reproduced here)