Five years ago, in a dark pandemic moment, I wrote about “Dreaming of Nepal.” I’d been to that distant country twice, for several weeks each time, along with about a week in India on each of those trips. A couple of movies from India I saw recently, along with an editing and fact-checking assignment that involved Indian politics, got me thinking about India and Nepal again. I’ve developed a habit of contemplating far-off places, and South Asia in particular, when I see things in the U.S. heading south.
In his 1980 book Cosmos, Carl Sagan noted that Hinduism, unlike other major religions, contemplated timescales comparable to those of scientific cosmology: “Its cycles run from our ordinary day and night to a day and night of Brahma, 8.64 billion years long, longer than the age of the Earth or the Sun and about half the time since the Big Bang.” He went on: “There is the deep and appealing notion that the universe is but the dream of the god who, after a hundred Brahma years, dissolves himself into a dreamless sleep. The universe dissolves with him—until, after another Brahma century, he stirs, recomposes himself and begins again to dream the great cosmic dream.” Sagan, though, preferred the idea “that men may not be the dreams of the gods, but rather that the gods are the dreams of men.”
Kalki 2898 AD, a 2024 film that I saw on Amazon Prime Video, creatively merges Hindu mythology into an absorbing sci-fi epic. It’s an offering of Tollywood, cinema in the Telegu language of the Indian states of Andra Pradesh and Telangana, as opposed to Mumbai-based, Hindi-language Bollywood (though, confusingly, Tollywood’s also a name for Bengali-language cinema). Kalki is the prophesized 10th avatar of the god Vishnu, the final one expected to appear in the Kali Yuga, the last of four ages in a larger cycle; it’s the worst of the four ages, and it’s the age in which we live. The movie opens in the aftermath of an ancient battle, when Krishna, the eighth avatar of Vishnu, rips a divine jewel from the forehead of the defeated warrior Ashwatthama, who’d tried to kill an enemy’s unborn child, and curses the warrior to wander the Earth, witnessing the crimes of our Yuga, until he’s called upon to protect Kalki’s mother.
Fast-forward six millennia to 2898, and the world is a post-apocalyptic landscape, in which a surviving city is ruled by Supreme Yaskin, a 200-year-old authoritarian who inhabits a floating structure called the Complex, and seeks fertile women so he can develop, via their fetuses, a serum that would give him vast powers. Rebels seek to overthrow this order from the hidden refuge of Shambala. A woman at the lab, who’s been designated SUM-80, tries to hide that her pregnancy has reached 150 days, while a girl disguised as a boy escapes such experimentation, and flees to a cave, inadvertently returning the divine jewel to an aged Ashwatthama. He emerges as an eight-foot-tall figure of fury, ready to fight like hell for the woman (now called Sumathi, a name given by a rebel woman) as she’s the bearer of the avatar.
A jaunty bounty hunter named Bhairava, a skilled fighter with an AI sidekick, is willing to do the Complex’s bidding so he can experience its mind-bending delights. Reincarnation factors into this drama, as a trance-like state may carry imperatives from a past life. The movie ends on a cliffhanger, as it’s intended to be the start of a Kalki Cinematic Universe. A mid-credits scene shows the effect of even a drop of Supreme Yaskin’s serum; a reported post-credits scene seems to have been cut off by Amazon.
Eager for more Indian cinema, I turned to Kanguva, also on Amazon Prime, another 2024 epic, in this case in the Tamil language and thus an offering of Kollywood, named for the Kodambakkan neighborhood of Central Chennai in the Indian state of Tamil Nadu. This movie, which is terrible, veered between 2024 and 1070. A present-day boy who’s escaped from a Russian biomedical facility, “near the Indian border,” with enhanced brainpower, is tracked by an Indian bounty hunter who feels a strange connection to him. Back in 1070, a Roman fleet (anachronistically) attacked the (fictional) Quintet Islands off India, rousing a response from a heroic warrior and his adopted son. Reincarnation is involved.
Escapism has its place, though the real world will intrude before long. In India, distorted history, in textbooks and curricula rather than fictional cinema, has been a hot-button issue in recent years. Hindu nationalists led by Prime Minister Narendra Modi have downplayed Muslim contributions to Indian history, as well as episodes in which Muslims were persecuted, such as the 2002 riots in Gujarat. Modi’s repeatedly referred to “1200 years of slavery,” a reference to Muslim as well as British rule, with the implication that the country’s 200 million Muslims have a lasting identity as foreign invaders. It’s a sad example of a worldwide trend toward nationalistic xenophobia laced with religious chauvinism. The wheel of history turns, and sometimes gives a repeat, as with Donald Trump’s second dystopian inaugural speech and its claim that “We will not forget our God.”
In Nepal, in 2009, we saw a tiger up-close, from atop elephants. On our second trip, in 2016, we saw a tiger but only from a long distance, its head poking out of the water. On that trip, though, we stayed at a resort outside Bardia National Park, and one day heard that a leopard had come through the nearby village the night before. There were guards who stood watch at night with long sticks, a precaution against animals more than crime (unlikely in the area). I never saw the leopard, but I always remember that far-off place when I come across the internet meme of the “Leopards Eating People’s Faces Party.” The punchline is a voter for that party decrying, “I never thought leopards would eat MY face.” It’s a theme that’s never been more relevant here in this country, amid shouting of “USA, USA!”
—Kenneth Silber is author of In DeWitt’s Footsteps: Seeing History on the Erie Canal. Follow him on Bluesky