In a 2023 year-end essay, Scroll.in film critic Nandini Ramnath argues that beheading became a striking visual motif in popular Indian cinema: a way to stage force, revenge, villainy or masculine power. Her examples range from Salaar: Part 1 – The Ceasefire to Gadar 2 and Jailer. The argument is about selected films and their imagery, not a measured claim that beheading was statistically common across Bollywood.
What Ramnath means by a year of beheading
Published on December 23, 2023, Ramnath’s yearender identifies decapitation as a conspicuous cinematic image and asks what it does on screen. In her reading, the act can make violence legible in an instant: it signals a character’s brutality, dominance, capacity for revenge or continued power.
That is a critical interpretation of particular scenes, not a count of films or a survey of Indian cinema. The essay provides no prevalence statistic, audience research or box-office figures, and it does not systematically compare 2023 with earlier years. Its examples are best understood as the writer’s chosen illustrations of a visual tendency, rather than proof of a measured industry-wide trend. Read Nandini Ramnath’s Scroll.in yearender.
How the selected films use the image
The examples vary in narrative setting and dramatic purpose. Ramnath’s criticism turns on whether a violent gesture is grounded in the story or chiefly presented as spectacle, as well as what it tells the viewer about the character wielding violence.
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| Film | What the essay highlights | Function in Ramnath’s reading |
|---|---|---|
| Salaar: Part 1 – The Ceasefire | Repeated targeting of the jugular, including a scene in which Deva, played by Prabhas, decapitates an opponent. | Violence is presented as a vivid demonstration of the protagonist’s force. |
| Gadar 2 | Tara Singh strikes a Pakistani soldier with a sledgehammer. | Ramnath argues that the blow lacks a contextual rationale beyond being part of the character’s repertoire. |
| Padmaavat | Political violence in a historical-drama setting. | The setting gives the violence a different narrative context from an isolated act of spectacle. |
| Dasara | A beheading tied to revenge. | The act is framed through a revenge motive. |
| Kuttey | A decapitation. | Included among the essay’s selected examples of the motif. |
| Jailer | A beheading that establishes the ageing hero’s capacity for violence. | The act reinforces the character’s retained power. |
| Vikram (2022) | A character uses decapitation to demonstrate savagery. | A comparison from the previous year, not a 2023 release example. |
| Animal | Despite extensive violence and corpses, the corpses retain their skulls. | A counterpoint to the specific decapitation motif, rather than an example of it. |
Why context changes the meaning of violence
The distinction Ramnath draws is not simply between films that show violence and films that do not. It is between violence that has a legible place in a story—such as revenge or the political conflict of a historical drama—and an act whose principal function seems to be to impress the viewer with a character’s capacity for brutality.
On that reading, a beheading may serve different dramatic purposes: it can mark a villain’s savagery, present revenge as spectacle, intimidate an opponent or establish that a hero remains dangerous. The same image can therefore carry different meanings depending on its narrative cause and the character attached to it. These are interpretive categories for reading the examples, not classifications produced by a systematic study.
Independent reader supportYour contribution helps us test, update, and keep practical guides available for everyone.The historical references behind the essay
Ramnath invokes Frances Larson’s book Severed: A History of Heads Lost and Heads Found to consider why severed heads command attention. Larson writes, “The dead human face is a siren: dangerous but irresistible.” She also describes decapitation as “the ultimate tyranny” and an act of creation that produces an artefact capable of compelling attention. These lines provide a historical and cultural lens for the essay; they do not establish that the films depict real events.
The article also names Amalendu Misra’s On Beheading and identifies Misra as a Lancaster University academic. It quotes his observation that “Slitting the throat of a human victim who is alive requires nerves of steel,” followed by the point that the experience would be challenging even for hardened criminals. The references widen the discussion beyond film technique to the disturbing power associated with the act, without turning the essay into a claim about actual criminal prevalence.
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What the essay establishes—and what it does not
- It establishes: Ramnath selected scenes from several films to argue that beheading was a striking image in popular Indian cinema discussed in 2023, and to examine how it signals force, revenge, villainy or masculine power.
- It does not establish: how often the device appeared across all Indian films, whether it increased compared with earlier years, how audiences responded, or how much the films earned. The essay gives no numerical count or supporting statistics for those claims.
- Its political connection is interpretation: Ramnath links cinematic appetite for violence to a wider political climate, but presents an argument rather than a measured causal finding.
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