‘Phule’ Movie Review: Grand Stories, Bland Storytelling

Director: Ananth Narayan Mahadevan
Writers: Ananth Narayan Mahadevan, Muazzam Beg
Cast: Pratik Gandhi, Patralekhaa, Sushil Pandey, Vinay Pathak, Alexx O’Nell
Language: Hindi

In this day and age, the Hindi historical biopic is a loaded genre. The stories of kings, Gods, warriors, soldiers, politicians and revolutionaries are often (re)told to divide and incite modern society. So the very act of choosing a story of 19th-century social reformers in a colonised India is a refreshing one. Pratik Gandhi and Patralekha star as Jyotirao and Savitribai Phule, the spirited Maharashtrian couple who spent their lives fighting for the rights of oppressed castes and women. The film covers a span of 50 years till the late 1890s: from the early days of their activism for girls’ education to the anti-caste institution they became as pioneers of equality and progressive values.

All along, the societal resistance they face has no single identity: patriarchal men, orthodox Brahmins, Muslim husbands, British opportunists, Marathi traditionalists. At one point, during a special ceremony — where an aging Jyotirao Phule is bestowed with the honorific “Mahatma” — he closes his speech by mentioning that the challenge is timeless: the country will continue to fight in the name of religion and caste in the future. Most biopics would have ended here, but Phule stays practical and finds solemnity in their deaths. Despite the sweeping post-credits slates, the film doesn’t close with blinding hope; there’s a sense that, despite decades of their tireless work, history is primed to keep repeating itself in newer robes. The progressive commentary is inbuilt. This is not a film with a social message so much as a story about social messaging.

Yet, Phule suffers from the same ailment as others from the oeuvre. It makes the viewer — in this case, me — tired of being taught: an irony for a film that, among other things, charts the rise of India’s first female teacher. The narrative scale lacks flesh-and-blood texture. The film-making is dull, the writing incurious, the performances flat, and the period dressing unconvincing at best. It’s the cinematic embodiment of the student who mugs up important chapters to pass their exams; the short-term intent is alright, but the long-term meaning is lost. Dialogue is narrated to each other; characters sound like human textbooks; conflicts are resolved through sheer reverence for the topic, not inquisitiveness. I quite liked director Ananth Mahadevan’s Gour Hari Dastaan (2015), a persuasive biographical drama about a former freedom fighter struggling to prove that he was a freedom fighter. But Phule lacks the perseverance of its storytelling — 130 minutes feel a lot longer when the craft is unimaginative.

The film tries to jazz up the timeline. It opens during the Poona bubonic plague in 1897, where an (allegedly) old Savitribai carries a child on her back to a medical camp. It then flashes back to 1848, to a young Savitribai already planning makeshift and covert classrooms with her older husband (and former teacher) Jyotirao Phule, whom she affectionately addresses as “seth-ji”. This briefly flashes back to 1838, when Savitribai was a child bride under the noble tutelage of Jyotirao. The simplistic tone emerges minutes into the film — when a group of disapproving Brahmin males walk to avoid the shadows of the lower-caste couple on the street, followed by the couple beginning every sentence with “we must” while conversing with each other. Not to mention the college-play-coded voice-over that doubles down on the exposition, leaving no room for scenes to be presented beyond their purpose.

Most of the film unfolds like it’s wearing a halo of sainthood. Some of the moments are potentially promising — like the montage of Savitribai and her Muslim friend Fatima facing similar hostilities from Indian men unwilling to educate their wives and daughters. Or Jyotirao Phule ‘negotiating’ with British administrators who encourage his goals, while the upper-caste Hindu men of his town fret about the future of Sanskrit and the imposition of English language. Or even the couple managing to convert the two attackers who were hired to kill Jyotirao Phule (he quips: “for the first time ever, Brahmins have spent money on me!”). But none of this goes beyond the Amar-Chitra-Katha-ness of its staging. Transformations and resolutions happen because they must.

The physical and psychological toll of activism only shows on Jyotirao, largely because Pratik Gandhi is an actor perceptive enough to examine the fullness of a legacy. But Phule, in general, takes the term “ahead of its time” a bit too literally. Patralekha’s Savitribai Phule is a classic case of a character often speaking from 2025 — and like 2025. It’s not about historical authenticity so much as artistic truth. The acting aside, it’s also what I call ‘the hindsight-filmmaking syndrome,’ where everyone in the 1800s seems like they know exactly how India will pan out and how history will remember them some centuries later. They speak in lofty rhetoric and retro-fitted superlatives; one almost expects them to whip out a cellphone and paraphrase their Wikipedia profiles. It feels like a time-travel movie more than a time-specific one. Even when they’re talking to a person, they’re speaking about that person at once.

As a result, there’s no inherent suspense or immediacy to their existence. We never know why Jyotirao thinks the way he does, apart from stray references to his obsession with Thomas Payne’s Rights of Man. We never figure out why Savitribai becomes a staunch feminist. What makes them tick? It’s there in the books, so we must accept it. Everyone plays a role like they’re aware of what happens next — and it’s hard to get past this most fundamental barrier. Phule becomes a cinema of formalities, not expressions and ideas. It’s a pity — a film about forward-thinking figures stuck in creatively-backward waters. In this day and age, the zero-gravity chasm between readymade stories and dramatised storytelling is the biggest sci-fi device of our times.