Every year, India’s Oscar submission generates a familiar argument: Was the “big” film ignored? Will American voters understand the chosen film? Does the selection committee know how campaigning works? Beneath these questions sits an assumption Bollywood rarely examines—that Hindi cinema is the natural centre and every other Indian film industry is a regional tributary seeking admission.
Gondhal troubles that map. Santosh Davakhar’s Marathi thriller, built around Maharashtra’s ritual folk-performance tradition, was selected as India’s official entry for the 2027 Academy Awards. The Indian Express reported the selection and Davakhar’s preparations for the campaign. The news should not be reduced to an underdog anecdote. It is evidence that cultural specificity can travel further than synthetic universality.
I have not mistaken submission for nomination. The distinction matters, and Indian coverage regularly erases it in the rush to claim an Oscar. A useful explainer on Gondhal and the Naga-language film Angh details the stages before nomination. Both films still face an enormous field. My argument is not that an Academy outcome will validate them. It is that their routes reveal how many cinematic Indias our mainstream hierarchy fails to see.
Specificity is not a barrier
Streaming was supposed to teach audiences that subtitles are not punishment. To some extent, it did. Viewers moved among Korean thrillers, Spanish dramas, Malayalam films and Japanese animation without demanding that every cultural detail be translated into generic exposition. Yet Indian producers still frequently sand away local texture in pursuit of the mythical “pan-India” viewer.
That phrase has become less a description of reach than an aesthetic recipe: heightened action, familiar archetypes, dubbed dialogue and marketing calibrated across territories. It can produce exhilarating cinema. It can also produce films that come from everywhere and nowhere. Gondhal’s premise points in the opposite direction. It trusts a ritual, language and landscape to carry dramatic meaning.
International audiences do not require a story to resemble their lives literally. They require a film to establish its world clearly and make its stakes emotionally legible. Roma did not become powerful by removing Mexico City from itself. Parasite did not neutralise Korean class codes. The best local cinema travels because detail produces credibility.
Bollywood once understood this instinct better than its current corporate vocabulary suggests. The classics Kabir Malhotra and I argue about were rooted in neighbourhoods, professions, dialects and moral worlds. Their songs and melodrama did not prevent specificity. What changed was not merely taste; it was risk management. A star-led project now tries to offend no segment, confuse no overseas buyer and interrupt no franchise possibility. The result can be expensive anonymity.
The centre has access, not automatic excellence
Hindi cinema’s structural advantages are obvious: larger publicity networks, national entertainment media, famous families, premium screens and easier access to capital. Those advantages are often narrated as artistic superiority. When a small-language film breaks through, we call it a surprise instead of asking why distribution made it difficult to encounter in the first place.
Gondhal director Santosh Davakhar’s biography complicates the standard industry route. A profile of his journey and filmmaking methods describes work shaped outside the conventional star system. I do not romanticise hardship; deprivation is not a film school the state should celebrate. The point is that talent remains widely distributed while opportunity is aggressively concentrated.
Streaming platforms briefly appeared capable of correcting this imbalance. Then they began reproducing familiar hierarchies: star packages, recognisable crime genres and recommendation systems that bury films lacking marketing support. Availability is not discovery. A title technically present in a catalogue may remain invisible without editorial curation, subtitling quality and promotion.
Theatres are harsher. Small films struggle for showtimes, then lose shows because audiences could not attend the inconvenient ones. The industry calls this market response, but the market was structured before the first ticket was sold. A film screened at 11 a.m. on a weekday is not competing under the same conditions as a franchise occupying every evening slot.
The Oscar obsession needs proportion
I understand why filmmakers value the Academy. A campaign can create distribution, international press and future financing. The award is not merely a golden statuette; it is an industrial gateway. But India’s annual fixation also reveals our dependence on foreign confirmation. We neglect a film domestically, then rediscover it when Los Angeles becomes interested.
The healthiest outcome for Gondhal would not be a fortnight of patriotic coverage followed by disappearance. It would be restored screenings, strong subtitled distribution, classroom discussion of the folk form and durable access after the campaign. Viewers should be able to find the film legally without a treasure hunt.
Selection bodies also owe the public clarity. Criteria, jury composition and procedures should be published consistently. Transparency would reduce the annual suspicion that the process is arbitrary or influenced by access. It would also help filmmakers understand that “Oscar material” is not a genre but a campaign combining artistic distinction, eligibility and resources.
Angh’s separate festival route is particularly exciting because it loosens the one-country-one-submission bottleneck in specified circumstances. India contains too many languages and film cultures for one annual choice to represent its total output. Festival pathways cannot solve distribution inequality, but they can create additional doors.
What Bollywood should learn
The wrong lesson is to commission ten thrillers based on folk rituals. That is how the industry metabolises success: it copies the noun and ignores the method. The right lesson is to trust filmmakers who understand a world, cast for the film rather than the announcement, and allow language to carry memory.
Bollywood should also stop treating regional industries as talent farms. Actors, cinematographers and directors are recruited after success, then absorbed into Hindi projects that often remove what made their work distinctive. Collaboration is healthy; extraction is not. A genuinely plural industry would finance films in their natural languages and distribute them nationally with care.
Critics and viewers have work to do. We should resist grading every Indian film by whether it can “represent the country.” That burden is rarely placed on an American relationship drama or a French comedy. Gondhal can be culturally rooted without serving as a museum exhibit. Its first obligation is to be a film.
I hope the Oscar campaign goes well, but I am more interested in what happens after the shortlist announcement, whatever the result. Will Marathi filmmakers find easier financing? Will folk performers receive attention beyond promotional events? Will audiences seek the movie, and will platforms make that search fruitful? Those outcomes would tell us whether the industry learned anything.
Gondhal’s rise is not proof that the margins have conquered the centre. The centre still controls money, screens and conversation. It is proof that the map was always wrong. Indian cinema is not Bollywood surrounded by regional footnotes. It is a multilingual argument in which Hindi cinema happens to own the loudest microphone. This year, a Marathi film has asked it to listen.
