Past and Present: Surveying Medieval India Amidst the Present Perceptions of the Past in Popular Medium

In today’s Indian cinema, there is a deluge of films based on historical background. One of the central themes of many of these movies is the description and the representation of the ‘other’. Padmavat is the quintessential example and sums up all the ideas served in movies of this genre which were released before and after it. Padmini, Ratan Sen, Alauddin Khalji as depicted in the movie are the tropes through which the idea about a particular period of Indian history is creatively visualised and presented. It also forms the perception of the past at the popular level and helps in the development of common consciousness and majoritarian common sense. In the light of this kind of cinema, this article tries to survey medieval India based on the reading of the historical sources to understand the nature of various kinds of binary and otherness through the multifarious representations of the other.