Two violent incidents inside schools have revived a question that Hindi cinema has never quite resolved: how far should a film go in depicting violence, and what does that depiction do to a young audience? The incidents have no established link to movies, but they have arrived at a moment when several Hindi and regional blockbusters are already being argued over for graphic, sometimes celebratory, violence.
The incidents that reopened the debate
In Panchkula, Haryana, an eight-year-old boy allegedly attacked a six-year-old girl inside a school classroom with an object that appeared to be a brick. In a separate incident in Andhra Pradesh, a 21-year-old allegedly entered a Class 10 classroom with a chainsaw and attacked a girl student, leaving two people injured.
Investigators have not drawn a direct line from these acts to films. But the imagery has been enough to push the conversation about screen violence back to the centre, because several recent hits have drawn criticism for exactly that.
The films under scrutiny
The criticism is not limited to Hindi cinema. Aamir Khan’s old observation that violence and sex are among the easiest emotions to provoke an audience with resurfaced when Animal released in 2023. Since then, debate has followed several big titles:
- Animal drew attention when Ranbir Kapoor’s character walked into a college classroom with a rifle.
- The Dhurandhar duology, pegged as the highest-grossing Indian films of 2025 and 2026, includes a sequence in which Akshaye Khanna’s Rehman Dakait smashes a man’s face.
- Jailer‘s torture and acid sequences drew complaints in 2023.
- Pushpa 2: The Rule, the highest-grossing Indian film of 2024, was criticised for graphic climax violence.
What experts say about young viewers
Children may imitate the behaviour of characters they admire, particularly heroes who are rewarded for violence, says Dr Subhrajit Parida, a paediatrician at Manipal Hospital Bhubaneswar. He adds that because children cannot always separate fiction from reality, they struggle to understand the consequences of violent content.
Dr Shivananda Pai, a neurologist at KMC Hospital Mangaluru, says repeated exposure can make children less sensitive to others’ pain and can lead them to see aggression as an acceptable way to solve problems or gain control.
The concern now extends beyond the narrative film itself. Muskaan Trikha, a clinical psychologist at Medanta Noida, points out that edited scenes circulating as reels can reach children passively, even when they are not actively looking for them, and repeated exposure may increase anxiety about the world being unsafe.
Creative freedom meets social responsibility
The film industry is split. Javed Akhtar has described some contemporary violence as ‘meaningless violence’, a phrase he used at the Ajanta-Ellora International Film Festival in January 2024. Radhika Apte has said she is disturbed by violence packaged as entertainment. On the other side, Animal director Sandeep Reddy Vanga pushed back against linking his films to real incidents, writing that the first response to a crime should be empathy rather than finding ‘a convenient scapegoat in cinema’. Filmmaker Ram Gopal Varma and singer-composer Amaal Mallik also argued that cinema alone cannot be held responsible for individual actions.
Why the influence question will not disappear
Hindi cinema’s cultural pull makes the debate hard to dismiss. In 2003, Salman Khan’s middle-parted hairstyle spawned a real-world style wave; fans still gather outside Shah Rukh Khan’s Mannat on his birthday to recreate his signature pose. That influence does not prove a one-to-one cause, but it does mean the treatment of violence is a fair question for filmmakers and audiences alike.
The useful distinction is not whether violence belongs in cinema. It is how a film treats that violence, who is watching, and what the surrounding culture rewards. Parents can begin with the most practical step: watch what children are actually seeing, including the clips that find them in their feeds, and help them understand the distance between a screen act and a real consequence.
Source: Hindustan Times
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