The independent critic asks: Does this film allow Mastani to be angry? Does it show her as a mother who lost a war, not just a lover who lost a man?

The grades that matter now are not out of five stars, but out of five dimensions: Agency, Accuracy, Interiority, Visual Language, and Subversion of the Male Gaze. So, where does this leave the cinephile who wants to approach Mastani on screen today?

But in the last decade, a quiet revolution has taken place. The grand, mainstream spectacle of Mastani—most famously played by Deepika Padukone in Sanjay Leela Bhansali’s Bajirao Mastani (2015)—has been challenged, deconstructed, and ultimately enriched by a parallel conversation happening in and the rise of the democratized movie review . The grade of a Mastani film is no longer measured by crores at the box office, but by the nuance with which it polishes her mirror. The Mainstream Grade: The Bhansali Template To understand the independent shift, one must first grade the mainstream archetype. Bhansali’s Mastani is a five-star experience but a three-star historical document . She is visually sumptuous: a swirl of indigo and gold, her eyes lined with kohl deep enough to drown in. The grade on technical merit—costume, production design, choreography—is an A+.

However, the critical grade on agency is a C-. This Mastani is defined by longing. She exists to be loved, then discarded, then memorialized. Her famous line, “Aap humse humari shart rakhiye, hum aap se apni wafaa rakhenge” (You set your conditions, I will keep my loyalty), is gorgeous poetry but poor politics. The mainstream film reduces her political alliance with Baji Rao to a digestive metaphor of romance. She is never the strategist; she is the casualty.

Between 2016 and 2023, a wave of Marathi and Hindi independent shorts and low-budget features began re-grading the Mastani myth. Films like Mastani: Unplugged (2019, dir. Ruchika Arora) and the documentary short The Other Peshwa (2021) refused the glamour shot. Instead, they used grainy 16mm, static long takes, and archival Persian texts translated into vernacular subtitles.

Take the channel Cinema Riot , which reviewed Bajirao Mastani in 2015 with a “Historical Feminist Grade.” They gave it a D. Then, in 2022, they reviewed the independent short Mastani’s Last Letter (a 22-minute film composed entirely of a voiceover reading a fictionalized letter from Mastani to her son). That film received an A+ for “emotional verisimilitude.”