The announcement that the team behind Made In India: A Titan Story (a recent Amazon MX Player series) is reuniting for a web series on the Tata family has come to be viewed with scepticism. Netizens are raising immediate questions about historical accuracy.
A section of Reddit users opine that Indian cinema has a long history of "turning corporate and political biopics into flawless hagiographies". Filmmakers frequently "sanitize complex legacies to ensure smooth theatrical runs and avoid legal trouble".
The Tata series is based on The Tatas: How a Family Built a Business and a Nation, a book by Girish Kuber. Past experiences say it all. We saw corporate myth-making in Mani Ratnam's Guru, which "heavily romanticized the aggressive rise of a tycoon" (Dhirubhai Ambani). It is highly likely that this multi-season drama on the Tatas will be similarly economical with the truth. "It is going to choose corporate reverence over genuine investigative journalism," a columnist opined. These are just PR exercises; they don't provoke the audience to be expansive in their thinking.
