Beyond all these records is a height yet unachieved in Indian gaming, one that Raji aspires to surmount. Gaming is still marginal among the arts in contemporary Indian culture, and so far, there has been no “crossover” game to bridge it to its peers in film, television, or literature. But amid a pan-national, multimedia boom in epic mythological fantasy, Raji is on the edge of making that crossover. It may very well be India’s first prestige game: the one that finally lives up to the nascent industry’s promise and establishes gaming as a vital cultural frontier.
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India’s tradition of militant women can and have been reclaimed as feminist symbols. But they exist within the context of Hindu patriarchy, and their ultraviolence have also been appropriated to support it. The feminist Paola Bacchetta has written about the rising trend of feminine Hindutva, who take from the warrior goddess her strength, and then channel it towards anti-Muslim violence, analogizing the Goddess’s fight against demons with their own fight against Muslims.

All this is to say: the virangana is not a symbol Raji can appropriate apolitically for its fantastical plot. Neither can it appropriate the Rakshasa. Nor the Rajput fort, nor the Pahari painting, nor the Balinese shadow-puppet. Maybe all of _Raji_’s flaws hinge on its lack of an explicit political program, an omission that only hides its implicit one.

That doesn’t make Raji malicious, but it does make careless in its own educational mission. In all fairness, it’s not like Raji isn’t making the same mistakes that aren’t being made by others in its genre or in pop culture at large, countless times over. This kind of stuff is everywhere—just look at the paradoxically demure warrior women mowing down hordes of dark-skinned barbarians in films, or the literal erasure of India’s Muslim history in a right-wing campaign to rename cities.

The “folklore” that media like Raji peddle have very little to do with the common folk at all, which is perhaps why the game is dubbed in no other Indian language besides English. Raji creates a world where the 21st century’s upper-caste, middle-class Hinduism is projected onto the far-off past, which tells us nothing about the past but does reinforce a widely-held delusion in the present. It speaks to how deeply nationalist ideology has penetrated the subconscious that Raji finds it easier to flatten Indian history and mythology into a caricature than try to probe beyond the narrowly-defined Hinduism enshrined by Brahmin elite. The irony is that the ancient Indians themselves managed to pull that off—the great living epics of the Ramayana and the Mahabharata are chock full of dissident, non-hegemonic voices, challengers from female, Dalit, and non-Hindu perspectives. If Nodding Head Games and other young, curious artists want to look to the past for inspiration, it would be best to start there.