Nothing is True; Nothing is Permitted: A Cultural Analysis of Assassin's Creed: India
Assassin’s Creed’s central philosophical claim — nothing is true, everything is permitted — is one of the more genuinely interesting premises in mainstream gaming. It’s a denial of natural social order; an invitation to question all received authority.
Which makes it especially ironic that Ubisoft, the studio behind this liberatory philosophy, has been extensively documented for its own authoritarian internal culture — suppressing female characters at the direction of management, and a well-publicized reckoning with workplace misconduct.
This essay, written for an Introduction to Cultural Studies course at IIT Jodhpur, reads Assassin’s Creed: India Chronicles and the graphic novel AC: Brahman through Foucault, Judith Butler, Janice Radway, Stuart Hall, and Dick Hebdige. The irony above is the conclusion; here is the analysis that gets there.
The Panopticon Goes Virtual
Foucault’s panopticon is an architectural model of power: a prison designed so that inmates never know when they are being watched, and therefore must always assume they are. The effect — self-surveillance — requires no actual watcher.
AC: Brahman features the “Brahman V.R.” headset, a product sold in India by MysoreTech (a front for Abstergo Industries, the Templars’ corporate face). Users believe they are experiencing ancestral memories through entertainment VR. They are actually providing Abstergo with genetic memory data to locate the Koh-i-Noor.
The headset is a panopticon. Users surveil themselves by using it. Their most intimate data — the memories embedded in their DNA — is harvested as they enjoy themselves.
Foucault had no framework for the internet or VR, but his theory extends cleanly. Social media platforms (Meta, Google — and in the game’s logic, Abstergo) are not just spaces within which power operates. They are architects of virtual space who, unlike physical architects, directly control what users can see, know, and remember. The essay’s formulation: we are not consumers; we are the product.
Performative Gender and Who Gets to Use the Headset
Butler’s performativity argues that gender is not an expression of some inner truth — it is a performance that is continuously repeated, enforced, and naturalized.
In Brahman, Jot Soora (male protagonist) uses the VR headset to explore ancestry, political intrigue, and historical conflict. Monima Das (female love interest) uses the headset to relive ancestral sexual experiences. She later drowns — her death functioning entirely to give Jot emotional motivation.
Monima exists to deepen Jot’s character. The essay reads this through Butler: Ubisoft’s (overwhelmingly male) development team “performed their own gender” in constructing these roles. The heteronormative logic of the game is not accidental — it mirrors who was in the room making decisions.
Similarly, Princess Pyara Kaur in Chronicles India is a damsel/love interest for the male protagonist Arbaaz Mir, despite the setting (1841 Amritsar, Sikh Empire) offering rich possibilities for female agency.
The game fails the Bechdel test.
The Romance Novel and Conditioned Consumption
Janice Radway’s study of romance novel readership argues that women’s preference for romance fiction is not a natural inclination — it was manufactured. The genre proliferated to monetize women’s leisure time; consumption was conditioned.
The Brahman V.R. headset is a new delivery format for the same conditioning. Monima’s use of the headset to access sexual/romantic ancestral memories maps onto the romance reader archetype. New technology, same captured audience, same exploitative structure.
Encoding India from the Outside
Stuart Hall’s encoding/decoding model: producers encode meaning into texts; audiences decode it, sometimes in line with the intended reading, sometimes against it.
The question for AC: India is who did the encoding. Ubisoft is a French studio; the development team for the India installment was not predominantly Indian. The India they encoded is Orientalist — mystical, exotic, superficially researched.
The most glaring example: the game’s protagonist Arbaaz Mir is dressed in visual variants of Altair’s Middle Eastern assassin attire. India in 1841, particularly the Sikh Punjab, had distinct visual traditions. Using recycled costume assets is not neutral; it signals that the India setting was primarily an aesthetic backdrop rather than a cultural engagement.
The name “Brahman” for the VR headset is another instance — Brahman is a concept in Hindu philosophy (the ultimate reality underlying all existence), one of the most philosophically significant terms in the tradition. Its use here is decorative noise.
The Assassins as Subculture
Hebdige’s analysis of subcultures: economically marginalized groups develop distinctive styles and practices that both resist and are eventually absorbed by dominant culture.
Arbaaz Mir and his mentor Hamid come from humble origins. The Assassins operate outside the state, in direct opposition to the Templar order (itself an analogue for colonial power). Their fashion, their brotherhood, their philosophy — all markers of a subculture defined against hegemony.
But as with Gramsci, resistance is always defined by what it resists. The Assassins are intelligible only in relation to the Templars. And Ubisoft, by packaging this subculture as a major commercial franchise, enacts the absorption Hebdige describes.
The Conclusion the Game’s Motto Earns
Nothing is true, everything is permitted. If nothing is naturally true, then no social hierarchy is naturally justified. This is genuinely radical.
Foucault argues that power produces truth — that “knowledge” is not neutral but always in service of a power structure. Which means Foucault’s theory and the Assassins’ motto are saying the same thing.
And it means that a corporation encoding Orientalist representations of India, erasing female characters under executive pressure, and selling surveillance-as-entertainment while proclaiming liberation — is not a contradiction of the game’s philosophy. It is a demonstration of it.
Full essay available here.