MY REJOINDER TO TAMANNAAH BHATIA'S RECENT INTERVIEW REGARDING MY 2015 ARTICLE

 

In a recent interview to the media platform The Lallantop, the actor Tamannaah Bhatia was asked about the representation of female bodies on screen, and in particular about my article published in The Hindu Businessline in 2015 under the headline “The Rape of Avanthika”. 

 

ICYMI: “The Rape of Avanthika” was a critique of a scene in S.S. Rajamouli’s Baahubali: The Beginning in which Avanthika (played by Bhatia) attacks Prabhas’ character in reaction to his incursions on her body portrayed in the preceding scenes. 

 

This encounter is depicted as a dance, during which he strips her of her practical warrior’s attire and alters it into a flowy outfit, unties her hair against her will, and forcibly applies makeup on her face. At the end of this passage, she is no longer fighting him – instead, she is mesmerised by her own transformation, and in love with him. 

 

I had described the scene as a symbolic – and romanticised – representation of the violation of a woman’s consent in sexual relations. 

 

“The Rape of Avanthika” was about Baahubali the film, not about Bhatia the individual. In her recent interview, though, she characterised the article as an attack on her. 

 

“When people can’t control you, they use shame and guilt as a technique to make you feel that you must feel ashamed of whatever you do. Because when they make you feel shame, they can gain control over you,” was how she began her answer to the question about the article.

 

She then spoke at length about sexual repression in our society. 

 

Attributing my article to this sexual repression, Bhatia made the following personal remark about me: “If you show someone the purest thing, but if that person thinks sex is a bad thing or your body is a bad thing or your entire system is a bad thing, then that’s all they will see.”

 

When “The Rape of Avanthika” was published, I was flooded with responses from readers who said it resonated with them, including a large number who told me they had, until then, assumed they were alone in their discomfort with that scene in Baahubali. Simultaneously came a spate of communal and misogynistic online attacks, in addition to vulgar, sexually explicit abuse. 

 

Having faced those attacks, I still say that Bhatia’s latest interview is the most inexplicable and absurd response to the article I have received in these 10 years.

 

The article was concerned about the romanticisation of sexual violence in a film. Bhatia has somehow interpreted that concern as an aversion to sex. 

 

I wrote about what I saw as a symbolic, prettified representation of rape. Bhatia has somehow interpreted that as my attempt to control her. 

 

Why would I want to control a stranger to whom I have no personal ties? 

 

This is not about me though. 

 

The issue here is the deep-seated internalised misogyny that prompted Bhatia to defend a portrayal of stalking, harassment and violence as courtship, and the normalisation of sexual violence in a film.

 

According to the National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB) 2022 report, India records 51 cases of crimes against women every hour. (Source: Times of India)

 

Women in India suffer acid attacks, rape and have even been killed by men who are socially conditioned to ignore or avenge rejection. 

 

That scene in Baahubali showed a woman initially enraged at the repeated violation of her bodily integrity by a man, but eventually making love to him. It is dangerous because it echoes what our society tells boys and men: that when a woman says no, she means maybe or yes; that true love or genuine attraction means persisting even after she rejects your advances; and that it is up to a man to “make her realise” (to quote an oft-used phrase) how beautiful she is. 

 

In such circumstances, I don’t care about Bhatia’s demeaning comments aimed at me, or her pretence that she does not know me or of me – we have met, and even spent time together. Besides, she has clearly devoted lots of time to thinking about my article for an entire decade. 

 

I genuinely don’t care about the act she put on though. 

 

I care that she, a celebrity with the power to positively influence minds if she wishes to do so, publicly made false allegations about “The Rape of Avanthika”, and intentionally conflated sexual violence with sex to confuse the audience at an interview. In doing so, she has supported the patriarchal status quo that causes great harm to women, and ultimately harms men too.

 

I feel compelled to write this rejoinder although I am short of time and bogged down by work, because sections of the media have unquestioningly quoted Bhatia’s interview in articles, without pointing to the regressive mindset she displayed and the falsehoods in her comments.

 

I am a middle-class individual without the massive PR machinery and management team that a millionaire movie star like Bhatia has working for her. This means I do not have the resources to amplify this rejoinder, and can only trust that individual members of the public and the media who share my values will amplify it for me. 

 

I repeat: this is not about me, it’s about Bhatia’s dangerous messaging. This is not about Bhatia either: she is a mere instrument, a mouthpiece, for an oppressive system that seeks to subjugate women and non-conformist men; a system that some women, sadly, play along with in the interests of career advancement.

 

The link to “The Rape of Avanthika” is here and here.

 

Please share this statement not just on the platform on which you are reading it, but in the e-groups, WhatsApp groups and other networks that you are a part of, so that it leads to a conversation that conservatives and misogynists like Bhatia do not want us to have. (Ends)

REVIEW 488: BAAHUBALI – THE CONCLUSION

Release date:	April 28, 2017
Director:	S.S. Rajamouli
Cast: Language:	Prabhas, Rana Daggubati, Anushka Shetty, Ramya Krishna, Sathyaraj, Nassar, a few seconds of Tamannaah Bhatia Telugu

(Note: This is a review of the Hindi dubbed version of the Telugu film Baahubali: The Conclusion.)

Fans of the Baahubali franchise have been discussing the hashtag #WKKB on the social media for a while now. If you have not guessed yet, that stands for “Why Kattappa Killed Baahubali”, a reference to the teaser in the closing scene of Baahubali: The Beginning in 2015. You will not find spoilers on the #WKKB front in this review. Hold on to your seats though for the answer to a far more pressing question: #DRTOHS.

In the first film, the tribal boy Shivudu (Prabhas) discovered that he is, in fact, Mahendra Baahubali, son of the late great Amarendra Baahubali (also Prabhas) who was robbed of the throne of Mahishmati kingdom by the machinations of his cruel cousin Bhallaladeva (Rana Daggubati) and uncle Bijjaladeva (Nassar). In Baahubali: The Conclusion, Mahendra hears the story of why and how that happened before setting off to avenge the deaths of his father and foster grandmother Sivagami (Ramya Krishna) and to free his mother Devasena (Anushka Shetty) from imprisonment in Mahishmati.

As with the opening film, this one too is an Amar Chitra Katha-style blend of mythological references and palace intrigue laid out on a vast canvas of visual grandeur. The proportion of the ingredients has been changed though, with myth and socially regressive themes being scaled down, family politics being scaled up, and the decibel levels being raised by several notches.

The novelty of seeing an Indian film so laden with heavy special effects at such a scale from start to finish has worn off in the two years since Baahubali 1 was released, and it is hard now to forgive this one for Mahishmati’s plastic façade and those painfully obvious CGI beasts. Somehow, nothing here seems to match up to that waterfall in Part 1. Still, when the going is good, director S.S. Rajamouli’s Baahubali: The Conclusion is pleasing to the eye, in particular with its costumes, lavish interiors and innovative stunts.

A film of this nature obviously requires a suspension of disbelief in that last department. And frankly, if we are willing to swallow the invincibility of the likes of Tom Cruise, Bruce Willis and the various Bonds down the decades, then there is no reason why we should not buy that scene in which Amarendra mounts an elephant by walking up its trunk with the animal’s assistance and – my favourite of the lot – that war-time gimmick involving palm trees, shields and Newtonian physics towards the end.

Those stunts, M.M. Kreem’s background score and the use of his songs to up the tempo of the narrative are what keep Baahubali: The Conclusion watchable even when the ridiculous over-acting becomes hard to take and the lack of freshness in the storyline sinks in. Daggubati and Shetty – both gorgeous, both equally charismatic – keep themselves relatively in check, which is admirable considering that over-statement seems to be the demand of Rajamouli’s storytelling in this cinematic diptych (“relatively” being a key word here). Prabhas’ pretty face somewhat compensates for all that self-indulgent posing about he does, most notably while Devasena sings a song about Lord Krishna in a scene that unwittingly betrays her man’s Oedipus complex.

The rest of the cast is laughable, with each rivalling the other for the year’s Worst Acting Awards. There is the usually wonderful Nassar who hams here to such an extent that he makes Sohrab Modi seem under-stated in comparison. The extras in every single scene – soldiers, courtiers and subjects – seem to be competing with the memorably howlarious bit-part players of the black-and-white era. And Subba Raju playing Devasena’s beau Kumara Varma is so bad, he should be declared a threat to society.

The queen of the film’s hamsters though (if such a word does not exist in the acting lexicon, then it should) is Krishna whose eyes remain fixed in a bulbous stare through the nearly three hours of this film’s running time.

For all its seeming innocuousness, Baahubali: The Beginning was a horribly narrow-minded film that rolled out a range of stereotypes couched in its good-looking frames. The black-denotes-evil cliché was exacerbated by its white-is-glamorous conviction. Disability coincidentally found its way only on to evil people. And Sivagami’s power paled into insignificance in the face of Shivudu’s sexual violation and ultimate subjugation of the warrior Avanthika played by Tamannaah Bhatia.

In that respect, Baahubali: The Conclusion is a step up. Devasena remains strong and active from start to finish, and is at no point reduced to being Shivudu or Amarendra’s sidekick. She is a partner, not a prop. Still, the marginalisation of Avanthika in this film is almost tragic. In Part 1 she was a feisty woman whose mission was taken over by Shivudu once he ‘makes’ her fall in love with him and discover her inner femininity. In Part 2, she is an absolute nobody with nothing to say and just a few seconds of screen time in mass scenes. In that context, giving Bhatia fourth billing in the closing credits (after the two leading men and Shetty, but before Krishna) comes across as condescension, not an acknowledgement of her star status.

There is so much else that is troubling in Rajamouli’s worldview: for one, the undisputed right of the Kshatriya to rule. If there is a question here, it is only: which Kshatriya – the good guy or the bad guy? And either way, it has to be one of the guys. All the spectacle in the world, the Durga-esque positioning of Sivagami and Devasena, and the emphasis on Mahendra/Amarendra’s virtues cannot camouflage Baahubali’s disturbing romanticisation of social status-quoism.

This then is the conclusion of this review: Baahubali: The Conclusion is a cocktail of fun stunts, attractive stars, grand settings, terrible acting, conflicted attitudes and closeted conservatism. (Aside: The Hindi dubbing is impressive. A bow here to the choice of voices and to Manoj Muntashir, dialogue writer and lyricist for this version.)

As is always the case, each viewer’s response to the film depends on her/his priorities. My priority, I admit, is not #WKKB but #DRTOHS: does Rana take off his shirt (in the film, as he has for the posters)? Answer: yes he does. For good measure, so does Prabhas. Both men rip off their upperwear in an extended scene of hand-to-hand combat, to reveal perfectly sculpted, stunningly muscular torsos in what has now become commercial Indian cinema’s most-used formula across all states. In the way it is told, #WKKB is not as dramatic a revelation as expected. #DRTOHS, on the other hand, is absolute paisa vasool.

  

Rating (out of five stars): **1/4

CBFC Rating (India):	UA
Running time:	167 minutes

This review has also been published on Firstpost:

http://www.firstpost.com/entertainment/bahubali-2-hindi-movie-review-baahubali-2-rating-cocktail-of-visuals-terrible-acting-closeted-conservatism-3411488.html

Poster courtesy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baahubali_2:_The_Conclusion

THE POLITICS OF THE TERM “REGIONAL CINEMA” / A LONGER VERSION OF THE COLUMN FILM FATALE PUBLISHED IN THE HINDU BUSINESSLINE

IT’S NOT “REGIONAL”, DAMMIT, IT’S “INDIAN”!

Next time you say the words “regional cinema”, remember the many political insinuations, the propaganda, lies and myths built into this loaded term

By Anna MM Vetticad

I hate the term “regional cinema”. There was a time when I only mildly disliked it, but as time passes I find myself unable to ignore the implications of those two seemingly innocuous words.

For a start, “regional cinema” suggests that there is such a thing as a “national cinema” of India, just as the term “regional language” used for languages other than Hindi suggests that Hindi is our “national language” though it is not.

I was reminded of the impact of these constant insinuations in the oddest way by the reader reaction to this column a few months back. Well, actually, it is not as odd as it is telling. I devoted a recent instalment of Film Fatale to the manner in which Hollywood has, for years now, been tapping multiple markets across this country by dubbing their films in various Indian languages or subtitling them, while a majority of Indian film producers still do not make an effort to target audiences outside their home states.

Although the immediate news pegs for the write-up were the release of the National Award-winning Tamil film Visaaranai and the Marathi blockbuster Sairat this year, I clearly stated that the points being raised “apply equally to Tamil, Hindi, Telugu and India’s smaller industries”. Yet, curiously enough (or perhaps, unsurprisingly?) almost every response from readers I received on the social media assumed that my discussion was about the need for subtitling films in languages other than Hindi – what they described as “regional cinema” – to take them beyond their domestic audience.

The inference is clear. The assumption that Hindi is spoken and understood in every corner of India has been so drilled into our heads, that we often miss a contrarian point even when it is spelt out for us in black and white. It is equally unthinkingly assumed that Hindi cinema is the primary choice of cinema for people in all Indian states, with films in their own mother tongues coming in second. Neither claim is true.

This column then is an examination of that loaded term “regional cinema”, the political propaganda, myths and lies built into it.

Myth 1: That Hindi is India’s national language. It is not.

Contrary to popular belief, Hindi is not India’s national language. No language has been given that status by the Indian Constitution. It was decided early on by the authors of the Constitution not to impose a single language on the entire country as a “national language” with all the political and patriotic connotations intrinsic to that label, until such time as the country was willing to accept one. Instead, under Article 343, Hindi and English were anointed the official languages of the Union – read: the languages in which all Central Government work would be done – while leaving each state to choose its own official language in which state government business would be conducted.

(Note: The Constitution does not use the term “national language”, it does however use the term “regional languages” to denote the official languages of all states including Hindi.)

How then has the “Hindi is our national language” fiction been circulated so effectively? The answer lies in a mixture of propaganda, political games, media ignorance, casualness towards facts and on the positive front, the soft diplomacy of the Hindi film industry.

The Constitution enjoined the Centre to make efforts to popularise Hindi. Independent of this instruction, Bollywood has beautifully and non-aggressively generated goodwill for the language outside the Hindi belt, quietly managing to popularise it among populations that do not consider it their mother tongue. This alone would have been perfectly acceptable, but other insidious efforts have been and continue to be made in favour of Hindi through deliberate misinformation campaigns and political aggression that have vitiated the language debate.

For instance, in classrooms across this country it is not uncommon for Hindi teachers to tell young students that Hindi is India’s national language. Politicians too routinely repeat this falsehood, as I recall BJP spokesperson Sambit Patra doing last year on a TV show where we were fellow panelists. From his silence when I corrected him, I gathered he was aware of the truth but chose to speak an untruth on a public platform anyway.

As it happens, the news media further spreads this lie, either due to their own poor research or because there are propagandists within its (our) ranks too. In 2009, for example, when Samajwadi Party MLA Abu Azmi was assaulted by Maharashtra Navnirman Sena hooligans in the Assembly because he insisted on taking his oath in Hindi, not Marathi, some newspersons spoke of an attack on the “national language”.

This fib has been repeated so often in the 69 years since Independence that it has now become a Goebbelsian truth for large swathes of the population. In a 2005 interview, film star Aishwarya Rai famously misinformed US talk show host David Letterman that Hindi is India’s “national language” and fuzzily implied that all Indian cinema is Bollywood.

Myth 2: That most Indians are Hindi bhashis. They are not.

What is the big deal, you ask? You mean apart from the importance of facts? The big deal is that politics and egos have blinded us to our amazing diversity. It is not Hindi but an imposition of Hindi that raises hackles in a country where Census figures have shown that 59 per cent of the population lists Constitutionally recognised languages other than Hindi as their mother tongue. For the record, Hindi has become an umbrella term for many languages dismissed as “dialects”, which makes even this figure misleading.

Since India is trotting along fine without a designated “national language”, why alter a harmless status quo?

The term “regional cinema” emerges from this context. India is the world’s largest producer of films. Unlike its closest competitors in terms of volume, the United States and Nigeria, India is also unique in that it is home to multiple thriving film industries in different languages that have survived the cash-rich American film industry i.e. Hollywood’s marketing muscle. This is a massive achievement and should be a matter of pride for Indians, yet the so-called ‘national’ media usually ignores all our cinema other than Hindi i.e. Bollywood.

I say “national media” for the English media, since English is the only language not specific to any Indian region. This media is primarily headquartered in Delhi and Mumbai. Hindi is a language of Delhi, Mumbai is the centre of Bollywood. Combine the convenience of proximity with biases, and you may see why most of them behave as if Bollywood is India’s largest (or only) film industry.

This media largely recruits professionals specialising in Hindi cinema, firstly because many of these organisations tend to have a north India bias, and second, since Hindi film specialists are more easily available in Delhi and Mumbai than those who write prolifically on other Indian industries.

Unfortunately, many Hindi cinema experts imply through their words that Indian cinema is primarily or entirely Hindi. Using the terms “Indian cinema” and “Hindi cinema” / “Bollywood” synonymously is also standard practice. Then there are those labouring under the misconception that Hindi is India’s “national language”, who believe it is okay to ignore what they consider secondary film industries. Other industries are thus relegated to the status of “regional cinema”.

To be fair, Hindi films do have a wider, pan-India reach and the Hindi industry has marketed itself better than its compatriots. The other side of that coin, though, is that even if a non-Hindi industry wishes to market itself, the ‘national’ media is rarely interested. The primacy of Hindi cinema is now a self-perpetuating myth. As the media ignores other cinema, it plays a role in expanding Hindi’s audience, an audience size it then uses to defend further ignoring other Indian cinema.

The only non-Hindi film to get as much coverage as Hindi films in recent years has been 2015’s Telugu blockbuster Bahubali – not so much because of its mega scale that was unprecedented in India, but because the iconic Bollywood producer-director Karan Johar backed the Hindi dubbed version. Since 2007, when the ‘national’ media suddenly discovered during Sivaji’s promotional period that Rajinikanth was perhaps India’s highest-paid star, this Tamil film legend too has been extensively covered – but again with a certain them-and-us attitude, often with a condescension directed at “the other” because of his trademark fantastical stunts on screen and bizarre levels of fan adulation off screen. The ‘national’ media usually covers Rajini as they would a display in an old curiosity shop, rarely with any degree of seriousness.

Myth 3: That the Hindi film industry is India’s largest film industry. It is not. 

The selective coverage of Indian cinema by the ‘national’ media cannot be explained away by volumes. According to the Central Board of Film Certification’s annual report for 2014-15, the language in which the maximum number of films was certified for the given year was Tamil, followed closely by Hindi and then Telugu. This was not unusual at all. For years, Tamil, Hindi and Telugu have been neck-and-neck in terms of number of films produced.

In a country that makes 2,000-plus feature films each year, an individual film journalist cannot possibly devote equal attention to all film industries. Hopefully, open-minded editors reading this column will see it not as an indictment but as a call for organisations to hire specialists. Just as BJP, Congress, Left and so on are separate beats in political journalism so also Tamil, Hindi, Telugu, Malayalam, Bengali, Marathi and so on should be separate beats for the news media in the country that is the world’s largest producer of films.

At the very least, media platforms should hire separate critics for each of our three largest industries. Until that happens, the least that we as individual film journalists can do is to not imply through our writings that the Hindi film industry is India’s only or largest or most significant industry.

A good start would be to flush that awful term “regional cinema” down a bottomless drain.

(A shorter version of this article was published in The Hindu Businessline’s BLink on September 10, 2016.)

Link to the shorter version of this column published in The Hindu Businessline:

http://www.thehindubusinessline.com/blink/watch/its-not-regional-dammit-its-indian/article9085970.ece

Previous instalment of Film Fatale: Bollywood and the Art of Avoiding Facts

http://annavetticadgoes2themovies.blogspot.in/2016/08/inaccuracies-in-bollywood-historicals.html

Related Link: Film Fatale: It’s Not Just Bollywood, Stupid!

http://www.thehindubusinessline.com/blink/watch/its-not-just-bollywood-stupid/article7561938.ece

Photo captions: Stills/posters from (1) Kabali (2) Bahubali

Photographs courtesy:

 (1) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kabali_(film)

 (2)  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baahubali:_The_Beginning