The attack against ‘Annapoorani’: Another reaction to the “enemy”’s actions
Varun Grover is nearly at the end of his latest comedy tour he calls “Nothing Makes Sense”. I watched him perform this set last year in August in the city of Hyderabad. The part of his set, and I couldn’t be trust to reproduce the words verbatim but only the central point, that caught my attention was his declaration that the right-wingers were out to “distract” the Indian liberals, with their protests that do not make any sense to the liberals against a variety of things, and that the liberals were completely taking the bait. As an example, he mentions the protests against films like Brahmastra (2022), or Laal Singh Chadha (2022) that allegedly hurt some Hindi sentiments and invited a ban against the films by the Hindutva community — as to what these sentiments are belongs to the land of the vague — which ensured every liberal watched the movie to make a statement. Why bother about pressing issues like rising communal hatred, or crime rates, or unemployment, etc. when you can go watch a movie only to show the saffron sect cannot cow you? He mentions that, similarly, when there were whispers that India would be renamed as “Bharat” — nothing legal as yet — there allegedly was a man on Twitter who went and calculated the amount of monetary loss the Government exchequer would suffer solely from printing out fresh Government papers with the new name.
To be fair, he followed this up with how when The Kerala Story (2023) released, the liberals had protested against the alleged lies spewed through the script, which prompted every single proponent of the Hindutva ideology also to flock to their nearest cinema and ensure the film was widely watched and profits made only to make a statement that the liberals cannot shut them down. Varun, true to his wittiness, added the lament that these protests, serving only to distract large tracts of the population from the actual issues going on in the country, also pushed people to watch truly terrible movies (like Brahmastra and The Kerala Story).
But for those of you who haven’t had the chance to listen to Varun Grover’s Nothing Makes Sense can open the newspaper today and take a look at what’s just happened with Nilesh Krishnaa’s ‘Annapoorani’ that released on Netflix on 29th December last year. “This movie is made for entertainment. Certain transgressions of tradition/ culture are displayed with care and responsibility as per the need of the story. The film does not intend to misrepresent any individual or society”, goes the disclaimer for Nilesh Krishnaa’s debut film ‘Annapoorani’. The film, which released on December 1st in the theatres, and only thereafter on Netflix on December 29th, had the due approval from the Central Board of Film Certification. When the streaming of the film was made accessible in Hindi, the Vishva Hindu Parishad (VHP) took offense at the portrayal of the Brahmin community in the film, and dubbed it “an attack on the faith of the Hindus”. From the land of the vague, mentions of how the film includes that Lord Ram, the Hindu God, ate meat, or that the protagonist, being a Sri Vaishnava Brahmin in the movie, ate meat inspite of “not being allowed to” or that she befriends a Muslim boy inspite of “not being allowed to” find place on social media. It is reported that someone has filed a criminal complaint before the Jabalpur Police Station, which immediately registered a First Information Report (FIR) against the lead actor, Nayanthara, as well as the director, under Section 153A and 3A of the Indian Penal Code (IPC) for promoting enmity between groups. At the same time, Bajrang Dal as allegedly filed a complaint at Oshiwara, an organization that calls itself “Hindu IT Cell” has filed another in South Mumbai. While those are pending, Zee Entertainment, being the co-producer, contacted Netflix, took down the streaming of the film altogether and promise to release it only after making edits, and released a statement saying ‘we have no intention to hurt the religious sentiments of the Hindus and Brahmins community and would like to hereby apologize for the inconvenience caused and hurt caused to the sentiments of the respective communities’.
I do not write to you here to talk about whether I watched the film, or whether the film captures anything at all that is not factual, to confirm whether the film actually captures any of those bits from the land of the vague that X is now playing host to from angry saffron herds, or to record my own experience as a part of the Hindu Brahmin community with what we are “allowed to do” or what not.
I do not write to you about that. I write only about how distracted, and irritated, and harassed I feel as I read that a film got excreted upon — I refrain from saying shat upon to maintain some decorum — once again for hurting these unquantified sentiments as announced by unqualified members of this saffron land mass that lies embedded within the sub-continent’s land mass.
I feel distracted from my day, from my work, from my life that I have been living otherwise peacefully and blissfully unaware of the going-ons in the country, a life that is not spent sniffing pages of the Bhagavad Gita or Hindu epics each morning only to see what can serve as fuel to set off on another rampage against perceived injustice. I feel distracted, and I am angered, and I write to you to see if you feel the same, and if we can stop.
Azar Nafisi, who is my latest hero lately, writes a letter to her father, which forms a collection of Read Dangerously (2022), confessing she feels “tongue-tied thinking of Trump’s candidacy, not just because of his person but also because what he represented and revealed about us.” “I wrote him that (in the Trump era) we are preoccupied by our enemies, real or manufactured, that most of our actions are reactions to these real or fabricated enemies”.
When you Google ‘Annapoorani’ to read reviews online, you are informed that 1630 viewers of the movie have left reviews online which constitute the 1 star majority rating, and that 1328 viewers have left written reviews. The top 20 or 30 — or 500 — reviewers, all with different names — have left the exact same review, which starts off with “THIS MOVIE IS NOT JUST A SHAME BUT A SCAM. DONT GO ON THE NAME, THEY JUST USED OUR GODDESS NAME FOR AUDIENCE [sic]. Classic example of leftist approach” and ends with “Now suddenly I feel so much respect for Brahmastra because at least they didn’t let down on us by playing with our emotions through putting our deities name on the movie for audience and then show their soft conversion/ political ideologies. It’s a shame!”. Apparently all of these highly qualified saffron crusaders have the exact same opinion; no wonder they share an ideology, too, considering how identical their thoughts are and how identically they translate to text. But before this turns into a bitter rant, I re-read Azar Nafisi’s understanding and ask: what does this reveal about us? And is this not — one hundred percent — a reaction to the real or fabricated “enemies”, even if the enemies happen to be the makers of this movie, or the actors, or characters that are supposed to be Brahmin but eat meat, or characters that supposed to be Brahmins, or Hindus, but who befriend Muslims. I ask these reviewers: can you truly say this is an action taken against your enemy, or is it a mere reaction? A multiplication of another’s reaction at that — I did not investigate as far as every single review to see who wrote this text first that everyone else sees fit to copy. And I ask the reviewers themselves: Is this not proof of how distracted you are?
And as Varun Grover points out, will the liberals not now be compelled to download this movie/ gain access to the original movie from any place possible only to see what the holler is about? Or worse, will the liberals not be compelled to protest right back to the saffron party without even having watched the movie?
I write now only to highlight some of the more important questions here that I pray would make you, both reviewer and liberal, and reviewer AND liberal, pause before you invest any time into reacting to this, questions that I pray would help you discern if you are truly “protesting” against anything to do with the film, or merely “reacting” to the actions of your “enemy”, and I am writing to all sides here:
Have you watched the film? Have you heard about the points being mentioned — that Lord Ram used to eat meat, or that Shiva did, or that Brahmins eat meat, or that they do not meat — from any source you yourself have read or accessed? What does caste mean to you? Are you aware of the how the caste system originated? Do you believe that people who are categorized under a particular caste are “allowed” and “not allowed” to certain things? If yes, by whom? Have you accessed or read any texts yourself that tell you how people from a particular caste ought to behave? What does the word ‘fiction’ mean to you? What does the word ‘story’ mean to you? What does the word ‘imagination’ mean to you? Do you believe that every piece of ‘fiction’ is reality? Do you believe every piece of fiction needs to be held to the standard of reality? Do you believe every piece of fiction needs to be deleted, or cancelled, or condemned, or brought down if it does not conform to reality, and facts? Do you believe that imagination is answerable to reality? Do you believe that fictitious characters, living fictitious lives, and being a part of fictitious stories, are bound by the same systems of caste and religion that people in the real world are? Do you believe, therefore, that these characters ought to be penalized for transgressing or violating the “rules” of these systems? Do you believe that when these characters in fictitious stories cannot be penalized, the writers of these stories have to be? Do you believe that the storyteller and the story are one and the same? Do you believe that when a character in a story behaves in a particular way, or utters some particular words, these are things that the writer himself says, or acts that the writer himself might have done? Do you know this for a fact?
Or do you believe… that the writer, in this country or any country at all, has no right to his own imagination and that the civil society’s laws, and the civil society’s systems, can be made applicable in the realm of that imagination and hence enforceable against it?
If you have not an answer to these questions, or have not an opinion about them, ask yourself: should you protest against the film, or various parts of it? should you defend the film, or the various parts of it? And are you truly “protesting” against something that is hurting your sentiments or your rights, or “reacting” to a perceived slight?
