The Misogyny in Mass Telugu Cinema

Vijay Devarakonda’s latest film, Family Star, is mostly unremarkable, save for one scene. It happens after an antagonist shows up at his house with an auto rickshaw and demands that his sister-in-law “get in”, as compensation for her husband’s unpaid loan.

Unsurprisingly, this angers our hero, who shows up at the antagonist’s place and beats up his goons. But then, our hero walks up to the baddie and delivers this threat :“We also have men in our family. We have the things you have. (the subtitle mistranslates this as “you have women in your family” rendering explicit what was meant to be implicit). But unlike you, I don’t need pickups and drops. Open fields, godowns, sheds, buses, trains, cars. Practically anything is okay.” 

“Why are Telugu films like this?” This is a question the Telugu cinema enthusiast often faces. With the Pan Indian success of films like Kabir Singh (2019) and Animal (2023), and the spectacular failure of a film like Liger (2022) — all films made by Telugu filmmakers featuring protagonists who insult women in some fashion, the sense one gets when talking about Telugu films to progressives from other states is a silent accusation: that a smaller industry’s sexism is being exported to a larger one, circumnavigating the progressive-minded elite filmmakers and their well-intentioned films, and pandering straight to the masses and their extant misogyny. 

A glance at the films that have come out of the Telugu industry over the past few months reveals something. In July 2023, there was Baby, a coming-of-age romantic tragedy-of-errors which saw young men cheering in theaters for scenes in which the male lead verbally abuses the female lead. We had Tiger Nageshwar Rao, in which the lead ogles a clearly uncomfortable heroine and tells her he feels a “different kind of hunger” when he smells a woman. Guntur Kaaram, in which the leading man comments on the body types of heroines across generations, from Bhumika to Sreeleela.

We’ve also had Tillu Square, the sequel to DJ Tillu (2022): both films take the noir trope of the femme fatale and marry it with the more local trope of the women who bring ruin. In these films, women are a dangerous and fickle “other” with mysterious motives whose entry into the hero’s life spells doom—their humour comes from reveling in a particular variety of male victimhood. In The Second Sex (1949) Simone De Beauvoir says that for men, “woman is mysterious in essence”, and that this trope is a sign that “men are unable to penetrate her special experience with any working of sympathy”.

Some of these examples will probably be contested—Sai Rajesh, the writer-director of Baby has stated that he condemns the misogynistic reactions elicited by his film, for instance. With many films the misogyny stems from an antihero figure which offers a veneer of plausible deniability to the authors of the work.

Even the films that would most like to recommend to those unfamiliar with Telugu cinema—Khaleja, Pushpa, Baahubali—have some degree of sexism that the advocate finds themselves in the awkward position to provide disclaimers for. It isn’t that other film industries in the South haven’t been guilty of horrific sexism and misogyny—but there’s a sense with mainstream Telugu cinema that, even now, in the 2020s, there has never quite been a reckoning with feminism, and that perhaps there is even a reactionary aversion to it.

The question, then, is where do the gender dynamics of Telugu cinema emerge from.

Last year, in a round-table with Telugu film journalist Prema for women’s day, Venkatesh Maha, the director of Care of Kancharapalem made the observation that the non-respectful feminine pronoun in Telugu (adhi) is the same as that used for inanimate objects, and that this must probably be amended to fix the invisible substratum of patriarchy and misogyny embedded in culture. The suggestion is not that a culture is uniquely misogynistic—but rather, that every culture must confront and contend with its own particular misogynies. 

Contemporary mainstream Telugu cinema’s gender dynamics are also rooted in the history of the mass film itself, in “Megastar: Telugu Cinema after NT Rama Rao”, writer SV Srinivas comments on the gender politics of the mass film in the era of Chiranjeevi and Rajinikanth:

“The heroes of the mass film engage in a battle against upper class/caste villains who are the enemies of state and society. In the genre, class and caste dynamics are further fused with gender politics. Highly masculine lower class/caste men carry the class war into the interpersonal domain by either aligning with sexually aggressive lower class women to fight a common rich enemy (for example, Gangleader), or tame the rich man’s arrogant daughter and marry her to ensure the resolution of social and economic contradictions (for example, Gharana Mogudu). “

While mass films have a history of foregrounding subaltern politics, there is perhaps a cynical opportunism associated with the kind of pageantry that invites the spectator to partake in the taming of the woman. In reducing the woman to an acquisition. In an episode of ETV’s Soundaryalahiri, K Raghavendra Rao, opined:“ What does the common man want? If you show a Rickshaw driver his life, what’s the use? You have to take the common man into a dream world. That a crorepati’s daughter has fallen in love with him, because it doesn’t happen in real life. They will relate with that.” 

In Megastar, SV Srinivas also talks about the “rowdy hero”, an “excessively masculine” subaltern protagonist characterised by his “propensity for enjoyment, which ensures that spectatorial investment in the figure is suitably rewarded by his pursuit of pleasure.” In the 80s and 90s, this figure was more embedded in actual class dynamics, as seen in films like Mutha Mestri or Khaidi. And while the 90s and early 2000s saw a move away from this, the rowdy hero made a big return in Telugu cinema in the mid-2000s with Puri Jagannath’s films, most prominently with Pokiri (2006). 

However this time, the class politics was mostly in a state of recession—what remained from the old mass films was the identification with the excess masculinity and the fantasy of “taming” the woman. In Puri's Businessman (2012), when our hero, an up-and-coming gangster in Mumbai shows up in a sports car at his love interest’s door step, she rejoices at the prospect of being gifted an expensive car and tells him she loves him. His response? “When you buy a car worth two crores, any woman will tell me she loves me, not just you”.

In Desamuduru (2007), when the heroine, who has taken a vow of celibacy and joined a monastic order, tells the hero that we’re all just dust, and to dust we shall return, he asks her if she’ll sleep with him for the night—”what does it matter, we’re dust after all!”. Then there is iSmart Shankar (2019), in which the protagonist “pretends” to rape the heroine and it’s all treated like a gag. In so many of these films, the woman’s personhood is treated as an obstacle to the hero’s libido — something which the audience is invited to identify with. Any reservations she might have about being with him are framed as misguided or frivolous. A defense of the gender politics of these films commonly offered is that these male characters weren’t meant to be idolized, that they were flawed: but watch the scenes when they interact with women and it’s difficult to deny that you’re being surreptitiously invited to partake in their treatment. 

Slowly, a generation of stars who had started out playing more classical, noble heroes in the late nineties and early 2000s started playing this type of lead character, ostensibly because of the success of these films — in Jalsa (2008), we saw an extended “comedy” scene where the hero jokes about about how enjoyable rape is, in Khaleja (2010) we saw scene after scene of obnoxious misogyny, and one could always sense the filmmakers anticipating the whistles and cheers of men in the theater. 

Today, unlike other industries in the South, the progressive politics of the smaller films like Sekhar Kammula’s Anand (2004) ,Tharun Bhascker’s Pelli Choopulu (2016), and Venkatesh Maha’s Care of Kancharapalem (2018) doesn’t seem to be permeating into the bigger films. Much of the sexism also has to do with the fact that there are so few female filmmakers in Telugu — Nandini Reddy being the only prominent one (and her films are often refreshing, despite their flaws, precisely because of the personhood and interiority they impart to women). After Arjun Reddy (2017), the smaller films seem to be changing too — we got RX 100 (2018) right after, and Baby.

In Animal, we witnessed a type of rowdy-hero with the class politics of the original mass films all but erased — here was a “rowdy” with enormous generational wealth — but the scenes in which he speaks to women were all too familiar if you grew up with Telugu cinema in the past few decades . Going by some edits and podcasts on youtube, it also seems that the politics of these films find resonance with anti-feminists and “sigma male” enthusiasts. 

In the film that Parasuram made before Family Star, Sarkaaru Vaari Paata (2022), the heroine defaults on a loan she takes from the leading man, and as compensation, he asks her uncle to leave her with him for the night —the joke here is meant to be the indignity of something that carries the stigma of rape, but isn’t rape — turns out he “only” needs someone to rest his legs on while he sleeps. There’s something decidedly feudal about the gender politics of both these films, in men feeling entitled to the bodies of women who belong to families that wronged them. This reveals another facet to the sexism — the persistence of the feudal in Telugu cinema.

The Telugu Film Industry still makes some of the best mainstream blockbusters in the world. The pity is that in so many of these films, we’re forced to reckon with the coexistence of incredibly ambitious filmmaking with awfully regressive gender politics. Recently, there seems to be pushback against progressive criticisms from people in the film industry, with some declaring that critics are irrelevant and elitist. (This isn’t very different from politicians looking to delegitimize journalists who are critical of them). It is perhaps worthwhile to remember that the Telugu states, together, account for the largest share of theaters in the country (more than 1500), and films matter more to the people here than they do anywhere else in the world.

A few months ago, I was seated in a theater watching Ridley Scott’s Napoleon. There’s a scene in it when Napoleon divorces his wife Josephine— she’s clearly shaken, reluctant to sign the decree. He slaps her. I heard someone cheer loudly and looked around — it was a teenage boy, perhaps seventeen, grinning at his friends. I wondered if Telugu cinema had taught him to do that.