Telangana 58: Impact of Movies

Most Indians do not realize the impact of media caricatures on the minds of the masses and how these depictions may perpetuate some of our prejudices leading to large scale discrimination.   Our movies, ads, TV serials are laden with negative characterizations of certain people being unconscionably lapped up by biased Indians without an iota of squeamishness that most civilized world would normally experience.   There are many references to caste, color of the skin, weakness of a woman, etc, that continue to fuel our prejudices perpetuating large scale discrimination of certain sections of people on a daily basis.  

For example, in many Telugu movies, there is consistent negative characterization of dark people.  They are looked down upon, laughed upon and are easily dismissed with a slap on the face or kick in the butt.  And this portrayal perpetuates our low opinions towards dark people in many families, leading to massive inferiority complex for dark skinned girls and boys who get taunted by many family members.

Only very recently, some of us in India have started to appreciate the impact of such negative portrayals and have been fighting off such characterizations.   References to lower castes, which were used as abuses or insults, are now being pushed back, of course with lot of reluctance, because some Indians tend to justify those abuses as ‘part of our great culture’ which needs to be preserved at all costs, even if means subjugating millions of peoples for another two thousand years.

One commenter writes on my blog:

I always thought that movies are made with a primary aim of making money (by appealing to as wide an audience as possible, and making everyone watch the same movie again and again). Or have things changed lately?

It’s a simplistic way of looking at the world, thinking that leaders are supposed to lead us, or that courts are supposed to deliver justice, or believing that books are for academic purpose only.   And then ask, ‘have things changed lately?’  And yet, we don’t trust many of our leaders; we don’t necessarily look up to them.  Courts don’t always deliver justice.   And books are not always for academic purpose.  Many books were banned by the ruling British in most of their colonies fearing that the readers will be enlightened to new ideas that could bring in a revolution.  Most communist countries banned many books for the same reason.   Books have transformed our societies and brought revolutions.  At certain point of time in recent past, rulers persecuted the authors and carriers of any literature which spoke of freedom to people.  The rulers feared these written words so much they had to ban them completely with ruthless force.  

Why did these rulers fear such ordinary words printed on a paper?  Because those words carrying new ideas had the potent force to change one’s mind.  A new idea is a powerful notion.  Once it takes seat in a human’s brain, it can cause great wonders and bring revolutions.  In the same way, repeated wrong characterizations of certain people can create hate, xenophobia, and apathy towards other sections of people.  One such massive propaganda led to death of six million Jews in the Holocaust.

We should not underestimate the power of the media.  The media can make a dark girl feel inferior in the Indian subcontinent pushing her to try 101 ways to improve her skin color.  The media can characterize Blacks in America as thugs and unintelligent, unworthy of a respectable job or profession.  A first-time foreigner visiting United States behaves very differently when he sees a bunch of Black guys on an empty street compared to seeing White guys.  Automatically, he cringes when he sees Black people and his heart starts beating faster.  Without having any experiences of his own, why does this visitor behave differently depending on the color of the people he faces on the street?  That is completely due to the movies and TV serials he has watched which has created certain impressions.  And those impressions are being played out when he encounters the Black people on the streets. 

The West has realized how such negative characterization in the media and books could lead to deepening our prejudices resulting in discrimination on a massive scale.  Many articles and books have been written to highlight the impact of such negative characterization leading to furthering discrimination in United States.  Of late, Hollywood makes extra attempts to move away from such negative characterization of Blacks. 

Searching Google on negative portrayal of Blacks in Hollywood, I found the following.

Ever since its inception, the cinema has influenced the way moviegoers view life. This was an especially powerful reality in early Hollywood films, which depicted their own interpretation of social mores and moral proclivities to mesmerized, largely naive audiences who accepted what they saw on the screen as truth.

African-Americans are portrayed miserably in this film, as docile, childlike domestics or brutal rapists or buffoonish politicians. [1]

Bill Cosby recently lashed out at those in the entertainment industry who he said insult and degrade minorities with their work.  "I will tell all of you this stuff hurts. God, it hurts ... This stereotyping, it hurts because someone sitting behind a desk said, `This is what I want Black people to look like.' 

"I knew there were Black architects, Black teachers and Black store owners, but not on TV," Kennard said. [2]

No such realization has happened in Andhra Pradesh.  No Andhra person is ready to concede that, ‘yes, we have discriminated Telanganas.  And we have shown them in negative light in our movies which has only perpetuated and exacerbated that discrimination’.

Telangana people constitute nearly 40% of Andhra Pradesh, and yet, no hero or heroine speaks Telangana in a mainstream movie.  The setting could be in Hyderabad, the heart of Telangana, but the hero, the heroine, and their good friends, the teacher, the professor, the mom and dad, all of them speak Andhra or Rayalaseema, but not Telangana.  It’s like a movie setting in Bihar but everybody is speaking Punjabi. Doesn’t make sense, does it? How is that a language spoken by nearly 40% of the state population doesn’t get their hero even once in the mainstream movies?

The reference to Telangana is always as a negative caricature, either that of a buffoon or a goon, either a coolie or an eve-teaser on the road.  This image is played out so many times that it becomes a recurring theme, leading to gross misconceptions about Telanganas.  You don’t need to go further to understand what Andhras think of Telangana people.  You can read from comments on my blog.  Consistently, Telanganas are characterized as lazy, drunkards, low class and unemployed youth.   How did this image come about when so many Telangana people are as literate and successful as any people in India? 

Even someone living in remote part of Andhra has already formed certain strong opinions about Telangana person having never met one – and that opinion is usually most often low, full of contempt, and worthy of ridicule.   Negative portrayals of Telangana people in the mainstream movies play a significant role in forming those opinions.

Movies are made for money, books are printed for money, and yet they could be used to change people’s opinions for good or bad.  And when a particular medium is being used consistently to characterize certain section of people, and a big chunk too, comprising nearly 40% of state population, one should ask ourselves whether we are doing the right thing.  We should ask if indeed, it is leading to discrimination as many Telangana people are alleging, if indeed we should admit the wrongs and try to set things right?  Or we want to exercise the option of discarding every allegation as a whimsical and fantastic imagination of some unemployed youth and continue to practice the same practices and harbor the same prejudices? Looks like Andhras have chosen the latter option, unfortunately.

That’s when that 3.5 Crore people revolt en masse.  They don’t need a KCR or TRS to come out onto streets to protest.  They just need Andhras to continue doing what they have been doing all these years.  Their dismissive attitude and behavior of apathy is good enough to fuel Telangana sentiment for another forty years.

A must read:

Nitin Harkara’s article: The Distorted Portrayal of Telangana in Andhra films.  He writes:

The biased, negative portrayal and continued tarring of a whole culture with a broad brush is not accidental. With the evolution of the Andhra film industry over the next few decades, the level of such misrepresentation reached new heights of sophistication. As Andhra’s grip on the core area of the Hyderabad region tightened progressively, the native people of Telangana were gradually pushed to the fringes of control in their own land. To further the colonial expansion of Andhra, there was a growing need to actively portray the people of Telangana as being crude and uncivilized, incapable of coherent communication or normal interaction in everyday settings, and completely unable to conduct their own affairs. The Andhra film became the perfect vehicle to further this discriminatory agenda…

…If there are any doubts as to the insidious influence of these Andhra films on the general population’s world-view, a casual conversation about the average Andhra person’s impressions of Telangana and her people should set them at rest. Three whole generations of people in Andhra have been raised on a steady diet of films like this, films that have consistently misrepresented the language, vocabulary and intonation of Telangana as one of criminals, buffoons and the economic underclass. The fallout from the subtle poison spread by these movies is a complete lack of understanding of Telangana’s people, its culture and its language among the general movie-going population, and that means just about everyone on the Andhra side of the Andhra-Telangana divide, educated or not. Despite its completely escapist character, or perhaps because of it, the Andhra film is the chief vehicle of entertainment for the masses. It is also, unfortunately enough, the vehicle that leaves behind the most powerful impressions in the minds of an audience eager to devour anything the movie maker churns out. 

Few links on negative portrayal of Blacks in Hollywood movies:

http://www.finalcall.com/artman/publish/videos/article_6505.shtml

http://www.filmreform.org/whats.htm