‘Yentamma’, Bollywood and its south Indians

Salman Khan's awkward dance shows yet again how Hindi cinema looks at people from the southern states as interlopers in the Índian' milieu

'Yentamma’, a Bollywood song from the forthcoming Salman Khan-starrer ‘Kisi Ka Bhai Kisi Ki Jaan’ is creating ripples through its representation of a ‘south-Indian’ dance inside a temple. It shows Khan wearing boots, sporting a white dhoti like a lungi, and looking unbearably awkward while dancing around.

Bollywood, notwithstanding Pathan’s success, is still ostensibly in financial trouble, and doing a ‘south-Indian imitation’ may be seen as a sure-fire path to commercial success, since Telugu and Tamil films are apparently doing well even in northern India. Understandably, Salman Khan’s gyrations are being seen as offensive, and former test cricketer L Sivaramakrishnan has lashed out on Twitter against the ‘degrading of south-Indian culture.’

Idea of pan-Indian

Bollywood has tried to be ‘pan-Indian’ even before 1947 which means that it has kept its Hindi simple and tried to find roles for people from every part of India, although it is the Hindi belt — and Hindi-speaking Mumbai — that has a hegemonic presence in the narratives. Just as it produces a predominantly Hindu cinema in which the Muslim is the outsider, it has also presented the south Indian as an interloper in an ‘Indian’ milieu, and south-Indian filmmakers like Mani Ratnam have even taken advantage of this in films like ‘Roja’ (1992) and ‘Bombay’ (1995), where the sub-text emphasises the south Indian’s estrangement from issues preoccupying the Hindi-speaking heartland and a simultaneous sense of belonging in India.

Mani Ratnam’s cinema style is south Indian and marked by loudly histrionic moments, alongside deep empathy for its obviously Tamil protagonists. If these people are outsiders, the viewpoint is also that of an outsider who is only a migrant in the denoted space of action. ‘Roja’, for instance, presents a perspective on Kashmir different from ‘Junglee’ (1961), ‘Kashmir ki Kali’ (1964), ‘Mission Kashmir’ (2000) and ‘The Kashmir Files’ (2022), where the key characters are supposedly residents. There is a sense in Mani Ratnam’s Hindi films of the director’s affiliation to the nation being voluntarily assumed, rather than a given, as in the other films. This aspect makes ‘Roja’s’ treatment of militant Kashmiris less problematic than in ‘The Kashmir Files’.

But when the film is set in a Hindi milieu and the director is not south Indian, as in the classic comedy ‘Padosan’ (1968), there is an obvious caricaturing of the south Indian as when Mehmood plays him. At the very least, this south Indian pundit is played so extravagantly by Mehmood that we can scarcely identify with him, and so we too laugh out loud. Mehmood is not offensive because he is only playing the Bollywood imagining of a south Indian and not an actual person from Tamil Nadu or Andhra Pradesh. A serious relationship for Mehmood, say with other personal attachments, might have made the film unbearably distasteful. This will become clearer if the north-Indian (rather than pan-Indian) perspective in ‘Padosan’ is also recognised — its lament at the feelings of someone rightfully one’s own being usurped by a ‘foreigner’. It is significant that Mehmood’s ‘south-Indian’ impersonations are rendered usually in thriller-like situations in which exotic Indians are being mimicked for the benefit of grave-looking foreign audiences (like the song ‘Badkamma’ in ‘Shatranj’, 1969). The performances are meant to trick foreign people into believing that these are the cultural treasures of south Indians.

The exotic other

Based on what has been said, we could propose that the south Indian represented the ‘exotic other’ to Bollywood and the caricaturing was essentially a recognition that south Indians — because of cultural attributes like their clothing, food and music — were different from oneself (i.e. Hindi speakers). One is not sure what the new Salman Khan-starrer is proposing to do with its south Indian motifs, but Khan (unlike Mehmood) is not an actor with a comic presence. Shahrukh Khan or Aamir Khan might have pulled off a parodic exercise but perhaps not Salman. Still, there is no knowing whether Salman is playing a south Indian (which is unlikely) or a typical Bollywood character pretending to be south Indian for the requirements of the narrative.

Migration angle

There is perhaps something very attractive about south India for those in the Hindi belt partly because migration of their kin southwards is helping to sustain many of their families. South Indian cinema’s success in the north cannot be completely unrelated to this, and it must be seen alongside the higher degree of cultural straight-jacketing in the north — which has rubbed off on Bollywood — where the only subjects allowed to be dealt with are patriotic ones. South-Indian cinema still celebrates law-breaking or criminality as in recent films like ‘Drishyam’, ‘Pushpa’, ‘KGF2’ and ‘Kantara’, and shows contravention of the law as a good thing. It could be the devil-may-care attitude of the south-Indian film protagonist rather than his dancing in dhotis that would more likely succeed in cinema because it speaks of political freedom more curtailed in the north.

(The author is a well-known film critic)