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Prominent film critic Anna MM Vetticad has responded to actor Tamannaah Bhatia’s remarks regarding her 2015 article The rape of Avanthika, based on the movie Baahubali: The Beginning.
Calling Tamannaah’s remarks “absurd”, Anna said it reflects the actor’s “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.
The article in The Hindu Businessline criticised the representation of the warrior woman character Avanthika (Tamannaah) in Baahubali: The Beginning. Anna had pointed out how a song sequence involving Prabhas and Tamannaah romanticises sexual violence.
The rape of Avanthika was part of the ‘Film Fatale’ column series in The Hindu Business Line, for which Anna received the Ramnath Goenka Excellence in Journalism Award in 2015.
Asked about the article during a recent interview with The Lallantop, Tamannaah accused Anna of attempting to “shame” her. The actor went on to defend the sequence, claiming, “I don’t think it was ‘The rape of Avanthika’. I think it was Avanthika finding herself through a young man who is wooing her.” Describing the scene as “pure”, Tamannaah alleged that the criticism came from sexual repression.
“When people cannot control you, they use the technique of shame and guilt. They always make you feel ashamed of what you’ve done. When they can do that, they can control you,” Tamannaah said.
In the problematic sequence, Avanthika is tattooed without her consent and forcibly disrobed. Her attire is altered, against her will, from that of a warrior to a gendered view of how a woman is expected to look.
The actor told Lallantop that the sequence represented Baahubali director SS Rajamouli’s vision of a “divine feminine who is wounded”. She added that the director wanted to show “something beautiful”.
Berating Anna, Tamannaah added, "What this journalist has said is her perspective. She will say everything that way. Everyone perceives things differently. You can show people the purest thing; if someone feels sex is a bad thing or your body is a bad thing … that’s what they will see, because that’s their perspective.”
Tamannaah added that Indians look at sex “with a dirty gaze” and talked about sexual repression.
Responding to Tamannaah’s claims, Anna recalled readers who had resonated with her criticism and had expressed their own discomfort with the sequence. She also said that she had been subjected online to sexually explicit abuse and communal attacks at the time the article was published.
“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.”
Referring to the song sequence, Anna added, “At the end of this passage, she is no longer fighting him – instead, she is mesmerised by her own transformation and is 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.”
Anna also explained that 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,” she said.
Anna further pointed out how women in India are attacked with acid, raped and murdered 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 makes 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,” Anna said.
In her statement, Anna raised concerns about the message Tamannaah’s remarks sent. “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.”
Anna added that Tamannaah is functioning as 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.”