AA Edit | Netflix’s Annapoorani faux pas

Less than six weeks after it was released on Netflix, the movie Annapoorani, featuring actress Nayanthara as its eponymous protagonist, was withdrawn by the OTT platform.

It is now de rigueur that any work of art, found to be offending the sentiments of any identity group, creates a controversy and leads to protests. Then the artists and their commercial patrons and facilitators backtrack, invariably.

The movie’s plot was never shy of tackling a tricky fault line in society. It is all about a Hindu upper caste girl wishing to become a chef while her traditional family follows a vegetarian diet. The girl’s male friend, Farhan, convinces her to start eating non-vegetarian food, with a purportedly objectionable dialogue, saying even Lord Ram ate meat.

For the Hindutva supporters and the Brahmin community, the movie immediately became a bone of contention — and they staged their protests online, asking Netflix to remove it. Even as the OTT platform at first ignored the objections, viewers took it to “top trending” status. Then suddenly, the streaming platform withdrew it, saying it was at the “licensor’s request”.

Some protesters accused the filmmakers of being advocates of “love jihad”, besides being anti-Hindu. Not many people supported the film on the basis of freedom of speech and artistic expression. It is now a given that no work of art can really be brought into the public domain if it can be accused of hurting sentiments — be they religious or pertaining to any specific community, caste, region or language.

Let us very well put up a signboard on the foreheads of all artists — don’t you dare offend. You are only meant to entertain.