'Bollywood Is A Victim Of...': Toxic Actor Sudev Nair Reacts To Stereotyping Of South Indians In Param Sundari | Exclusive

Sudev Nair is enjoying critical praise for his cop role in the Malayalam series Kammattam. It premiered on Zee5 on Onam. Sudev is also a part of Kannada star Yash's upcoming movie Toxic. He reacted to allegations on Param Sundari and other Bollywood movies for stereotypically depicting South Indians. A section of social media has called out Janhvi's character for making a “mockery of Malayalis” in tone and representation.

Sudev said that he has seen some viral videos from Param Sundari online and was aware of the ongoing debate of screen representation of South Indians in Hindi cinema. He admitted he has not seen the movie, but added, “From whatever visuals have been circulating on social media, it's quite evident that the writing has been very surface-level and cliches have been used too much. It's basically just lazy writing. And Bollywood has been a victim of this kind of surface-level writing, not just regarding South Indian characters, but overall for a while now, which is why people have slowly veered more towards South Indian movies.” Sudev Nair admitted that the regional cinema was once considered “crass” and “masala”, but “they are honest and which is what audience wants". "There's been a sense of laziness that the audience is sensing from Bollywood,” he said.  

Those playing the devil's advocate on behalf of Bollywood alleged that even regional cinema, especially South Indian movies, portray North Indians in gimmicky roles. While Sudev agrees with this, he argues, “I think what happens is when you have an outsider character in general, that character is always perceived as a threat, so that character becomes the villain, or there is a relief when you make fun of that character. Then you resort to the most base cliches to get that point across.”

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Quoting Javed Akhtar, the actor said, “When you don't know something, you tend to exaggerate it.” He opined that such a situation of stereotyping is created when writers do not do ample research. Even though he acknowledged the shortcomings in regional cinema, Sudev said, “In recent times, it's more Bollywood, especially in the South, if you see Malayalam cinema takes its writing much more seriously.”

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While the South Indian film industry might not run into trouble for stereotyping as much, the portrayal of female characters in Telugu and Tamil movies remains controversial and a recurring issue. Scenes sexualising the female body are rampantly used as tools of entertainment. Defending the Malayalam film industry against these allegations, Sudev shared, “I proudly mentioned Malayalam cinema, that the occurrence of something like using women only for hyper-sexualising them is very, very, very minimal, if absent, in fact. We have very strong female characters written in Malayalam, and there are movies that Lokah, for example, a superhero movie, worked with the female protagonist. There have been movies that have been made in Malayalam that have been remade with the female protagonist and butchered in other languages because they just didn't get it."

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The stereotyping of the “other” in Bollywood movies became a discussion again with the release of Param Sundari. Social media users and some content creators accused the makers of stereotypical representation of Janhvi Kapoor's character Sundari. Many mentioned how scenes depicting people climbing coconut trees and Malayali nurses were stereotypical traits, often associated with Kerala. The makers of Param Sundari are yet to respond to the accusations. Param Sundari is directed by Tushar Jalota.