The biggest talking point for the entertainment industry in 2022 has been the north vs south debate. And rightly so. After all, 71 per cent or Rs 3,600 crore of the top 10 all-India box office collections came from Telugu, Kannada and Tamil-language cinema. Over-the-top (OTT) trends show a closer fight, but content from the four southern languages in terms of the number of films released and the weeks they trended is sizeable and comparable to the Hindi language stable.
As a pan-India actor who has worked across six language industries, primarily in the south, these numbers feel like much-needed fresh air. But it’s important to see where this trend is stemming from. Have southern language films crossed the milestone of being perceived as successful Hindi remakes or redubs to now standing on their own because their content is unique? Undoubtedly, the visualisation standards of the films that were part of the top 10 list were remarkable. But will this suffice in the long run?
Southern language films — barring the advantages that technology brings — haven’t inherently changed much in the last decade. Malayalam, including its new wave, much like Marathi, focuses on story-based narratives. Telugu on exaggerated action and fantasy dramas. Tamil does a balancing act between making strong stories with socio-cultural realities and mass, male adrenalin-led action fantasy films. The industry that has actually changed in the last decade is Kannada with experiments taking place in small and big ways. In other words, what is new for the rest of the world is fairly predictable for regular southern Indian viewers. What changed is the revolution that one film, Baahubali, brought with regard to eyeballs, followed closely by OTT opening up the viewership base.
This sudden rage for southern Indian content is because they bring a new, diverse appeal of regionality coupled with massive technological investments in storytelling to the rest of India. But this cannot form a sustained recipe for success. It’s not that in the southern Indian market, all big-budget movies with massive marketing spends or all rich story-based films with the best cast and reviews become hits. Compared to the Hindi film industry, southern Indian filmmakers are perhaps more rooted, and risk-taking, making the effort to produce mind-bending work. But on the diversity quotient, it has enormous ground to cover, which if left uncorrected will dilute its current “I am new and novel” trend.
Globally, OTT has moved the viewing experience from theatres to phones and screens. This means that access to visual content is now available to those who traditionally couldn’t afford it. In other words, its audience is no more the “I can pay for entertainment” male members of the family, but also includes people of different gender dispositions, races and castes. As this trend gets mainstreamed, the patriarchal privileged Indian male cinema gaze is going to be challenged. Of course, it will have its share of viewership, but both the global and the evolved Indian audience coming from diverse spectrums is going to seek much more representation in terms of gender and caste.
The 2022 diversity report produced by UCLA on Hollywood, which was the earliest adopter of OTT, holds valuable clues for Indian cinema. Eight of the top 10 Hollywood films in 2021 had main casts that were at least 30 per cent non-white. Films that had casts that were over 90 per cent white had poor box office outings and were in the lowest 10 per cent in regards to performance. The box office numbers naturally reflected workplace stats — the inclusion of women on-screen grew, with 47 per cent of film leads being women. Between 2011 and 2021, women’s share of directors increased more than fivefold — from 4.1 per cent to 21.8 per cent. Women’s share of writer credits rose to 33.5 per cent in 2021, from 26 per cent in 2020. Non-white underrepresented individuals made up 30 per cent of directors and 32 per cent of film writers.
But is Indian cinema, even southern Indian cinema, recognising this change in its content and workplace? The answer would be a roaring no. The 2022 O’Womaniya India diversity report found that even in promotional trailers, women accounted for only 25 per cent of the time in which characters are talking. As many as 48 titles allocated 10 seconds or less to female characters. And these trends are worse in southern Indian cinema. The report further reveals that OTT is driving the change in representation — films and TV series streamed on OTT platforms performed better than theatrical films across all parameters.
On the other hand, the easy access to rich, global OTT content has ensured that the Indian viewer, long considered a captive by Indian filmmakers, is spoilt for choice and is going to be more demanding. In 2022, non-Indian language content was the most watched on Netflix in India. So, unless my industry friends and I leverage this moment and bring forth unique stories underscoring India’s inherent diversity, we will forever be playing the catch-up game with our global peers.
One of the easiest ways of doing this is to befriend the domestic publishing industry, which naturally attracts more diverse writers (men of all ages, women, Dalits, LGBTQIA people), more diverse genres (sci-fi to folklore, dramedies and young adult content) and across different regional languages. And this applies to not just past works published but also the books of the future. According to Urvashi Butalia, director at Zubaan Books, the strength of Indian publishing houses is that they have the independence to publish on a variety of topics and issues as the decision-making lies with them. Butalia says that the young today are interested in reading diverse voices and that’s what makes an Indian publishing house relevant.
This trend isn’t new. An incredible 70 per cent of the world’s top 20 grossing films are based on books. Only in the Indian film industry, though, do we rely heavily on original screenplays, although it is easier to turn to a completed work and a fully envisioned (and beloved) world than to develop a story in-house. Why are we so dependent on the same staid, computer graphic-infused, thinly-laden young, angry male-driven plots?
It’s time for the Indian film industry to embrace the change standing at its doorstep. We finally don’t just have a southern or northern belt audience; we are at the brink of attracting a global audience that wants to see what is truly and distinctively Indian. Let’s embrace the diverse literature in our visual stories to get the cash registers and critics ringing praise to what is naturally us — an India that is urban and very rural, empathetic but weirdly ignorant, scientific yet dogmatic, complex yet basic, very rustic real yet myth laden, glamourous and plural.
The writer is a National Award-winning film actor, dancer and public policy researcher
