Lack of Telugu Female Representation in Media
NOTE: This blog post is a long one, I know. It's just that I have so much to say on this subject and it's been a low-key hot topic for a number of years and I am trying to make this issue more known, because I do believe this issue is more serious than people realize. I know I don't work in the entertainment industry (especially the Telugu industry) and I am not qualified to give expert answers. I am new to the whole blogging scene and wanted to make this post as in-depth and clear as possible. Please let me know if I'm missing any details or have mistaken anything that I have written. Also, please feel welcome to add anything that I have missed. Peaceful and constructive feedback is much appreciated. I hope this post resonates with you. Much Love <3
Yes.....you heard that right!! Before I continue, I know there are going to be a lot of people who are thinking, "What is Telugu?" Well, every state in India has its own regional language. These regional languages are not simply options that one can just choose to speak in India. Each regional language is deeply connected with the culture, customs, and ideologies of its corresponding state. Each regional language has its own heritage. Like so, Telugu is a regional language in South India that is predominantly spoken in the South Indian states of Telengana(formerly part of Andhra Pradesh until 2014) and Andhra Pradesh itself.
We all know Bollywood, right? Well, a lot of people do. It's the most popular film industry in the country and is the national film industry that everybody in India knows about. Bollywood films are in Hindi, the national language of India. Just like how Hindi has its own film industry, a lot or all (I'm not entirely sure) of the regional languages in India have their own regional film industries, mostly popular among the people of the languages' respective states. Some of these regional film industries are actually massive, including Kollywood(Tamil), Mollywood(Malayalam),Sandalwood(Kannada), and Tollywood(Telugu). In fact, Kollywood and Tollywood are the 2nd and 3rd largest film industries in India, after Bollywood. Both of these film industries have their own sets of super popular movies and film actors and actresses. The film industry this post will be focusing on is Tollywood.
Why Tollywood, you may ask? Well, it is the film industry where the movies are in Telugu, which happens to be my mother tongue. With so many regional film industries, you would expect the people of those regions to represent their respective film industries. In Tollywood, the male lead is almost always of Telugu heritage. Having a male lead of Telugu heritage is seen as a badge of honor, especially in a film industry that has been male dominated and patriarchal for so long. It is understood that a film has value when it has a male Telugu lead because men often are traditionally seen as more powerful and influential than women. Really?
With that type of attitude prevalent in Tollywood.....guess what?....surprise, surprise.....Tollywood has taken its sexism so far that most of modern Tollywood's leading actresses (especially the A-listers) are not even of Telugu heritage.
Yeah....that's fucked up. I know it wasn't always like this. Back in the olden days, Telugu women ruled the movie scene, but as the film industry wanted to become modern, there was a massive decline in Telugu actresses getting lead roles and women from other regions of India started coming in. Also, most of these leading ladies can't even speak Telugu proficiently, and often times have dubbing voice actors voice over their dialogues. These actresses basically lip-sync to these voice actors' voice-overs. So instead of having actual native Telugu speaking women actually reciting their own dialogues, they have non-Telugu women play women whose mother tongue is Telugu. Meanwhile, the leading men get to recite their dialogues IN THEIR OWN GOD-DAMN VOICES!!
So, why is this the case? Why are there so few native speaking Telugu actresses getting lead roles?
That is a massive question, as there are so many layers to this. These reasons that I will be talking about are from my own observations of what I've noticed in the media and within my own personal experiences. First of all, a lot of Telugu people seem to have some sort of hatred and disrespect for their own culture. I think because they have a history of being oppressed by foreign groups of people, they have internalized this notion that who they are and their culture are not worthy of love and acceptance. In order to compensate for that feeling of inadequacy, they seem to feel the need to be like their oppressors and taunt the people they feel they have the most control over, women and girls. Basically, brainwashing them to think that they are not good enough as their non-Telugu counterparts. So they are taking out their insecurities on their own women, and one of the ways they do that is praise non-Telugu women over them and tell them, "Hey, you are Telugu and a woman. Therefore, you are not beautiful. You have no power. You have no ability to make a difference in the world. Your lives are going to be 100% run by our own agendas so that we can feel power over you. Also, don't you even think of following your dreams. You don't have the right to have dreams". Yeah, that is harsh and can damage one's psyche and in turn will make these women and girls deeply insecure.
Also, British rule and foreign invaders in India have contributed a lot to the whole "White is right" attitude, and for a lot of Telugu people, it is even worse. North Indian people are usually lighter skinned and have more Eurocentric features compared to South Indian people, therefore closer to whiteness, therefore seen as superior. And what about the non-Telugu South Indians? In the eyes of so many Telugu people, they are seen as the more exotic and more creative of the South Indian people.
And Tollywood, being the way that it has been for a long time, capitalizes on all of these things to the fucking T. The people that make these movies,first of all, probably believe that Telugu girls do not have what it takes to be a main female lead. With the power of media in their hands, they further perpetuate the whole "Telugu girls are invisible and that they don't matter" idea by hiring lighter-skinned, Eurocentric looking non-Telugu women. Especially if a movie's male lead is a big A-lister person and the movie is branded as a modern,cool, stylish, fantasy world, the makers of that particular movie usually look for a female lead that they believe can add to the whole modern, cool, stylish, fantasy appeal. To them, more often than not, Telugu actresses just don't make the cut. They usually want to get a North-Indian girl whose again light-skinned and has Eurocentric features. Since she would be considered closer to whiteness, she would be thought of as more modern and glamorous.
If you look at most of the A-list actresses in Tollywood, you would see that they all have similar light to light-tan skin tones and have Eurocentric features like big eyes and a small, narrow nose.
For example, one of the biggest if not the biggest actress in Tollywood as of now (at least, in terms of social media following) is an actress by the name of Kajal Aggarwal. Kajal Aggarwal came into the Tollywood scene back in the mid-to-late 2000s, and became a big name after her 2009 film Magadheera, which at the time was the biggest Tollywood film of all time. Ever since then, she has been killing it in the Telugu film industry, and a large contributing factor to her success (while she is very talented, and I'm sure worked her butt off to be where she is), is the fact that she has very light-skin, big eyes, and long wavy hair. Basically, having a foreign, exotic, non-Telugu look.
Here's a picture of Kajal Aggarwal so you can get a clearer idea as to what I'm talking about:
These actresses not only dominate the movie scene but also the advertising market. These actresses get so many endorsement deals. Everytime, you are watching a Telugu tv channel, a good chunk of the ads shown on that channel will feature any of these actresses. Whether they are endorsing some sort of sari label, jewelry company, skin-care product, body soaps, hair-care products, technology........you name it. Their faces are plastered all over billboards and in shops in both Telangana and Andhra Pradhesh.
Here are some examples:
Kajal Aggarwal(Punjabi Heritage) in an ad for Khazana Jewellery
Samantha Akkineni(Half-Malayali Half-Telugu heritage) in an ad for an Hitachi Air Conditioner ad
Rakul Preet Singh(Punjabi Heritage) in an ad for Vaibhav Jewellers
See what I mean?
With Telugu's mass media's propagation of non-Telugu beauty, I wonder how this affects Telugu girls, whether they are from the mother land or NRIs (non-residential Indians). Seriously, why is there such little discussion about this? The deep effects: the messages and ideologies a Telugu woman can internalize......well,
I can list a few:
1) That is just how the film business is here and there is nothing we can do about it.
2) We as Telugu women are less than our non-Telugu counterparts in terms of a lot: power, strength, worthiness, love, acceptance, and especially beauty.
3) I, as a Telugu woman, do not have the right to follow my dreams.
4) I cannot make a difference or make amazing history because I was born a Telugu woman.
5) In order to appeal to a guy that I like, I have to appear as non-Telugu as possible. Who I am is too much of an abomination to be with such a guy.
I know all of these thoughts seem extreme but I feel too often than not, these are the kinds of thoughts that could be circulating in the collective sub-consciousness of the Telugu female population.
Looking at these ads and the high quality of these ads makes me think, "Why are Telugu women not offered to be in ads as cool as these, as artistic, as high-quality.......something that can bring in a massive audience?" First of all, I have to ask myself why I care so much about this issue. I often feel like other Telugu people don't seem to give as much of a fuck as I do about this issue. In return, I often feel kind of ashamed for caring so much. But I can't help but care every time I see or hear anything about Tollywood and seeing people blindly praise these women without seeing the shadiness underneath. People might think I care too much, but I can't help but care too much. It's easy for me being an NRI to stay away from this type of propagation because I can just choose not to watch and consume these things and am less likely to unexpectedly see or hear something regarding Telugu media. The thing is I am more concerned for the women and girls that actually live in Telangana and Andhra Pradhesh and are forcefully bombarded with this shit on a daily basis. Do girls there actually care that women of their heritage are not being equally represented in comparison to non-Telugu woman? Yeah, this post is getting long. I know that, but I just have so much to say on this subject but I don't think I can fit all of my ideas in one blog post. I just want to write a clear and in-depth post about how I feel about it. I know I don't work in the Telugu media space, so I am not one to give expert answers to this issue. But yeah, I feel that a lot of women have gotten so used to and so numb to this type of propagation that they have given in to it. At the same time, there could be other women that pretend like they don't care but secretly do but are afraid to voice their opinions in fear of judgement and humiliation.
But for all of the people that do care, is there hope in solving this issue? I think so. I mean we are seeing, slowly and steadily, more Telugu women in the recent years having critically acclaimed roles in Tollywood and being recognized for their work, and honestly it's about fucking time. Here are a few Telugu actresses that have done just that:
Anjali
Swathi Reddy
Eesha Rebba
Punarnavi Bhupalam
Not only that, we are seeing several Telugu women do some amazing things in the media space outside of the Telangana and Andhra Pradhesh market.
May I remind you of the 2014 Miss America winner Nina Davaluri?
Given Tollywood's obsession with western culture and equating white and lighter skinned women
with glamour and beauty, having a dark-brown skinned Telugu woman become the FIRST Indian American to win the Miss America Pageant is so amazing and honestly represents hope. Hope that as Telugu woman,no matter what skin color we are, we can be and rise above the narrow beauty standards and expectations our society and culture set for us.
And also Deepica Mutyala:
I mean it's great to see Telugu women make great strides in their respective fields, but we can't just throw out these examples and expect that to be enough to solve this issue. If someone expresses concern for the lack of native Telugu women being recognized and praised for their work, we can't just throw out these examples and tell them to shut up. We can't just talk about the few Telugu women getting recognized and still have Tollywood go back to putting Telugu women on the back burner. That's not how it works. There is no benefit in telling truth-seers to shut up just so a system can go back to its ignorant ways.
Yes.....you heard that right!! Before I continue, I know there are going to be a lot of people who are thinking, "What is Telugu?" Well, every state in India has its own regional language. These regional languages are not simply options that one can just choose to speak in India. Each regional language is deeply connected with the culture, customs, and ideologies of its corresponding state. Each regional language has its own heritage. Like so, Telugu is a regional language in South India that is predominantly spoken in the South Indian states of Telengana(formerly part of Andhra Pradesh until 2014) and Andhra Pradesh itself.We all know Bollywood, right? Well, a lot of people do. It's the most popular film industry in the country and is the national film industry that everybody in India knows about. Bollywood films are in Hindi, the national language of India. Just like how Hindi has its own film industry, a lot or all (I'm not entirely sure) of the regional languages in India have their own regional film industries, mostly popular among the people of the languages' respective states. Some of these regional film industries are actually massive, including Kollywood(Tamil), Mollywood(Malayalam),Sandalwood(Kannada), and Tollywood(Telugu). In fact, Kollywood and Tollywood are the 2nd and 3rd largest film industries in India, after Bollywood. Both of these film industries have their own sets of super popular movies and film actors and actresses. The film industry this post will be focusing on is Tollywood.
Why Tollywood, you may ask? Well, it is the film industry where the movies are in Telugu, which happens to be my mother tongue. With so many regional film industries, you would expect the people of those regions to represent their respective film industries. In Tollywood, the male lead is almost always of Telugu heritage. Having a male lead of Telugu heritage is seen as a badge of honor, especially in a film industry that has been male dominated and patriarchal for so long. It is understood that a film has value when it has a male Telugu lead because men often are traditionally seen as more powerful and influential than women. Really?
With that type of attitude prevalent in Tollywood.....guess what?....surprise, surprise.....Tollywood has taken its sexism so far that most of modern Tollywood's leading actresses (especially the A-listers) are not even of Telugu heritage.
Yeah....that's fucked up. I know it wasn't always like this. Back in the olden days, Telugu women ruled the movie scene, but as the film industry wanted to become modern, there was a massive decline in Telugu actresses getting lead roles and women from other regions of India started coming in. Also, most of these leading ladies can't even speak Telugu proficiently, and often times have dubbing voice actors voice over their dialogues. These actresses basically lip-sync to these voice actors' voice-overs. So instead of having actual native Telugu speaking women actually reciting their own dialogues, they have non-Telugu women play women whose mother tongue is Telugu. Meanwhile, the leading men get to recite their dialogues IN THEIR OWN GOD-DAMN VOICES!!
So, why is this the case? Why are there so few native speaking Telugu actresses getting lead roles?
That is a massive question, as there are so many layers to this. These reasons that I will be talking about are from my own observations of what I've noticed in the media and within my own personal experiences. First of all, a lot of Telugu people seem to have some sort of hatred and disrespect for their own culture. I think because they have a history of being oppressed by foreign groups of people, they have internalized this notion that who they are and their culture are not worthy of love and acceptance. In order to compensate for that feeling of inadequacy, they seem to feel the need to be like their oppressors and taunt the people they feel they have the most control over, women and girls. Basically, brainwashing them to think that they are not good enough as their non-Telugu counterparts. So they are taking out their insecurities on their own women, and one of the ways they do that is praise non-Telugu women over them and tell them, "Hey, you are Telugu and a woman. Therefore, you are not beautiful. You have no power. You have no ability to make a difference in the world. Your lives are going to be 100% run by our own agendas so that we can feel power over you. Also, don't you even think of following your dreams. You don't have the right to have dreams". Yeah, that is harsh and can damage one's psyche and in turn will make these women and girls deeply insecure.
Also, British rule and foreign invaders in India have contributed a lot to the whole "White is right" attitude, and for a lot of Telugu people, it is even worse. North Indian people are usually lighter skinned and have more Eurocentric features compared to South Indian people, therefore closer to whiteness, therefore seen as superior. And what about the non-Telugu South Indians? In the eyes of so many Telugu people, they are seen as the more exotic and more creative of the South Indian people.
And Tollywood, being the way that it has been for a long time, capitalizes on all of these things to the fucking T. The people that make these movies,first of all, probably believe that Telugu girls do not have what it takes to be a main female lead. With the power of media in their hands, they further perpetuate the whole "Telugu girls are invisible and that they don't matter" idea by hiring lighter-skinned, Eurocentric looking non-Telugu women. Especially if a movie's male lead is a big A-lister person and the movie is branded as a modern,cool, stylish, fantasy world, the makers of that particular movie usually look for a female lead that they believe can add to the whole modern, cool, stylish, fantasy appeal. To them, more often than not, Telugu actresses just don't make the cut. They usually want to get a North-Indian girl whose again light-skinned and has Eurocentric features. Since she would be considered closer to whiteness, she would be thought of as more modern and glamorous.
If you look at most of the A-list actresses in Tollywood, you would see that they all have similar light to light-tan skin tones and have Eurocentric features like big eyes and a small, narrow nose.
For example, one of the biggest if not the biggest actress in Tollywood as of now (at least, in terms of social media following) is an actress by the name of Kajal Aggarwal. Kajal Aggarwal came into the Tollywood scene back in the mid-to-late 2000s, and became a big name after her 2009 film Magadheera, which at the time was the biggest Tollywood film of all time. Ever since then, she has been killing it in the Telugu film industry, and a large contributing factor to her success (while she is very talented, and I'm sure worked her butt off to be where she is), is the fact that she has very light-skin, big eyes, and long wavy hair. Basically, having a foreign, exotic, non-Telugu look.
Here's a picture of Kajal Aggarwal so you can get a clearer idea as to what I'm talking about:
These actresses not only dominate the movie scene but also the advertising market. These actresses get so many endorsement deals. Everytime, you are watching a Telugu tv channel, a good chunk of the ads shown on that channel will feature any of these actresses. Whether they are endorsing some sort of sari label, jewelry company, skin-care product, body soaps, hair-care products, technology........you name it. Their faces are plastered all over billboards and in shops in both Telangana and Andhra Pradhesh.
Here are some examples:
Kajal Aggarwal(Punjabi Heritage) in an ad for Khazana Jewellery
Samantha Akkineni(Half-Malayali Half-Telugu heritage) in an ad for an Hitachi Air Conditioner ad
Rakul Preet Singh(Punjabi Heritage) in an ad for Vaibhav Jewellers
See what I mean?
With Telugu's mass media's propagation of non-Telugu beauty, I wonder how this affects Telugu girls, whether they are from the mother land or NRIs (non-residential Indians). Seriously, why is there such little discussion about this? The deep effects: the messages and ideologies a Telugu woman can internalize......well,
I can list a few:
1) That is just how the film business is here and there is nothing we can do about it.
2) We as Telugu women are less than our non-Telugu counterparts in terms of a lot: power, strength, worthiness, love, acceptance, and especially beauty.
3) I, as a Telugu woman, do not have the right to follow my dreams.
4) I cannot make a difference or make amazing history because I was born a Telugu woman.
5) In order to appeal to a guy that I like, I have to appear as non-Telugu as possible. Who I am is too much of an abomination to be with such a guy.
I know all of these thoughts seem extreme but I feel too often than not, these are the kinds of thoughts that could be circulating in the collective sub-consciousness of the Telugu female population.
Looking at these ads and the high quality of these ads makes me think, "Why are Telugu women not offered to be in ads as cool as these, as artistic, as high-quality.......something that can bring in a massive audience?" First of all, I have to ask myself why I care so much about this issue. I often feel like other Telugu people don't seem to give as much of a fuck as I do about this issue. In return, I often feel kind of ashamed for caring so much. But I can't help but care every time I see or hear anything about Tollywood and seeing people blindly praise these women without seeing the shadiness underneath. People might think I care too much, but I can't help but care too much. It's easy for me being an NRI to stay away from this type of propagation because I can just choose not to watch and consume these things and am less likely to unexpectedly see or hear something regarding Telugu media. The thing is I am more concerned for the women and girls that actually live in Telangana and Andhra Pradhesh and are forcefully bombarded with this shit on a daily basis. Do girls there actually care that women of their heritage are not being equally represented in comparison to non-Telugu woman? Yeah, this post is getting long. I know that, but I just have so much to say on this subject but I don't think I can fit all of my ideas in one blog post. I just want to write a clear and in-depth post about how I feel about it. I know I don't work in the Telugu media space, so I am not one to give expert answers to this issue. But yeah, I feel that a lot of women have gotten so used to and so numb to this type of propagation that they have given in to it. At the same time, there could be other women that pretend like they don't care but secretly do but are afraid to voice their opinions in fear of judgement and humiliation.
But for all of the people that do care, is there hope in solving this issue? I think so. I mean we are seeing, slowly and steadily, more Telugu women in the recent years having critically acclaimed roles in Tollywood and being recognized for their work, and honestly it's about fucking time. Here are a few Telugu actresses that have done just that:
Anjali
Swathi Reddy
Eesha Rebba
Punarnavi Bhupalam
Not only that, we are seeing several Telugu women do some amazing things in the media space outside of the Telangana and Andhra Pradhesh market.
May I remind you of the 2014 Miss America winner Nina Davaluri?
Given Tollywood's obsession with western culture and equating white and lighter skinned women
with glamour and beauty, having a dark-brown skinned Telugu woman become the FIRST Indian American to win the Miss America Pageant is so amazing and honestly represents hope. Hope that as Telugu woman,no matter what skin color we are, we can be and rise above the narrow beauty standards and expectations our society and culture set for us.
And also Deepica Mutyala:
Ok, I love her so much. She is a beauty-expert, make up artist, and entrepreneur that rose to fame in YouTube. Her second video went super viral with over 10 million views. She is also one of the most successful South Asian entrepreneur's in the beauty industry. Deepica and her team launched one of their most profound projects called TINTED in early 2018. The purpose behind Tinted is to give voices to underrepresented people in the beauty industry. Deepica described TINTED as "the first ever digital community focused on the representation of 'all the shades in between' ". TINTED is a platform meant to give others the voice to share their stories. Pretty cool, right?
I mean it's great to see Telugu women make great strides in their respective fields, but we can't just throw out these examples and expect that to be enough to solve this issue. If someone expresses concern for the lack of native Telugu women being recognized and praised for their work, we can't just throw out these examples and tell them to shut up. We can't just talk about the few Telugu women getting recognized and still have Tollywood go back to putting Telugu women on the back burner. That's not how it works. There is no benefit in telling truth-seers to shut up just so a system can go back to its ignorant ways.
These ladies are here to inspire change, but we can't expect them to be the change all by themselves and while we passively watch. These change makers need others to truly have their back. There also needs to be more change makers that openly talk about this issue. There needs to be massive public outcry to have more talented Telugu woman be represented in media. What these women have done in their fields is exceptional. Not only are these ladies stunning and talented in their respective fields, there are proof that there is light at the end of the tunnel. These amazing ladies, through their work and talent, have the power to show Tollywood, the people of Andhra Pradhesh and Telangana, and the rest of the world that Telugu women are a force to be reckoned with!!
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