Netflix today pulled a popular Indian film that follows the career of a young girl who aspires to become the country’s best chef from its platform in India, after an anti-work campaign led by Hindu nationalists.
Critics of the film criticize the work for including scenes showing meat eating, as well as a love story between the Hindu heroine and a young Muslim man.
“Annapoorani: The Goddess of Food,” which was the second most-watched film on Netflix in India the day before it was pulled, depicts the perilous journey of a Hindu priest’s daughter who dreams of becoming India’s best chef, and tackles challenges due to his Hindu upbringing.
In the course of events, the film’s heroine abandons the strict vegetarian system in which she was raised, while members of the Hindu upper class abstain from eating meat.
A Muslim classmate helps her navigate the cutthroat world of her culinary school, until the two fall in love, confronting them with one of Indian society’s most enduring taboos: interfaith marriage, vehemently rejected by mainstream groups.
Last week, an activist who felt insulted by the script filed a police complaint, saying the film promoted “love jihad,” a negative phrase coined by Hindu nationalists who accuse Muslim men of marrying Hindu women and forcing them to convert to Islam.
Ramesh Solanki, who filed the complaint, said on the XN platform that Netflix and Zee Studios, the co-production company, “produced this film intentionally… to hurt the sentiments of Hindus.” He asked the police to take action against the main actors of the film.
For days, a campaign calling for a boycott of the film and its immediate removal from Netflix has spread widely on Indian social media.
The withdrawal of the film “Annapurani” from Netflix in India today, just weeks after its premiere, has raised eyebrows among its critics.
The spokesman for a group of Hindu activists who criticized the film, Shriraj Nair, said that the authors of the work “realized their mistake”.
“We have never interfered with the creative freedom of the film, but we will never tolerate defamation and ridicule of Hindus,” he wrote on X.
India has a long history of film censorship, but the country’s film industry has gradually shunned any content that might offend the religious sensibilities of Hindus, whose religion forms the majority in the country, since Hindu nationalist Prime Minister Narendra Modi took office in 2014.
In December, the Washington Post reported that Netflix and Amazon Prime had ruled out several projects in India for fear of hurting the feelings of Hindus in this officially secular country.
2024-01-11 15:44:13
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