On June 21, Sandeep Vanga’s Kabir Singh was released in Indian theatres to the Bollywood-consuming crowd.
The lovestruck, heartbroken, brooding Kabir Singh (the film and the character seems like one being) had already garnered attention for being a Shahid Kapoor-starrer and the Hindi remake of the Telugu hit Arjun Reddy.
Now, 17 days and Rs 235.72 crores later, Kabir Singh has a divided audience – ardent supporters of the movie and people who are left speechless by the glaring misogyny.
Speaking to Anupama Chopra in an interview for Film Companion, Vanga tried to justify the actor’s violent behaviour which is mostly directed at his love interest played by Kiara Advani.
He said, “When you question people’s belief system, they get angry. I think that’s what happened. It is not even a healthy criticism. It’s very pseudo. When you are deeply in love, deeply connected with the woman, there is a lot of honesty in it. If you don’t have that physical demonstration, if you don’t have the liberty of slapping each other, then I don’t see anything there.”
South Indian actor Samantha Akkineni and singer Chinmayi called out Vanga’s justification of violence against women in a series of tweets that subsequently resulted in a host of trolls attacking them, or in non-millennial terms, shaming them for doing their work.
In a bid to support their ‘director Sir’, “anti-feminists” delved deep into the celebrities’ lives, picked up moments out of context to shame them and inadvertently proved to be true Kabir Singhs.
Vanga’s comment which reinforced the film's misogynistic undertones, amassed a wave of support from Twitterati, birthing the hashtag #wesupportsandeepreddyvanga.
It is true what they say about films being a representation of society. Here is someone on Twitter supporting the director's justification of violence by resorting to online abuse.
Kubra Sait who had expressed her criticism of the movie also got trolled.
What the Twitter war revealed was that sometimes male chauvinism doesn’t require logic. For instance, what does this tweet have to do with anything?
There’s more on those lines:
Here is a classic. This is a fail-safe time-tested tool used by people indulging in misogyny. They point out: Since there’s so much poverty around, why does an artist only point out misogyny on screen? Why not poverty? Why not unemployment?
One of the ways a film’s success can be measured is by finding out how much its audience can relate to it.
And Kabir Singh is running successfully despite the ‘woke’ backlash because it seems like Vanga has struck the right chord with chauvinists.
Here is one last tweet to know how logic pans out in a 'Kabir Singh'’s mind.
However, not everyone has jumped onto the misogyny bandwagon. There was a slight trickle of support for Samantha and Chinmayi who braved the Twitter war.