I didn’t watch director Sandeep Reddy Vanga’s 2023 film Animal, which was widely decried for being violently misogynistic. What I heard about it was enough, and I know many women also made the choice not to subject themselves to it. It was preceded by Arjun Reddy in 2017,
which I watched a few minutes of and clicked off. Now, the controversial director has taken to social media to publicly berate an unnamed actor, and to question her feminism. It is known that his next venture, entitled Spirit, initially had Deepika Padukone in the lead role, and that she has been replaced by Triptii Dimri, following her exit due to “creative differences”.
In a post dated May 26th , Vanga said: “When I narrate a story to an actor, I place 100% faith. There is an unsaid NDA [Non Disclosure Agreement] between us. But by doing this, You've 'DISCLOSED' the person that you are.... Putting down a Younger actor and ousting my story? Is this what your feminism stands for? (sic).” He accused the actor of playing dirty PR games, and expressed other grievances. It is widely presumed that the post is a dig at Padukone, who has not yet released any statement about her departure from the project.
In the cinema industry, there’s no such thing as an unsaid NDA. NDAs are aplenty, and signed for all kinds of things, however minor, and a person who chooses not to have that contract in place before sharing sensitive material is doing so knowingly, or foolishly. NDAs in and of themselves are problematic. For one, they have long been used against people to prevent them from lodging sexual harassment or other exploitation cases — across industries. For another, they are also used to unethically gain control over intellectual property. In the entertainment industry in particular, storylines created by screenwriters are known to frequently wind up in permanent limbo; the artist loses copyright just through the pitch, and cannot take their story elsewhere.
Vanga claiming higher moral ground on the basis on not having had an NDA in whatever context he speaks of is obfuscating, to those who don’t know how common they are.
But the feminism part? That isn’t even obfuscation. That’s sheer rage against a woman actor — whoever she may be — thrown in to incite his fan following’s anti-feminist stances further. These stances manifest not merely in virtual stones being thrown in cyberspace in the direction of public figures. They manifest above all in the mistreatment of people in daily life.
The fundamental contention is one of hypocrisy: an actor who is a known feminist presumably Padukone who is known for being vocally progressive) is not. The ideology is dragged in irrelevantly, but the inference is that people who preach the ideology do so in a hollow way.
Look: some people do. There are plenty of wolves in merino wool keffiyehs and pussyhats, so to speak. But Vanga has no foot to stand on to call them out, or to call them in — as we who are in the movement try to in complicated, community-centric ways. Feminism’s value in the world remains unshaken — and its detractors know it.