An Indian filmmaker is facing multiple police charges for “hurting religious sentiments” over the poster for her new film, which depicts the Hindu goddess Kaali smoking a cigarette and clutching an LGBTQ+ flag.
Leena Manimekalai, an Indian filmmaker currently living in Canada, was attacked online with thousands of threats of violence, rape and death after the poster of her short film Kaali, which was screened in the Canadian city of Toronto over the weekend, went missing. viral on social media.
The hashtag ‘arrest Leena Manimekalai’ started trending. On Tuesday, two police cases – one in the Indian capital Delhi and another in the neighboring state of Uttar Pradesh – were filed against the director and others involved in the film for “disrespectful portrayal” of a Hindu god and allegedly “hurting” religious sentiments.
The Indian High Commission in Canada also issued a statement saying they had received complaints from members of the Hindu community about the poster and “urged the Canadian authorities and event organizers to withdraw all such provocative material.”
Manimekalai wrote and directed the film as part of his film studies at the University of Toronto. In the piece, the goddess Kaali inhabits the body of Manimekalai and wanders the streets of the city in search of belonging. The scene depicted in the film’s poster captured a moment where she shares a cigarette with a homeless man while dressed as the goddess.
The Aga Khan Museum, which hosted the film’s screening in Toronto, issued an apology saying the film and poster had “inadvertently caused offense to members of the Hindu and other religious communities.”
Manimekalai, who was born and raised Hindu in the southern Indian state of Tamil Nadu but has now distanced herself from her religion, denied that her film was in any way disrespectful to the goddess or Hinduism. She defended her right to cultural freedom and freedom of expression in her art and stated that she was “fiercely opposed to censorship that comes from within and without”.
“In rural Tamil Nadu, the state I come from, Kaali is believed to be a pagan goddess,” she said. “She eats meat cooked in goat’s blood, drinks arrack, smokes bidis [cigarettes] and dances wildly… this is the Kaali I had embodied for the film.’
In the days since the film’s poster appeared online, Manimekalai said she, her family and associates have received threats from more than 200,000 accounts online, in what she described as a “mass lynching on a large scale” by right-wing Hindu groups.
“I have every right to reclaim my culture, traditions and texts from the fundamentalist elements,” she said. “These trolls have nothing to do with religion or belief.”
Manimekalai’s film is the latest in a long line of projects, from films and TV series to commercials, comedy and theater, that have been accused of “hurting Hindu religious sentiments” in India in recent months, in what many see as a rapid erosion of freedom of expression and the cultural sphere under the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP).
Over the weekend, a theater performance in the state of Karnataka was stopped by a right-wing Hindu group because it contained Muslim characters and depicted a Hindu-Muslim nexus.
Both Manimekalai’s debut feature, Sengadal, and her follow-up, Maadathy: An Unfairy Tale, ran afoul of the Indian censor board. The director was also one of the few who came forward as part of the #MeToo movement and accused director Susie Ganesan of sexual harassment. Ganesan filed defamation charges against her and her passport was temporarily confiscated.
“I feel like the whole nation – which has now deteriorated from the biggest democracy to the biggest hate machine – wants to censor me,” Manimekalai said. “I don’t feel safe anywhere right now.”
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