Annapoorni - The Movie

So I finally watched the Tamil movie Annapoorni. Am I a fan of Nayantara? Nope. 

I only wanted to see first hand how the narrative was set for anti-Hindu, pro-Islam propaganda. The brainwashing is so subtle and soft you might say it isn't there and it is all a figment of one's imagination. 

But nope. The undermining of Sanatan Dharma is very much present. The Islamic agenda is pushed throughout the movie - from Love Jihad to Islamic food habits to dressing and prayers. 

The climax shows a scene in a cooking competition where Nayantara has to make biryani. The first thing she does is wrap herself up in a hijab, kneel down and do namaz!! Seriously!!? 

It is a stupid scene in terms of practicality. She is part of a national cooking competition. Competitions are bound by time restrictions. Never ever seen any cooking competition, national or international, where a contestant indulged in such religious theatrics.

It is a wrong scene in terms of the messaging. It tells you how biryani is a Muslim dish. To make a Muslim dish, one has to do namaz first so that it tastes heavenly. 

I cook biryani. All I do I wash my hands. 

If the filmmaker had shown a Hindu woman praying to Shri Vishnu before making puliogare, it would be immediately labelled as "regressive" and "orthodox." But a Hindu woman dressed in a hijab offering namaz is "devout", "faith", "so beautiful."  That is sheer hypocrisy. 

The hero, a Muslim, tells the heroine, a Hindu "Don't listen to your parents". The irony cannot be missed. A Muslim man who, even in the twenty-first century follows diktats of a sixth century desert cult, goads the heroine to not obey her parents' 'archaic' rules. These men are notorious for shoving down 1450 years old, archaic practices down their women's throats, all in the name of religion. Blind following is the number one trait of Islam. No questions asked. Just follow what is being told. A woman not listening to parents in a Muslim society and not following their orders is blasphemous and an act of rebellion. 

But this is justified in the movie when the girl is Hindu and the adviser is Muslim. Slow claps!

He takes her away from her wedding venue. He asks her to run away from the mandapam. Is this even possible with a Muslim woman and a Hindu man? Nope, unless you want fatwas and Sar Tan Se Juda slogans thrown at you. Mob lynching and murder of Hindu men who dared to marry or have relationships with Muslim women is rampant, though, under-reported or hushed up by the media. And here, we have a Muslim man literally taking the Hindu bride from her wedding in the name of "freedom." Freedom - the word that is the very antithesis of Islam. 

All this within the first forty-five minutes of the movie. 

The movie explicitly sends the message that the picture on the left (below) is a symbol of oppression while the picture on the right is a symbol of freedom and liberation. Left is ugly, right is beautiful. Only a dickhead would consider being wrapped head to toe in a black tent as beauty as opposed to a woman in solah-shringar (16 adornments). The first one looks like a Goddess, the second one like a widow.  

The Muslim boyfriend encourages his Brahmin girlfriend towards non-vegetarianism. If a Brahmin eats chicken, and her parents oppose it, they are orthodox. Can a Hindu man do the same to a Muslim woman and ask her to cut, cook and eat pork? If the heroine made pork biryani, would that be okay? No. That would lead to nation wide protests, burning of cities and endless debates of personal faith. If a Muslim eats pork, then it is haram. Islamic religious belief. In this case, questions of personal taste, freedom and choice do not come up. They are not orthodox for opposing pork. They are "devout Muslims."

Rangarajan, the heroine's father, is the temple chef of the Srirangam Ranganathaswamy temple and is constantly shown as "orthodox" Iyengar family. Can't it be "devout" Iyengar family?   

Srirangam Ranganathswamy Devasthana is a thousand year old temple. It has the mummified shrine of Saint Shri Ramanujacharya. It is an important spiritual center for Sri Vaishnavism. It is the first and most important of the 108 sacred Vishnu temples.  

The movie shows the daughter of a priest of THIS temple being attracted to the smell of figh being fried, cooking chicken, offering namaz, wearing hijab and being wooed by a Muslim. The movie's sole agenda is to show how the traditions of this Hindu temple and the Brahmins are "regressive", that the Hindu society stifles freedom and personal choice, that they are rigid in their rules, that they are close-minded and narrow in their thinking. 

The irony is, all these are traits of Islam, the religion they want to showcase as the torchbearer of liberal values. There is nothing liberal or free in Islam. 

Nayantara herself has chosen the Sanathan path in her personal life. Raised a Christian, she follows Hinduism, married a Hindu man, and is raising two boys in the Hindu way of life.

The director of the movie? Nilesh Krishna. Krishna in his name! Veer Savarkar was right when he said he doesn't fear the British or the Muslims but the Hindus against Hindus. 

My Experiments with Religion

I was born to Hindu parents & raised a Hindu. But it’s only now that I am irresistibly drawn to my birth religion. I was actually baptised in a Protestant Church before college. Converted to Roman Catholicism during college. Learnt about Jehovah's witnesses after college. 

Looking back, i can hazard three reasons why I was a religious vagabond. One, I went to a school run by Protestant Christian missionaries. The Sunday Bible classes, retreats & daily prayers influenced me & before i knew it, I had taken the holy dip, "cleansed" all my sins & become a “born again Christian” with a Christian name “Sandra”. Two, a practical foresight. I was in a serious, aimed-at-marriage relationship with a Malayalee Roman Catholic Christian in college. The conversion to Roman Catholicism was going to be a necessity someday as we were planning a Church wedding. 

Three, like many Hindus, I did not have a regimented Hindu upbringing. Yes, we celebrated all the ‘Hindu’ festivals. Yes, as kids, I sang devotional songs in the pooja room, everyday, just before dinner. Yes, I had prayer books too. Yes, I visited temples & bowed down before the Gods. But I never went to weekly Yoga classes nor daily Sanskrit classes. I didn't “study” the Ayurveda or the Bhagavad Gita. There were no structured, scheduled classes for any of these intrinsic components of the Sanatana Dharma, popularly called Hinduism. The things I did in the name of religion were all hand-me-down oral traditions & practices, that I followed mostly during festivals. I just never “studied” any of it.  I didn't “delve” into the significance of each of the things I saw or did. I was not “taught” why temples had bells or how the recitation of OM was stirring or how temples were painstakingly built as energy centers or how the concept of ‘the Universe within us’ & ‘mind over matter’ is central to Hinduism. Unfortunately, I never peeled the layers. 

Festivals were more times of merry making & school holidays than anything else for a child growing up in a remote village with access to no other entertainment in life. Dress up, eat nice desserts, visit relatives’ homes – this summed up our view of festivals. We never looked at it as a “religious” “Hindu” celebration. As adults, we negated the festivities as mindless rituals. Once in the city, we further removed ourselves from all native traditions claiming they had no relevance in a no-time-to-stop-for-anything metropolitan life. We became mechanical followers of a belief system that had its origin thousands of years ago & actually branched out into three more religious sects -  Jainism, Sikhism & Budhism - but was lost out on us because we cared not to accept it, we cared not to own it.

We Hindus go to Christian schools & recite prayer after prayer, forcibly or otherwise. We learn their scriptures & their Gods. Since weekly Friday or Sunday attendance in temples is not mandatory, we choose not to go on any day. And then, remain ignorant of the good values of our own faith because we don’t really have first hand knowledge of our religious texts. Worse still, in the garb of pseudo intellectualism, some of us condemn our religion, with our half-baked theories & ill-informed minds. 

Hindus need to be “taught” the tenets of Sanathan Dharma. We need to be “taught” the Vedas & the Upanishads, which are a storehouse of knowledge & spiritual truths. We need to be  “taught” Sanskrit in schools, like Arabic is. We follow the priests & their chants in Sanskrit, the vedic language, without understanding it & lose out on the richness of the language & the beauty of our religion. Yoga & pranayama techniques are potent tools to widen our consciousness beyond the ordinary sense of time & space. But none of these Sanatana Dharma marvels are compulsory in schools, unlike the Bible in Christian & the Quran in Muslim institutions.

 

We Indians take pride in our roots only once the West has embraced it. Yoga is a classic example. As David Frawley said in his book  “How I became a Hindu”, “There is no more only one true religion for everyone than there is only one true race, language or way of life. As a pluralistic system, Hinduism does not require that we hold to a single belief or savior.” Hinduism is not only a religion, but a culture, a spiritual path.