Leena Yadav’s bold cinematic endeavour Parched has come under fire. Gujarat’s Rabari community has filed a PIL, seeking a ban on the film, claiming that it shows the community in poor light.
Unperturbed and unwilling to buckle under pressure, the film’s director Leena Yadav says, “Though the PIL was filed a day before our release, we’ve been receiving threats for weeks now. Our dialect specialist Nain Rana and my husband (cinematographer Aseem Bajaj, who is also the co-producer of Parched) have been getting threatening calls saying things like, ‘You don’t know what we can do. We’re a community of seven lakh people.’ They have been trying to reach me too but they don’t have my phone number. We are not giving in to any pressure tactics.”
Strangely, the film makes no mention of any community or geographical location. So how did the community feel slighted? Says Leena, “By the clothes of one character. Tannishtha Chatterjee wears clothes worn by women in the community. But is that enough to decide that we’ve in any way been disrespectful? We’ve received no notice as of now. Once we do, we will decide our course of action.”
