Exactly 10 days back, Balaji Motion Pictures released the trailer of much-awaited film Udta Punjab starring Alia Bhatt, Shahid Kapoor, Kareena Kapoor Khan and Diljit Dosanjh’s. Pretty soon, this trailer became an instant hit. At the time of writing this article, this trailer has more than 8.9 million viewers only on the YouTube. People loved the rockstar look of Shahid and simple dirty look of Alia Bhatt.
Did you notice that I used the adjective “dirty” while describing the look of Alia? Actually, she is playing a migrant labour from Bihar character who has come Punjab for the labourer job and hence it was character’s demand to make her look like so. But many film fans from Bihar didn’t like it and found it stereotyping with pre-assumed image of a Bihari person. In fact, an open letter was written by Shefali S Jha for Newsable.com, wherein she stated that she was thrilled to see the performance of Shahid and the rest of the cast, but she couldn’t digest the migrant Bihari character of Alia in it.
In her open letter Shefali S Jha says:
“You actually underwent a month-long coaching to get the dialect right, and still ended up calling the language ‘Bihari’? Not good. And, by the way, ‘Ee’, ‘Ka’, ‘Kon’, ‘Chutiy***’ is not the ‘Bihari’ language either. It’s just lazy stereotyping, something Bollywood has always excelled at.”
Okay, now look at the below-added video clip in which I have only highlighted the part of the part of this film’s trailer where Alia has been shown.
Alia also responded to this open letter with a simple yet effective tweet:
Hmmmmmmm 🙂 pic.twitter.com/pWbSOkNGWm
— Alia Bhatt (@aliaa08) April 20, 2016
By the way, I am also Bihari and I didn’t find this trailer “badly stereotyping” . I might use the “poorly” but not “badly” because I didn’t find anything that hurting or offending to the Bihari me. Though, she tried to act, walk, look and talk like a Bihari but couldn’t perform it with perfection. Here is a quick example of wrong Bihari lesson .
In the last part of this video, she says ” Ho gayee na ch***apa“. We Bihari rarely speak in Feminine. We usually speak in Masculine. So, even if we have to say this, we will say ” Ho gayaa na Ch***apa“.
So, what do you have to say about all this? Watch the full trailer here and comment your feeling.
