In the Chacha Chaudhary comics, Sabu’s temper tantrums were cosmic events. “When Sabu is angry, a volcano erupts on Jupiter,” read the caption. Children understood the absurdity: the eruption wasn’t literal; it was comic shorthand. It belonged in the elastic, ungoverned universe of a comic strip.
Sabu was never particularly bright; to the non-red-pilledindividual, he could well have been Pran’s homage to Obelix. But chew on this for a moment: tomorrow, if intelligent life from another planet were to present itself, thanks to Sabu, we would probably imagine them dumb enough to be Handyman 2.0. An entire generation was simply convinced that aliens existed only to be mocked — or could go volcano-eruption angry if they didn’t like what we offered. Remember Mars Attacks? It didn’t end well for mankind. And yet, in that film too, the Martians literally lost to a song. That’s the danger of humour presented as shorthand. Once the gag is rehearsed often enough, it mutates into perception. We don’t just laugh at the volcano; we believe in it. And Bollywood has built an empire on precisely this habit: associate a community with a joke, rehearse it until it ossifies, and then pretend it is “just comedy”.
Which brings us to Param Sundari. Watching this one could almost believe that Malayali women routinely scramble up coconut trees in fits of rage. Malayali men, meanwhile, are shocked curiosities if they are seen wearing gym shorts. Throw in Kathakali dancers who appear in broad daylight like wedding baraatis, mullappoo flowers tucked in every second head of hair, Ayurveda deployed instead of actual medicine, and of course, the token pet elephant, and you realise Hindi cinema is still treating the south as though it were a comic strip waiting for its next eruption.
It’s not as though the filmmakers don’t know better. They just don’t care. The Malayalam spoken in Param Sundari is so mangled it feels like a cruel parody, as though the actors learnt their lines from Google Translate during a layover in Kochi. Sundari, a name that Malayalis barely associate with their linguistic or cultural traditions, is repeated until it becomes a punchline rather than a character. And geography is folded with Nolan-esque imagination: the lovers hop from Alappuzha to Athirappilly to Munnar as though Kerala were a pocket square that can be folded to suit cinematic convenience.
Then there’s the casting controversy: a non-Keralite actor playing the lead. Honestly, I have no quarrel with that beyond a point—it’s acting, after all. Cinema would be poorer if we began gatekeeping roles along ethnic lines. Some of the most memorable screen accidents happened precisely because filmmakers ignored those boundaries. Kabir Bedi, an Indian, became an international sensation as the Italian TV hero Sandokan. Quentin Tarantino cast Pam Grier in Jackie Brown because his copy of Elmore Leonard’s novel was missing the first few pages where the character’s background was detailed. Happy accidents. The problem isn’t that Bollywood casts outsiders as insiders. The problem is that it then sabotages the very cultures it claims to represent by draping them in cartoon costumes.
This is neither accidental nor new. Bollywood has always leaned on stereotypes as shorthand. What’s astonishing is how durable these tropes have been. From Chennai Express (Deepika Padukone’s accent stretched thinner than a dosa) to Ra.One (south Indians apparently eat Maggi with curd) to Meenakshi Sundareshwar (a 2021 streaming release that thought “funny Tamil uncle” jokes were fresh), Hindi cinema has spent decades flattening southern cultures into slapstick. It doesn’t stop at the south. Sikhs in Bollywood exist only to be lampooned. Gujaratis haggle their way through every frame. Bengalis quote Tagore between bites of machher jhol. Muslims glide around in sherwanis, sprinkling “adaab”s that real-life Muslims would struggle to recognise. Biharis are either rustic fools or mafia dons. Diversity in India is rich and layered. Diversity in Bollywood is comic relief.
In the 1960s through the 1980s, this passed off as standard comic grammar. Audiences didn’t expect sophistication; they expected a laugh. In an India where the economy dragged and society seemed static, humour relied on fixed identities. The Sikh joke, the Malayali joke, the Bengali joke—they were easy currency. Liberalisation in the 1990s changed a few things. Suddenly there were malls to parody, MTV accents to ridicule, call-centre cubicles to satirise. For a while, it looked as if the coconut-tree gags might retire. Yet Bollywood has a way of going backwards while pretending to move forward. Today, scrambling for the elusive theatre audience, Hindi filmmakers are raiding their childhood VHS collection for inspiration. If action films look like reheated Mahesh Bhatt-Mohit Suri melodrama pumped with Yash Raj gloss, comedy has gone back to 1980s caricatures: Ms Briganza clones, drinking jokes about Malayalis, Kathakali as instant exoticism. In Param Sundari, Malayali women swoon over a hero in tight T-shirts, and a boat race—a discipline requiring years of synchronised training—is reduced to the idea that well-built dudes can do anything. The joke is not just lazy, it’s insulting.
Bollywood’s defenders claim cinema mirrors society. But the mirror cuts both ways. Films shape how communities are perceived. A generation raised on Chennai Express doesn’t merely laugh at Deepika’s accent—it internalises it as “the way Tamils speak”. A generation watching Param Sundari doesn’t simply chuckle at coconut trees—it learns to think of Malayalis as caricatures in mundus. When repeated often enough, stereotypes stop being jokes. They become prejudices with a laugh track. Today, millions of people think of the Sindhis or the Sikhs in a particular way that has led to alienation. The irony is that this collapse into cartoonish representation comes at a time when southern films are defining the global image of Indian cinema.
Baahubali, KGF, RRR, Pushpa—they might not be the greatest films ever made but they are culturally rooted, narratively daring, and technically spectacular. They prove that authenticity travels, and specificity resonates. Meanwhile, Bollywood, forever marketing itself as “pan-Indian”, still can’t depict a Malayali without inserting Kathakali into a love scene. The south doesn’t need Bollywood. Bollywood needs the south. And yet it insists on talking down to them. Why? Because stereotypes are the cheapest form of storytelling. They require no research, no imagination, no risk. They are comfort food for a creatively bankrupt industry. The problem is that they are also corrosive. They reduce communities into comic strips, convincing audiences that a culture is nothing more than its props and accents. This isn’t nostalgia. It’s negligence.
There is, however, an insecurity lurking underneath. Bollywood no longer leads the cultural conversation even perceptibly. It competes with other cinemas across the nation for realism, spectacle, and sharpness. Its old tricks look outdated. And so, it does what insecure industries do: recycle the past, serve it up as comedy, and hope no one notices. And yet, the larger damage remains. Producers will argue this is just a film, not to be taken too seriously, that you should leave your mind at home. If only they had taken themselves a little more seriously—and not lost their minds in the process.
Opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not purport to reflect the opinions or views of THE WEEK.
