Vibrators To Hindu Twitter Trolls, Indian Film Star Swara Bhasker Not Afraid of Shaking Things Up (SCMP)

Read the full article by Vir Sanghvi at SCMP.com

An Indian actress who introduced the vibrator to Hindi cinema has become the latest target for the country’s notorious Twitter trolls. And she is loving it.

Swara Bhasker’s own bio on Twitter describes her as “an armchair activist, Twitter warrior, troll destroyer, right-wing baiter, liberal hysteric”. The candour is admirable – and the bio is accurate.

Consider a recent instance involving her latest film, Veere di Wedding. Though it is a commercial movie with star power, it is distinguished by the absence of a male lead and its focus on women’s concerns.

Bhasker plays a spoilt, rich girl married to a man unable to sexually satisfy her. She turns to a vibrator and in one of the film’s most talked about sequences, pleasures herself. (This is Hindi cinema so there is no actual nudity; only the suggestion of self-gratification.)

Shortly before the film was released, right-wing activists urged viewers to boycott it. The call for the boycott was not prompted by the vibrator scene but by another controversy. Some months ago, after a rape was reported inside a temple, Bhasker and other stars took part in a campaign to protest against rapes. Hindu activists treated this as an insult to Hinduism and some denied that any rape had taken place in the temple.

In the event, hardly anyone boycotted the film. It took one of the biggest box office openings ever for a film without a male star, making it the surprise hit of the summer.

But by then, the trolls had begun to focus on the masturbation scene. One tweeted that he had taken his grandmother to see the film and that she had been appalled. Exactly the same tweet, with the same wording (down to the misspelling of the word masturbation) appeared again and again on Twitter, being posted with a variety of different handles, with each user pretending that this was their own experience. The obvious cut-and-paste tweeting campaign soon became the subject of endless jokes on social media and fodder for stand-up comedians. In the process, the trolls gave the film the kind of publicity that money could not have bought.