MUMBAI: Producer Ektaa Kapoor has put it on record — in her view, Bollywood has a “Hinduphobia” problem. Speaking on Ranveer Allahbadia’s podcast, the Balaji Telefilms head said the Hindi film industry readily embraces western animation and fantasy but hesitates when it comes to Indian folklore and mythology.
It is a charge she anchored in personal experience. Kapoor recalled being mocked while growing up for wearing a teeka and a dhaaga — “called a freak… labelled a tantrik,” she said — and described walking into a club straight from a mandir, only to be met with shock by the people around her. For someone who grew up steeped in Hindu tradition, the industry’s wariness of that very culture has been a long-standing frustration. That sting of being judged for something as simple as a temple visit stayed with her, and it clearly colours how she reads the industry’s content choices today.
The comments land at a moment when the conversation around representation of Indian traditions on screen is louder than ever. Kapoor’s argument, in essence: Hollywood’s mythologies get mounted as spectacle without a second thought, while India’s own epics and folklore are treated with a caution that borders on embarrassment.
She was careful, though, to note that the tide is turning. Kapoor said acceptance is improving — that the audience’s appetite for stories rooted in Indian folklore is now impossible to ignore, and that the industry is, slowly, catching up to that demand.
She offered her own work as evidence. Kapoor said she made The Vvaan precisely to create awareness about Hindu folklore — and the film’s box-office run appears to have vindicated the bet. Per Koimoi’s day-19 tracking, the film’s success has made it Sidharth Malhotra’s fourth-highest grossing film in India, a commercial validation of the folklore-first approach she has been advocating.
The “Hinduphobia” remark is vintage Ektaa — blunt, personal, and designed to provoke a conversation the industry would rather sidestep. Whether Bollywood’s leading voices engage with the substance of the charge or dismiss it as rhetoric, the podcast clip has already done its job: it has put the industry’s unease with its own mythology back at the centre of the debate, and ensured that folklore-driven films like The Vvaan are no longer easy to write off as exceptions.
For a producer who has spent three decades reading the audience’s pulse — from television’s saas-bahu era to the streaming age — the message to her peers was unmistakable: the stories are there, the audience is there, and the hesitation is the industry’s own.
