Rashmika Mandanna has spent years being told her Hindi accent is the problem. On Koffee With Karan Season 9, she declined the premise.
What she said on the couch
Appearing with her husband, Vijay Deverakonda, the actor said trolling has been a constant of her career: her performance, her language, her acting, her accent. She did not draw a neat line between criticism and trolling; she described an audience that has found one reason after another to object.
“Ever since I started working in the film industry, you know, I’ve been criticised or trolled for one thing or the other.”
Her response, she said, was to refuse to build a barrier around herself. “I didn’t want to just work in one industry. I wanted to work in them all. I didn’t want to speak just one language. I wanted to speak all languages.”
That was a deliberate choice made early in her career. It is why she now points to Animal and The Girlfriend as contrasting roles that give her satisfaction: playing very different characters was the plan, not a compromise.
The accent, treated as fact
On the trolling around her accent in Animal, Cocktail 2 and Chhaava, Mandanna’s answer was shorter than the criticism. “I am from the South of India. So I am going to have an accent. It’s unreasonable to think otherwise.”
The reframe matters. Accent trolling usually assumes a neutral, correct Hindi that every performer should approach. Mandanna declines that standard. A South Indian accent is not a technical fault; it is part of who she is.
The labour audiences do not see
Mandanna also described the work of dubbing for her own films in multiple languages. She tells directors they are free to use another voice if a character needs one; according to her account, none have chosen to replace her.
That is not a complaint about dubbing artists. It is a point about the craft involved in multilingual filmmaking, and the pride of carrying a role in her own voice across languages.
- The trolling has followed her across performance, language, acting and accent.
- She says she deliberately chose to work across industries and languages rather than be boxed in.
- She offers directors the option to use another dubbing voice; none have taken it.
Why it matters for Hindi film
Hindi cinema has long drawn on performers from southern industries, yet the accent question keeps returning as a way to diminish some of them. As films travel across languages and markets, the idea of a single neutral accent is becoming harder to defend.
The useful test for viewers is not whether an actor sounds “local,” but whether the voice serves the character and the scene. Those are different questions.
Source: News18
Comments