Vamshi Vemireddy, Assistant Professor of English at the Humanities and Social Sciences department, IIT Tirupati, says, “Telugu cinema has increasingly witnessed this trend with the emergence of the third generation stars such as Chiranjeevi, Nagarjuna, Venkatesh and Balakrishna, though it has its roots way back in Shobhan Babu’s time.”įrom yesteryear’s Shobhan Babu to Nagarjuna, bigamy has been justified in spite of the law. Realising that their husband was born for humanity and the Lord’s service, his wives in the latter part of the movie give up their lives, freeing Annamayya of any earthly attachment.

In the 1997 devotional flick Annamayya by K Raghavendra Rao, God is shown as personally conducting the wedding of Annamayya (Nagarjuna) with his cousins – Timakka and Akkalamma. Polygamy has been made acceptable in cinema by taking refuge in mythology, in which most of the Hindu gods are known to have multiple wives, Mahesh adds. As the majority of the audience is also male, having multiple heroines fighting for a hero appeals to their libido too,” Mahesh says. “We are fundamentally a patriarchal society with a male dominated film industry, where a hero is aspirational and heroine is an object of desire.

Annamayya movie