Kajal Aggarwal: "I Always Drew the Line"

Kajal Aggarwal has said South cinema is changing for the better, with women now getting more liberal and meaningful roles than the industry offered when she started. She added that she personally always drew a line and never accepted the kind of item-number staging common in an earlier era of Telugu and Tamil cinema.

It is a rare moment of a working actress naming the boundary explicitly rather than gesturing at it, and it lands at a point where the conversation about how South Indian cinema writes and shoots its women has genuinely shifted over the past decade.

Her own filmography backs the claim: a two-decade run across Telugu, Tamil and Hindi cinema built more on lead and ensemble dramatic roles than on the picturisation-heavy female parts that defined the previous generation of southern commercial cinema.