Adoor Gopalakrishnan, filmmaker and chairperson of a film institute named after first Dalit president K.R. Narayanan, has courted controversy with misogynistic comments against women cleaning staff who had accused the institute’s director of caste discrimination.

Adoor on a TV channel on Monday cast aspersions on the women cleaning staff of K.R. Narayanan National Institute of Visual Science and Arts in Kottayam, Kerala.

“These women think they are stars before television cameras. They go around fully decked up. They dress up as if they are members of the WCC (Women in Cinema Collective),” Adoor said.

“They get interviewed every day. They were previously not capable enough to speak (before the media). They have all been trained. They have become stars. There are people who train them (to speak before the media),” Adoor said.

He added: “They come before cameras and claim they are all widows. Only two of them have lost their husbands. Four of them have husbands. They have been taught to say lies,” he said.

One of the cleaning staff, Saimi, told The Telegraph that there were five such employees at the institute and three of them were widows.

“Three of us including me are widows. We didn’t expect a man of Adoor sir’s stature to speak with such disdain and disrespect towards women.”

“What does he mean by saying we turn up before the media all decked up? It is so cheap of a man like him to cast aspersions on poor women like us struggling to feed our children and families on the monthly salary of Rs 8,000,” she added.

The women had earlier accused institute director Shankar Mohan and his wife of forcing them to work at their home 12km from the institute.

They had also accused the couple of making them clean their toilets with nothing but scrubs and not the long-handle toilet cleaning brushes, apart from bringing up their caste.