Spoiler alert: This article is not a review and discusses some scenes in detail.
The scene opens to a Buddha half buried in the mud. A girl, possibly no more than ten-years-old, sits astride the idol’s shoulders. She tries to stand up, teetering on the edge, a gleeful smile on her lips as she spreads out her arms like wings. At this exact moment, her father working in a field nearby, breaks the spell. Shouting at her for her “irreverence” he drags the little girl off the statue, much to her annoyance. “You never let me fly! Hasn’t the Buddha himself said ‘there is no god?!” she demands. The father grumbles to himself about his ‘out-of-control’ daughter. The girl, miffed, but unrepentant, goes off to play in the mud chasing fish. With this sequence, lasting less than a minute, director Pa Ranjith sets off on a tale drawing together feminism and anti-caste politics centering a girl child, a rare sight in Kollywood.
Dhammam is part of Sony Liv’s anthology series Victim, who’s Next? featuring four short films by Pa Ranjith, Venkat Prabu, M Rajesh and Chimbu Devan. Ranjith lets Dhammam unfold through the eyes of Kema, a little girl. The 30-minute film comes as a refreshing take in many ways. Though a child plays a lead role, she isn’t infantilised and made to speak her dialogues with gratingly exaggerated attempts at cuteness. Instead, Ranjith lets Kema’s intelligence shine through—an intelligence that as adults, we often dismiss in children. While child sexual violence is an issue that needs to be addressed, when minor girls are central characters in Kollywood stories there is a tendency to not go beyond that. As if their only relevance to cinema can be as victims of abuse. Dhammam’s director does none of that.
But the film isn’t blind to oppressive structures. It weaves them in while still allowing Kema to come across as an individual with agency. She is also the sole logical figure caught in a whirlwind of male emotions. The story is set in rural Tamil Nadu, a first for Ranjith, who has so far placed his films in the working-class neighbourhoods of urban settlements. Like in Mari Selvaraj’s Karnan, he doesn’t let the idyllic green paddy fields and rolling hills turn into a romanticised backdrop free of bias and violence. Mercifully, it’s also not yet another hyper-sentimental turf war between an evil corporate and the cookie cutter version of a vivasayi (farmer)—a recent trend in mainstream Tamil cinema.
In Karnan. caste holds a death-like grip over entire communities. Karnan revealed this by focusing on what the seemingly simple access to a bus stop means to a lower caste group. Dhammam revolves around the caste-politics of who gets to walk on the embankments of water-logged paddy fields; who has to make way for whom? Carrying that story forward is Kema. She's wilful, assertive and completely rational. She openly challenges authority whether it's her own father, Guna (Guru Somasundaram) or the dominant caste neighbour, played impressively by Kalaiyarasan.
For example, when Kalai and Kema block each other's path on the narrow embankment, he tries to shoo her away with a derisive “pah”, like he's chasing away cattle. She looks pointedly behind her as if to ask whom he's talking to, before saying she was there first, so he should make way for her. This leads to an altercation between her father and Kalai. Kalai gets grievously wounded. Furious that Guna had dared to lay hands on Kalai, three of his male relatives show up threatening revenge.
When they get there, all they can think of is asserting their ‘caste-pride' and showing off their masculinity. Guna’s immediate focus is on surviving their attacks and fighting back. The fight drags on for long and the scenes verge on the darkly absurd. Here are three dominant caste men brawling in the mud with Guna over their hurt ‘pride’. So blinded by their vanity, their imagined bravado, their need for revenge, purportedly on behalf of the wounded Kalai, none of them apply their minds even for a minute. If they had, their first and logical action would have been to rush a profusely bleeding relative to the hospital. It's Kema, agitated but still keeping her head, who finally restores some sense. Holding a knife to the throat of one of the men (Hari Krishnan), she quietly intervenes, “ippo addida, paapom” (let's see you hit him now). This brings the fight to a standstill long enough for Guna to point out their idiocy to the men.
The scenes delivered a two-part repartee to popular Kollywood tropes. The industry is still busy doling out “loosu ponnu'' characters to their female leads. At a time when even adults are depicted as hysterical and silly or illogical women, Kema, a girl child, is the only rational anchor in the whole film. Guna may fight back when he needs to, yet he constantly scolds Kema for her independent nature. She is the one capable of reminding an adult male about the rationalism at the heart of Navayana Buddhism espoused by Dr Ambedkar. At no point in the film are any of her qualities diminished. She’s actually what every other character, the men, could aspire to be.
In contrast, the dominant caste men are little more than vain, bloodthirsty, brawling thugs, divorced from basic logic. Blinded by their caste-pride, they don't do the obvious thing in the situation, which is to rush Kalai to the hospital. Instead, they roll around in the mud trying to ‘avenge’ a man whose life they could easily save. This distinction comes off as an interesting commentary on caste and masculinity. In the Tamil films of the eighties and nineties set in rural Tamil Nadu, dominant caste men were shown as ‘proud’, obsessed with honour and easily given to violence. It celebrated these qualities as the male ideal. Dhammam, with a touch of dark comedy, shows those qualities for what they truly are: the toxic vanity of casteist men.