*Spoilers ahead*
“It was super!” exclaimed Faiz, the eight-year-old son of youth and labour activist Muneer Katipalla, as we walked out of the film theatre after watching
Faiz then told my partner Kavya Achyut, “If you dig the ground for gold, your house above it could turn to dust. Just ask your mom once.” Before the movie began, Kavya had mentioned to Faiz that there was a gold mine under her house in KGF (Kolar Gold Fields), in Kolar district of Karnataka.
Such was the power of the magical realism in Pa Ranjith’s Thangalaan that an eight-year-old child picked up on the destruction caused by the mines. If you go to watch the film expecting a chronicling of the tragedy that unfolded in KGF, you might think that Pa Ranjith has made it into a horror film — given the snakes, spirits, and possessed people that appear throughout the film. But the effect is such that the tragedy that KGF’s gold mines wrought stays etched in your mind, long after leaving the theatre.
Couldn’t Pa Ranjith have simply told the story of how the British, in their lust for gold, extracted slavery from a Dalit community from Tamil Nadu, and how they were buried in the very earth that they dug, in a straightforward manner? Had Ranjith climbed the cyanide hills — the hillocks of cyanide-laden waste generated by the mines — wouldn’t he have found real stories of thousands of Dalits? Couldn’t his film have told the stories of the struggles of those buried beneath the red and blue flags visible from the KGF shafts? These questions may occur to people who know of the destruction that KGF wrought. But magical realism possesses a power that goes beyond direct storytelling and leaves its mark on the minds of everyone, be it children or adults. It has the power to imprint reality in our minds through magic, and Thangalaan succeeds brilliantly at that.
Through the spirit Arathi who repeatedly asks if “gold brings everything,” the film tells the story of how gold mining laid waste to KGF and of those who survived it, and concludes that “gold will destroy your life.”
Pa Ranjith clearly conveys that the gold we wear is the blood of Dalits. In the film, Ranjith shows that after the head of Buddha’s idol was severed, the oppressors used the oppressed to attack Arathi’s body, which then bleeds rivers of blood. Arathi’s blood turns into gold. The king then finds gold in the very plains beneath the mountain that Arathi protected. The blood of the black panther, representing the Dalits, also turns into gold.
This blood turning into gold is not merely a metaphor limited to Ranjith’s fictional film, but reflects reality. The gold mined from the earth beneath KGF is indeed the blood of Dalits.
The disease silicosis was first identified in India in the KGF mining area. In 1934, Dr S Subba Rao, a senior physician of the Mysuru government, identified silicosis and submitted a report to the government. Those suffering from silicosis die from coughing up blood. Three lakh Dalits over three generations worked in the gold mines and perished, coughing up blood. This is what the film refers to, when it shows the blood gushing from Arathi’s body and turning into gold.
At the centre of Pa Ranjith’s film is the message: “Once you descend into the KGF mines in search of gold, there’s no possibility of a prosperous life.”
Agricultural workers and bonded labourers from Tamil Nadu, who were still relatively healthy, had migrated to KGF in search of daily wages. However, once they began mining for gold, their bodies bore marks of ill health. In reality too, this finds resonance. People had descended into the mines and they never came back up, even as dead bodies. The bodies of around 8,000 people over two generations were never found.
Around the time the mines were being closed in 2001, three lakh workers were employed in the KGF gold mines, and all of them were Dalits and poor. There were no toilets for these workers’ families; thousands of labourers had to use the same public toilets. When the toilet pits filled up, excrement flowed like rivers, invading the homes of the labourers.
At the time, the communist red flag was the only support for the Dalit mine workers. A red flag in one hand and a bucketful of excrement in the other, S Balan, the son of a miner, once organised thousands of workers and led a march to the municipal office. The plan was to dump the excrement on the commissioner’s head. However, the police stopped them from entering the office and attacked them with lathis. Balan, then a 35-year-old lawyer, poured the bucket of excrement over the police inspector’s head. The police dragged Balan to the station and booked him. As the first accused, Balan represented himself in court and was acquitted.
“You are the chief, Thangalaan,” a British officer tells the titular Thangalaan, the protagonist played by Vikram, entrusting him with the task of finding gold. After Thangalaan discovers gold, he is also tasked with the responsibility of bringing more labourers to excavate it. Believing that they could live a life of dignity mining for the British, the whole village of Dailts migrates along with Thangalaan. But the situation in KGF had changed. Soldiers with rifles were stationed to guard the area where Thangalaan found gold. While this is the story Pa Ranjith tells, there is a connection between KGF and the British rifles that were used against our own people.
The gold mined by “our people”, represented by Thangalaan, was sent to Britain — 8 lakh kg of it. During World War II, this gold was sold by the British to the United States for weapons. The British maintained their rule in India with the use of rifles. Labourers who thought the gold that they had mined was theirs, and tried to take it with them, were shot by the British with rifles bought with that same gold. From 1930, workers organised under the red flag. Under the communist banner, they launched a protest against the British in 1946 demanding food and wages. Responding to the call of the red flag, thousands of miners who had descended into the shafts emerged in massive numbers. The British opened fire, killing six communist leaders who fought for Dalits’ right to food and wages. The martyrs’ graves still stand in Andersonpet, KGF.
Why was magical realism necessary to narrate the tragic stories of the Dalits and the poor in KGF? Through the surreal quality of the genre, history can be presented to the public without an ideological lens.
The Dalits are the original inhabitants of this land, though there are no historical records to show for it. This land historically and culturally belonged to them, but folklore does narrate this history. Sometimes, it becomes necessary to tell this history by weaving folklore, imagination, and people’s beliefs along with history, for which magical realism is a good tool. Pa Ranjith and his crew have succeeded in using this tool excellently, and the audiences have attested to that.
Naveen Soorinje is a Kannada journalist. A version of this article was first published in Vartha Bharati. Views expressed here are the author's own.
Also read: Thangalaan review: Pa Ranjith’s magic realism film is a must watch