A speech by popular Tamil filmmaker Vetrimaaran, emphasising the need for political awareness in cinema, went viral on October 1. “Our identities are being taken from us very quickly, such as by dressing Thiruvalluvar’s image in saffron or depicting Raja Raja Cholan as a Hindu king,” the director — known for hit movies such as Asuran and Vada Chennai — had said, while speaking at a birthday event for MP and Viduthalai Chiruthaigal Katchi (VCK) leader Thol. Thirumavalavan. In what appeared to be a veiled reference to Mani Ratnam’s screen adaptation of Kalki’s historical fiction novel Ponniyin Selvan, he also pointed out that such erasures were happening in Tamil cinema too.
Later, when asked for a response to Vetrimaaran’s speech at a recent Ponniyin Selvan-I press event, Kamal Haasan had said: “The term Hinduism did not exist in Raja Raja Cholan’s time. There were Vainavam, Saivam, Samanam (Vaishnavite, Saivite and Jain traditions). Hindu was a name given to us by the British, because they didn’t know what else to call all these. It’s rather like how they changed Thoothukudi to Tuticorin.” No doubt, this will raise right-wing hackles. When the video of this event went viral on October 5, Wednesday, there was a burst of tweets using the hashtag ‘TamilsAreNotHindus’. The hashtag on the same date was trending at over 48,000 tweets and still growing.
When the reporter specifically asked Kamal, “Vetrimaaran says Raja Raja Cholan was a Tamil king, not a Hindu king”, Kamal responds: “That is what I am saying too. We had various religions. In the 8th century, it was Adhishankarar who brought everything under the concept of Shanmatha Sthapanam. But that is all history, we should not bring that history here. People are here to praise a work of historical fiction [Ponniyin Selvan]. We don’t have to fictionalise history nor twist it. Neither do we need to bring in language problems here.”
But if questions about the version of history being told in a historical fiction movie cannot be asked at the very press event for that movie, where else are they to be asked? Or are we to assume that amid the countless references to the Thanjavur temple made by the cast at various press events, at a time of virulent Hindutva, we do not require some ideological clarity about the scenario into which this film is releasing? For a film whose promotions have, for a large part, revolved around its pride in Tamil history, why should any questions about the on-going smothering of the very same linguistic identity the film wants to benefit from, not be posed at such an event?
In the case of Vetrimaaran’s speech, though it predictably drew flak from the Hindu rightwing, many have also applauded it. But his timely warning begs the question: how has Kollywood fared in recent times while reflecting gender, caste and communalism on screen? Tamil cinema has persistently been far more vocal about political issues than Bollywood, particularly more so in the years since the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) came to power in 2014. Yet, a closer look at Kollywood shines light on the bigotry and ignorance of the industry. By extension, Tamil society’s reaction to radical shifts in who gets representation on screen also merits exploration.
Kollywood is far from free of the Hindu rightwing’s propaganda claws. Last year's Raame Aandalum Raavane Aandalum, or RaRa as it was also referred to, is one such worrying example. “Manusha payala vida maadu dhaan osathi” (cows are more valuable than humans), says a character vehemently, in a country where mere rumours about possession of beef have led to lynchings. The film is released into a caste-society in which even meat-eaters in most parts of India look down on beef as ‘unclean’. RaRa told the story of two beloved bulls, belonging to a young couple, that go missing and the owners’ quest to be reunited with the animals. Since the Tamil words for cow and bull are ‘pasu maadu’ and ‘kaala maadu’ respectively, the word ‘maadu’ is simply used throughout the film, which takes pains to deride the beef market and make cattle-smuggling for consumption the big reveal in the story. RaRa’s politics could not be plainer. And interestingly, it was one of the four films produced by Jyothika and Suriya’s 2D Productions for direct release on Amazon Prime. RaRa came out just a month ahead of Jai Bhim, a film starring Suriya himself and receiving critical praise for its anti-caste credentials.
Director Manu Anand’s FIR, which came out this February, revolved around the premise ‘Who is a good Indian Muslim?’. The answer it provided was: a good Muslim was one deeply embedded in state excesses. FIR was a film in which unchecked violence and abuses of power by state apparatuses was valourised; and the best Indian Muslim was the one who participated in that violence out of patriotism. The description is quite reminiscent of dialogues like “yeh hai Hindustan ke Musalmaan” (these are Hindustan’s Muslims) from Akshay Kumar-starrer Sooryavanshi. The Bollywood film was similarly committed to the good Muslim-bad Muslim binary while portraying anti-terrorism outfits in the armed forces. FIR too has its share of violent terrorists, all Muslim, who are brutally killed off by the good Muslim characters at the cost of their own lives. The moral of the story is thoroughly bleak.
Of course, FIR is also a film of such ridiculous stretches that at one juncture, the Indian Air Force, Gautham Vasudev Menon as an NIA head, and a character playing Modi seriously weigh the pros and cons of conducting a drone strike on the Ambattur Industrial Estate in Chennai.
FIR isn’t the only release this year pushing military exceptionalism. Beast, Vijay’s big release for 2022 also played into the good-Muslim-bad-Muslim dichotomy. Vijay plays an ex-Research and Analysis (RAW, India’s Intelligence wing) agent who goes trigger-happy on Muslim terrorists, after they take a Chennai mall hostage. The director, Nelson Dilip Kumar, seems to be a fan of military men with big guns, if his previous film Doctor is anything to go by. But Doctor was at least a darkly-comic story for the most part. The segment in Beast plays into the wearying fear-mongering against Muslims that film industries across the country simply need to retire for good.
Actor-filmmaker Parthiban had made a great deal of hype about his single-take non-linear film Iravin Nizhal that released in July. Apart from turning out to be a crashing bore, the movie also happened to rely on graphic scenes of sexual violence and rape jokes. In a scene, when his character’s wife tells him she’s falling in love with him after seeing how he dotes on their daughter, despite his routine abuse and criminal activities, he sniggers: “She was conceived only because I raped you!” This is supposed to be a comic moment, one that drew sickening bouts of laughter from the audiences. Sexual violence as comedy may be one of the lowest bars to set for oneself.
Another entirely different film, also from this year, to use rape as a plot device was Nenjuku Needhi. Udhayanidhi Stalin’s remake of Article 15 faithfully recreated the sequences of caste-based sexual violence that was critiqued in the original. Despite packaging itself as an anti-caste film, Nenjuku Needhi, like Article 15, relied on the saviour-complex of its privileged hero. Dalit characters were chiefly presented as fodder for the film’s opression spectacle. Since the premise of both movies was the gang-rape of three minor Dalit girls, the visuals are particularly disturbing. As the Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (DMK)’s Youth Wing Secretary and now MLA of Chepauk, Udhayanidhi uses Nenjukku Needhi, which he produced and starred in, to force-fit his party’s election manifesto into the plotline, rather than to spread a better understanding of the ideals of Dr BR Ambedkar and Periyar, whom the film keeps referencing.
Kollywood still struggles to comprehend the concept of agency, and to not rely on the ‘oppression as spectacle’ trope to get a point across. Unfortunately, this is an aspect that even Vetrimaaran himself has been criticised for, whether it was the caste-violence shown in Asuran or the police custodial abuses depicted in Visaranai.
While films with ham-fisted understanding of anti-caste politics are being churned out, there is also a wave of caste-pride films in Tamil cinema. Last year brought us Mohan G’s Rudhra Thandavam. In keeping with the director's earlier films, this was yet another propaganda set-piece dedicated to Vanniyar caste-pride. The community, categorised as Most Backward Class (MBC), has pockets of political clout in parts of northern Tamil Nadu. Some years ago the spectre of ‘naadaga kaathal’ (drama love) against Dalit men, became a political talking point. The concept is similar to the equally vindictive boogeyman of ‘love jihad’ about Muslim men. Mohan G’s previous Draupadi was dedicated to this ‘naadaga kaathal’ spectre. Rudra Thandavam was a lamentation of how the Protection of Civil Rights (PCR) Act was a burden on a ‘good’ Vanniyar cop who kills a Dalit boy and how the Act ruined the cop’s life. The Dalit boy’s life? It matters little in the movie, like that of all the Dalit characters, who are mostly portrayed as drug peddlers or vagrants who mix LSD in women’s drinks at pubs to sexually abuse them.
Yet another spurious take from last year, against legal measures meant to ensure social justice, was Yennanga Sir Unga Sattam. The film’s title loosely translates to ‘What is this law of yours, sir?’. The law in question is caste-based reservation. In a story that tiringly recalls director Shankar’s 1993 Gentleman, a poor Brahmin man is unable to get into the Tamil Nadu Public Service Commission (TNPSC), because allegedly reservation is a roadblock in his life. With dialogues like “Why must I alone wear myself out studying?”, the film breaks out the vacuous argument of ‘merit’. And with lines like “Why should there be a difference between Brahmins and non-Brahmins among poor people? There should be a separate quota for the poor, whatever caste they are from,” one can only assume the reference is to the Economically Weaker Sections (EWS) quota introduced by the Union government and criticised for being poorly-thought out.
These films either signal a lack of understanding on how a caste-society functions, or of how crucial agency is for lowered-caste characters when making an anti-caste film. The denial of the fact that legal measures are a counter-balance to generational privileges is erasure. Depicting lowered-caste characters — Dalit people in Nenjukku Needhi, Irural people in Jai Bhim — as mere victims with no agency of their own is erasure too. And this also compels us to examine how progressive forces react when representation is done right ever so rarely.
At the time of writing this article, it is impossible to ignore the waves of discussions that came after Pa Ranjith’s Natchathiram Nagargirathu released. At first, some in the Left took issue with Rene preferring to call herself an Ambedkarite instead of a Communist. The debates that took place largely on Twitter led to CPI(M)’s Tamil Nadu general secretary K Balakrishnan saying in an interview that “one movie cannot erase from history what the Left has contributed to the annihilation of caste”. Balakrishnan mentions that he hadn't watched the movie yet, but was responding based on the interviewer’s question regarding the controversy.
But scrutinising the Left’s role in the anti-caste movement was not the point of the dialogue in Natchathiram. It was a proud declaration by a Dalit woman that she was an Ambedkarite, so why then should her assertion of who she is be construed as an attempt at historical erasure? Or are we to understand that Rene, and millions of real life people like her, do not have the right to choose their political identity even within progressive spaces?
After the film was released on Netflix recently, fresh criticisms rose that Rene was “unreal” and that Ranjith had failed to critique Brahmanical ideology. How exactly does speaking against the very real violence by intermediate castes — in Natchathiram, it was the false narrative of ‘naadaga kaathal’ — not also question the system based on the Brahmanical sanatana dharma that enables such violence?
The erasure that does happen in Natchathiram is following the events at the anniversary party at Sylvia (Sherin Celin Matthew) and Joel’s (Damu) home. Besides sexually harassing Rene, Kalaiyarasan’s Arjunan makes transphobic and homophobic remarks about Sylvia, a trans woman, and gay couple Dayana (Sumeeth Borana) and Praveen (Arjun Prabhakaran). Yet, when there is a decision to be made about whether Arjunan should be thrown out of the theatre troupe, it is only Rene who decides. The reasoning for keeping Arjunan is spot on: the path to progressive politics is one of facing our own bigotry and being accountable for it. This was exactly why Sylviya, Joel, Dayana and Praveen should have been part of deciding whether or not Arjunan gets to stay. Kalai’s character had caused hurt to them as well as to Rene. Ranjith’s solidarity for LGBTQIA+ communities is clear enough in the film, and is a rarity in Indian cinema, yet several such scenes leave you disappointed.
If Kollywood and its Tamil fanbase want to differentiate themselves from regressive politics peddled in Hindi cinema, the most sincere way to do so would be by course-correcting.