Anti-caste Tamil filmmaker Mari Selvaraj said that Thevar Magan, considered an iconic movie in Tamil cinema, had inspired him to make his latest movie, Maamannan–by reimagining the film about Thevars, a dominant community, with Dalit characters. In his speech during the audio launch of Maamannan’s on June 1, the director in the presence of actor Kamal Haasan, the lead actor of Thevar Magan, confessed to him that he did not understand whether Thevar Magan was right or wrong when he watched it for the first time. Besides playing the lead role, Kamal Haasan also wrote and produced Thevar Magan.
Mari Selvaraj said on stage, “Today Thevar Magan is treated as a masterpiece. Every director would have watched it before making their films. I did the same. But it distressed me greatly. I did not understand whether the movie was right or wrong.” Thevar Magan was released in 1992 and starred Kamal Hassan, Sivaji Ganesan, Revathi, Gautami, Nassar, and Vadivelu in important roles. The movie revolves around Sakthivel Thevar (Kamal Haasan) who returns home to his village where his father Periya Thevar (Sivaji Ganesan) is the chieftain. While it was a success when it was released, there has been increasing criticism from anti-caste activists as the movie ends up glorifying the feudal nature of the dominant caste Thevars in southern Tamil Nadu.
Mari Selvaraj, who is a Dalit filmmaker, shed some light on Vadivelu’s character in Maamannan and how it is loosely inspired by Thevar Magan. Vadivelu, played a small yet significant role in Thevar Magan as Esaki, a servant employed by Periya Thevar. While his caste position is unclear in the movie, he is shown as a subservient man who is even ready to lay down his life for his dominant caste ‘masters’. Esaki’s hand is chopped off by Periya Thevar’s rival Mayan (Nassar) because Sakthivel demanded that he open the doors of a disputed temple without realising the gravity of it. Even after Sakthivel decapitates Mayan, Esaki asks the protagonist to hand him the murder weapon so that he can go to jail instead of the former.
In the context of Vadivelu's character in Thevar Magan, Mari Selvaraj stated that he wanted to imagine how it would be if his father was a part of the Thevar Magan world. The director said, “I wanted to see how it would be if my father was in this world. Maamannan is a film I made for my father. The character Esaki played by Vadivelu is a maamannan (king of kings). What if Esaki transformed into a maamannan is the story of Maamannan.”
Mari Selvaraj’s speech hinted that Vadivelu will play the role of a powerful Dalit man in Maamannan. Mari, who espouses progressive and anti-caste views, is known to change the existing dominant narratives and center them around Dalit people. In his previous film Karnan, the filmmaker reimagined Karnan from Mahabharata. In the epic, Karnan was born after his mother Kunti conceived him as a virgin from the sun god Surya. He grew up as a Shudra but actually belonged to the warrior clan Kshatriya. This trope was subverted in Mari Selvaraj’s film where Karnan (Dhanush) was a Dalit man and portrayed as a warrior. The film, in fact, opens with the song ‘Kanda Vara Sollunga’ which features the line ‘Suriyanum pekka villa…’ (he was not born to the sun God Surya).
Elaborating on his distress after watching Thevar Magan, Mari Selvaraj said that he faced a lot of internal conflict while watching the movie. The filmmaker, who has written numerous short stories and poems before making movies, said, “I watched it [Thevar Magan] as just a movie but I had also seen how cinema affects a community. On one hand, it is elevated for its film language. On the other hand, it created a huge impact on me. Maamannan is a result of all the pain, distress and the positive and negative emotions I experienced after watching Thevar Magan.”
While this might have been the first time that Mari Selvaraj tried to have a dialogue in a public forum around how Thevar Magan enabled caste atrocities in southern parts of Tamil Nadu, four years before his debut film Pariyerum Perumal in 2018, he had written a lengthy letter to Kamal Haasan about how distressed he was after watching the movie. In his scathing letter, Selvaraj questions why Kamal Haasan chose to make a film like Thevar Magan which glorified caste violence and casteist practices despite his progressive political stances. Mari Selvaraj points out how it does not make sense for the actor to wield his machete throughout the film and then during the climax, ask people to give up violence and educate their children.
The filmmaker goes on to highlight instances of caste violence that were allegedly inspired by Thevar Magan, particularly a song from the movie titled ‘Potri Paadadi Ponne’ which has the line ‘Ithu Thevar kaaladi manne…’ (this soil belongs to the Thevars). In the letter, Mari Selvaraj alleged that the song, which was played on loudspeakers during temple festivals and weddings, caused clashes between castes.