Kaala and the Dalit Popular: Recovering Caste Histories. of Modernity

Transcription

1 Kaala and the Dalit Popular: Recovering Caste Histories of Modernity Shyma P. Kaala is the latest from Pa Ranjith, the director who has been experimenting in developing a visual language of Ambedkarism in Tamil popular cinema. From his first film, Attakathi (2012), where he was forced to edit out a picture of Ambedkar from the screens, to Kaala (2018), where Dalit reformers like Ambedkar, Phule and Iyothee Thass appear as pictures on street walls, names of galis, and implicit dialogues, Pa Ranjith has been successful in persuading the cinematic space to talk about caste and casteism. Even as stereotypes pertaining to dark skinned and minority religious bodies are uncritically received and revived in the film, the larger than life star persona of Rajnikant, the acceptability of a left Bahujan discourse etc are perceptibly used to imagine a Dalit bahujan popular, a not very insignificant space of negotiation and contestation within the discursive space of Tamil popular cinema. This cinematic popular, on its hand, has enabled a recovery of literary Dalit history and its take on modernity, the various aspects of which would be discussed here. The articulation of caste in Tamil popular cinema has been associated with the assertion of non Brahmanical movement which was not very concerned about Dalit identity and politics. While talking about how Ranjith Pa s Kabali becomes an exception in the way it which it addresses Dalit caste, Stalin Rajangam in an interview with Sruthisagar Yamunan describes how the Tamil film fraternity is predominantly OBC, and there would be a backlash in their own circles when the basis of the politics of these communities is questioned. Rajangam says that as long as films show the unique history and traits of the Dalit movement and disassociate themselves from the OBC dominated non-brahmin movement, like Kabali did, there will not be acceptance. 1 Leonard Dickens in his Spectacle Spaces: Production of Caste in Recent Tamil Films, discusses how caste were often figures as the other of Indian/nation in Tamil films. Dickens distinguishes between three phases of caste articulation in 1 Sruthisagar Yamunan in an interview with Dalit scholar Stalin Rajangam;

2 Tamil films. The first wave saw the projection of a glorified Dravidian culture as part of imagining a Tamil ethno nationalism, in order to contest a national identity. However, in the 1990s this tension with the national gets alleviated with the audience, being invited to identify with the urbane, English-speaking, cosmopolitan protagonist, especially in the films of Manirathnam. The Tamilness was defined as part of belonging to the Indian nation. The late 1990s on the other hand saw directors like Bala, Cheran and Thangar Bachan make films that portrayed rustic and marginal lives. However as Dickens suggests, these films constructed the defying subjects as profane identities meant to be eliminated and imagined the rustic spaces as a caste pure space (170). As may be seen in these different phases of Tamil cinema, caste was not something to be addressed, rather it was to be evicted from or rendered profane in the cinematic popular. It is in such a context that Tamil films which explicitly articulate their Dalit lineage like Pa Ranjith s Kaala become significant. Kaala and the earlier films especially Kabali conceptualize a Dalit popular which historicise Dalit memories and speak and visualize the language of a politicized Dalit. It is a popular that is imagined through/in cinema but goes beyond it. The popularity that the book My Father Balaiah by Prof. Y.B. Satyanarayana obtained after the release of the film Kabali is an instance in point. Dr Y.B. Satyanarayana, an academician and co-founder of the Centre for Dalit Studies, chronicles the history of three generations of his Dalit family in My Father Baliah. A biography of his father, the book also recounts the harrowing experiences of casteism, migration from Vangapally in Telangana, and the resilience of the community which helped them out of bonded labour and to modernity. This book figures in the first scene of Kabali where Kabali is found reading it from his prison just before he is to be released. There was an increase in the readership of the biography after the release of the film. The community reviews in the social cataloguing website Goodreads, the largest social network for readers, documents how a super star like Rajnikanth can become a reason for a book to get its due. A number of readers thank Pa Ranjith for introducing them to this book through Kabali. The Dalit popular in Kabali spills out in such various ways and thereby creating larger venues of engaging with caste, its history and its determining role in the making of modernity. Or there is a recovery of the realm of the Dalit literary

3 which had often been obscured and neglected by mainstream reading public. The teacher who teaches Chokhamela in Fandry and the professor who teaches poets like Namdheo Dhasal in Sairat are part of such reinstatement. The film has also evoked memories of to the Dharmapuri riots in 2012, in which caste Hindu mobs ransacked Dalit villages after a Vanniyar woman and a Dalit man eloped. I see Kabali as a sort of a response to the hate politics that the Pattali Makkal Katchi unleashed in Tamil Nadu after Dharmapuri, says Dalit scholar Stalin Rajangam. 2 Kaala, on its part, is the story of Dharavi from the perspective of a community of migrants, many of whom had come from Thirunalveli and settled there. One finds that it is different from its depictions as the underworld of crime and cruelty or the underbelly of the financial capital which houses destitution, diseases and despair. This is how Dharavi has been imagined onscreen be it Bollywood films, including those like Slumdog Millionaire or South Indian films like Tamil (as in Nayakan) or Malayalam films. Kaala is however about the lives in Dharavi, their hip hop youth, working men and women and studying children. It is about celebrating wedding anniversaries alongside the fight for their land and rights. Kari Kaala, is the much loved don of Dharavi, who leads and instigates the settlers there who include Tamil migrants, in their fight against plans of eviction by Manu builders, a construction company headed by Haridev Haridada, who also happens to be a union minister. The film ends on a note of optimism as Kaala, who was supposedly killed and taken care of, emerges from different corners of the multitude and attack Haridada, eventually killing him. The subtext of Ram-Ravana is evoked with the dark skinned Ravanas avenging the fair Rams and his historians, writing themselves back to history, to the present. Dharavi becomes the site that witnesses this ideological shift wherein black, blue, red and green colours are lashed out at the mundanity of white and narratives of casteist purity associated with it. Rather than feed upon livid lives of oppression, depravity and passivity Kaala s frames throb with colours of Dalit Bahujan life and survival. The land issue and eviction of Dalits from their homelands in the name of development, hithertho unaddressed in cinema becomes pivotal to Kaala. Rupesh Kumar s article Kaala: A Dalit Political Expression, discusses the film in the backdrop of the thirty or so Dalit families in Thuruthi, who are under the threat of 2 Sruthisagar Yamunan in an interview with Dalit scholar Stalin Rajangam;

4 eviction as part of realignment of the National Highway. The film recovers memories of communal unrest caused by external instigation in On December , the Shiv Sainiks took out a cycle rally through Dharavi celebrating the destruction of the Babri Masjid in Ayodhya which was the provocation for the communal rioting that followed, remembers Kalpana Sharma in her write up on Kaala. 3 Even as the film s representation of the religious Muslim as gullible, as one who can be easily provoked into a communal rife, remains problematic, the cinematic Dalit popular becomes a platform for the recovery of histories of communalism, discrimination based on caste, inequal distribution of resources including land etc critiquing a mainstream narrative of a modern, secular and democratic India. As a person who believes that learning the vocabulary of the mainstream is indispensible for the popularity of a medium as cinema, 4 Pa Ranjith s films inevitably bear the contradictions of representing caste in a secularised realm. The need for incorporating a fair skinned Huma Qureshi inorder to assert the uniqueness and rights of a dark skinned wife and including a narrative of rape to subdue a revolting woman even as the women in these films are otherwise bracingly different from existing clichés, repeating of stereotypes of dark skinned villains and the skepticisms associated with the religious Muslim figure may be seen as part of such contradictions. 3 Kalpana Sharma. In Pa Ranjith s Kaala, A Glimpse of What Dharavi Truly is-and What it Could Have Been; 18 June Arun Janardhanan. Jaathiyude Bhoothakannadikal: Pa Ranjith Parayunnu-An Interview with Pa Ranjith;

5 Works Cited Dickens, Lenny. Spectacle Spaces: Production of Caste in Recent Tamil Films. South Asian Popular Culture. 25 October Kumar, Rupesh. Kaala: Oru Dalit Rashtreeya Prakyapanam. Madhyamam Weekly. 25 June Shende, Vinay. Kaala: A Bahujan Grammar for Cinema. Round Table India: For an Informed Ambedkar Age. w=article&id=9394:kaala-as-seen-by-a-commonperson&catid=119:feature&itemid=132; 14 June 2018.