HUM HINDUSTANI: Flavour of a film —J Sri Raman

In the north, Raavan is evil incarnate, and his effigy is burnt during a festival every year. In Tamil Nadu, Raavanan is the anti-hero. Even worshippers of Ram have long seen him as a worthy adversary of the Lord

The other day, half-jokingly, a friend asked, “Why don’t you write on the World Classical Tamil Conference? Your column lacks the southern flavour totally!” He had a point. But the subject he suggested still left me cold.

A film I saw a couple of days back, however, helps me to put in this piece a flavour of not only the south of India but also the north-south divide that keeps figuring periodically in political discussions and polemics.

Before coming to that, a word or two in self-defence. If the south features infrequently in this column, it is for the same reason that makes Gujarat a recurring issue in it. The far right is the columnist’s favourite subject, because he is convinced it is the Indian people’s worst foe, and the south is not its stronghold. It wields power only in one of the four southern states, Karnataka, and we have taken note whenever attacks have been made in the Bharatiya Janata Party-ruled state on allegedly traitorous minorities and tradition-breaking women, even in its capital and India’s ‘silicon valley’ of Bangalore.

As for the Tamil conference held in the textile city of Coimbatore on June 23-27, it is no lack of love for the language that held back the columnist from holding forth on the extravaganza. But it is hard for any true Tamil lover to listen on tirelessly as he or she is told that the language is older and so greater than all other tongues, that the avowed proof of the Mohenjodaro script as proto-Dravidian puts the superiority of the ‘Tamil race’ above all argument and doubt, that the Tamil women will tarnish their image if they break the taboos of the Sangam period (circa 300 BC-300 AD), and so on and so forth.

All this gets more tedious when interspersed with tributes to Tamil Nadu chief minister M Karunanidhi despite the politician’s well-publicised protestations. True, he had started out as a successful scriptwriter and penned some provocative on-screen dialogues. The record still did not and should not have put him on an equal footing with the creators of epics.

The far right parivar (family, including the Bharatiya Janata Party) deserves condemnation for all the crudities and cruelties perpetrated in the name of ‘cultural nationalism’. But the ‘cultural sub-nationalism’ of the kind the conference symbolised represents no counter to the national-level menace.

Very different, however, is the cultural contention that two recently released films, meant for viewers in the country’s two major regions, represent. Much-acclaimed director Mani Ratnam has made two versions — one for Bollywood and the other for Kollywood (as Tamil cinema made in the studios of Kodambakkam in Chennai, capital of the Tamil Nadu state, is known). Bollywood’s ‘Raavan’ has bombed at the box office, while Kollywood’s ‘Raavanan’ has hit the jackpot. Can one say thereby hangs a tale of two cultures?

‘Raavanan’ is the Tamilised form of ‘Raavan’, the adversary of Ram — the hero of ancient Indian epic Ramayan and a major Hindu deity. The story of the epic is widely known all over the subcontinent and even outside. For the uninitiated, however, it is about Sri Lanka’s king Raavan abducting Sita, the beautiful spouse of exiled prince Ram, and the latter slaying him in a battle and liberating her before winning back his lost kingdom of Ayodhya (the city where the pious and devoted soul of the parivar is said to dwell).

The theme triggered off a north-south debate or divide long ago, and the two films perhaps testify to its continuance. In the north, Raavan is evil incarnate, and his effigy is burnt during a festival every year. In Tamil Nadu, Raavanan is the anti-hero. Even worshippers of Ram have long seen him as a worthy adversary of the Lord. The emergence of Dravidian, regional politics in the south saw his elevation as a warrior against the racial Aryan conquerors. The quality of history behind the campaign has been questioned, but it did strike a popular chord in a region that nursed much resentment at perceived neglect by those at the national helm.

Now two reasons have been suggested for the difference in responses to the two films. Quite a few hold Abhishek Bachchan responsible for the audience’s rejection of the Hindi version. It would be unfair to agree without seeing the film, but the actor who did a good job as the founder of the Ambani business empire might not have quite fitted his role in ‘Raavan’. Tamil star Vikram, with several other passion-filled performances before, has certainly revelled in his ‘Raavanan’ role.

The other reason, surmised by many including Vikram, lay in the nuances of the name of the epic character. The title itself may have turned away some of the audience from the theatres screening the film, especially after the high-voltage hyping of an effigy-fit character into a hero of sorts.

Columns will continue to try and answer the conundrum. Meanwhile, it merits notice that both Ravan and Raavanan are metaphors for a tribal rebel. Both Abhishek and Vikram essay the role of someone who fights the powers-that-be, to whom his people, women in particular, are just playthings. There are more than mere shades of the ongoing war against Maoists in India’s tribal terrain, and Mani Ratnam seems to take Arundhati Roy-like sides.

If not called either Raavan or Raavanan, the anti-hero may look like an endearing rebel to some, and an extremist deserving of elimination to others. And this difference in responses would not reflect any inter-regional divide.

The writer is a journalist based in Chennai, India. A peace activist, he is also the author of a sheaf of poems titled At Gunpoint