PS Vinothraj: Filmmaker Profile

PS Vinothraj, whose last film Pebbles was selected as the Indian entry for the 94th Oscars, premiered The Adamant Girl at the Berlin Film Festival 2024. Like Pebbles, it makes astonishing use of Tamil Nadu’s unique light, sounds, landscape and even animals.

PS Vinothraj burst onto the indie cinema scene when his directorial debut Koozhangal (Pebbles) won the Tiger award, the top prize at the International Film Festival of Rotterdam in 2021. Late that year, it was India' entry to the Academy Awards. In February 2024, his second feature Kottukkaali (The Adamant Girl) premiered at the Berlin International Film Festival, and all five screenings across the city were sold out. 

When I meet Vinothraj in person, he is all smiles after a wonderfully engaged post-screening discussion with the audience at Arsenal, one of Berlin’s many thriving arthouse cinemas. At his hotel in Mitte two days later, with his co-producer Kalai Arasu as our interpreter, it becomes clear that the smiles are part of his persona.

Vinothraj wears his experience lightly, but the 35-year-old’s journey into filmmaking has taken unimaginable grit and clarity. Compelled to drop out of school in Class IV, he worked as a child labourer in a Madurai flower market and a Tiruppur singlet factory before landing a job at a Chennai DVD shop, where he started watching three world cinema DVDs a day. The aesthetic of Vinothraj’s films—long takes, minimal background music, no songs, zero melodrama—may have been shaped by this immersion.

He beams when I mention the late Greek director Theo Angelopoulos, whose 1998 Palm D’or winner Eternity and a Day he has called his favourite film. His favourite filmmaker, he says, is Tony Gatlif, French director of many films on the Roma community. A picture of Gatlif, a 70-something man with grey hair and a warm smile, is Vinothraj’s phone wallpaper. Gatlif’s films and Eternity and a Day are “travelling films”, which Vinothraj says “will always be my inspiration”. But while admiring these European masters, his cinematic material is drawn from his immediate surroundings, both physical and socio-political. Formally, too, he makes astonishing use of Tamil Nadu’s unique light, sounds, landscape and even animals: a stray puppy, a sacrificial rooster, a mute but recalcitrant bull.

Pebbles featured an angry alcoholic called Ganapathy (stunningly played by Karuththadaiyan) who drags his son Velu (Chellapandi) out of school, so that they can go fetch his wife from her natal village 13 km away. Vinothraj mapped their journey, much of it on foot, onto a barren landscape of searing white heat that echoed Ganapathy’s relentless rage. Nothing really ‘happens’ during the 75-minute film (too short for an interval, which prevented a theatrical release in Tamil Nadu); it is about the mundaneness of this violence. But you cannot but be gripped by the father-son dynamic, with the child’s reaction to his father swinging between fear and subversion, and often settling for a watchful silence.

Silence is also the only weapon left to Meena in The Adamant Girl—if one can call it a weapon. Malayalam actor Anna Ben brings to the titular character a sense of mental fatigue combined with the last dregs of physical resistance. Meena is often in frame, in a moving vehicle. But she stays unmoving, even in her expression—except in one shot where she walks free, in her mind’s eye. And she speaks only one sentence in 100 minutes. We learn early in the film that she is ‘promised’ in marriage to Pandi (played with scarily believable aggression by popular Tamil actor Soori) but is in love with a boy she met in college.

Having failed to talk her out of it, both families decide to take Meena to a shrine where the ghost of her lover will be exorcised out of her. Her silence, Vinothraj told me, is because “the film starts after she has tried everything else”; one imagines the arguing and yelling and weeping that went before. Thinking about it later, I wonder if having a mostly silent protagonist also aids in Vinothraj’s quest, as he put it to me, to make films “that keep you visually engaged, that keep your attention despite whatever language barrier may exist.”
In other words, pure cinema.

Kottukkaali certainly is. It begins with a woman bathing, fully-clothed, at a public tap. Before seeing her face, we have felt her tears. Walking back home in the pre-dawn light, she passes by a covered bike and a buffalo, both somehow evoking the must-always-be-clothed bodies of women. Vinothraj takes us quietly by the hand into this cloaked world of women’s sadness, from Meena’s crying mother to Meena, whose tears have run dry. Parallel to it, often its cause, is the world of men’s anger, represented here by Pandi, his throat coated with a white lime paste because he is so hoarse from shouting.

Many have read the film as feminist, and it is. But Vinothraj’s clarity about everything that’s wrong with this universe does not preclude a profound understanding of everyone in it. “The film is about the internal war between Pandi and Meena. Neither of them is bad,” he told me, going on to explain how even minor characters fit into his cinematic vision. “The small boy in the rickshaw is like Pandi in childhood, a good boy. The little girl who drags the bull away is how Meena would have been in her childhood. Meenakshi was the ancient queen of Madurai. Pandi, Pandian, is also a historical king. So in my backstory, right from childhood, they’ve been ‘the king’ and ‘the queen’. Pandi would have felt responsible for Meena.”

Fictional backstories aside, his scripts often draw on things that have happened to people he knows. For Kottukkaali, his sisters contributed a lot of what became the women’s dialogue. “Everyone is very supportive (of my process). In fact, they joke: ‘Don’t get into any other trouble, or he’ll make another film!’”

His films, too, show a close-knit community where people look out for each other. But they also reveal a deeply patriarchal society: its rituals, its alcoholism, the lack of freedom for women, verbal and physical violence by men. Does he ever worry about the critical gaze he turns on a society he knows so intimately, exposing it to an international audience? “There are positive things in each culture, but also a few (negative) things that need to be addressed. As a responsible artist, it is my job to send a message across, so that these things will stop,” says Vinothraj. “There are no heroes and villains, only the social situation that is creating the conflict.”

First published in Moneycontrol, 10 Mar 2024. 

What Paava Kadhaigal tells us about pride and honour

My Mirror column:

A new Tamil anthology film makes a flawed but genuine attempt to grapple with the tragic effects of our national preoccupation -- ‘family honour’.

At the very end of Love Panna Uttranum, Vignesh Shivan's segment in the newly-released Tamil anthology film Paava Kadhaigal (‘Sinful Tales’), there is a textual postscript that tells us what happened to the characters after the film ends. One of the lines reads: “Veerasimman managed to escape from the village and went to live with his daughter in Paris”. I scoffed at it mentally when I read it. Because Veerasimman is the terrible casteist father from whom his daughters must escape if they are to live anything resembling free lives.

 

Love Panna Uttranum has many problems, not the least of which is the director's inability to handle the vast tonal shifts he’s going for, leaving his audience swinging between high tragedy and low comedy. But as the compendium's four tales about 'honour' drew to a close, I realised that Shivan's postscript wasn't as inaccurate as I'd thought: It is South Asian fathers (and often mothers) who need to find a way to escape the vice-like grip of patriarchy and caste; from social chains that bind them so tightly that they can no longer feel the blood running in their veins -- literally. If they break the codes of caste, community and gender, it seems that their children are no longer their children.

 

As I watched Paava Kadhaigal's various sets of parents harden their hearts against their offspring -- and worse, try to control their lives -- I kept thinking of the old Kahlil Gibran poem from his bestselling work The Prophet. “Your children are not your children,” it goes. “They are the sons and daughters of Life's longing for itself. They come through you but not from you. And though they are with you, yet they belong not to you.” The cool kids probably don't read Gibran any more, but it remains desperately resonant in the India of 2021, where our politicians know we'll eat out of their hands if they cater to our meanest, most controlling instincts -- especially with regard to our daughters. Ergo, the 'love jihad' bogey, recently given legal form.

 

This particular film happens to deal with Tamilian families. But parents across South Asia cling ferociously to the idea that their children are nothing but miniature versions of themselves; robotic agents put on earth only to carry out their bidding – or actually, the bidding of that ogre called society. Individual freedom can only seem an impossible dream when you've internalised the social order completely, and we see it in some of the most affecting films of recent years, from Nagraj Manjule's searing 2016 Marathi hit Sairat  to the ringing refrain that Pakistani-Norwegian filmmaker Iram Haq made the title of her harrowing 2017 film, What Will People Say?.

 

But treating these parents as embodiments of evil -- as at least two of the segments here do -- is not useful. It seems to me crucial to look at the moments which even these narratives leave open, moments at which we see their vulnerabilities and the horrific double binds they seem to find themselves in. Paava Kadhaigal's first narrative, Thangam, directed by Sudha Kongara, puts the harshest lines in a mother's mouth when she tells her son Sathaar (a wonderful Kalidas Jayaram), who identifies as a woman and is saving for a sex change operation, to die so that his sisters can live 'normal' lives, ie find suitable boys to marry. In the last segment, Vetri Maaran's Oor Iravu, too, we see the real and depressing effects on the rural siblings of a courageous young woman (Sai Pallavi) who has chosen to marry her Dalit partner and migrate to the city. “After you eloped, Dad pulled us out of college,” says one younger sister to her when they meet two years later. Another sister's husband apparently left her when he heard there was a half-Dalit baby joining the family he had clearly married into for its unblemished upper-caste status. The younger brother, meanwhile, is publicly mocked for his sister's elopement to the extent that he drops out of college.

 

The third segment, directed by Gautham Menon, in which a young girl is raped, deals with the bogey of honour in a different context -- that of actual sexual violence. But here, too, the most interesting thing attempted by the film is the mother, whose traditional ideas of sexual purity as something that women must safeguard “like a temple”, push her brain in frightening directions.

 

Menon's short film feels muddled, though, in its attempt at showing us all sorts of different reactions. The brother's idea of vengeance and the mother's of penitence and surrender to fate, contrast with the father's shame as a failed protector, before finally embracing his vulnerability enough to allow the daughter to move on.

 

The most frightening character in the film, brought to unforgettable life by the marvellous Prakash Raj, is the father who steels himself against his favourite daughter. “She chose you over all of us, and I carried on as if she'd never been born,” he tells her husband with a muted bitterness. And yet it is this same father's attachment to the daughter that leads to tragedy. As he says to Sai Pallavi's Sumathi as the film draws to its excruciating close, “If I could let you go, I would.”

We really need that Gibran poem.

 

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 3 Jan 2021

In vino veritas – I

My Mirror column:

Jayaprakash Radhakrishnan’s deceptively simple film The Mosquito Philosophy (2019) leaves you asking, who really are the suckers?

A drinking session becomes a place for revelations in The Mosquito Philosophy (2019).

About ten minutes into Jayaprakash Radhakrishnan's sort-of-mumblecore Tamil film The Mosquito Philosophy (2019), a man complains to his friend that the liquor shop overcharged him, but no-one in the crowd supported his case against the cheating shopkeeper. “Do they have no self-respect or guts?” Suresh mutters. “Well, it is to gain self-respect and guts that we drink!” laughs his friend JP (played by Radhakrishnan himself). “Don't expect anything from the men in a liquor shop until they're high!”

It feels like a throwaway line, just a bit of humour. But as we get deeper into the nightlong drinking session that is the film's chosen milieu, we are made to realise that alcohol does serve that purpose, among others. In fact, The Mosquito Philosophy feels almost inspired by that old Latin proverb, In vino veritas - In wine, there is truth. As an English poet called Abraham Fraunce put it as far back in 1592: “Wine moderately taken maketh men joyfull; he is also naked; for, in vino veritas: drunkards tell all, and sometimes more then all.”

The four men have met because Suresh has some news that deserves a celebration. The only single one in their group, he’s finally decided to get married. But he is just a little cagey about telling his friends, and it soon becomes clear why: he has sworn for years that he would only have a love marriage. Now, at forty, he has made a decision to accept an arranged marriage prospect. It's all to make his mother happy, he insists – and then it turns out that the girl chosen by his mother is fifteen years his junior.

What makes the film successful is its quality of creeping up on you, rather than bombarding you with the things it wants you to think about. The predictable wife jokes at the start ease the viewer gently into a familiar middle class Indian milieu dominated by them. “Oh don't worry, no wife thinks her husband's friends can ever be a good influence,” says JP, and over the course of the film, each man in turn gets mocked for being afraid of his spouse. “Suresh, that's life after marriage,” the friends say to the soon-to-be-married man when one of them rushes back home to eat because his wife hasn't given him permission to be out for dinner.

JP seems the best adjusted of the men with respect to his wife – she is in and out of the room while his friends drink, and even joins in the conversation occasionally. But he has also asked his friends over for a drinking session without first checking with her - if he asks her first, he chuckles to Suresh, she is likely to refuse. Again, it's a throwaway moment – but it finds a larger echo when we hear over the course of the evening that JP followed his wife around for nine months before she agreed to marry him. What he describes as a college romance, a drunken Suresh now points out, could well be understood as stalking – JP simple didn't take no for an answer.

Is there is something worrying about a world in which husbands must ask their wives' "permission" to go have a drink or hang out with their friends? Yes, but there is also something worrying about a world in which a twenty-four-year old woman finds herself in the position of accepting an arranged marriage with a not-particularly-attractive man over fifteen years her senior. There is something particularly sad about the fact that a man who isn't even married already feels put upon, not excited, when his fiance calls him to make weekend plans. 

"Truth is like fire, it glows and burns," Suresh quotes the artist Gustav Klimt as having once said. The scalding truth of this society is that men and women continue to look at each other as separate species, each brought up to perceive the other as a creature that needs to be tricked into captivity -- not lived with in mutually defined freedom. It is no coincidence that even the alcoholic haze that lets home truths be spoken is closed off to one gender. 

(The first part of a two-part column. The second part is here.)

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 15 Nov 2020.

Life in the shadow of death

My Mirror column:
Thinking about how AIDS has been represented on the screen, from the USA to France to India, throws up a set of tragic tropes, with one exhilarating exception

The award-winning actor Nahuel Perez Biscaryat in Robin Campillo’s 120 Beats Per Minute 

In May this year, a Tamil film called Sila Samayangalil (Sometimes) was released on Netflix. Directed by Priyadarshan, the film is set in the waiting room of a medical clinic. It gets certain things right, deftly establishing situations and characters.


A salwar-kameez-clad receptionist (Sriya Reddy) arrives insensitively late, given that people have been queuing since 6.30 am, and proceeds to talk on her cellphone. The depersonalised waiting room is typically unwelcoming, with its immovable rows of uncomfortable chairs, its notices about rules and timings, and the annoying automated voice-over in which counter token numbers are announced.



As is so often the case in India, however, that sanitised veneer of bureaucratic efficiency stops short of ensuring a functioning water dispenser, or preventing bribery. Despite a tendency to over-dramatise his actors' responses, Priyadarshan produces a sense of how this shared experience (the lack of drinking water, the collective irritation at the receptionist) shapes this rather motley crew into a community – especially as the seven people who’re waiting realise they’re all here for the results of the same thing: an HIV test.

There are six men and one woman, each with different reasons why they think they might have contracted the virus. Ashok Selvan’s relatively calm Balamurugan volunteers his story first, then Prakash Raj’s petrified Krishnamurthy, and so on – until we, the audience, have been given a whole range of possible ways in which AIDS might spread. By making the talkative Bala a pharmacist, the film takes the easy route to information dissemination, telling rather than showing.


I was struck by how wary Priyadarshan seems to be of his viewers’ moral judgement, how little he trusts them to sympathise or forgive anything that might depart from the monogamous heterosexual norm. Some of the male characters – though by no means all – are allowed a single ‘mistake’, but even so, they judge themselves very harshly.


Others have tragic stories about blood transfusions and saving accident victims. As for the sole woman character, she is visualised as being infected in the most non-agentive way possible – as a victim of anonymous sexual violence.


There is, of course, nothing ‘wrong’ with any of these narratives. All of them gesture to real possibilities where a person might get HIV without having, as the film’s characters repeatedly say, “done anything wrong”. But it is worth noting how studiously a film released two months before the Indian Supreme Court decriminalised consensual gay sex by scrapping the relevant parts of Section 377 avoids the slightest mention of men having sex with men.


I came upon Sometimes last week, when thinking about World AIDS Day, which was instituted in 1988 by the World Health Organisation, and thus celebrated its thirtieth year on December 1. And I couldn’t help but think about how far we are from making a film like 120 BPM – Beats Per Minute, Robin Campillo’s award-winning 2017 film about ACT UP activists and the battle against AIDS in 1980s Paris.

120 BPM, among whose many richly-deserved awards is the Golden Peacock at last year’s IFFI, is both a pulsating account of a political movement and a profoundly affecting personal narrative. Campillo moves with consummate fluency between brilliantly detailed scenes of political agitation and intensely intimate scenes that take in love and sex, friendship and family. And yes, death. For death is what hovers over all the AIDS films that have ever been made, right from the originary 1993 moment of Philadelphia. Its early Hindi ‘adaptation’, Phir Milenge (2004), in which Ron Nyswaner’s protagonist, played by Tom Hanks, was split into two characters, played by Shilpa Shetty and Salman Khan, and Salman died. As did Sanjay Suri in My Brother Nikhil (2005), an early AIDS drama in which Onir managed to give Hindi cinema an openly gay and yet sympathy-worthy protagonist, even if it had to be wrapped up inside Juhi Chawla’s saccharine-sweet sister act for public consumption. At this year’s IFFI, I also watched Yen Tan’s painful 2018 drama, 1985, in which a young Texan man goes home for Christmas but cannot bring himself to tell his family that he is gay, let alone what he really needs to, that he has AIDS.


1985 and My Brother Nikhil have many tropes in common: the ultra-masculine unsympathetic father, the clueless childhood girlfriend who can’t understand why the protagonist won’t reciprocate her love, the devoted monogamous partner – and the close sibling who will be the one to remember the hero after he’s gone.

Young people living under the shadow of death: that is what unites these disparate films. In Sometimes, too, it is the possible death of innocents that the film plays on. The AIDS film repeatedly shows how love in these situations comes with the terrible condition of illness: taking care of the one you love is a literal responsibility.


120 BPM, too, is tragic, with perhaps the most excruciating and moving depiction of slow death by disease that I have seen on film. And yet, somehow, what the film leaves one with is a remembered energy, a sense of endlessly articulate debate and endlessly flamboyant action, stretching from past to future.

In one of 120 BPM’s many stunning moments between the protagonists Nathan and Sean, Nathan describes being 19 and driving from Aix to Marseilles with an older man he has just met. The highway is jam-packed with cars, and Nathan imagines dying there, in a car accident, and their blackened bodies being discovered, and people wondering what they were to each other. It is a strange, dark vision, and yet acutely appropriate to the AIDS film – a vision in which desire and death, anonymity and intimacy, past and future are forever, and tragically, intertwined.

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 19 Dec 2018.

Studio portraits

My Mirror column:

The mid-20th century Tamil film world of SS Vasan and Gemini Studios had a marvellous chronicler in the late Ashokamitran: the third of a multi-part column.

Dr. Rajendra Prasad with the founder of Gemini Studios SS Vasan (left) during his visit to the Studios in connection with the Mahatma Gandhi Memorial Fund. Madras, April 1949. Photo credit: Times Group.

Last week, discussing Perumal Murugan’s novel Current Show and Shenbagam Ramaswamy’s 1981 story ‘The Saga of Sarosadevi’, this column had suggested that modern Tamil literary fiction might be particularly invested in popular cinema as a symbolic space for the interplay of dream and reality.

In that context, it is worth noting that one of the undisputed masters of modern Tamil fiction, the late Ashokamitran, famously spent 14 years from 1952 to 1966 working for Gemini Studios. Run by the legendary entrepreneur SS Vasan, Gemini Studios was for nearly 30 years from 1940 a fulcrum of film production not just for Madras but India. Ashokamitran wrote enjoyably of his time there in a series of essays first commissioned in 1984 by Pritish Nandy as editor of the Illustrated Weekly of India, later published as My Years With Boss (2002).

The ‘Boss’ of the title was, of course, Vasan. Why the head of a Tamil cinema studio in the 1940s came to be called Boss (even by his family) when he “had never worn a trenchcoat, brandished a gun or chain-smoked cigars” is explained by the fact that Vasan’s first deputy, an American called William J Moylan, called him that, and the appellation stuck.

The book is full of wonderful anecdotes from a time of great cross-fertilisation of ideas. The winds of literature, theatre and politics all swept through Gemini Studios. One of Ashokamitran’s drollest tales involves the famous poet Stephen Spender arriving at Gemini Studios. The existential mystery of what “an English poet [is] doing in a film studio which makes Tamil films for the simplest sort of people” is met by such authoritative speculations as “He is not a poet. He is an editor. That’s why the Boss is giving him such a big reception.” The respect for editors was self-explanatory, since SS Vasan was also editor of the popular Tamil weekly Ananda Vikatan.

More than the event, though, it is Ashokamitran’s poker-faced laying out of the setting that is beguiling. “Gemini Studios was the favourite haunt of poets like SDS Yogiar, Sangu Subramanyam, Krishna Sastry and Harindranath Chattopadhyaya. It had an excellent mess which supplied good coffee at all times of day and for most part of the night. Those were the days when Congress rule meant Prohibition and meeting over a cup of coffee was rather satisfying entertainment,” he writes. Then comes the sentence of true genius: “Barring the office boys and a couple of clerks, everybody else at the Studios radiated leisure, aprerequisite for poetry.”

Ashokamitran’s own specific work as a young man, which he relates with relish, was to copy out, in long hand, thousands of articles and reviews from the magazines and trade journals to which Gemini Studios subscribed but which “were not to be cut up”. “If Baburao Patel had only known how I rewrote the majority of his editorials and the Bombay Calling pages of FilmIndia, he would surely have made me an ingredient of his later-day homeopathic preparation, Shivsakthi (which he qualified as ‘the tonic of gods’).”

Ashokamitran’s more general location in the Studios was in the Story department, “comprising a lawyer and an assembly of writers and poets”. His brilliantly deadpan take on the lawyer “looking alone and helpless—a neutral man in an assembly of Gandhiites and khadiites” is followed in natural progression by the story of how one day “The Boss closed down the Story Department and this was perhaps the only instance in all human history where a lawyer lost his job because the poets were asked to go home.”

In his fiction, Ashokamitran took this milieu and made of it something that could alternate between deadpan humour and ineffable tragedy. In the magisterial story ‘Tiger Artiste’, for instance, he describes the visit to the Studios of a man who describes himself as ‘Tagar-Foight Kader’. He turns out to have been sent by one agent Vellai who rounds up extras for crowd scenes. Told that they aren’t casting any crowd scenes at the moment, the man looks disheartened, but then persuades the narrator and his associate, an ex-cop called Sharma, to watch him do his thing: impersonate a tiger.

The men are reluctant at first, but the emaciated-looking Kader produces a performance whose ferocity is matched by its life-threateningness. “On his fours, he sprang higher than a man’s height and planted himself on the two-inch wide ledge above our heads. Then, clutching the iron railing of the ventilator, he let out yet another roar.” The air of torpor in the Story Department office is entirely ruptured. “Careful, ‘pa, careful, ‘pa,” shouts Sharma.

Then Kader returns to the ground – and to reality. He falls at Sharma’s feet, weeping. He has had no work for months. “‘My wife has asked me not come anywhere near our house, saar.’ This was the man who had been a tiger a few minutes ago.”

The story is about the widespread poverty from which people came looking for jobs in films, but also about the illusory quality of all performance. The cinema, again, is a place of betrayal.

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 27 May 2018.

Life, Tamil cinema style

My Mirror column:

What does cinema stand for in Tamil fiction? The second of a multi-part column on films and life in Tamil Nadu.

Last week, as an absolute outsider, I took the liberty – and risk – of speculating on the subject of cinema and Tamil Nadu. Not on the state of cinema in Tamil Nadu –about which I know far too little to say anything of value –but Tamil Nadu as a state of cinema. My route into the subject was Tamil fiction, starting with Perumal Murugan’s novel Current Show.

I ended the previous column on the cusp of a tale being told by the old Watchman in Current Show. The story in question was of how old man Poosariappan came to build the Vijaya Theatre that is the novel’s grim, dark locale. 

Poosari was really rich then—had his own weaving mill. Had a car and driver even then. He was planning to build a grain godown. One day, he sees his daughter-in-law, Sadaiyan’s wife, dressing up to go out. Looking at her, you wouldn’t say she’s from his caste. Fair and round, like a ripe tomato. Poosari couldn’t bear to see this red tomato going out like that—powder on her face, nice clothes... . Before he knew what he was doing, his mouth blurted out: ‘What’s all this dressing-up? Like some cheap night-dancer?’ They say she got really angry. So angry she yelled back, forgetting his age, ‘I’m going to see a film. Know what a cinema theatre is? Ever been inside one?’

Poosariappan felt so slighted by his daughter-in-law’s taunt that he decided to convert his intended grain godown into a cinema theatre. In another variant of the tale, it was Poosari’s mistress in Mallasamudram who gave him the idea –to get back at his daughter-in-law – and the theatre was named Vijaya after her. Another version had Poosari building Vijaya Theatre to get back at his Gounder friend, owner of Krishna Talkies, who had made fun of Poosari for thinking that a theatre was a tent with dancing women in it.

The various origin myths which Murugan stitches together here reveals how deeply cinema has become part of warp and weft of Tamil everyday life, embedded into the existing dynamics of caste, class and gender. The theatre represents sophistication, modernity, but is also redolent with the illicit, the sexual. For a man like Poosari, moneyed but not urbane, a cinema theatre is good business, but it isn’t only that. Becoming a cinema owner seems to stand in for control of recalcitrant women, somehow making a claim to masculinity and caste status by owning a hall in which a minute’s worth of soft porn plays every day. Years later, Poosari has never seen a single film fully, says the Watchman – only that minute of porn.

The cinema also makes its presence felt in several short stories in the mammoth collection The Tamil Story: Through the times, through the tides, edited by Dilip Kumar and translated by Subashree Krishnaswamy. In Prapanchan’s crisply narrated ‘In a Town, Two Men’, an urban landscape of new cinema theatres forms the backdrop of a tale about an unpaid loan. There is a faint whiff of sarcasm that attends this geography; a sense that there might be more cinemas than homes in this universe. “The huts were razed and they built a cinema hall there. No one knew where the hutment dwellers had disappeared. Perhaps they were living inside the cinema hall.”

A very different spin on the idea of living in the cinema theatre is provided by another story in the collection, 'The Saga of Sarosadevi' (1981). Shenbagam Ramaswamy’s story begins with a woman called Bhagyam who is watching a film when the baby in her stomach decides it is time to come out into the universe. “It was the time when actor Sarojadevi was mouthing the song sung by playback singer P Susheela: ‘Thangathile Oru Kuraiyirundalam (Even if there is a flaw in the gold...)’. A stern voice ordered from the back, ‘Sit down, di.’ ‘Move your feet. Make way for this akka. She’s got labour pains.’ Ponnamma had to announce this loudly in the dark of the cinema hall.”

The faceless women in the surrounding seats let Bhagyam and Ponnamma out, though not without some sarcastic grumbling: “Look at her coming to watch a film at the time of labour!” “Such a craze for films, is it?” “Perhaps she thought if she delivers in the cinema hall, she’ll get fame.” But there isn’t enough time to get to the hospital. A midwife is rushed in, and “[b]y the time Sarojadevi and Sivaji Ganesan were united with their child in the film, Bhagyam had given birth to a girl.”

The hapless child is named Sarosadevi (that is how Ponnamma pronounces the name of the heroine) but her time on earth is nasty, brutish and short. Life offers her none of the expansiveness and luxury conjured by her name. One wonders if this might be one of the recurring ways in which the trope of cinema appears in modernist Tamil fiction – to show us a population that dreams of cinema, only to then peel back the curtain and reveal the unvarnished grimness of life?

[To be continued]

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 20 May 2018.

Big screen, writ larger

My Mirror column:

Life and cinema in Tamil Nadu seem to intersect more than in most places. The first of a multi-part column on a unique cultural universe.

Wellingdon Theatre in Madras screening the film Parthiban Kanavu in the 1960s

Over the century and a bit that it has existed, cinema has successfully established its dominion over most parts of the world. Still, as I found myself wondering for the umpteenth time during a recent visit to Tamil Nadu, is it likely that there exists another corner of the globe as deeply steeped in film?

The way in which this cinematic state is usually marked is by noting the intertwining of the Tamil world of film with that of politics. Dravidian cultural nationalism came of age alongside film production in the state, and since then the relationship between popular cinema and populist politics has been a shaping influence on twentieth century Tamil culture and history. It is an absolutely remarkable fact that the office of Chief Minister of Tamil Nadu has been occupied almost continuously since 1967 by people with a film background (up until the present incumbent). These comprise two screenwriters – CN Annadurai and M Karunanidhi; one actor – MG Ramachandran (MGR); and two actresses – Janaki Ramachandran (VN Janaki) and J Jayalalithaa.What does it mean that Tamils constantly elect their film folk? Is this a love of the big screen writ larger still, upon life itself? It certainly feels like it, and that is what makes Tamil Nadu unique. That constant feedback loop between everyday life and cinema exists all over India, but one senses something qualitatively different about the level at which it works in TN. One of the ways this power is expressed is in the cinema’s lasting colonisation of urban space –or rather in the tribute city-dwellers still seem to willingly pay to the film god. One still cannot turn a corner in any town without encountering a film poster, or more likely three.

The state’s literary sorts have also paid tribute to the cinema in plenty. As a non-Tamil reader, sadly, I must depend on my meagre reading of translations to make this claim. The great Perumal Murugan has an early book called Nizhal Muttram (1993), brought out in V Geetha’s English translation by Tara Books in 2004 under the title Current Show. It revolves around a young man called Sathivel, who works selling cold drinks at a beat-up cinema theatre in an obscure Tamil highway town.


Each chapter of Murugan’s strange, disjointed but striking book begins with an italicised timeline which is almost always connected to the time and place of the theatre. “ Like a giant snake, the queue passages twist and wind their way. It is always dark inside them. Sometime, chips of light get past the queue doors and flee into the theatre.” One particular queue passage is never opened to the public, because it was originally built for those who wanted “Sofa Ticket: Rs 2.00”. As there had never been enough customers for Sofa Tickets, the passage had become the “boys’ room”.

In Murugan’s telling, the cinema theatre emerges as its own universe: its dark interiors an alternative to the harsh sunlight of the everyday world, and its comfortingly repetitive cyclical clock a reprieve from the inevitable onward march of real time. “ In a few minutes the counters will open for the night show. Already, there are crowds at the gate. For a film such as this one, there is no need to worry. The seats fill up, though it has been running for a week already.” Or this, where he details the routines of the players for the successive acts that make up the day’s performance: “ The Betelnut-man lives close to the theatre. He leaves as soon as he shuts down late in the evening. The Teashopman is from Morepalayam, but he has a cycle which he rides home after the interval. He only returns in the afternoon of the next day. The Soda-man prefers to sleep the night at the theatre. He usually asks for his ramshackle cot to be brought out after the interval. He positions it near the stairs.”

The world of Sathi and his companions – some only called ‘Filmreelman’ and ‘Watchman’ – bears some sociological similarity to that of Kannada writer Jayant Kaikini’s story ‘Interval’ that I described in a recent column.

But here the very history and geography of the land can seem built-up of film theatres: The Filmreel-man, for instance, must carry around boxes of MGR films to distribute on a commission basis, traversing a landscape of names that goes from Pallipalayam to Tiruchengode and onwards – “Finish with one town and move to another” with not “a single free day”. In another conversation, the building of a new theatre called Flower King brings on the ancient Watchman’s reminiscences about how the book’s Vijaya Theatre came to be. “There is silence all around, only the rustling sounds of hands moving over posters. Who doesn’t love a tale?” Who doesn’t, indeed?

[To be continued]

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 14 May 2018.

Book Review: Eighty eight ways to read Tamil literature, one story at a time

A book review published in Scroll: 

Neil Gaiman once described short stories as “journeys you can make to the far side of the universe and still be back in time for dinner.” The Tamil Story: Through the Times, Through the Tides, translated from the Tamil by Subashree Krishnaswamy and edited by Dilip Kumar, is a whopping collection of stories: capacious enough to work as a mode of immersive slow travel, or as 88 little trips into as many Tamil worlds.

Kumar and Krishnaswamy have worked hard to produce a volume that offers up variety alongside a sense of historical context that is all-too-rare in Indian publishing, especially for literature in translation. So while it's fun to dip in and out of the book's different literary registers and locations, I was glad to be able to look up the writer of a story I particularly enjoyed in the Bio Notes.

And once you've read a bunch of stories, Dilip Kumar's Foreword helps place the writers within his brief history of the Tamil short story: from the earliest experimenters of the first two decades of the twentieth century, to the writers who made their name with the journal Manikodi in the 1930s – Mauni, Pudumaippittan, Ku Pa Rajagopalan – through the sharper, more cynical post-independence decades, and into the 1990s, when Dalit writing began to emerge as a distinct voice.

Across space and time

The stories assembled here range as widely as possible across time and space and milieu. So for instance, there are striking depictions of rural settings, past and present. I found Ki Rajnarayan's humorous 1969 tale The Chair, about how a household acquires their first-ever chair and finds that the whole village has a use for it, full of thoroughly enjoyable detail – the sub-judge who starts everything off by visiting in “suit-boot” rather than coming “like one of us, in a veshti and shirt”, or the grandmother who keeps pressing her own stretched legs.

Na Muthuswamy's Ghee Stain (2004) is starkly different in tone, couched as an artful address to the present-day reader, who is assumed not to be able to visualise – and yet urged to understand – the rural world being described. The whole text feels like a paean to that remembered life – the houses with their courtyards, the screens of coconut fronds, the line of sight from the outer pial to the interior of the kitchen – before the ending disrupts the nostalgic mood entirely.

The city, too, features often, starting early on. The 1921 story Subbayan, for instance, harks back to Victoria Park / Singara Park / Rani Park as the site of a great fire in 1876. Pudumaippittan's The Great Graveyard (1941) is a devastatingly caustic take on urban poverty, describing the Mount Road round-tana as a “good place to die”. There is representation both of the multicultural life of Madras – the Anglo-Indian community in Faraway Land comes across as deeply rooted in this Tamil landscape – and of Tamilians in other places, ranging from Mexico to Bombay.

One of my favourite urban stories in the collection is The Sound of Footsteps, a taut and surprising 1971 story about a working woman whose worries are wifely: “Would he have eaten? She had left only after cooking. She had asked him to eat if it got too late. He would of course be worried... He would be peeping out from the balcony.” The city isn't named, but the protagonist traverses what appears to be a Delhi geography, taking a bus from Gol Market to “Motibhagh I” and walking along an unlit Ring Road.

Themes that return

Certain recurring themes are exactly the ones you might expect from a collection of Tamil writing: caste, electoral politics and the cinema. Reading these stories makes it apparent that caste consciousness hasn't gone anywhere, only acquired altered forms and new spaces for expression. Among the earliest iterations of caste here is in the story Kannan's Grand Mission, in which five women are returning from their bath in the river with “dots of kumkumam on the foreheads of their glowing Brahmin faces” when they meet “untouchables” and abuse them for not stepping aside. Lest this 1925 tale and Ghee Stain fool us into thinking that the pollution-purity aspect of caste is buried in some distant past, the editor includes two razor-sharp contemporary stories – Bama's The Judgement (2003) and Sivakami's A Long Train Journey (1999), in both of which a world with all the accoutrements of modernity – trains, municipal water supply, public schools – is shown up as riven by caste feeling.

In another story from 1977, Jeyanthan's Bonds of the Daytime, a caste feud rocks a government Panchayat office. More devastatingly, caste enters insidiously into the most intimate of spheres, becoming a way for a woman to taunt her husband.

Caste has always lain just beneath the surface of Indian politics, and the stories here are no exception. Nanjil Nadan's story Vote Grabbers is a deliciously sarcastic 1981 account of the partitioning of electoral constituencies to ensure the victory of certain communities: “Anyway, in the constituency, despite dinning in from Standard Five...that this is a secular, egalitarian republic, no one other than a Velaalan who belonged to the Marumakkal community could ever win here. Not even Mahatma Gandhi.” The figure of Mahatma Gandhi appears more literally in Saarvaagan's droll Flag Hoisting in Chinnoor – as a bust “imported from Italy for five hundred rupees”, on which kumkumam must be smeared before every speech.

I also really enjoyed Daily: A Pandian Express, a lovely telling of the day in the life of a political fixer – a man from Madurai who is now 'our man in Madras' for a steady stream of favour-seekers from his hometown.

The cinema hall was clearly the temple of the Tamil twentieth century. It appears as a place of refuge, but also of dramatic action. If Prapanchan's In a Town, Two Men lays out his urban geography in terms of the non-stop sprouting of cinema halls, The Story of Saroja starts its bathos-filled tale with the birth of a baby in the cinema.

The fictional pull of cinema also appears. In the rather odd The First Cheque Arrives, a couple stage a 'murder' to test if the story is convincing enough to bag a film contract. Ashokamitran's affecting Tiger Artiste is a very different take on film's fictional universe: seeing it from the unglamorous perspective of stuntmen and junior artistes, but still managing to imbue the idea of performance with magicality.

Other stories could be transposed easily from Tamil Nadu to elsewhere in India: like several portraits of marriages, from youthful newness (Timepass) to jaded argumentativeness (In Search of Truth). Kumudhini's The Passing of a Day casts an affectionate glance at a whole universe by tracking an old lady who could be considered a busybody or an indispensable pillar of the community. Two stories that deal with animals and their relationship to human life – Dhavamani, in which a woman loses her treasured cow because of a neglectful family, or Shards, about a man who shoes bulls’ hooves for a living – could have been written by Premchand. The familial cruelties administered to poor old Naagu Paati for continuing to have a taste for food – i.e., life – in Journey reminded me of Sarbajaya's sharp-tongued responses to the withered old Pishi in Pather Panchali.

The translation strategy

Subashree Krishnaswamy's translation pays a great deal of attention to language, especially to the figures of speech that bring a world to life. In Journey, for instance, the younger women who taunt Nagu Paati never fail to use the symbolism of food: “to pour ire into my stomach”, “my belly is burning”, “everyone is going, and you are still sitting digesting all this”. As the translator points out in a Note at the start of the book, they have given “a free rein to Indian English”.

This worked well for me in the dialogue, even when it was clear that the characters are speaking in Tamil. So in In a Town, Two Men we find: “What, 'pa, Gopalu, you've completely forgotten, is it?” or in Busting of Bravado: “From then I'm listening, next time, next time... This fellow is a great leader it seems.” In the superbly told The Opposite End by SA Kandasamy, about a physical education teacher with a reputation for temper, we get: “What, saar, you are talking like this and all...” and “Why, saar, all this unnecessary quarrel?”

But much of the time this Tamil English enters into the telling of the tale, spilling over from the dialogue into the narration. For instance, in the same story, we have, “Vasudevan had accused that the brother hadn't shown the correct account”. Or in Faraway Land, we get “They both were neighbours”. In Scribe, “A doubt suddenly appeared: would he ask money for writing?”, or in Their Separate Ways, “Very fair she was, almost bloodless.” Or in Vote-Grabbers: “Eight to ten open carts and three fully-covered ones. Besides all these, to go around a crane-white Ambassador car.” This is something of an experiment in translation. To find out if it works to immerse you further in the Tamil universe, or occasionally brings you up short, you'll need to read the book yourself.

Published in Scroll, 2nd July 2016.

Picture This: Studio sagas

My 'Picture This' column for BL Ink:

Two books by Ashokamitran offer a richly storied account of the '50s film world, as seen from Gemini Studios.

An Indian poster for the Gemini Studios extravaganza, Chandralekha (1948)

Another poster for Chandralekha, this one for its international release, makes the film seem like an Indian circus coming to town

Was the studio era in Indian cinema its most colourful, or is it just that it has had the frankest chroniclers? “When Najmul Hassan ran off with Devika Rani, the entire Bombay Talkies was in turmoil,” begins Sa’adat Hasan Manto’s vivid essay on Ashok Kumar. Manto’s sketches of film personalities in Stars from Another Sky offer glimpses of the workings of several major Hindi film studios of the 1930s and ’40s: Filmistan, Bombay Talkies, Hindustan Movietone, V Shantaram’s Pune-based Prabhat.

But Manto did not focus on a particular studio. 

Recently, I came across a book which does. The acclaimed Tamil writer Ashokamitran, it turns out, spent his youth at the Public Relations Department of SS Vasan’s Gemini Studios, which produced huge hits such as Chandralekha, Avvaiyar and Samsaram. In the ’80s, Pritish Nandy, who was then editor of the Illustrated Weekly of India, persuaded Ashokamitran to write a series of reminiscences — in English — about his years at Gemini. These were later published in the form of a (very) slender book called My Years with Boss. It covers only five of those 14 years, but brims with wry, entertaining anecdotes of how things were done at what was then among India’s grandest film studios.

To start with there is Ashokamitran’s description of his own job, which he describes as “respectably insignificant”. It seemed to consist, first and foremost, of cutting out news clippings about the film industry and filing them under various heads from ‘Aarey Milk Colony’ to ‘Zoroastrianism’. “Seeing me sitting at my desk tearing up newspapers day in and day out, most people thought I was doing next to nothing,” he writes. Magazines were not allowed to be cut up, so chosen articles had to be copied out in long hand. “If Baburao Patel had only known how I rewrote the majority of his editorials and the ‘Bombay Calling’ pages of Film India...” writes Ashokamitran.

Other parts of his job are more recognisable: such as bringing out special souvenir volumes before the release of a big film, or dealing with the “assault of the visitors”. Most were turned away with masterfully obfuscatory responses. “But a film studio can’t afford to turn everybody out. It can’t take chances with guests of income tax commissioners and cousins of joint secretaries. Also traffic constables. Or the airlines people.” Ashokamitran mines these visits for a terrific vein of observational humour: “[I would] let them sit on the swivel chairs of the makeup rooms and say, ‘This is the very mirror Madhubala sat in front of’. Visitors ever (sic) could never resist the temptation to adjust their hair.”

Other visitors included some unlikely big names: the Chinese Premier Chou En-lai “sat through an hour’s shooting of a dance by a large princess wriggling with abandon”, while the poet Stephen Spender made a baffling speech. Gemini Studios may not have been quite the place for Spender, but Ashokamitran makes it apparent that SS Vasan, though he may have been a “hundred per cent free enterprise man”, had respect for poets and artistes. One of the book’s highlights is the lifelong battle between Vasan and C Rajagopalachari, over many things including the loyalty of the hugely popular writer Kalki. Another brilliant story involves Vasan’s arrival in Calcutta for the premiere of his star-studded Hindi film Insaniyat — pause here to think about this remarkable world, in which the only film starring both Dilip Kumar and Dev Anand was produced by a Madras studio and premiered in the capital of Bengal — to find that a strange sort of Bengali film, that no one had expected to be more than a stopgap between the previous film and the Gemini production, was running very well. Vasan insisted on the contractual arrangement, and on September 30, 1955, the film was stopped for the release of Insaniyat. But he was intrigued enough to take the unsubtitled reels back to Madras, and Ashokamitran, who saw them soon after in the studio theatre, remembers being stunned. The film was Pather Panchali.

Insaniyat also marked the end of the studio era. Until 1955, Vasan had really been the Boss: all his projects flowed from his own ideas and intuitions, and “[t]he scores of men and women needed for a film were all his employees”. “But from the early 50s, he would have to take into consideration the whims and fancies of men and women who may not have had the slightest feeling for him, or may have been far less mature or wise, but who enjoyed at that moment the adoration of the film-going masses.” The rise of the star-based era also meant the jettisoning of many studio employees — writers, song-writers, musicians, technicians, even actors and actresses.

Ashokamitran describes some of these unsung heroes lovingly. But he also drew on those years to produce a meditative novel called Manasarovar, about the unexpected bond between a studio scriptwriter called Gopal and a Bombay star. The film world that appears here is terribly prosaic, and still shunned by middle-class morality: wives are suspicious of husbands who work in films, even studio drivers judge stars for talking to junior artistes. 

The portrait of tragic hero Satyan Kumar, son of a fruit seller from Peshawar, derives much from the real-life Dilip Kumar, even down to his special relationship with Nehru. It is an odd, melancholic book. Ashokamitran’s unornamented prose sculpts a profound contrast between the scriptwriter’s dry-eyed response to personal tragedy and the star’s near-breakdown, heaving with tears. The actor who must channel grief for practically every film has no idea how to deal with it in real life. The book ends with a final nod to the strangeness of performance. ‘You know how to bathe in a river, don’t you?’ Gopal says to Satyan Kumar, and then adds: ‘Of course you do. You have done it in so many films!’

Published in the Hindu Business Line on on July 31, 2015.

Picture This: Up Close and Real

My BL Ink column this month:

Kaakka Muttai and Kuttram Kadithal, two award-winning films releasing this month, show how fissures in Tamil society are amplified by the media.

A still from M. Manikandan's Kaakka Muttai (The Crow's Egg)

A still from Bramma G.'s Kuttram Kadithal (The Punishment)

Summer is film festival season in Delhi. When the city showers award-winning Indian cinema on you, it’s possible to forget that the skies are raining fire outside. The International Film Festival of India may have jilted us for milder climes, and Osian’s Cinefan left us to our own devices after whetting our appetite for Asian and Arab cinema. But the National Film Festival, organised every summer, screens all the previous year’s national award-winning films at Siri Fort, and the Habitat Centre’s annual film festival, which just completed a decade under the indefatigable U Radhakrishnan, offers the pick of recent regional cinema as well as a retrospective. And the entry is free.

This May, it was Tamil films I found really interesting. One of my favourites was Kaakka Muttai (The Crow’s Egg), written and directed by M Manikandan, and produced by two of Tamil cinema’s current big names: Dhanush, the actor and Vetrimaaran, the critically-acclaimed director of Aadukalam. It is billed as a children’s film and won the national award in that category, as well as earned its two child stars, Ramesh and Vignesh, a thoroughly deserved National Award for Best Child Artiste. But Kaakka Muttai, which released in theatres yesterday, is by no means a film only for children. Yes, it is an uncomplicated story, sensitively told, and not boring for a minute; so children will enjoy it. But the simplicity is deceptive. The premise — that of two little boys from a Chennai slum becoming fascinated by the idea of tasting a pizza — is the basis for a subtle, affecting film about the inequalities we’ve come to take for granted.

Manikandan’s achievement is to show up the grotesqueness of the world we’ve built without ever saying it in words. The pizza parlour that opens across the road from the children’s home, serves pretty ordinary mass-produced pizza. But to the children who’ve never eaten it, the stringy melted cheese surface studded with unfamiliar vegetables looks as exotic as the moon’s. And though they have no idea what a pizza tastes like, the whole world seems to conspire to make it seem they’re missing out on something marvellous. The actor who inaugurates the restaurant and is filmed eating the first slice, the advertisement that makes the cheese look more melty, the astounding price tag of ₹300 — all intend to suggest that pizza must be truly scrumptious. We laugh as the children are taken in by these things. But, in fact, we are also laughing at ourselves, because we are taken in too: the nexus of consumption, advertising and media has us in its grip much more than these children.

The film’s turning point comes when the boys, having finally saved up enough money, arrive proudly to get their pizza. But the manager emerges and gives one of them a resounding slap, knocking him to the ground. Defeated, the boys pick themselves up and go home. But it so happens that another slum child has recorded the whole thing on his phone, setting off a media circus in which politicians and businessmen and local toughs are all vying to mould the narrative to their purpose. The media is inescapable in this arc, but perhaps it comes out looking a little better than in the first half — without the media’s amplification, there would have been no event at all.

A few days later, I watched another Tamil film. Fascinatingly, Kuttram Kadithal (The Punishment), which won the National Award for Best Tamil Film and releases on June 19, also centres on a slum child being slapped. A young female teacher called Merlin, taken aback by a bratty pre-adolescent boy who says he’d kiss her if it were her birthday, slaps him. By some quirk of fate, the boy has a pre-existing medical condition; he falls unconscious, and then into a coma. Sure enough, the media gets involved. However, this time we see its impact not just on the one slapped but also the one who did the slapping.

This is Kaakka Muttai seen from the other side: the middle-class person who slaps the child in Kuttram Kadithal is a frazzled young woman doling out what she thinks is necessary discipline. The film claims to show everyone’s point of view, but Bramma G’s direction tilts us clearly away from the slum child’s uncle, a street thug who walks around with the aura of the power he can marshal.

Kuttram Kadithal is exceptionally well-cast, and the actors bring each and every character to life: from the teacher in favour of sex education to the principal’s wife. The slum child’s mother, who drives an auto, is much more convincing as a working-class person than Kaakka Muttai’s too-urbane mother (Iyshwarya Rajesh). But a loud, distracting background score and a series of soppy songs turn a potentially taut slice-of-life narrative into an indulgent, high-pitched drama.

I preferred the understated neorealism of Kaakka Muttai. But both films offer a startlingly similar view of contemporary Tamil Nadu, as a society so fractured by class (and caste) that it takes only a tiny media spark to start a full-fledged fire.

Published in the Hindu Business Line.