Something unprecedented happened in Tamil cinema at the beginning of 2005. It was a film released on the Pongal1day, called Kathal (Love), which
became a blockbuster overshadowing all other films including Tirupaachi, starring Vijay, who is the recent heartthrob and heir-apparent to the Super Stardom of Rajni Kanth. What makes the success unusual is that Kathal is a small budget film with blunt, in your face realism; something that when it rarely happens will only be an off beat film with short runs and select screenings but can never aspire to be a blockbuster. However in the case of Kathal not even the aftermath of the tsunami could dampen the sensation the movie made in the box office in the districts worst affected by the cala- mity, as a report in rediff.com claims (Poornima 31 January 2005).
Kathal is a film that deserves a full length analysis rather than my limited discussion of it here as providing token to my larger argument in the paper. It shares some of the credos of Italian neo-realism, e.g. the entire film being shot on location and the casting of large number of non-professional actors (with the exception of the hero and the debutant heroine.) A small boy picked up by the director in the streets of Madurai, who performed so smartly in the film, is reminiscent of De Sica’s child actors. I am not sure that the film would fit the Bazinian or Deleuzian frameworks of analysis of Italian neo-realism but that need not deter us from saying that Kathal’s break with the visual and narrative codes of Tamil cinema is substantial and
hence its huge success a sort of puzzle, as Tamil cinema has generally been wary of realism of this sort. It can be said that for all its difference the theme of the film is love, which is perhaps a narrative feature nearly omni- present and mandatory in all Tamil films even when it only makes a mar- ginal contribution to the story or plot. Be that as it may, my interest here is in another emergent trope in Tamil films that Kathal shares whole heartedly. It is the narrative construction of southern Tamil Nadu as a distinct entity submerged in pre-modern violence, caste bigotry and anarchy. More than the few other films we will take a look at in this essay, it is Kathal with its benchmark realism that renders bare the polar descriptions of modern, metro- politan Chennai and the South as its non-modern other and in particular Madurai, the second largest city in the state.2Of all the existing major cities,
Madurai is the most ancient in terms of historical references; Chennai/ Madras on the other hand has its origins in the recent colonial past.
The film Kathal opens with shots of Madurai city and a school in which the heroine, who belongs to the Mukkulathor or Thevar caste, studies. She had decided to elope with her Dalit boyfriend and we learn about her family from the photograph she ponders over with tears. The caste identities of the characters are verbally unsaid in the film but anyone who knows the every- day markers of the castes can immediately guess them. As she meets the young man at the bus stand and boards the bus going to Chennai, we are treated to long, charming segments of flashbacks in which we learn about how love developed between them. Meanwhile, the girl’s father, a ruthless caste leader who runs a liquor shop and Kattai Panchayathu,3 along with
his younger brother-henchman, finds out about the elopement and launches a search. The young couple, on reaching Chennai, seek asylum in a low cost bachelor’s quarters famously known as ‘‘mansions,’’ where a friend of the young man is already an extra resident. The friend is a street vendor and is yet to become a paying resident of the already crowded room into which he had squeezed himself. In spite of this precarious situation, the friend and later other mansion inmates help the couple register their marriage, find a job for the young man and a house for the couple to start living in. The girl’s uncle and his men manage to get a lead to the friend’s whereabouts in Chennai from the young man’s mother and track him to his pavement shop. The girl’s uncle convinces the friend that the girl had misunderstood them and they would not stand in the way of her choosing her partner. The friend takes him to the dwelling of the newly married couple where the uncle appeals to them to come with him back to Madurai, promising support to their married life. They return with him and other men to Madurai, only to realize that they had been trapped. Her father, kinsmen and womenfolk all combine to make her remove the thali4threatening to kill the young man
who is anyway beaten to a pulp. She acquiesces in order to save his life and is whisked away. The boy becomes mentally deranged. The film closes with a sequence several years later in the neighboring town of Dindugal, when the girl, now (re)married with a child, finds her ex-lover/ ‘‘husband’’ wandering
in the street as a filthy insane vagrant. She is overwhelmed by the sight and runs out in the middle of the night to locate him in the streets. Her humane (present) husband, who follows her, takes the inarticulate lunatic also under his custody and admits him in a home for the insane, to offer solace to his wife. Kathal, in all its realist mise en scene, makes Madurai a place where caste determines one’s identity. In a subtle coding, Madurai is also a place where anonymity is difficult the girl’s uncle turns up at the bus stand even as they were waiting to board the bus. They usually meet under a culvert and not in a public space like a restaurant, park or cinema theatre. In Chennai, no one talks about caste. Among the bachelors, about a hundred of the mansion inmates, who proudly celebrate the wedding of the couple, no one is anxious about their caste. And it is not only the non-family bachelors, even the families that the couple approaches for renting a house and, in one sequence, casual onlookers from a flat are undisturbed by the age and cir- cumstances of the young couple and the role of caste. Except for the initial harassment of the heroine by the sex starved bachelors of the mansion, Chennai provides an ideal asylum to the couple and for once the public spaces are considered safe for them. They spend a whole night watching films and traveling in buses, something unimaginable in Madurai in the narrative logic of the film. In Chennai, it seems that not only does caste not determine one’s identity, but that anonymity is a shield in public spaces. Chennai and Madurai come to stand for different temporalities, Chennai a city of modern, free individuals and Madurai as populated by the pre- modern castes, clans and kinship. I argue that Kathal is able to successfully employ the trope of the pre-modern south only in the wake of whole range of films and media representations which contributed to its constitution. Our problem here is not just whether the narrative of Kathal is plausible, authentic or real. When we call something ‘‘imagined,’’ ‘‘constituted’’ or ‘‘socially constructed’’ such a thing need not necessarily be dissociated from the real, or whatever shreds and complex networks of the real that would lead to such imagination or construction, as Ian Hacking has explained (Hacking 2000). Taking the lead from him, I propose that it is necessary to avoid the true or false debate when we consider the workings and the con- stitution of the trope of southern Tamil Nadu.5In Kathal, I see a classic
expression of the trope that Tamil cinema has been constituting for the Tamil psyche, which is torn between the threatening pre-modern assertion of caste and an allegedly ‘‘egalitarian,’’ free market space of modern indivi- duals or citizens. Such a split of the Tamil self is articulated in the con- stitution of the geographical identity of Southern Tamil Nadu which serves as a metonymic extension of the caste identity of Mukkulathor. It is not incidental that the figure of Thevar or Mukkulathor (the caste comprising the three aristocratic clans Kallar, Maravar and Agamudaiyar) comes as the best epitome of undying ‘‘essence of caste’’; as we shall soon see, as with most other cases this particular figure of Thevar and accompanying vio- lence has its origins in the colonial era.