Oh Tamil! Tomorrow is ours Oh Tamil!
The Nation is also ours
Say my house is Mother Tamil Nadu Be firm that you are an Indian
(Song lyrics from the film Roja) For millions of Indians, wherever they live,
a major part of ‘India’ derives from its movies
(Rajadhyaksha and Willemen 1994: 10)
Mani Ratnam’s much acclaimed and award winning film Roja, released in 1993, is a story about the personal ordeal of a newly-wed, innocent village girl from the Southern Indian state of Tamil Nadu. Her husband Rishi is a cryptologist working for the Indian Government. He is assigned a post in an Army Communication Centre in Kashmir where he is abducted by a group of Kashmiri separatists who demand the release of their leader Wassim Khan in exchange. Roja who doesn’t speak Hindi or English pleads in Tamil and with hand signals to politicians and military officials to help secure the release of her husband. But Rishi manages to escape in time without any assistance from the Indian authorities. The movie ends with the reunion of Roja and Rishi and the terrorist leader Wassim Khan still in prison in India. The climax of the narrative thus not only secures the Indian nation but more crucially reinforces the hegemony of a secular (Hindu) postcolonial Indian nation as constructed by the nation-state.1
The highlight of this movie is not so much that it is set in the disputed territory of Kashmir or its emotive depiction of the impact of terrorism on the lives of the people concerned but the powerful rendition of an unpro- blematic secular, postcolonial version of nationalism. The film established Mani Ratnam as one of India’s most successful commercial film directors. The movie was also dubbed in several languages including Hindi, Telugu and Marathi. The Hindi and Telugu versions of the film were a major box- office hit and it held currency for a national audience.2In its later versions,
Roja became the focus of a lively scholarly debate on chauvinism, secular- ism, nationalism and national identity.3 However, while these debates
approached the film as a film with ‘India’ as its theme, they fail to inter- rogate the original moment, the characters and their narrative trajectory through the film. As Vasudevan (1997: 161) points out, most critics failed to observe that ‘in the original version, language functions to highlight differ- ences of identity which are entirely suppressed in the Hindi version: the protagonists come from Uttar Pradesh, not Tamil Nadu’. Even in the Telugu version, Vasudevan observes that the locations were not always from Tamil Nadu. It is worth noting that in the Tamil version, the name of the village in Tamil Nadu appears on screen. Moreover, the fact that the char- acters were Tamil caught in a frontier political dispute on the north-western border of India, and that Roja, a girl from a small remote village, who never left the village, hardly spoke any English, let alone a word in Hindi was completely ignored. These circumstances weren’t merely accidental but poignantly highlight that even if Mani Ratnam’s intention was to trans- cend regional and linguistic differences and celebrate the triumph of nationalism in the face of terrorism the border dispute and the language spoken by army officials were both alien and incomprehensible to the Tamil audience as experienced by Roja. The India represented in the film Roja slips between what Homi Bhabha (1994) termed as the pedagogic and the performative, simultaneously normalising and rupturing the imagining of the nation through the spectre of separatism, the threat to national security, linguistic divergence and cultural alienation. For the Telugu and Hindi audience, this disavowal of the Tamil subject engaging in national politics suggests in some sense the impossibility of a Tamil presence within the national narrative or space. It raises the question: does this mean that Tamils and Tamil cinema cannot articulate the nation for a non-Tamil speaking Indian audience?
It is commonly argued that Tamil cultural nationalism enacted through political movements such as the Dravidian movement led by Periyar R. Naicker (who founded the Justice Party in 1917), C. N. Annadurai (who led the Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (DMK)) and his predecessor M. Kar- unadhi and M. G. Ramachandran (founder of the All-India Anna DMK (AIADMK)) was instrumental in the politicisation of Tamil culture and identity, which in many ways has worked against the notion of a homo- geneous and unified Indian nation-state. The symbiosis between cinema and politics which is a unique characteristic of Tamil society with the past six Chief Ministers coming from the world of cinema further enshrined the political role of Tamil cinema in propagating a Dravidian and Tamil-centric nationalism. While both these connections are true of Tamil cinema, there is little written about the ways in which Tamil films construct and articulate the Indian ‘nation’ through the cinematic apparatus.
It is our argument that Tamil cinema has had a central role both in the colonial struggle and the postcolonial construction of Indian national
identity. To demonstrate this, we offer a critical survey of films in Tamil cinema history that both celebrates and unsettles the notion of an imagined India. We contend that Tamil cinema has always maintained an ambivalent relationship with the idea of the ‘Indian’ nation. At times, it has constructed a hermetically closed and homogeneous version of the nation (and national- ism) where the Tamils are represented as an entity embodying and embra- cing the singular identity of the nation. Conversely, the figure of the nation is contested through counter narratives which celebrate an essentialised notion of Tamil cultural and linguistic identity and which serve to challenge Hindi-centred nationalistic discourses. This ambivalent relationship is a response that is rooted in and emerges from the history of South Indian (Dravidian) secessionist politics, the anti-colonial movement, the post- colonial nation-building project, the DMK and AIADMK rule, national conflicts and more recently the threat of terrorism.
In attempting to establish Tamil cinema’s (dis)engagement with the national project however complicit or contentious it may be, we also seek to com- plicate the notion of a national cinema in the Indian context.4The fact that
Hindi language cinema or Bollywood is considered as India’s national cinema and all the others labelled as ‘regional cinemas’ has meant that non-Hindi language cinemas are excluded both in popular and scholarly discussions as worthy of speaking or representing the nation. The term regional cinema accentuates the peripheral existence of non-Hindi language cinemas. This reinforces Mumbai cinema’s special location (since the arrival of sound) both in the colonial and in the later postcolonial imagining of the Indian nation in the shadows cast by a north Indian, majoritarian Hindu and Hindi-speaking identity. The hegemonic and homogenising tendencies of an Indian national cinema effectively reduce the national cultural meanings produced through the lens of regional cinema as insignificant or irrelevant. While within the context of the Indian film industry, Tamil cinema is not seen as a national cinema, it is nevertheless a cinema concerned with the idea of the nation. We argue that any study of an Indian national cinema must acknowledge the contributions of regional cinemas to the overall imaginings of the Indian nation.