Tathagata Buddha says: “Be The Light Unto Yourself!”
Director Pa. Ranjith’s Thangalaan is a surprising package that equals the making of Hollywood magnum opus of the 60’s ‘Mackenna’s Gold’. It’s also a wayward cinema that redefines how Indian cinema has to be made hereafter.
While the North of India got the growing audience to watch the dubbed version of this Tamil movie, down the south, in it’s native state, the audience got split into the below categories.
1. Those who were awestruck by the wonderfully presented screen canvas as mere entertainment.
2. Those who were appraising the slice of real life struggle & survival depicted with its historical precision on celluloid, and farther the painstaking efforts to bring about the troubled lives of ‘untouchables’ under caste hegemony.
3. Those casteist dumpsters whose puss-bursting blisters as negative comments as social media writeups, that no other Indian movie has ever encountered. Their petulant casteist remarks over the movie posters, movie clips, sneak peaks, film crew interviews, showcased their grave-old degree of decaying mindset. Thangalaan have taken a direct hit of a maelstorm with their parody memes, sleazy jargons: ‘We (identifying & representing our caste) refrain ourselves from watching the film’.
4. The warehouses of ‘self-‘(ec)centrically popular’ radicals, so-called ‘forward-thinking tanks’ from liberal literary circles, harrowed a hole into their hideouts, with their well-kept ‘killing silence’ about the movie.
The film & its content meticulously indulge the audience by juxta positioning history to witness layers as below:
1. Time: The lives of untouchables during the 17th – 18th Century
2. Body/Material: Social discrimination and relentless struggle for salvation of untouchables
3. Space: Spiritual quest of untouchables about who they are?
No need to mention the spellbinding performances by the finest film crew, technicians & their intricately woven excellence. Many packed houses reflects the results of their efforts. Hence, let’s check out the history of the untouchable in Thangalaan or, in other ways, how Thangalaan put an end to the past history of ‘battering flour’ Indian cinema.
The story got unfolded into three acts.
The first two acts consist of facing & experiencing the problem, the final act is about finding salvation amidst the mind-bending search for gold.
1. Untouchables loses their land, food reserves that came out from the reap of the harvest, shelters, jobs, belongings, separated from their beloved ones, the long-instigated untouchability catapults them to have a psychological impact resulting in constant fear, meaningless blabbering, trying to seek refuge in religion not of their own, tackling the insults, casteist slurs, self-reliance and most importantly keeping them out of the Hindu (Anti)social (Dis)Order.
2. All they left to regain their self-respect is by repeated retelling of their own history of their ancestors to their children and kinfolks. That story too is non-linear, blended with fantasy & magic, hearing it, their minds get ready to attune, re-identify their once lost roots.
3. Being forcibly evicted from their own lands, to survive & keep up hopes of finding a caste-free land, Thangalaan and his people have to face daily life struggle to save their skins despite how Brahminical elements diffuse and subvert the benefits of the untouchables to serve their own.
4. It also portrays being poverty-stricken, how difficult it is for the untouchables to reorganize and unite if things go awry. and starving propels them to turn into beef eaters.
The attire, skin tone, weapons, language, body language, conflicts, intuition-driven life, unmatchable skills on navigating unknown landscapes, ability to sense & cautioning others about the upcoming dangers, misinterpreting the acts of Aarathi (because, they forgot who they really are) inaddition make the movie a stalwart among the movies screened so far.
The Final Act: Path to Salvation:
There are handful takeaways for the audience after stepping away from the theatres.
- The movie urges you to go through the books to understand the history of the native people, why they are not hindus and how untouchability as a social evil declined them.
- What gold means to them? Who hunts it? Who haunts the hunters? Who is expelled from the fertile lands, and who wanders the wastelands? The gold & its land belong to whom? Who safeguards it? Why is it hidden to many under naked eyes? Who’s snatched of their treasure & let the land bleed? Who claims to be the benefactors of gold? Why is land more important than gold? Who betrays them?
It’s up to the viewer to find out the answers, socially assert themselves shaken by the hard hitting truths by thoroughly reading below works:
- Baba Saheb Dr. Ambedkar’s Writings and Speeches which is commonly known as BAWS,
- The Buddhist Tripitaka Pali Canonical Texts,
- The Archaelogical Survey of India by Alexander H. Cunningham,
- Buddhist India by Dr. Rhys Davids,
- King Asoka by Vincent Adam Smith to begin with.
The answers are also simpler if, the viewer can find out the history behind:
1. Time: Who was Aaran? Who was Aarathi? Who was Kaadaiyan? Why Kaadaiyan’s & Aarathi’s blood soiled the earth? Who was Bhoodha (Land of) Muni? Why was he beheaded?
2. Body/Material: Who was the searcher and the searched?
3. Spiritual Quest: What was sought and what was found in the end dawns the new beginning.
Be it haters, lovers or those who are agnostic about the movie, it’s undeniable success lies on rising up, rapture audience with one final question: Aren’t we the results of our conscious & unconscious decisions?
Thangalaan in its artistic language retells the scintillating quote of Baba Saheb Ambedkar ( 22nd October 1938): “I shall stand for principle and will fight alone for it!”.
Jaibhim Namo Buddhaya!
Udayakumar Vijayan is a writer from Chennai, Tamil Nadu
Email: [email protected]
