Angammal opens with an elderly woman telling a story to her granddaughter. The story is of the wild winds that visited their village a few decades ago and took away many persons and animals with it. The grandmother narrates that the winds carried the smell of a flower that touched everyone’s spirits in the village, and reveals that her mother had the flower tattooed on her upper arm and she wants the same for her granddaughter. But the little girl shows liking for her grandmother’s tattoo instead, which the latter dismisses as random scribbling. Who still believes in tattoos, asks her daughter-in-law, dressed in a saree with headphones around her neck.
This sets the tone for the film, which centers around the grandmother, playing the titular character. Angammal is the heart of the village; she meets, greets, and cares for everyone around her. She has friends and knows how to have a good time. But everybody fears her, for it is not easy to talk her down or make her do something against her will. The problem is that her younger son, city-educated, wants her to wear a blouse so she looks decent when his prospective in-laws, urban elite, visit to meet his family. Thus begin the attempts to convince her to keep up with the changing times.
Where everyone else has upgraded their standard of living, she is one of the last two women in the village to still wear a saree without a blouse. But what is the big deal about not wearing a blouse? The film throws open the question. Is it about women’s desire and bodily autonomy, or about the class-caste and rural-urban divide? Or is it about aging parents holding their ground in the face of their now adult children telling them what is right? In a village society where everyone knows about everyone else’s personal matters anyway, Angammal makes it a public issue. But neither the fellow villagers nor her family members understand what is at stake.
Angammal is not in favor of tradition or against change. For instance, she is the only woman in the village who rides a motorcycle to move around. She flirts with a man who she is attracted to in the neighborhood. She has worked hard all her life to provide for the education of her younger son so he could become a doctor, a first in the village. The entire village knows that in the past she confronted a man who repeatedly beat his wife, giving her another lease of life. But her son’s appeal for a blouse, reflecting the breeding inferiority in his eyes for her ways of being, leaves her rethinking.
What is progress and for whom; where does one stop in its pursuit; is it still progress if it leaves you unable to breathe or speak, the film asks. It plays around the blouse that has historically been a site of contention. Where Brahmanism has prohibited Dalit women to wear a blouse, it has forced tribal women into wearing one. The brunt of such forced exclusion from and inclusion into the caste Hindu society has invariably been borne by women. The film goes a step further in using the blouse as a metaphor of societal divisions: it does so with such intricacy that no one section of the society is pitted against the other.
All the characters are sketched with such nuance and depth that they are all central to and good in the story, with no one being on the side or a villain. Be it Angammal’s younger son who agrees to her wearing the blouse only for the first meeting with his prospective in-laws because it won’t be an issue once they get to know who she really is, or her prospective daughter-in-law, who despite having the capacity to afford a blouse with sleeves, wears one without it when visiting her – they all stand with each other, despite carrying conflicted worlds within themselves.
The film points out the problem, which perhaps is not a person but an idea deeply entrenched in society. Angammal is a clarion call to reconsider what progress is. Though set in the rural Tamil Nadu of the 1990s when India was going through liberalization, privatization, and globalization of its economy at an unprecedented pace and scale, the film couldn’t resonate more today, where anything and everything is passed off as development. In the wake of all that is accepted in the name of growth and adaptation to change, Angammal’s quiet but resolute resistance leaves you rooting for constructive meaning, as opposed to what she calls random scribbling.
An adaptation of Perumal Murugan’s short story Kodithuni, writer-director Vipin Radhakrishnan’s 117-minute film premiered at the MAMI Mumbai Film Festival this month.
Aayushi Bengani is a research scholar at Delhi School of Economics. Her research interests include the politics of city, culture, and knowledge.
