In The Land and the Shadows, Perumal Murugan turns cinema into a prism through which caste, class, desire, morality and memory are refracted; it’s a rich, personal portrait of Tamil film culture
When I was an undergraduate in a West Bengal small town in the 2000s, I chanced upon a copy of Current Show (2004), a then-recent novel-in-translation by the Tamil writer Perumal Murugan. Although I knew nothing about Murugan or his body of work back then, I bought the book on a hunch and enjoyed it thoroughly.
The novel followed the everyday life of Sathivel, an impoverished young man who sells soda bottles at a single-screen theatre. Written to resemble the rapid cuts one sees in a thriller or a horror movie, Current Show was unlike anything I had ever read at that point in my life — raw, unadulterated and unflinching in its depiction of Sathivel’s ganja-fuelled days and nights, marked by abject poverty and squalor.
Upon reading Murugan’s latest collection of essays-in-translation, The Land and the Shadows (Hamish Hamilton/Penguin Random House India), you realise the extraordinary real-life incidents and circumstances that informed Current Show. The first five-six essays in this book describe the teenaged Murugan helping his father run a soda bottle stall at a small movie theatre in Karattur, Tamil Nadu.
He also describes his interactions with the other young boys who had been working at the theatre for many years — you can see the kernel of Current Show developing in these passages. The author does a brilliant job of describing the socio-economic conditions that led to a slew of new theatres in small-town Tamil Nadu. We are shown, for example, how the advent of power looms led to many lower-caste men coming into money and investing it in the newly-fleshed-out world of movies.
Broadly speaking, the first half of the book covers the complex role cinema plays in Tamil society, while the essays in the second half tackle individual creators (actors, writers, filmmakers) from the Tamil industry and Murugan’s views on their work.
In this section, Murugan covers all the major film stars from MGR and Sivaji Ganesan to modern-day superstars like Rajinikanth, Kamal Haasan and Vijay — he is astute and gracious while talking about these very different leading men, and it is a genuine delight to see one of the pre-eminent voices of Tamil literature talking about Tamil cinema’s past, present and future.
Cinema, a communal experience
A recurring theme in many of the essays in the first half is cinema as a communal experience. Murugan writes how in the ’70s and ’80s, most theatres had rudimentary seating, with “floor tickets” being the preferred, low-cost option. The sitting area on the floor, close to the screen, would usually be covered with a large amount of sand. And if the person seated in front of you was really tall, you could just scoop up handfuls of sand, create a little mountain for yourself, and enjoy the film with an unobstructed view.
Cinema-as-communal-experience also led the young Murugan to learn a whole lot about what working-class and middle-class audiences wanted out of a film. There’s a very entertaining passage in the book where Murugan explains why MGR was deemed superior to Sivaji Ganesan among Tamil housewives. In many of Ganesan’s films, suspecting a woman and questioning her character was the central dramatic hook, bringing with it endless agonies.
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Films such as Deivapiravi (Noble Soul), Nichaya Thamboolam (The Betrothal), Puthiya Paravai (New Bird) and Kulamagal Radhai (Radhai, the Homely One) fit this template perfectly. The female lead would be subjected to a variety of trials and tribulations before she was deemed trustworthy again. Murugan writes how Tamil women, especially housewives, saw Ganesan’s onscreen persona as akin to a jealous, possessive, pot-bellied husband — whereas MGR’s love was absolute and his leading ladies were worshipped like goddesses, their bashful faces lighting up at the sight of the beloved.
In a similar vein, Murugan talks about how a film like Kai Kodukkum Kai (Helping Hand, 1984), starring Rajinikanth at the height of his superstardom, was squarely rejected by Tamil-speaking audiences. According to the writer, Tamil cinema operates in moral absolutes, especially when it comes to besmirching the honour of a woman, particularly a married woman. Kai Kodukkum Kai, on the other hand, is quick to forgive a married woman’s rapist, and audiences did not like this decision — nor did they appreciate the heroine’s failed suicide attempt.
“Could a rapist who assaulted the heroine be allowed to live as a reformed character? The audience simply couldn’t accept it. Especially coming from a beloved hero like Rajinikanth, the line, ‘You have not been spoilt in your heart’, was hard to digest. According to the ingrained conventions of cinema, a girl who has been ‘spoilt’ is expected to die — that’s the tragic tradition, isn’t it? Accordingly, the heroine attempts suicide, but her failure to end her life left audiences unsatisfied.”
Life imitates art, art imitates life
Some of my favourite segments of the book involve Murugan talking about his personal selection of “underestimated gems” from Tamil cinema — films that were ahead of their times, unconventional in their approach or acts of formal experimentation. Aval Appadithan (That Is How She Is) is a good example of the kind of film Murugan is talking about here — this was a 1978 film directed by C. Rudraiah, starring Sripriya, Kamal Haasan and Rajinikanth. This was a rare and exceptional movie on many counts; it had a large amount of English-language dialogue and the screenplay took an outspokenly feminist point of view, both highly unusual phenomena for Tamil films of the era.
Murugan is a fair but tough critic; even when he praises creators, he is careful to critique them in the same breath. For instance he praises Bharathiraja for his grasp of rural life in Tamil Nadu, but he is also quick to temper the praise by observing that Bharathiraja’s female characters are either flat, two-dimensional stereotypes, or unrealistically evolved, super-pious women spouting pretentious lines about women’s empowerment.
Murugan is also sensitive to the fact that while novelists like him can get their work done while being lone wolves, filmmaking is a massively collaborative venture involving the labour of dozens, often hundreds of people. When a critic dislikes a novel, his/her opinion can really only hurt one person i.e. the author of the novel. But when a critic disapproves of a film, it has the potential to hurt so many folks, through no fault of their own. Why should a hero’s poor performance, Murugan asks the reader, necessarily invisibilize, say, a film’s excellent production design, hair, makeup, or any of the other dozens of things accomplished by unobtrusive worker bees in the background?
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Towards the halfway mark of the book, Murugan observes that everybody working in the film industry is still tarred with the same unflattering brush. The stereotype is that people working in the film industry have crippling vices and make for bad spouses or romantic partners. As Murugan explains in the passage cited below, this is an old, entirely unfair lie:
“The belief that the arts disrupt simple, straightforward lifestyles has somehow taken root in our society. Not just those who practise the arts but even those who are drawn to and appreciate them are often viewed with suspicion. There’s a pervasive notion that such people are unsuited for raising families. It’s true that the arts have the power to alter perspectives and challenge norms. But I often wonder: Do people in other places also see the arts as antagonistic, or is it just us who fear their influence? Yet, despite this societal scepticism, the arts endure.”
The Land and the Shadows isn’t a conventional book of cinematic essays. It approaches its subject from several asymmetric routes: caste, class, etiquette, the mores of a societally acceptable romance et al. But once you spend some time with the book, you quickly fall in love with Murugan’s elegant style, his piercing observations and his multi-modal understanding of cinema as a medium.
