Living on the Edges of National Imagination

A poster of the movie in 1974

I was a fourteen-year-old boy when I watched the Malayalam movie, Nellu, which won quite a few awards. My school had taken us, class 10 students, on a tour. One way of engaging young students effortlessly in the night was putting them in a cinema theatre. That’s how I came to watch Nellu. The songs in the movie stayed with me for years because they were quite erotic. I think the eroticism of the songs woke me up from my comfortable sleep during the movie. I was tired after the whole day’s journey. Secondly, I was an early sleeper; I am one even today. Thirdly, I hardly understood what was going on in the movie.

Though I never cared to download those haunting songs for my car’s pen drive, the tunes rose in my mind this morning for some mysterious reason and so I watched the movie on YouTube. That’s when I realised that the movie showed the life of the Adiya tribe in the Wayanad region of Kerala from a sensitive outsider’s point of view. A 14-year-old wouldn’t understand the depth of the movie. Watching that movie half a century later, I wondered whether we, Indians, have become any better in our treatment of people who don’t belong to the dominant community.

Wayanad was forestland before people from southern Kerala migrated and settled down there. The original inhabitants of the place, tribal people, were soon subordinated. The movie has characters belonging to both the sections: the migrants and the tribals.

The migrants make the laws. Using those laws, they exploit the tribals. In the end, of course, a migrant family is made to appear benevolent by accepting a tribal woman whose modesty was outraged by a member of that family. An upper caste Nair family accepting a casteless (which means ‘untouchable’) woman as a member of the family was quite revolutionary in Kerala of the 1970s.

The caste system vanished from Kerala long ago. In fact, the state has come a long way from those heartless practices of ancient Hinduism, thanks largely to the strong leftist politics of the state. Kerala was the first state in the world to democratically elect a Communist government to power, in 1957. Alas, today under the leadership of Pinarayi Vijayan, present Chief Minister, the Marxist Party has become more bourgeoisie than the BJP.

Watching the movie Nellu again today made me think about the degradation of our politics. The idealism presented in the conclusion of the movie is absolutely absurd today. No director would dare to give such a conclusion today. Oppression of certain people has become the country’s legal policy today. The lives of these oppressed people are made to unfold in the background of the dominant community’s narratives. The movie left me wondering whether I am also being pushed to the edges of the national imagination.

I understand that the life of the tribal people in Wayanad hasn’t improved much from those old days in the movie. Tragically, more and more people are subordinated today by the country’s official narratives. In the name of uniformity. One nation, one religion, one language, one … Dictator. 

Well, I’m just meditating. Driven by a movie.

The conclusion of my contemplation: A county that insists everyone must resemble the dominant community does not strengthen itself; it commits a profound betrayal of the very idea of civilisation, which is built not on forced sameness but on the respectful coexistence of difference.