The Sociopolitical System as a Prison

 

Can a society or the state itself become a prison for the citizens? If we look at current Indian political scenario, the answer is too obvious. Here people can be arrested or at least accused of treason for merely questioning the government. Your very citizenship can become suspect. In fact, just anything can happen to you once you become a target of your government. Two recent examples are R Rajagopal of The Telegraph who is a staunch critic of Modi and Priyank Kharge who questioned the RSS.

This thought rose in my mind after I watched a Malayalam movie yesterday. Balan: The Boy is not a political movie at all. It is a psychological thriller that keeps the viewer hooked with its pivot fixed on a haunting fear that a young mother of a little boy experiences after she is released from prison. All through the movie, we experience a suffocating atmosphere of paranoia as the protagonist struggles with fight-or-flight responses endlessly.

In fact, the movie subverts the genre labelled ‘psychological thriller.’ In a typical thriller, the source of terror is a specific villain. Here, the entity tracking down the woman as well as her son, keeping them in a perpetual state of psychological trauma and paranoia, isn’t a singular bad guy – it is the state itself because she has no identity proof in the first place except as a freed convict and she wants to shed that identity for the sake of her son. The film shows us that our sociopolitical system can be the ultimate psychological antagonist, driving individuals to exist on the margins.

There are too many people in India today who live on such margins because of a haunting political system. Too many. And that is the only reason why I chose to write this post.

The film begins inside the cold walls of a prison. But soon we move out of that prison to the ordinary world outside, only to realise that that world is another prison albeit a bigger one without the concrete walls or steel bars. It can be worse than the prison, in fact, a more exhausting if not devastating cage.

The woman had killed her husband, but only for the sake of her own survival. But once you are a criminal, you’re labelled for life. Our societies don’t know how to reintegrate people. When a system denies individuals a legitimate path to survival (forget integration), it actively forces them into a morally grey, underground existence. The mother’s paranoia and her resort to illegal, fluid identities aren’t choices made out of malice; they are desperate yet coldly calculated rational responses to a system that refuses to let her start over.

Even the child is stripped of a genuine identity by the system. He has no name in the movie though he is given a dozen names as the situation demands. He is forced to shed names like clothes so much so he asks his mother more than once: “What is my new name?” He is never allowed to anchor himself to a name, a place, a school, or a friendship. He remains, quite literally, just a balan, a generic noun.

When a sociopolitical system fails to protect a family, it is always the children that pay the heaviest toll. The child in this movie gets dissociated from reality. Life robs him of his childhood, his psychological stability, and his very sense of self. The system doesn’t just neglect him; it systematically erases him.

What strikes us particularly in this movie is that the commonplace theme of the nobility of a mother’s love is subverted here. The mother’s love is undeniable here too, but it is a love warped by structural oppression. The world is so hostile to her that her primary mode of parenting becomes absolute paranoia.

The pertinent question is: When the “ecosystem” we build is so inherently hostile that a parent must raise their child in a state of perpetual terror just to keep them alive, who is the real criminal?

It is this thought that moved me to write this post. Our system is the real culprit. It can endanger not only feeble creatures like the woman in this movie but also influential personalities like the ones I named in the beginning.

Is there a solution? Are we condemned to live in a sociopolitical system that has become more vitiated than what Kafka showed us in his novels?

Balan does not offer us any comfort in this regard. It ends by showing us that when the state and society form an unholy alliance of judgment and exclusion, they create a machinery that grinds human lives into dust.

We see so many thousands of lives around us today, the displaced, the faceless, the perpetually fleeing. They are individuals, millions of them, whom our system has broken totally. Balan reminds us that until we replace institutional antipathy with genuine structural empathy, we will continue to produce generations of nameless children, running from a past they didn’t create, towards a future they are never allowed to own. And all our boasts about humongous temples and Shiva Lingas will resound with a hollowness that will strike at our very roots one day. 

By Gemini AI

APage from my new book:
The Simplest Guide to Religion