Jayakanthan - A tribute

The privilege of writing a tribute to an icon like Jayakanthan should legally be restricted to only those who are well acquainted with his magnificent oeuvre. Otherwise people like me, to whom JK is not more famous than say, Sir C.V.Raman , will start uncorking their bottles of ink to record their so desperately made up obeisances. If someone asks me,  “Who was Sir C.V.Raman?” I would reply with a school-boyish alacrity, “ Sir C.V.Raman was awarded the Nobel Prize for Physics for his invention of Raman Effect”. When faced with the second question ,”Good.  What is Raman Effect?”, I would have to stammer “Well… Umm. I love physics. But…”

My tribute shall be based upon the only interaction I had with his work, that too in a field, where he is not so known for. Cinema. To top it all, I have seen only one of his cinematic works-Sila Nerangalil Sila Manidhargal(SNSM). So as I am wiping my face to rid myself of the guilt that surrounds me as to the crime of deriving mileage to gather attention from his sad demise by flexing my writing muscle, I choose to proceed, with much difficulty.

SNSM was a black and white movie released in 1976 written by JK and directed by Bhimsingh. It narrated the story of an adolescent Brahmin girl, jettisoned away by her own family after she is raped by an anonymous person. She takes refuge in her old uncle who unfortunately, demands her body in return for his care and succor. She does not choose to refuse his help on account of his abominable desires, because she has nowhere to go.  At the same time, she does not succumb to his desires, respects him with all her heart since he has not yet done away with her in spite of her dogged resistance. As time passes, she grows up to become a Government official and gains her much- needed independence only to meet the man of her destiny again -the one who outraged her chastity.  She is fated to meet the man who had turned her life upside down with a sleight of a hand, crushed all her hopes and made her lonely forever. The woman is faced with the question as to whether she should avenge this unscrupulous beast for his heinous act, or wait … is he really the unscrupulous beast she assumed him to be?

We are in for surprises throughout the narrative as the woman moves into her middle age and befriends her rapist.  She discovers that he is married unhappily, and has an adolescent daughter. She finds that, this man is more flesh and blood than she thought, who is deeply repentant of his past and considers his failed marriage as his deserved punishment. The film beautifully meanders into the relationship of the woman with his daughter who suffers from the estrangement of her mother. As the story unfolds, the woman’s uncle grows more like a beast waiting to prey upon her and the man transforming into a pathetic , wounded little animal that needs attention and sympathy. By the end of the movie, it looks more like a role reversal , as everyone who is bound to support the woman,  turning into scary epitomes of selfishness and the supposed bad guy progressing from reprehensibility to respectability.

We need to realize that the film was released in 1976 when our movies still had not learned to sympathize with women who no longer, were considered to be ‘pure’. The film not only broke the rules of life, but also that of Tamil cinema, where, for its first and only time, it had a raped protagonist, entrusted her into the hands of an incestuous care-taker, allowed its villain to go physically unpunished and if that is not enough, shuddered its audience into announcing that the rape was not completely a ‘rape’. You would have declared a film that goes along like – Guy rapes girl;Guy is ‘sentenced’ to marry her; Girl hates him first; Then mistakes Stockholm Syndrome for love;Girl starts loving him to eternal marital bliss- as utterly regressive. Why should the woman always marry her rapist? Is that the maximum punishment a man deserves for his act? But what will you call a film that allows her heroine to develop feelings for such a man out of her own free-will and solid judgment?

No critic, of the yesteryear, I suppose would have been willing to remove the ‘moralist’ hat to analyze the film for its deep complexities. 

 Another surprising aspect of the film was an appreciable amount of unavoidable sexual dialogue, and the censors should have had JK at knife-point, as all these dialogue are spoken in English throughout the film.

It was a beautiful touch to show the young rapist, who reportedly was on a virtual ‘raping’ spree during his scandalous youth, grow into a complaining father, on account of his daughter’s unwillingness to comply with his elderly conservatism on her dressing and relationships.

Every main character in the film, is imbued with shades of irrepressible sexual hunger which blows the tenuous screens of morality to smithereens, questioning every belief that was thrust upon us , right from our childhood. It is not my point here to dispute the significance of morals or to dismiss them, as archaic and completely useless. To study certain slices of real life situations only through the lenses of morality and tradition, shall not yield the solutions that mankind badly needs to fix its daily problems. The very function of art is, to take its patrons on journeys into unchartered territories and offer a multitude of perspectives into the various aspects of life. That’s what SNSM did.

 JK is reported to have infused so much sensibility into the popular art forms. He must have been the first one to introduce his audiences to surrealism, as seen in his chilling short story ‘Nandavanthil Oru Aandi’ . I was ashamed to find that when I was searching for surrealism in the works of Bunuel, Bergman in Europe, here was someone who had mastered it in my mother tongue.

JK was a man who had a dubious resume, that would include a breathtaking variety of jobs he had to do for his livelihood from a proof-reader to a milk-vendor. As a result, it is said that his fiction was all very personal and woven around people from all walks of life, especially around the lumpen elements of society like prostitutes and pickpockets. Hence, the daredevilry to question established foundations of thinking and attempts to empathize with people whom we would generally abhor.

Recently I was surprised to learn that an unprecedented number of 5 lakhs of French people had gathered to protest the murderous attacks unleashed on the magazine Charlie Hebdo, in response to its non-conformist,radical journalism. It is said that any award winning book in Paris sells copies that outnumber the total population of Paris. Tamil Nadu is said to have a population of around the same number but  sells Sahitya Akademi award winning novels to the tune of a mere 3000 per year. We remained mute when right wing elements forced our writer Perumal Murugan out of his profession. That is the respect we pay to our writers. I still feel had JK been an English novelist, he would have joined the canon that houses the likes of Franz Kafka, Dostevysky,etc.

U.R.Ananthamurthy, an icon of Kannada literature was given State Funeral recently on his demise. I could see so much anguish all around me even when K.Balachandar left us. In the last two days, I could not see even one status on Facebook wall or a mention of JK’s name during casual conversations in my office. This is no place to proselytize the masses from their precious pursuits of survival into the noble religion of reading. All I expected was some awareness of the presence of a great icon amongst us. We can excuse ourselves that we are too busy for all this or may be you can accuse me of pretending to be too highbrow. Either way, I am beginning to feel that my aforementioned guilt is slowly withering away off me.