Virumandi Re-watch

I recently discovered The Other Banana, a podcast on non-Hindi Indian movies, and was blown away by the competence of the reviewers, not to mention the refreshing focus on movies overshadowed by the noisy nonsense that is big-budget Bollywood. (Not that I don’t enjoy some B’wood nonsense myself but there is vastly more to Indian cinema and, living in the West as I do, I’m very often annoyed at how the two are conflated.) First of all, please go check them out: http://www.whereistheotherbanana.com/. (Needless to say, I also immensely love the name of the podcast.)

A pair of episodes that I particularly enjoyed were the ones discussing Virumandi, Kamal Hasan’s 2004 film, written, directed, and starred in by him. I saw this movie in 2011 and, at the time, thought it was a mighty attempt to subvert the traditional image of hero/villain, which ultimately failed because Kamal’s ego would never actually allow him to be the villain.

On re-watching it, I discovered just how wrong I was.

Subversion is not a goal with this movie. In fact, it doubles down on a very familiar message in Tamil & Hindi cinema, that of how the system takes advantage of the hapless, by making the hero not the one who uplifts the downtrodden but the downtrodden himself. The character Virumandi is so naive that at no point in the movie does he actually take a decision purely by himself. He only does as he’s told: by his grandmother, by Kothaala Thevar, by Annalakshmi, by Kothaala Thevar’s wife, by Nallama Naicker, by Peikaaman, by Dr. Angela, and finally by the jailor played by Nassar. Of these, only Kothaala Thevar’s wife even does him the courtesy of asking him (to lie in court in favour of her husband); all the others simply tell him what to do and he, trustingly, obeys. Which, of course, first lands him in jail with a death sentence and then, as he listens to more trustworthy folks, gets him out of it.

How did I miss this on my first watch? Well, I wasn’t paying enough attention to the song Karumathur Kattukulle, which tells the story of the deity Virumandi, who gullibly turns up to do a good deed for his sister Pechiamma and is tricked and imprisoned by her instead. Sounds familiar? Yeah. Similarly, this song (and Andha Kandamani which includes a persistent Veliye Vaa refrain) is vital to understand that Garbagruhatha Vittu Veliyerudhu Saami is not deification of Kamal Hasan (which I 100% thought it was on my first watch) but the setting right of a centuries-old wrong. Without the good folks at TOB, I wouldn’t even have known to pay attention to the song and the myth.

Without this vital context, you can read so much into this movie because there is so much there. A widely-held opinion, for example, is that it is about capital punishment. You can just as easily think it’s about caste politics, or violent feuds, or subversion attempts, or Rashomon-style truth-relativism. But while it contains all of those, it is about none of those.

Neil Gaiman once wrote about how to read Gene Wolfe. All of those instructions apply to watching this movie, especially the first two: everything you need to understand it is contained within, and yet, there is so much in there you can’t trust.

I’m so happy to finally feel like I get this movie, possibly only to be outdone by my happiness several years hence when I realise that no, I didn’t understand it then, but I do understand it now. Repeat ad infinitum.

ETA 13th Jan 2021: Had some more thoughts. (Looks like I didn’t even have to wait years or for another re-watch to reframe my understanding!) First of all, I’m more and more convinced that this film both “copies” and subverts Rashomon. On my second watch, I realised how apparent it was that Kothaala Thevar is lying in his testimony. That selective super-cut of events, that retelling of the truth in order to lie, is very Rashomon-like. However, Virumandi’s testimony is not like that at all. It’s honest to the point of pain, leaving out nothing, embellishing nothing. It’s very clear on what it thinks an honest account looks like.

Secondly, I’ve slightly modified my opinion on what the movie is about. It’s not just a retelling of the Virumandi-Pechiamma myth for the modern day. It’s also an exhortation to be a better society. By placing the hero, an archetypically “strong” one, as the victim, it’s saying that what all the movies told us, that someone will show up to save us, is utter bullshit. We want to be saved? We need to be better as a society. To do away with the death penalty; to pay attention to caste-gender-class politics, to colonialisation, to uneven distributions of power in general; because otherwise even the hero that might save us might well end up powerless.