Kamal Hassan’s Singaravelan (1992) opens with him coaxing a bull that is wreaking havoc in the village into ‘behaving’ by merely talking. The climax of the same film has him pull out a whip and crack it threateningly before he leaps. In this scene, he’s getting the heroine to behave. And these two scenes in their contrasting
visualisation of animal as person and person as animal, sums up for me the discussion on Tamil culture that is echoing across the state.
40-50% of Tamil Nadu’s agricultural labourers are women, and some bull breeders are women too, but the ‘Taming of the bull’ is an act reserved for the men. Even if we were to believe that science has not advanced enough to keep native breeds alive (a popular argument), how is a bunch of men hanging on to/piling upon/touching/hugging a bull for the longest possible time going to keep them alive? Like many other sports, Jallikattu worships toxic masculinity — the need to subjugate a being with less power to assert one’s own male authority. Though Jallikattu is being presented as a means to find the strongest bull, it is clearly a hunt for the strong male who can control the strongest bull. What then, the sport or the current sentiment is, are the ideas of masculinity and male honor dressed up as Tamil culture.
The Jallikattu might be a matter of pride, but is also very much a part of the mechanism that seeks to uphold caste and gender hegemonies. It is the machismo of the sport and the culture it seeks to keep alive that shuts down ‘others’ be it women, or those from other religious or linguistic groups.
When the sexual promiscuity of female actors is questioned for taking a stand, when dissent is shut down with trolling, what we see is the manifestations of this toxicity. Caste and masculinity are closely intertwined because they both seek to keep women under control. The machismo exerted over the cattle, extends itself to women too, in this culture and in real life.
This is a state where honour killings are still prevalent, where female foeticide is existent, and female subjugation is dominant. Where is the pride in changing these things? When will we take to the streets for changing this culture, instead of jumping the bandwagon for sensational issues? When will we understand culture as something dynamic, as something that evolves with time? When will we create tradition to match with the times? And when will we allow rituals to be challenged?
(The writer is a Chennai-based activist, in-your-face feminist and a media glutton)
Archanaa Seker
seker.archanaa@gmail.com