CHENNAI: Chetan Bhagat wrote about 2 States. M Muthaiya made a film about three villages. What’s the connection? Bhagat’s bestseller and Muthaiya’s raw film Komban have about as much in common as the film does with Dalits or Thevars, or their politics. Zilch. And that much became easily evident through the 136-minute film, as there was little if not no references to caste or discrimination of any sort.
At a screening held on Wednesday for the media, everyone rubbed the sleep off their eyes in the hope of catching these ‘offensive’ scenes — the ones that people told the High Court would incite violence in the hinterland. After all the talk about how the judges and complainants had “walked out after five minutes of watching the film” because they found certain scenes objectionable, the attention was riveting.
Ever since the film’s producers uploaded the bursting-at-the-seams-with-rural-bravado trailer on YouTube, caste-based groups have been making life hell for them. After a Nadar Peravai and the Devendra Kula Vellalar Uravinmurai Sangam sent notices and pushed the censors to retract their ‘U’ certificate and replace it with a ‘U/A’, Puthiya Tamilagam’s Dr Krishnaswamy and company had taken centre stage. Word from the production house was that they could file a defamation suit.
For the first 30 minutes, every scene was viewed carefully, every dialogue scrutinised with alacrity and every facial contortion, name, village’s name even, scanned thoroughly in the hope of spotting the signs powerful enough to set off violence. Forget the text. People plumbed the sub-text and came up with a few hypotheses. But none of these held water. Karthi plays Kombaya Pandian from a cluster of villages in Ramanathapuram. Though there’s no reference to what caste they’re from, it’s evident that however much they want to fight among each other, all three villages belong to the same caste. Everyone calls everyone else a ‘maaman’ or a ‘mapillai’, which is not common in places where the caste divide still exists.
If anything, there’s a scene that takes a solid swipe at the caste system. The handlebar-moustache toters of Rajkiran’s village ask him to join them to visit the temple because their ‘jathi-janam’ were all going. With impeccable timing, Rajkiran ripostes that he’s happy to go with the ‘janam’ (people) but not with the ‘jathi’ (caste) because all it does is create difference between people, leading to violence. A film that glorifies violence and brawn with an ease that would make most censor boards uneasy, this may sound ironic, but with caste-based allegations flying around, it’s a saving grace.
That was when people began wondering if what Karthi said at the beginning made sense. “I’m scared when people tell me they want to watch the film seriously because it’s a film that you need to sit back and watch casually,” he said.
When the film ended, the mood prevalent was one of mildly righteous outrage, especially because the director and the producer were cued in. The only other emotion was mockery, wondering how people who had spoken at length about the film without watching it, would feel then. Caste no bar, clearly.