Name: Thangalaan
Director: Pa. Ranjith
Writers: Pa. Ranjith, Tamizh Praba, Azhagiya Periyavan
Year: 2024
First published Aug 17, 2024. Updated Aug 18, 2024.
An island moved northward for a million years and hit a larger landmass. Mountains rose and rivers flowed. People came, thrived; new people came, thrived; new ideas formed, old ideas extinguished; wars happened, ideologies created, religions established. This is the story of India. Who came first? Who came second? Who came later? To whom does the land belong? This is also the story of India. The former set of statements feeds the latter questions, and vice versa.
The tribe of Nagas were the inhabitants in the land of what we call Tamil Nadu today, 2500 years ago. So has the premise set in the movie of Thangalaan. New people came and introduced the Varna caste system that created divisions based on birth. Some of the groups in these original inhabitants welcomed the new people but eventually they were oppressed by the new landlords and the Brahmin priests, and became untouchables. These oppressed people welcomed the Sakhya Muni, the Buddha and his principles. And over time, Buddhism waned while Hinduism waxed. The movie has this mytho-history thread as its core vision.
The story is set in early 19th century and is about a village of the oppressed people of Paraiyar (Pariah) caste in Veppur, North Arcot region. Bonded in slave labor by a landlord of an upper caste, they welcome the quest of a British named Lord Clement to find gold in the area of Kolar under the leadership of a man named Thangalaan. (Note that I use the word Paraiyar/Pariah to reference them as in the movie and not in a derogatory way.) There have been stories about old kings mining gold from that area, Cholas, two thousand years ago, and Tipu Sultan, a hundred years back. A brahmin works as a translator and a helper to Clement. And this has been shown the case right from earlier days. A brahmin worked as an advisor to the Chola king as well who sought the same gold. The Brahmins at the forefront use the caste system as a tool to help their masters, firstly the kings, and now, observing the change in power, the British. The landlord who is a descendant of erstwhile kings is now served by the next-in-line in the caste hierarchy, the Pillai. Interpolating outside the movie, one could observe that, within the next hundred years, this alliance of non-Brahmin landlords and upper castes, and eventually other non-Brahmins, established the Dravidian movement, and the rise of oppressed people who were still below in heirarchy, joined hands, identified themselves as Dalits, and created a major impact in politics and culture.
The movie has three layers. One is the present time of Thangalaan and his village of Paraiyars helping Clement to find gold. Another is the historic past when the Nagas acted as protectors of the land and the gold hill. And the third one is in the myth believed by Thangalaan’s people about the guardian-sorceress, Aarathi, who does not let anyone enter the gold land, and by extension how this myth plays as a vision inside Thangalaan’s head. Initially, we are only presented with the first and the third – the reality to find gold and the myth of a person who protects it. The crux of the movie lies in conjoining the two with the second layer of the historic past. That the myth is a form using which people remember history. Myth is a powerful form of influence; religions exploit it heavily and so do ideologies and politics. People who were stripped of everything, from being literate, from owing land, from leading a dignified life – they have only one tool to remember history, that is, myth.
The movie portrays gold as a metaphor of the dignified life originally led by the people of the land. The Nagas possessed the gold, they stood on top of the gold hill in their own legs. They owned and protected the land. They were hunter-gatherers who lived in sync with the wildlife. They raised black leopards as their pets and considered snakes as their guardians. (The name Naga itself means snake.) The new people from the north (since Indian land is a peninsula) introduced new ideas. The Nagas rejected all of these ideas. But some of them began to consider these new ones. This group accepted Buddha and his principles of non-attachment and non-violence. At the same time, another new idea of Brahminism was thrusted on them as well. This led to grouping them by birth into various castes, and they were classified as untouchables, the Parayars; they got stripped off their land, and made to work as bonded slave labor. This continued in the age of the various kings up until British came. The oppressed people then sought the morality of the British to uplift themselves, and in the movie by finding the gold. Whether British had that morality or not is for the viewers to decide after watching the movie.
The portrayal of the lives of the Paraiyars in the early 19th century is anything but extra-ordinary. They live in, or forced to live in, small huts. The men use a netted coir cot outside the hut, perhaps a common thing across all castes at that time. Both the men and women work on the land by themselves, right from the first light. The cinematography is not from the third person point of view, but from a close quarters. You feel like you are on the land toiling. Well, but they don’t toil per se, they sing songs amidst their work. The songs themselves seem like a remembrance of their history. The songs and their day-to-day conversations include sexual innuendos too, uttered by both men and women. This is contrasted with the landlord where he sits on a chair and gives orders to people, while his wife’s role is just to stand behind him, speaking nothing and doing nothing.
Historically, the British and their missionaries helped the Parayars and the other oppressed people by providing them with education which the Indian upper castes did not. Hence, they associated more with the British in certain aspects. There is a beautiful scene in the movie where the young son of Lord Clement, William, tries to get down from the horse carriage and asks for a hand from the young son of Thangalaan, Asokan. The scene shows a perplexed Asokan for a moment that a person not from his own caste asks to be touched by him. A smile dawns on him, and he realizes that this is not just another upper caste person but a young white Britishman who does not have an iota of discrimination in his heart. In another scene, Thangalaan buys his wife and other women in his village, a jacket, the upper breast-wear, from the money paid by Lord Clement. Only the upper caste women were allowed to wear them, and now, they grab their own rights. The scene is depicted in a very fine manner without losing dignity. The women, after wearing them, comment that they feel more light now that their breasts have a support. The scene continues in a mild sexual innuendo without crossing that thin line when Thangalaan jokingly says that it would be difficult for her children, him being her first child, to drink milk.
One can relate the movie to the novel, Vellai-yaanai (The White Elephant), written by Jeyamohan, which depicts the plight of Dalits in the late 19th century working in the ice factories of Madras presidency. The White Elephants are the giant ice cubes which the Dalits were forced to work with under extreme conditions without any proper protection. (It would be interesting to study the similar situation of the Blacks in the USA in parallel since they too were forced to work in ice factories to cut ice and as ice-boys to deliver ice.) The upper castes sought them from various regions of the country and forced them into factory labor without proper remuneration. Finally, the Dalits uplifted themselves by demonstrating the first-ever union factory strike in India asking for proper salaries. One of the major characters of the novel is Kathavarayan, a real-life character who later renamed himself as Iyothee Thass (Iyothee Thaasar). He was a scholar, writer, and a revolutionary, who wrote about the hierarchical caste inequalities and how the Brahmins and mainstream Hinduism robbed of the power of the Paraiyars and Buddhism, respectively. One could thus connect the novel and the movie through Dalit oppression and their own upliftment. A major difference is that in the novel, the giant ice cube is the oppression that is thrusted on the heads of Paraiyars and they fight against it, while in this movie, the gold is the dignity that is robbed from them and they fight for it.