Of honour killings!

Aakrosh (Outrage, Hindi; 2010)

Director: Priyadarshan

https://sanjaymehta.me/2010/10/16/priyadarshans-aakrosh-with-
ajay-devgan-tight-and-powerful/

I thought honour killings and caste discrimination were a thing of the past. One would say the story behind the story was topical when this movie was made, when honour killing was a frequent occurrence, especially in northern India and the northwest region of the subcontinent. 

I remember reading about the time when EV Ramasamy visited Malaya back in the 1930s. He reminded the Tamil immigrant workers in Malaya to leave behind all the bad practices that they acquired from India. Caste, gender discrimination, superstition and fatalism should not be brought to their newfound land. He encouraged the Indian ladies to emulate the local ladies, don a sarong and be mobile. 

In the 21st century, we do not see caste playing a significant role in the day-to-day life of Malaysian Indians. On the sly, however, people may identify with the region their ancestors came from and their spoken language. Being in the minority, they lack the clout to influence major decisions in the country on a larger scale. Social media, instead of creating a borderless one world, only helped to subdivide them into small groups that scream to find how people are different from others.

This movie had so much promise when it cast some of the most money-spinning actors at that time, including Ajay Devgn, Vinod Khanna, Bipasha Basu, Paresh Pawar, and Reema Sen. The theme was something very current at the time. There was a flurry of killings of young people along the line of honour killings. 

It tells the tale of two CBI officers who were sent to a small town to investigate the disappearance of three medical students. The town is controlled by the local strongmen, who also work closely with the local policemen. They run it as if it were their own property. Cases are not investigated, and evidence is swept under the carpet to protect the crooks. One of the missing medical students was in love with the chief's daughter. As the boy was from a lower class, the father thought it befitting that he should be killed and the case be squashed.

Unfortunately, this film did not perform well at the box office despite the strong cast and gripping storyline. Probably the audience had seen too much corruption in the system to be awed. The theme of honour killing had already been in the headlines much too much to excite the general public. 

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

Are you ready for the challenge?

Paava Kadhaigal (பாவ கதைகள், Sinful Tales, Tamil, 2020)

Netflix Miniseries S1, E1-4.

From a movie-making, storytelling or cinematographic point of view, this anthology of four stories hit the nail and gets an all-star rating. It also deserves an A+ for the attention-grabbing edge of the seat type of suspense in my books. It is all hunky-dory for entertainment value, but somehow, I could not help it but compare it to the novel 'Mother India' which came out in 1927 when the heat of self-rule was very much in everybody lips. It can be described as a polemic book that attacked the practices, religion and every fibre of Indian society. Katherine Mayo, the author, a historian by training, thought that India was not fit for self-rule and independence looking at India's treatment of India's women, animals and the untouchables.

What do you know? Despite all the leaps and bounds that the society had bounced, the storytellers decided that the old formula of societal discrimination against LGBT, women, castes and victim-blaming would sell. Are they covertly telling that Indians are not ready to meet the new world's challenges as they are still stuck in the colonial era's quagmire?

The first story (Thangam, Beloved) deals with a love triangle where falls in love with a Muslim girl against both families' wishes. This is complicated by the girl's gay brother, who is supposed to be the bridge for their union, who also falls for the sister's beau. He, however, sacrifices his affection for the sake of his dear friend and beloved sister. But both families are having none of those and have no qualms into resorting to honour killing for normalcy. 

For the record, India had legally accepted transgender people as the third sex since 2014. It replaced the 153-year-old colonial law set by the Colonial Powers which viewed the same-sex relationship as an offence. Since antiquity, hijras (the third gender) have been recorded in Indian history, including Kama Sutra, to straighten the record.

The second offering (Love Penna Uttranum, Let us Love) tells the nefarious act of Janus-faced local politicians who seemingly promote inter-caste marriages, but in reality, vehemently opposes it. He does not hesitate to stage an accident of his daughter who fell in love with the politician's lowly driver. Things become intricate when his second daughter turns up with her friends and confess to being a lesbian. 

The funny thing is that the murderous father eventually realised his wayward ways, turned over a new leaf, had to leave his wild country to become a regular person to learn rap music in a civilised country like France!

The third story (Vaanmagal, Daughter of the Sky) takes a swipe at the perceived Indian society's propensity to victim-blaming. A pre-pubescent girl is raped (after a mix-up), and the family is more interested in hiding the 'shame' and taking the blame for such a malady to have taken place. Seeking legal redress and punishing the perpetrator are not options as they viewed as a humiliation to the victim. At one time, the mother even thinks of killing off her 12-year-old kid for bringing shame to the family! This episode is a subtle attack on the Tamilian practice of public announcement when a girl attains menarche. It is construed as a roll call to deviant to pounce on an unassuming young girl. 

The final episode (Oor Iravu, One Night) is the heart-wrenching one which is probably based on a real event. After she had eloped with her boyfriend from her village two years previously, a father visits her gravid daughter. She is now settled in the city with a stable job and a lovely apartment. Their union was opposed by her family because of the boy's caste, hence the clandestine arrangement. It appears had mended his ways and invites the couple to his home for a baby shower celebration. The suspense is what happens in the father's house—an intense performance by Prakash Raj, who always excels in character roles. 

Good entertainment value. 

(P.S. The Bollywood 1957 national award-winning blockbuster 'Mother India' was a rebuke to the novel of the same name portraying a stoic self-sacrificing single mother who, despite the adversities in her life, manages to bring up her two sons.)