May be a black-and-white image of one or more people and beard
<https://www.facebook.com/photo/?fbid=10159096288005489&set=a.352264660488&__cft__[0]=AZXUzus7V4BgDDIhWjGOHSZk283vAW5xxijeuTkjCb1mr0fvi24psUaXEZEhK4iVVRkc4nmD7EaFREW5OmJgh-xWZA0GJvshst4RgVoofDaKVkY3OtzJsuBge9HaTq_8bR6GmyDK9BMt_XEMkzccrAmN13e3oiH3VstvOo3rL3YRdg&__tn__=EH-y-R>
*Jairus Banaji*
<https://www.facebook.com/jairus.banaji?__cft__[0]=AZXUzus7V4BgDDIhWjGOHSZk283vAW5xxijeuTkjCb1mr0fvi24psUaXEZEhK4iVVRkc4nmD7EaFREW5OmJgh-xWZA0GJvshst4RgVoofDaKVkY3OtzJsuBge9HaTq_8bR6GmyDK9BMt_XEMkzccrAmN13e3oiH3VstvOo3rL3YRdg&__tn__=-UC%2CP-y-R>
1tS1ponsoigraehldl
<https://www.facebook.com/jairus.banaji/posts/10159096291680489?__cft__[0]=AZXUzus7V4BgDDIhWjGOHSZk283vAW5xxijeuTkjCb1mr0fvi24psUaXEZEhK4iVVRkc4nmD7EaFREW5OmJgh-xWZA0GJvshst4RgVoofDaKVkY3OtzJsuBge9HaTq_8bR6GmyDK9BMt_XEMkzccrAmN13e3oiH3VstvOo3rL3YRdg&__tn__=%2CO%2CP-y-R>·
The revolutionary film maker John Abraham (1937–1987), who started the
Odessa Collective in Kochi in 1984 and whose second feature film (made
in Tamil) ‘Donkey in a Brahmin Village’ (Agraharathil Kazhuthai, 1977)
was banned in Tamilnad. From Ashish Rajadhyaksha’s Enyclopaedia of
Indian Cinema, one gathers that he studied economics at a college near
Kottayam, was educated by his grandfather who gave him his first camera,
worked as an insurance salesman in Bellary, and went to the FTII to
study under Ghatak. He raised money ‘by travelling from village to
village beating a drum and asking for contributions to a genuine
“people’s cinema”’. He was fond of drinking and is said to have died by
falling from a rooftop.
A Brahmin professor of philosophy Narayana Swamy (played by M.B.
Sreenivasan) is lampooned for adopting a young donkey whose mother has
just been done to death by a mob. The rector of the Christian college
where he teaches tells him the whole college has been plastered with
posters making fun of him and that this is ‘bad for our discipline’.
‘This is demoralizing our institution’. The young professor then agrees
to take the donkey to his village. In the village N. hands the donkey
over to Uma, a deaf mute, to look after. Throughout the film he and Uma
are the only characters who express any real emotion other than the
ridicule, anger, etc. that the Brahmins constantly express. Thus N.
tells his dad, ‘One evening when I came home, I found this donkey on my
doorstep. I was told that an angry mob had killed its mother. I felt
perturbed. I didn’t know what I should do. Do you know what crossed my
mind? I felt that a living thing had come to me for love and affection.
I hadn’t the heart to drive it out’. He returns to the village some
months later to find the donkey has become an object of mounting
frustration and resentment. Uma gets pregnant but loses the baby. When a
priest discover its discarded corpse, he mobilizes the other priests,
shouting ‘It’s a curse to find a baby’s corpse in the temple!’. When
they summon Uma’s mother, she blames the donkey. The priests decide the
donkey ‘has polluted the temple’. ‘Even when driven out of here, this
donkey manages to return. There is only one solution—to kill it’, says
the headman. As the villagers grab hold of the young donkey and drag it
away, beating it as they do so, the voice-over says, ‘Tell me, where is
Hari the God? Tell me, growled Hiranya. The good son replied, He is in
the pillar and in every particle of dust…God is the sum total of each
and every thing’. They go back to tell the priests they’ve killed the
donkey. But some days later they see a donkey wandering on the hill.
Miracles start happening. The priests now change their story. The
headman says, ‘At a glance I saw a donkey lit with divinity on the
child’s face…Everyone must contribute to the temple and help us build
it. We’ll then be worthy of Lord Shiva’s blessings’. N. overhears this
conversation among the Brahmins. He goes looking for Uma and finds her
mourning. He tries to console her. He goes home and reads. Beside him on
the bed is a book with Che’s picture on the cover. The voice-over says,
‘Reciting verses from Poet Bharati’s Dance of Doom’, after which a long
sequence follows where Bharati’s poem is recited against rapidly
alternating shots of N. and Uma and the refrain ‘O Mother, the dance
that you execute captures my heart’. At the very end the killers are
shown dancing frantically around the donkey’s skull. The verses with
which the director started the film return at the end. ‘Fire is the god
of heroism. Fire is the flaming sun. Fire is the essence of light. May
it burn…Virtue, wisdom, life, penance, sacrifice, enmity, anger,
oppression—we pay homage to all these qualities of fire…Fire, which is
life’s comrade, we greet you…Like you, O Fire, may our minds sparkle.’
The apocalyptic dance poem that John Abraham recites close to the end of
the film is taken, as he tells his viewers, from Oozhi-k-Koottu or
‘Dance of Dissolution’ by Subrahmanya Bharati. Bharati was the most
revolutionary of the early 20th century Tamil writers. Although known
also by his pen-name ‘Shelley-dasan’ from his deep admiration for
Shelley, his political writings were banned by the British as
‘sedition’. He died in poverty in 1921 at the age of 39 , after writing
seven hundred pages of poetry that were destined to have a profound
impact on Tamil culture. Bharati himself had welcomed the Russian
Revolution, writing ‘O people of the world, behold this new wonder!...It
was like a forest reduced to firewood by a whirlwind’.
To describe Agraharathil Kazhuthai as a ‘delightful satire about Brahmin
bigotry and superstition through a helpless donkey’ misses the point of
the film. The film is not about caste per se but about caste as
emblematic of wider cultural attitudes. Abraham’s Brahmins are simply
emblems of a more widespread lack of humanity that defines India’s
society and culture. Thus the intellectual /protagonist who adopts the
donkey is himself a Brahmin, which immediately breaks with any caste
essentialism the film might otherwise suggest. The killers of the young
donkey are not Brahmins either, but probably Vellalas. The passenger on
the bus who objects to having a donkey being transported is your average
Joe. Seen in this light, Abraham’s film is almost a Christian parable
about the brutality that is bound to characterize societies that build
their superiority on the oppression of others. And read in a more
political way, it advocates an alliance between revolutionary
intellectuals (or let’s say the most progressive sections of the middle
class more widely) and women. It is no accident that a woman plays the
part of the deaf mute. And no accident either that she and Narayana
Swamy are the only characters shown as truly capable of love. To my mind
the film is a parable about the future that was waiting obscurely to
explode in the years and decades after Abraham fell to his death.
A restored and complete version of the film can be seen here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_pBTtAue0rA
<https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_pBTtAue0rA&fbclid=IwAR16nRcdG-ZgC-JZUD9pGCOT5jpud4gXUIKFXc3nzvvbR81qI7jBTJA811k>
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