The assertive and outspoken filmmaker Pa. Ranjith’s latest, Thangalaan, is one of the most awaited films; not just because it features a galaxy of stars including Vikram, Parvathy Thiruvothu, Daniel Caltagirone, Malavika Mohanan and others, but also because the film is based on the often-unheard and unexplored history of how the Dalits of Tamil Nadu mined and created the Kolar Gold Fields (KGF) with their bare hands and sheer will.
Having mostly focused on contemporary recent history in films such as Madras, Kabali, Kaala and Sarpatta Parambarai, Thangalaan is Pa. Ranjith’s attempt to go further back and reclaim the history of Dalits, and give them agency in history yet again.
In an interview with The Hindu, the screenplay and dialogue writer of Thangalaan and Sarpatta Parambarai, Thamizh Prabha, explains the fundamental thought behind writing a film which talks about how the Dalit community contributed to the creation of Kolar Gold Fields in present-day Karnataka.
“When someone asks us, who built the Taj Mahal or the Thanjavur Peruvudaiyar Koil, who do we remember? We remember King Shah Jahan and Raja Raja Chola. But in reality, it was built by poor and marginalised people,” he says, and continues in the same vein about the history of KGF.
Tamizh Prabha, Pa. Ranjith and Vikram on the sets of ‘Thangalaan’
He says, “It is said that the later Cholas and Tipu Sultan have mined gold from KGF. But, once the East India Company took over, they asked Lt. John Warren to do a survey, who found minerals and submitted a report. Many years later, (a soldier) Michael Fitzgerald Lavelle started digging by mobilising a huge population before giving up... but he set everything up. Later on, Taylor and Sons established KGF where more than 10,500 feet was dug. But who created these mines? Why wasn’t their story told? That story is Thangalaan.”
This doesn’t mean, however, that Thamizh Prabha could attempt writing such a film without having an extensive understanding of the history of KGF and of Dalits in Tamil Nadu.
“During the filming of Natchathiram Nagargiradhu, he (Ranjith) told me that he wanted me to work on a film on KGF, and gave me a detailed first draft. There was a metaphorical element in its storytelling,” he explains. This prompted Thamizh Prabha to acquaint and familiarise himself with many resources, which included a novel and a number of non-fiction works on varied topics.
“We read a lot of books about people of KGF; a docu-novel called ‘Living Dangerously’ (by F.E. Penny) which is quite like Thangalaan itself, a lot of non-fiction books on folklores such as ‘Gopura Tharkolaigal’ (by A. Sivasubramanian), ‘Kolaiyil Udhitha Deivangal’ (A. Sivasubramanian), ‘Koil, Nilam, Saadhi’ (Po. Velsamy), writer Su. Venkatesan’s ‘Velpari’... as well as a lot of kattukadhaigal, and books on ‘Nattu Vaidhiyam’ to prepare myself,” he says.
Thamizh Prabha also visited KGF to understand its landscape and people, and interact with the last remaining descendants of those who worked in the gold fields, that was shut in 2001.
“When I visited KGF, I got to explore the recreation club built for the British, the houses built for the workers and the underground tunnels, which we couldn’t go inside because of the lack of oxygen,” he said.
Vikram in a still from ‘Thangalaan’
Ask him if such an expansive knowledge of KGF’s history ever come in the way of creating a fiction, and Thamizh Prabha says, “I am not writing a documentary or an article on history; I have the right to interpret the history. For example, let’s say there is a village where they follow the practice of serving tea in different cups for you and myself. I see that social reality. But in my story, I will take the tea and throw it in his face,” he says.
He recalls how Kamal Haasan’s Hey Ram and Quentin Tarantino’s Inglorious Basterds fictionalised history and invoked Dr. B.R. Ambedkar’s words to make a larger point about writing the past.
“Fiction gives us this freedom. I read history to create the ‘reality’ (world) of the fiction. To paraphrase Dr. Ambedkar who said, ‘Fill the gaps in our history with social truths’. Can we say with certainty whether villages were divided into ‘ooru’ and ‘cheri’ many hundred years ago? I believe it because... if the situation is bad today, it would have been worse back then,” he muses.
Fiction, history and giving Dalits their agency
Someone who understands the complexities of writing history, especially Dalit history, is writer and historian Stalin Rajangam, whose work focuses on early Dalit icons, Tamil cinema and the Tamil Buddhist tradition.
If history can only be based on robust evidence-gathering as determined by experts, then it may be a challenge to write a history for Dalits, who have been ostracised from mainstream society for long for hundreds of years. “Does that mean that Dalits are a people without any history?” asks Stalin.
According to him, it is not that Dalit history alone is bereft of robust evidence gathering.
“My contention is that all documentary evidence presented to write history is on shaky ground. Dalits never had the opportunity to turn their myths and stories into ‘history’. Fiction is a part of writing history and it need not be considered as untrue; it is intuition about what possibly could have happened in the past. In Dr. B.R. Ambedkar’s ‘Who were Untouchables’, many of his assertions can be considered as educated guesses, but they cannot be dismissed,” he tells us.
He adds that filmmaker Pa. Ranjith is a product of two phases of Dalit writing. “After the ‘90s, Dalit literature made its way into public consciousness for a decade. Thereafter, non-fiction writing about magazines and periodicals run by Dalits in the past, non-fiction works written by leaders in the past, and documentary evidence about protests undertaken by Dalits across Tamil Nadu became more widespread. It instantly created an impact in the intellectual space, which moved the needle towards writing of Dalit history.”
“Until then, Dalit literature written by writers such as Bama, Sivagami and other poetry mostly spoke about the sufferings, discrimination and challenges faced by Dalits in everyday life. But non-fiction texts in 2000s spoke the truth; that the history of Dalits in Tamil Nadu wasn’t just about them being victims and that they also have an enviable history. For instance, Iyothee Thass Pandithar wrote that Dalits had a great intellectual tradition and that they had a Buddhist past,” Stalin says, and claims, “Filmmaker Ranjith is a product of these two developments; he has been influenced by both the Dalit literature of the ‘90s and the non-fiction writing that showed that Dalits weren’t just victims.”
A still from ‘Thangalaan’
Thangalaan, which is a fictionalised take on history, would present a forward lead in his career. He says, “However, since Ranjith believes in annihilation of caste, history (in films) should be rewritten carefully. The problems one runs into when doing that — depicting history as it is — is that it wouldn’t be well-liked by the Dalits, especially middle class Dalits. Therefore, he fictionalises it, by keeping history in the background, and focuses on what should have happened in history.”
Stalin adds that Thangalaan will go beyond presenting a straightforward history of Dalits going to work and creating KGF because of poverty and lack of agency.
“A more complex understanding of history would show that they must have gone for a reason, and not just as people who were dominated and enslaved. Conventional history may not concern itself with such questions (about why and how), but a filmmaker like Ranjith focuses on why they could have possibly gone to work in KGF by fictionalising it.”
He concludes, “Ranjith fictionalises pieces of history to give agency to Dalits. Instead of showing Dalit people as those who went to KGF because they were dirt poor, without food and water, and presenting an account where the film sympathises with their sorry plight, Ranjith wants to show us that Dalits lived a dignified life and that they struggled to sustain and reclaim it.”
