Portraits of DamNation: Part I

Donkeys and a Tale of Doom

In this first part of our series we look at two donkeys who experience the cataclysmic failure of a nation to address one of its worst vices—caste. They are part of the same tale that has been playing on loop, across space, time and generation. One is killed and the other doomed. But in this grim and unending saga of injustice both stand witness to powerful moments of vengeance that are as disruptive as empowering.

Both Chinna (the little one), from the 1977 movie Donkey in the Brahmin Village, and Kutti Mari from Maadathy (2019) are much beyond metaphor. In many ways they are like primitive figures etched on cave walls reminding generations of humankind’s basest instincts.

Chinna, is an orphan donkey who strays to the house of Narayanaswamy, after its mother is killed by a frenzied mob in the city. A professor of philosophy at a leading college, Narayanaswamy happily takes Chinna in, but those around do not share his kindness. Chinna continuously faces the ire of a people who have decided that a donkey is too lowly a being. But matters come to a head when Narayanaswamy decides to take Chinna to his hometown, a Brahmin village, where its presence stirs up a hatred so profound that it ultimately kills this little donkey.

Kutti Mari, like Chinna, also strays away from its herd and finds a warm companion in Yosana, a young girl from the community of Puthirai Vannar, a marginalised section among Dalits in southern Tamil Nadu. Yes, you read that right. But what could further diminish a people who have had to bear the evil of untouchability itself? It is unseeability. Puthirai Vannar wash the clothes of members of Dalit caste groups and also bathe the bodies of the dead in the communities. They are forced to remain strictly out of sight, since even seeing a member of this community is considered to be ‘polluting’. However, one fateful night, a free spirited and inquisitive Yosana treads the path of transgression and shows up in the village during a festival celebrating the local female deity. She is gangraped by a group of Dalit boys (one of them being Kutti Mari’s herder). After the assault, when the men leave, Kutti Mari suddenly appears for a barely alive Yosana to throw herself on it. She is carried to the newly built temple of the local deity Madaathy where her lifeless body is found much to the horror of her family and disgust of the villagers.

Neither of the tragic tales, however, portray the donkeys as mere receptors of an unwarranted practice. Of the many portraits of Chinna that we see in the film, perhaps the most sobering one is where Chinna carries a placard hanging from its neck that reads “Professor of Philosophy”. It is an image devoid of pity or sentimentality because here Chinna stands like a detached spectator not only to the debasement of the insolent students who parade him around campus, but also the audience whose cinematic engagement could be equated with a crowd that gets used to a routine spectacle. And it is in a close-up shot of Kutti Mari that this turning-a-blind-eye becomes all too literal. This is the moment when it stands before a brutalised Yosana, prefiguring the curse about to befall the villagers—when they all turn blind. But before that happens, the upper-caste mob takes its anger out on Yosana’s family.

Likewise, the frame of the mob chasing Chinna’s mother is an indictment of a society in its insatiable appetite for violence. The lack of context for such a madness is as terrifying as it is real. But what is worse is the normalcy of it. Majoritarian violence assumes a ritualistic character, one that serves as a collective catharsis. This is the same reason why Chinna is killed; to satisfy the whims of privileged fools who assume Chinna is behind the series of misfortunes that befall their village.

In Madaathy too, the village is called to question. When the villagers find Yosana’s body at the shrine of the local deity, they are enraged that the sanctity of the holy place has been compromised. On being cursed by Yosana’s family they start hurling stones at them. Interestingly, in the movie which is recounted as folklore, this is where the scenes are transformed into a series of paintings. It is perhaps an apt metaphor for our digitally driven culture today, where violence—like these paintings—is preserved through endless reproductions.

But beyond the mob, violence is also writ large upon the seemingly innocuous but obnoxious obsession with purity. We see Narayanaswamy’s maid washing the courtyard and making a holy design with rice flour powder as part of her morning chores. This is after she refuses to clean donkey poop. After all, not everyone is as lucky as a cow! In Madaathy too, on the day of the temple inauguration, village women are seen engaged in similar auspicious decorations, while their men prey on the likes of Yosana and her mother.

In such an unjust system, therefore, in a rude logic, compassion has a brutal consequence. In his village Narayanaswamy leaves Chinna to the care of Uma, a mute woman who is the only one, apart from the professor, who loves and respects the animal. When Uma conceives out of wedlock and gives birth to a stillborn child, Chinna is blamed for it. The story is spun by her aunt who manages to convince the Brahmin priests that it was the donkey who carried the dead baby to the temple, when in fact it was she who placed it there. Much to Uma’s and Narayanaswamy’s dismay, Chinna is hounded and killed. As for Kutti Mari, it follows Yosana’s family as they are chased out of the village through pouring rain and thunder to the unknown.

Yet, as history testifies, love defiled has often wrought vengeance. The stills of Uma and Yosana’s spirit as they watch their villages live out their curse pulsates with a terror so profound that it makes us sit up, like those many moments throughout centuries when deathly defiance was the only thing truly holy and pure.

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