40 Years Ago: Two Tamil Films That Could Have Been So Much More

The year 1983 saw the release of one of Tamil cinema's all-time great films Salangai Oli, directed by K Vishwanath and headlined by Kamal Haasan. 

One of the interesting trivias about this hall-of-famer movie is that the director wanted Kamal to shave off his moustache for the role of a man besotted with classical dance. But Kamal was unwilling to do so --- his phase of serious experimenting with make-up and physical appearances was still a few years away. 

With Kamal reluctant, Vishwanath approached the dancer VP Dhananjayan to play the lead role in Salangai Oli. 

While Dhananjayan was still considering the offer, Vishwanath returned 10 days later to tell him that Kamal had agreed to appear moustache-less in the film. (It is a different matter that Kamal actually played the role with his moustache). The point is Dhananjayan had earlier seen an unnamed film, under the baton of Hollywood director Herbert Coleman (an associate of Alfred Hitchcock), for which he had shot a long dance sequence, not being released at all. 

But it was in 1983 itself, the famous Bharatanatyam dancer did get to see himself on screen, and that was in the Tamil film Kann Sivanthaal Mann Sivakkum, where his solo performance of Nandanar Charitram was included. 

That he was disappointed that his half-an-hour performance got only -a 5-minute of run-time on screen is a different matter. 

But this is not about Dhananjayan, but about the film Kann Sivanthaal Mann Sivakkum itself. It is 40 years since the film, on one of the bloody but darkest chapters of Tamil Nadu history, released.

Kann Sivanthaal Mann Sivakkum is based on the Keezhvenmani massacre (1968) in which 44 Dalit labourers were burnt alive by a landlord named Gopalakrishna Naidu. 

The gory incident in which even kids were mercilessly singed to death remains a major blot in the annals of Dravidian government in the State. (Revealingly, DK founder EV Ramasamy put out a statement blaming the Communists for the massacre. That the perpetrator of the crime and EVR belonged to the same caste was a fact that was not easily lost).

Even though Kann Sivanthaal Mann Sivakkum (based on the Indra Parthasarathy novel Kuruthipunal that won the Sahitya Akademi Award in 1977) was based on a heart-rending catastrophe, the film did not carry the emotional heft or the intellectual gravitas that the incident deserved. 

Directed by Sreedhar Rajan (who ended up marrying Dr Jaya Sridhar, the daughter of Gemini Ganesan), the movie was, for the most part, pretentious as it sought to ape the Bengal art film-like ethos. The film was a product of a Communist ecosystem to which Sreedhar Rajan owed his allegiance then. 

The film had some good actors like Jaishankar, Poornima Jayaram, Rajesh and Calcutta Vishwanathan, among others, in the cast. But the narrative and the staging were all over the place and the acting (especially by the newcomer Vijaymohan and Raveendhar) was outrageously hammy. 

His background music provided some kind of respectability that the story deserved. The song Manidha Manidha, in the strong voice of KJ Yesudas, to this day remains the clarion chorus at Communist meetings in Tamil Nadu. 

The tune and orchestration, even while being rousing and evocative, manages to underpin an element of pathos --- it is sheer genius to manage to marry two differing emotional ideas in one single musical piece. 

The film was panned by the media and performed even more badly at the box-office. But still, Kann Sivanthaal Mann Sivakkum fetched Sreedhar Rajan the Best Debut Director award at the 30th National Film Awards in 1983. This was the power that the Left ecosystem wielded at that time. 

Another movie of 1983, which too was backed by Communists (and which too fetched a National award), was Oru Indhiya Kanavu. 

Directed by Komal Swaminathan, based on his own stage play of the same name, this film was among the early ones to focus on the plight of tribals living in the hills. 

In this case, it is about the story of  rape and subsequent death of a tribal woman named Gangamma at Javadhu Hill on the Eastern ghats. 

Her case is taken up by a city woman who had earlier befriended during her earlier study visit. 

A Minister's son is behind the heinous deed. But, as ever, venal and powerful subvert the system and those fighting for justice are silenced with a heavy hand. 

The film is poignant, but as with many Komal Swaminathan movies, this too has a bleak ending. The man, who was known for his hard-hitting political satire and stories, never offered too much hope in his films.

Anyway, Oru Indhiya Kanavu deserves plaudits for taking up a sensitive subject, but kind of dropped the ball in its preachy and loud treatment. The movie was, however, taken up by the Communists who screened it in many places across Tamil Nadu as they had done its original stage play. 

The movie was also taken to the Soviet Union, and the film eventually won the Best feature Film in Tamil at the National Awards (1984). 

The two movies had the potential to have shaken the State in those quieter times. But they were let down by some shrill filmmaking. That they still won major awards is a telling commentary on who called the shots for long in India.