Tamil and Kannada cinema have in recent years captured the journeys, challenges and joys of migration. What has led filmmakers to this subject?
Subha J Rao
A still from Kannada film Photo
MANGALORE, Karnataka: Filmmaker Pa Ranjith’s ‘Thangalaan’ that dropped on Netflix in October shines a rare spotlight on a forgotten episode of Dalit history: of their relentless toiling in what would become the Kolar gold fields for British masters, a period of slavery rife with sickness and death of workers from India’s most marginalised community.
This 19th century saga follows the lives of workers who were taken to a place that would later be known as Kolar in Karnataka, over 300kms from their hometown in Veppur in Tamil Nadu.
The film that hit theatres in August 2024 received among the loudest cheers at a screening in Miraj Cinemas in Ambernath, about 50km from Mumbai, when a group of women from nomadic and denotified tribes - such as the Nath Panthi Davari Gosavi community who travel with their cattle and sing, the Vaidu who sell traditional medicines and Waddar, stone sculpting artists, among others - watched what they believed was the reclaiming of a past forgotten, a film that held a mirror to the lives many felt they continued to live.
A screening of Thangalaan organised by Anubhuti Trust in Ambernath for women from nomadic and denitrified tribes. Picture credit: Anubhuti Trust
While commercial blockbusters (Lokesh Kanagaraj’s Kamal Haasan -starrer Vikram (2002) and his Vijay-starrer Leo (2023) in Tamil; KGF (2018, 2022) and Kantara (2022) in Kannada; and SS Rajamouli’s Baahubali (2015, 2017) and RRR (2022) in Telugu, and Malayalam films including hits Kumbalangi Nights (2019) and Manjummel Boys (2024) from southern Indian states have made waves across India, a bunch of filmmakers is pushing the envelope in the telling of stories of the lived reality of the country’s invisible, marginalised people.
“We live in a time when films don’t speak about issues such as migration, connection with Nature, and environmental justice. People like me have never felt seen,” said Deepa Pawar, managing trustee and founder director of Anubhuti Trust, a nonprofit working with nomadic tribes in Maharashtra that arranged for the screening of Thangalaan.
“But this film showed our food, our culture, our art, our relationship with people and land…When the film ended, the women told me: tai, this is our story, it’s not a film (this is our story, not a film),” Pawar, an Ambedkarite, told The Migration Story.
Poster of Tamil film Thangalaan
The Tamil film industry released 156 films last year that earned the industry Rs 1,961 crore, its highest-ever gross, and the neighbouring Kannada film industry grossed Rs 312 crore in 2023 when it released 101 films, according to media consulting firm Ormax Media, which evaluates films that release in at least 25 screens.
The two industries have found pan-India fanhood in recent years as language barriers crumbled during the pandemic lockdown when entertainment consumption on OTT platforms peaked, making films across languages accessible to a wider audience.
The Hindi dubbed version of Thangalaan, in fact, received a lot of online traction and rare discussion about caste and oppression. Pa Ranjith, widely hailed for putting the Dalit voice at the forefront of his storytelling, has put the spotlight in his past films on invisibilised communities: in Madras (2014), he captured the fondness for football and rapping in North Madras, a contrary portrayal to its perceived image of being a den of violence and gang wars.
He later explored housing rights of Mumbai’s slum dwellers in Kaala (2018) and the exploitation of tea plantation workers in Kabali (2016), both starring superstar Rajnikanth.
Filmmaker M. Manikandan too deals “tangentially or directly with migration”, said film critic Aditya Srikrishna citing Aandavan Kattalai (2016) that explored the question of identity and belonging. “And in Kadaisi Vivasayi (2022), there is the aspect of how neoliberal development drives land and agriculture away from rural and mofussil towns, which ultimately lead to migration,” he said.
Poster of Tamil film Kadaisi Vivasayi
This is a departure from how migration is often approached in Tamil cinema.
“Since Tamil Nadu is a highly urbanised state, there is always a grappling with nostalgia, for a past left behind while also embracing the modern and technical advancements that come with migration. Because there is a co-existence of both ways of life, this is also reflected in the movies,” said Srikrishna.
In the Kannada film industry, however, films such as Utsav Gonwar’s Photo (Kannada), which released in March 2024, and the more recent Chilli Chicken (Kannada, June 2024) by Prateek Prajosh, are still outliers.
THE OUTSIDERS
A still from Kannada film Photo
Photo spoke about the plight of migrant labourers on their long walk back home to North Karnataka from Bengaluru during the COVID lockdown. The film told the story of a little boy who wanted to take a photo in front of Bengaluru’s magnificent Vidhana Soudha, Karnataka’s assembly building, his migrant construction worker father and mother back home.
“I was in Coorg to write a script when the lockdown was declared. I read about how a pregnant woman from my zilla died of multi-organ failure after the long walk, even before she could reach home. It ate me from within and I wanted to document it,” filmmaker Utsav Gonwar told The Migration Story.
Gonwar himself had experienced being an ‘outsider’, having moved to Bengaluru from Raichur to pursue his filmmaking career. The distance between his hometown and the city he lives in might be just 450 kilometres, but the chasm was wide, he said.
“You might have the money, but not the confidence to go to a hotel — you prefer the streetside carts. So, imagine the plight of someone who is not educated and who comes here to feed his family?” Gonwar said over a phone call.
Chilli Chicken, which has now been released on Amazon Prime Video, narrated the story of four people from the Northeast and their attempt to integrate into Bengaluru life and pick up the local language, Kannada.
“My first exposure to migration as a concept was probably Aditya Chopra’s 1995 Dilwale Dulhaniya Le Jaayenge and the trope of the NRI holding on to the idea of his homeland,” said Prajosh, who himself grew up in the Gulf, where he said he felt like an outsider. The feeling of home came only when he visited India for summer vacations, he said.
A still from Kannada film Chilli Chicken
The outsider feeling reflected in the resolution he tried to show in his film in which northeastern migrants are shown to be confused for Chinese, rarely getting called by their real name and being treated poorly by their employer. But it ends with them reclaiming their identities, and no longer ‘unseen’.
“When I worked on my film, I knew how I wanted to treat my characters, and this was based on my own experiences,” said Prajosh.
“When living in the Gulf, I was often reminded that I was an outsider. I wanted my characters to not feel that way, eventually,” he said.
The film also ran in Manipur, and received much love from there for how it portrayed migrant labour, film distributors said.
‘DOCUMENTING THE INVISIBLE’
For decades now, films in Tamil and Kannada have showcased the movement of its characters from villages to cities — locally called Pattanam, Nagaram, Pattana, Nagara or Shaharu — a geographical area far removed from the subject’s.
There have been songs, including one featuring superstar Rajinikanth, about the difference between village and city life. In the 1987 Tamil film Velaikaran, Rajinikanth’s character sings: “Thottathula Paathikatti Paathirukkaen…” (I’ve seen people build a border for their fields, but it’s only in the city that I see people building borders for the mound of rice on their plate).
But most films have set aside the caste angle and atrocities, and have captured the village to city journey as quick with almost guaranteed success, people moving from penury to uber luxury in the span of a five-minute song.
A still from Tamil film Paradesi
Director’s Bala’s Paradesi (2013), stayed reasonably real. Based on Paul Harris Daniel’s historical novel Red Tea, it is a searing tale of early tea plantation bonded labour and their inability to escape a plight worse than death during the British Raj. But the film did not go into the nuances of why such terror is perpetrated on just one set of people.
In 1980, K Balachander’s Kamal Haasan-Sridevi starrer Varumayin Niram Sivappu (the colour of poverty is red) married socialism and poverty and the human condition evocatively, but the language got its first sample of the migrant condition, in terms of the institutionalised slavery of the migrant workforce in Vasanthabalan’s brutal Angaadi Theru (2010), which revolved around the iconic Ranganathan Street in the bustling T Nagar locality of Chennai, the capital of Tamil Nadu.
In many of the textile and departmental superstores there, the staff were not allowed to sit in between work, faced sexual harassment, and abusive employers.
A still from Tamil film Angaadi Theru
“Nearly 40 minutes of my film is a documentary of sorts,” said filmmaker Vasanthabalan. “During my research, I found out about the people who made their riches cleaning toilets and washing shirts. I only added a slender thread of love and friendship in the background to enhance the film. I have watched films that spoke about migration earlier, but have always felt it romanticised the concept,” he said.
“Making this film also changed me as a person, I saw things differently then on,” he said.
Pa Ranjith’s Thangalaan and Prateek Prajosh’s Chilli Chicken seek to empower the voiceless in their storytelling. Thangalaan shows how the characters learn what it is like to not be an ‘untouchable’, to be treated as human.
Thangalaan, the lead character, even gets to wear clothes, instead of just a loincloth and a half-dhoti. The film’s most powerful scene is when he returns on horseback to take the others to the promised land, bearing gifts of top garments for the women.
“Migration is viewed differently, depending on where you stand in society,” said Tamil Prabha, who co-wrote the story and screenplay of Thangalaan.
He said that the perspective of migration is vastly different from the lens of the employer who is only seeking to get a group of people to develop a place.
Whereas for migrants, the thinking is radical.
“They move because the system they live in at present does not give them the freedom to live, either due to gender or caste reasons. And in the process of building these bigger cities, Dalits and other underprivileged people have paid a steep price for their physical and mental strength,” Tamil Prabha said.
For Gonwar, documenting the country’s invisible workforce is important. It corrects the often misplaced depiction of migrants - often for humour and lacking commentary on hardships - in popular cinema, and establishes the reasons for their movement and the solutions the society must seek for them.
“It is important to speak of the people who gave their sweat and blood to build what would go on to become a temple or monument. I’d like to tell the story of the worker who polished the marble tiles laid at the Taj Mahal. That said, I think migration is also about empowerment. It allowed many people to dream,” Gonwar said.
Subha J Rao is a Mangalore based film journalist covering Tamil and Kannada cinema
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