Despite being a Rajinikanth movie, Kaala has not been screened in many multiplexes yet, particularly in Mumbai where the events shown in the movie supposedly took place. Moreover, reviewers also did not do adequate justice to Kaala. What has made the mainstream entertainment media, critics and viewers sideline it?
Indian movies, especially the commercial ones, carry representations of the social classes in India. Such cinema-based representation has been a monopolistic legacy of certain social and economic groups that dominate the entertainment industry. If that particular urban entertainment ghetto has neglected the turmoil displayed in Kaala, then definitely there are some deep cuts made by the movie. This curiosity to diagnose the ‘Kaala therapy’ to Bollywood cinema and its outcome drove me to the cinema.
There is considerable agreement that movies are instrumental in bringing about revolutionary changes in the perception of viewers. The trend-setting and value-stimulating function of movies is well-known. However, there has been an exploitative commercial propensity to cash in on the social problems and discontent through the creation of entertainment products around it, particularly in Bollywood and on television. Such a pattern has given rise to the infiltration of the misleading reality of caste, class, religion, and gender-related structural obstacles into movies. Instead of showing the reality, the ruling mainstream class tends to customise the perception of social problems and the weaker classes. In effect, such managed perceptions become the reality. The damage done by such manipulation of the reality cannot be fathomed easily, considering the deep cognitive impact that movies exert.
With the capitalist and clannish motives to control artistic expression and products such as movies, several social problems in India have lost their realistic portrayal in Bollywood movies. The ontology has been fractured. Furthermore, when imperialist cultural groups control cinema, it leads to a distinct artistic imprint through a controlled discourse that rules the minds of viewers. Mind you, these viewers are the citizens, or to give it a more formal name, (mainly) urban
civil society. Such controlled cinema influences the opinion-building process on certain problems represented in the movie. What is this friction Kaala started in modern-day urban cinema that is far from the reality?
Kaala has triggered a theory about Bollywood movies in my mind. Although not an original one, my theory of Bollywood heavily relies on what a French sociologist termed as ‘symbolic violence’. The cultural imperialism that has permeated into the modern entertainment culture has overburdened the social psyche, particularly through the over-represented urban monoculturalisation and its typical impressions. Further, it has triggered the emergence of class-centric aesthetic standards as emitted from the entertainment mediums.
Artists may come with genuine ideas but the monocultural class controls the artistic collectivity and reduces it to a sellable entertainment product. In the long run, the original conceptual trails lose their life force. A cinema culture created through such aberration does not allow stories of the disenfranchised in cinema with its original conceptual integrity and aesthetic gear. Kaala broke this rigid pattern with its passionate handling of an age-old neglected problem of struggles of immigrants in Mumbai. More important, the movie brought the underlying political entrepreneurship to the surface. The credit goes to Pa. Ranjith for proving the full potential of the movie as a reformatory medium with a novel aesthetic framework and a stroke of genius. The marginalised urban social groups shown in Kaala are victims of not just economic but also the cultural imperialism of the mainstream. The economic forces and its powerful pressure on the survival of the poor is a distressful reality that could find a way in Kaala.
The drudgery of cultural imperialism in cinema is two-fold. It is taking place through the act of co-production of socio-economic violence in a real sense, and further, it is aggravated by the cinema-based symbolic violence. Such a pattern of movie-based symbolic violence leads to the creation of a challenging reality, to borrow a jargon — a static worldview about the social reality.
When movie-makers miss or blur the authentic aesthetic of the marginalised surrounding their problems symbolised in a movie, it triggers a different mass view of the reality than the original one. While slums and working immigrant are the beating heart of any urban habitat, there is visible discontent among the higher urban classes about the slums and the poor people living there. The hypocrisy of the mainstream classes reveals their dependency on the slum population for the cheap labour and services for their survival. The class virus is so dangerous that it maintains the bias against the marginalised despite the dependency. Pa. Rantih’s Kaala revealed the living reality of the slum-based migrant population to urban viewers, to break their heart with reality therapy.
The symbolic violence that reified the original issues on the margins of urban habitats has continuously diluted and misdirected the urban reality. What people always see is progressive urbanisation, be it on TV or in the movies. For long, Bollywood movies have maintained a similar array of symbolic violence to create an exclusionary cinema. For such rigid problems of movie-based oppression of the disenfranchised, Kaala gave a proper reaction. The symbolic capital represented in Kaala is a strong reply to the symbolic violence imposed on the disenfranchised citizenry and the genuine beneficiary consumers of the reformatory cinema.
Whenever artists try to stand for real-life problems and the emotional world of the common people, they are likely to get tagged as alternative cinema-makers. I am sure there are more unexplored glorifying notions for such artists and their artistic creations. In a way, Kaala has created a prototype of commercial reformatory cinema, if not an alternative cinema. The silence of critics and content writers in the entertainment media about Kaala has highlighted the structural system of Bollywood and its shallow ethical footing.
Pa. Ranjith has changed the typical movie-making pattern where movies are used as a powerful medium by the dominant classes to create a symbolic capital that supports their power structures, in cinema as well as in the urban social-economic structures. Bollywood cinema has landed in a strange urban terrain with a nauseating overrepresentation of the intersection of the urban middle-class and elite class imagination. The most stressful reality exists with the ruling class portrayal as the so-called mainstream progressive cultural group. Pa. Ranjith’s Kaala has launched a notable resistance with such oppressive urban majority. Until today, the dark side of progressive urbanisation has been missing in Bollywood cinema with its original symbolism and iconography. Kaala gave voice to those repressed and suppressed voices in the urban territory.
It may sound a little strange for a common viewer but there is a co-production of positive cosmopolitan scripts from certain classes and their symbolic systems through Bollywood movies. The real-life silence of the powerless common folk generally gets transferred to the imaginative reality in cinema to reinforce the culture of silence. This happens particularly by stigmatising and later killing the aesthetic values of the disenfranchised. This damage is irreparable until the selfhood of such population is represented holistically through all possible mediums of public communication including movies. Pa. Ranjith comes in with Kaala therapy to trigger the selfhood of the repressed urban immigrants.
The German philosopher Prof. Martin Heidegger took the poems of Holderlin to show the nature of revelation of the truth and the emancipatory expressions of humans through the artistic language in poems. Prof. Heidegger believed that the
language used by poets is emancipatory and not controlled by the mainstream languages that carry oppressive undertones. The original aesthetic language shown in Kaala overcomes the language-based oppression that is commonly found in the multimodal cultural imperialism.
Kaala tried the depiction of the emancipatory spirit and collectivity of the disenfranchised in their language and culture. Author Bhalchandra Nemade underscores that art is a collective expression and not just an individual’s creation. On this ground, Pa. Ranjith’s Kaala has succeeded in bringing forward the collective struggles of migrants in the financial capital of India. Here, Kaala stands as the expression of the collectivity of the struggling and oppressed migrants highly vulnerable to class-based violence. The ‘situatedness’ of Pa. Ranjith as a writer-director is phenomenal and he stays with what he believes. The same is true for the producer Dhanush and actor Rajini, who endorsed Pa. Ranjith and his venture.
Breaking the patterns of symbolic violence performed on the communities that have no access to express or set up their symbolic systems is the praiseworthy achievement of Pa. Ranjith. There is a visible outcry about what is being represented in Kalaa. The restrictive screening of Kaala in the financial capital of India alongside the silence in the media and the otherwise talkative urban groups reveals the success of Kaala. Unfortunately, the reception of Kaala in Mumbai also shows the cognitive hijacking of the urban audience by jazzy modern cinema and its shallow entertainment ethics.
The subject matter handled by Kaala is highly urban in nature, hence it is essential to keep the discussion within the urban sphere of cinema. Slums are being stigmatised by common urbanites and the media try to keep such views by bombarding and reinforcing stigmatic notions about the slum culture. The selfishness and hypocrisy of the dominant urban classes become strikingly visible in Kaala. In fact, Kaala revealed the biased nature of class-centric urban groups in the movies that otherwise appear to advocate people’s problems in the media.
To understand Kalaa and its riposte to mainstream symbolic violence, one needs to reach an aesthetic consciousness and a really open mind. The symbolic violence induced by the cinematic medium is better understood through works such as Kaala that has overturned the established culture in the movie industry. Movies cannot stay aloof from the cultural manifestation, and Kaala succeeded in revealing the artistic representation of the same. The nature of urban political entrepreneurs and their ventures are shown in Kaala using the lens of the diverse migrant population groups. It can be argued that there is too much problematisation of the political stream and the real masters behind the show are absent in Kaala. Nevertheless, Kaala has triggered the cognitive system viewers
through its emancipatory symbolic structure to reach the real culprits. Pa. Ranjith has addressed an urban problem of human rights and survival. And along the way, he showed how the symbolic violence in cinema can be tackled if one switches sides.
Indigenisation of movie-making has taken place with Kaala. The cultural friction started by Kalaa will keep altering the dominant aesthetics imposed by mainstream Bollywood cinema. What Nagraj Manjule’s Fandry and Sairat have done to Marathi cinema is happening to Hindi cinema through Kaala Karikaalan. The only question that is still unanswered: Can Bollywood shelter such talented movie-makers, their scripts, and impact on the established cinema culture? And, what if ‘they’ try to retaliate against the retaliation by Kaala?
ggdhaske@umail.iu.edu
