Wallop him, child
The world of Sarpatta Paramparai is around us much before we’ve seen enough to select and compose such an understanding. It arrives in the slow moments before the opening credits roll up. We hear first the whistle of a train. As the names turn up in the appropriate shade of bloody red for a boxing film , we hear bicycle bells, passing trucks, deeper horns from the harbour, the line Thaaimel aanai, Tamizhmel aanai in TM Soundararajan’s voice, compressed and squeezed out of what might be a transistor radio or a streetside bell speaker, a political speech promising porattam (struggle), and the sundry grunts, punches and cheers of a boxing match, before returning to the sound of a train speeding, the rhythm of which is now picked up by the parai . We are immersed by such devising in the North Madras of the 1970s, the parts beyond Central, the world of the film. And we are served our first oblique intimation of Pa. Ranjith’s intentions, if you go by the fact that the next line in the TMS song is Kurudargal kannai thiranthu vaippen ( I will cause the blind to see).
The opening shot offers the searching, flapping, restless eye multiple perches and an equal option in temptations to wander. We begin inside a warehouse piled high with gunny bags, and a doorway just beyond frames men bent in the hard labour of moving these sacks, while in the middle distance some others are hard at work, and beyond them the green shimmer of the port, and its quiet offices. The thing about this shot is the unrelieved brown that dominates; begrimed walls, sacks, crates, and khaki uniforms, with relief provided only by the blue cloth wrapped around porters’ heads, and the green of the waters.
When we catch sight of Kabilan, Arya’s character, it is hardly in the manner of the grand entrance that we might expect of a star. I don’t want to say symbolic, but Pa Ranjith has him bent under the weight of a sack that he is carrying. He is unable to leave immediately for the boxing matches his friends at work are off to. When the siren blows, Kabilan takes off like an arrow from a tautly drawn string. He is still in the uniform of the Port Trust, but it’s a different man from the subservient one that the screen has just shown us.
What we’re offered in this progression of a minute is a simple juxtaposition of two worlds-those of work, and of play. The first is presented as repetitive and unengaging, and worth only a strictly measured allegiance, while the other seems to require passion, romance, and memory-keeping.
It's an all-male world when we meet it first, this fellowship of the ring that features the quicksilver verbality of Kevin/Daddy (John Vijay), Kabilan’s friend and colleague Gautaman, and several nameless others. We learn, through little nudges, that these men are Dalits engaged in menial labour, and bound in comradeship to Kevin, who is Anglo-Indian, and thus another sort of outsider in a caste-driven world. From their practical jokes and guffaws we learn that Kabilan is mortally afraid of being caught at these matches by his mother. Kevin quickly unwinds a string of stories, all to do with Bakkiyam, Kabilan’s mother going to mad lengths to keep him out of the sport because she doesn’t want him to finish like his father Munirathnam, who started out a boxer and ended up a goon who was gutted for his deeds.
Their enthusiasm for the sport brings them into uncomfortable contact with a network of those who see themselves as entitled to being part of what Saarpatta represents through family connections and training in the sport. Kevin, being a retired boxer, is the one who eases these tensions for Kabilan with laughter and wry commentary. None of this detracts from the power of this local, rejigged version of boxing to give those who choose it a new way of belonging.
The question that Ranjith leaves dangling and unasked, through this juxtaposition of work and play, is why does the possibility of solidarity among workers not hold these men together in the way that boxing does?
The traditional Marxist answer to this might be false consciousness, the blindness to material realities engineered by coercive mechanisms within capitalist societies. Ranjith’s Ambedkarite reading sets this answer aside gently to remind us that the modern moment, the new world of work, simply reproduces traditional hierarchies without much mobility-the Dalits have menial jobs ‘reserved’ for them. The passion and the memory-keeping that Kevin and Kabilan and Gautaman perform with boxing comes from the fact that the sport allows them to work in a way that makes sense to them, to be more whole than they are in their real lives, and to see and understand their reality as combatants in a silent caste war, albeit with the possibility of change and mobility. As Geertz might have said, they recognise themselves and their world more fully in and around boxing than they ever will outside of it. Boxing, in other words, allows them to labour for themselves, whether that labour is at becoming boxers, remembering great punches or fighters, or for no more than fantasising (or ‘doing bathroom boxing’, in Kevin’s memorable phrase).
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The British gave boxing a grander name-pugilism, and if you go looking through popular Victorian literature or earlier, you will see it called the noble science or the noble art. These elevations seem to spring from the fact that the sport did not require brute force as much as it did a quickness of feet, mind and fists. The romance of boxing, such as it is, constructs for us the fantasy of the brain directing the body and the body leading the brain in endless complementarity. Boxing was, perhaps, for its Western enthusiasts a QED for the idea of soul or spirit, for how else could anyone explain the electric coming together of sinew and synapse?
It is this idea that animates one of the best school stories ever written (for boys, mind you) -The White Feather, by P.G. Wodehouse. The hero, Sheen, is a retiring type, and tries to avoid getting involved in a fight between school and town boys. That moment marks him as one who chickened out, and he is soon ostracised by his class. All that changes when he meets a boxing coach with a signature statement (“A straight left beats the world”) and that sets off his redemption.
As the Wodehouse novel might show, the charm of the boxing story is also that of man making himself, or achieving that by a battling within to find a better version of himself. We have also seen the gendering of this archetype being rewritten onscreen in a film like Million Dollar Baby.
When I was eight, my dad and I put chakkar together for the first, and only time. It was April, and I was on a gloriously raucous summer vacation. The chakkar part came from the fact that I went with him to college, and then waved cheerily from the puttani-seat in front of his bicycle at his principal. She waved back because she thought I was being taken to a worthy library, and I waved because I knew we were decamping to Pallavi theatre, to watch a film titled The Greatest. The hero of this film spoke an English I couldn’t follow, but that didn’t matter because I was rapt in enjoying the fact that he wore chaddies with the word Everlast on them , and found myself swinging from side to side on the seat that was too big for me as he danced around the ring.
I knew his name was Mohammed Ali, and much else, but the basis for my fascination was something that I caught from my father. Much later, I learnt that his political courage was another form of the spirit that drove him as he danced and wove his way around the ring. For my dad, and for many young men like him in the 1970s, Ali defined a way of living in a world that was set against you. In dedicating the film to Ali, Pa. Ranjith acknowledges these matters of spirit and inspiration.
When you watch Sarpatta, you cannot help but notice the ornate formula by which boxing is identified. The phrase is rosamana aangila kutchuchandai and is rendered once in the subtitles as ‘the professional English boxing style’. I can see the conflation of honour with a form of professional pride, but think it worthwhile to point to two historical echoes that seem to matter in the film. In the idea of rosam, there is some trace of the noble science idea that the colonising British may have left behind. The other historical echo is the Periyarite notion of suya-mariyathai or self-respect. The political space that Periyarite politics organises is real, but it comes with a last mile problem for a Dalit like Kabilan. How to find this self and make it work?
We have heard of education and political struggle having such happy consequences, but those are fairy tales beyond Kabilan ‘s reach. Boxing becomes that means, because it organises a testing of the self in the body; in its unpredictable theatre, the self becomes visible and available for work even outside the ring.
It is this recoverable self, separate from bodily adversities that Kabilan and Rangan remind each other of at different points. When Rangan refuses to train him for the bout with Vembuli because he has fallen, Kabilan says “Udambu venna maariyirukkalaam, manasula ippavum adhe veri than odikitturukku” (My body may have changed, but the same passion still stirs within my mind). In the last minutes of the bout, as Kabilan sits bloodied and sliding into unconsciousness, Rangan’s desperate appeal to him is “Udambu than odinjirukku, manassu ippavum kallu thaan” (Your body may be broken, but your mind is still a rock).
Some viewers have complained bitterly about Arya’s acting in this film. I did not train to watch this film, as Arya did to act in it, or like the director did to make it, but each time I watched the film I could still feel the strain on every muscle I have never ever exercised.
There is this moment when Pasupathi’s character Rangan finally, grudgingly begins to give Kabilan some attention. It comes after Kabilan challenges Raman on behalf of Rangan, and manages to sock him in the jaw. The camera shifts at this moment to Kabilan’s legs pumping away energetically off the ground. It is a wordless moment---you see what Rangan is seeing. That Kabilan has fight in him, and might be a natural,.
When the bout with Dancing Rose happens, there is that last bit where Kabilan lets his guard down and dares Rose to attack. This comes after a moment where he lets Rose attempt landing his punches, and shields himself. He observes the older man’s feet, and learns how to predict what he might do next. That is how the knockout of Rose is set up.
The film makes a very exacting demand on the viewer; a kinaesthetic sharpness that allows you to see Kabilan’s changes in personality mapped in bodily attitude. You cannot but move with him through the stages he is given in the film: nelithal (an apologetic twisting when the film begins) to nitral ( or holding his ground) before sliding all the way to the depths with veezhthal (the fall that occurs when he loses compass) and then to nimirthal, quite literally the feat of p;icking himself off the ground.
Ranjith is not asking the deep rhetorical question ‘can the subaltern speak’? He is answering, in this film, the practical question how does a man find the backbone to stand up and hold himself? The answer is by daring folly, by falling many times, and with the help of many others. Arya empties himself to achieve this arc.
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Since we are talking of Rangan and Kabilan, let us locate some of the nelithal that we see him perform. Somewhere in the fact that they behave like lovers quarrelling, or at least Rangan does. One could take an imaginative leap and wonder if the script reverses the modes of akam poetry just a little. Akam poetry would typically begin with koodal, or to be joined, and then travel through stages such as pirithal/separation, iruttal/patient waiting, irangal/anxious waiting, and oodal/feigned quarrels.
All of the film up to the fight with Raman is oodal, the feigning of anger, between Rangan and Kabilan. It turns into irangal as Rangan guides him through the intricacies of footwork and dealing with Rose while also discovering that his son Vetri is a jerk, and then into the iruttal of waiting for his new protege to take on Vembuli and restore Sarpatta to its eminence among boxing clubs. Pirithal is the moment of Rangan’s arrest all the way up to his decision to turn up and watch the final fight against Vembuli. Koodal is initiated in the moment when Rangan gets up from his seat way in back and strides up to the ring to be reunited with Kabilan.
Ranjith plunders the modes of romantic love from long ago in this story of father and son finding each other by complicated means. There’s irony here, in that they are men of different castes, and in the fact that it is his tearful but frequently feckless son Vetri who spouts what his wife dismisses witheringly as appa-vasanam, or father-love speeches, even as he fails him. It is also true that Rangan has more than one or two sons. There is also his good son, Meeran, the Muslim boxer who is disembowelled by Vembuli early in the film but never strays from the straight and narrow.
We could say that this is Ranjith’s fantasy, that men can be each other’s fathers and sons in spirit despite the strict divisions of society. That smuggling this father-son love into his film is his revenge on a society which has discovered honour killing as a remedy for the unspeakable romance between Dalit men and Bahujan (a word that doesn‘t work well in Tamizhnaad) women.
If John Vijay’s Kevin is called Daddy, it is only to allow us to ask the question, who else is Daddy here? I am also deeply upset by the fact that many rewinds and rewatches later, I am still not able to identify the voice that pops in, one moment after Rangan has urged Kabilan to get up and fight, with the words: ‘Appa solren, yezhundirra (This is your father, asking you to get up). Who is this ghostly woo-woo voice? I now wonder if I misheard.
It is possible to read overtones of Ekalavya in Kabilan’s story, but we must remember that Rangan is no Drona. The real tragedy in the Mahabharata story is not so much Ekalavya losing his thumb and missing out on the ancient Olympics. It is that when Drona gets an opportunity to turn up at the popping crease of life, all he can do is resolve into a pair of no-balls. Rangan is better than that.
It may also be that if Ranjith chooses the mythical direction, it is to not to repeat an archetype but to repudiate the necessity for anybody to be either Ekalavya or Drona. Instead, we have Rangan confessing that Kabilan’s talent is greater than he imagined. At that moment, he is no longer guru, or surrogate father, but chooses to become an ally. Alongside many others like Kevin, Gautaman, Bakkiyam, Maariamma, and Beedi Rayappa.
There is something else. The fear that drives Bakkiyam’s rage over her son’s interest in boxing, or Rangan ‘s initial unwillingness to accept him as student is actually an identical fear: a fear of history repeating itself. Both of them fear that he would go down the same path towards being a gangster. The first words Rangan speaks to Kabilan are about him being exactly like his father. He does seem to begin repeating parental history, but as Gautaman remembers to ask, why do we assume that he cannot help himself or choose a new course?
There are other answers to this trope as well. Bakkiyam has no idea what to do when her husband is set upon and killed. That is not how Maariamma deals with the same situation, a generation later. Kabilan is too drunk to fight back, but she does and fends off then attackers by a combination of swearing, and shouting, and picking up the first thing she can find. Myth, and elegant moves such as displacing a narrative core long enough for you to find that myth is still the hole in the vada’s centre are cop-outs that he has no time for.
Gautaman’s Ambedkarite courage is not something that Rangan has, despite the fact that he is a self-made man. That object lesson comes to us from a man who takes one look at Kabilan and asks Kevin if he has brought land-rubbish to the sea. Beedi Rayappa, the fisherman-turned-boxer-turned-fisherman salvages Kabilan from the ruin he has become, and does this not by conventional training but by teaching him to row a boat, cast a net, and catch crabs. Just as he finishes the task, some play of the light picks out the name of his boat, and it is Ramji. I see what you did there, Pa Ranjith.
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Boxing, in the film, draws thousands, not just from North Madras, but also from ‘faraway oorus, like Guindy, Aminijikarai and Adyar’, to quote the commentator. This smaller Madras, or North Madras is a bunch of villages that have slumland or under-city force-written in their destiny. It is likewise a zone where a cheery cosmopolitanism is possible between Dalits, Anglo-Indians, and Muslims, where several anti-caste movements such as neo-Buddhism and the Dravidian one live cheek-by-jowl. The names Kabilan and Gautaman point to this neo-Buddhist past as much as they do to a non-Brahminical and rational tradition. This paradoxical smallness of place but largeness of heart seems to define time and place in the film.
This cosmopolitan spirit is also at work during Kabilan’s engagement to Maariamma, where assorted divinities from different traditions and religions, crops and grains are all invoked as witnesses. The genius loci, as Ranjith would have it, the spirit of North Madras, is a resilience of inner fibre in adversity, and perhaps it is this resource on which Kabilan eventually draws.
A connected element is the defining flair that is written into each character who gets screen time. Kalaiyarasan’s Vetri is all style, and has an almost Liril Girl bounce when he bursts into the ring. Raman is played in varying shades of smugness or stuckness. Pasupathi’s portrayal of Rangan deserves an essay to itself, for there is so much he puts into each word or physical gesture. One superb memory will be him coming out of jail and quelling Vetri’s attempt at garlanding him with one scowl. Maariamma is defined by a fierce appetite for life, and this ferocity comes into love, into anger, into everything she does, and Dushara Vijayan takes on the roominess of the role with zest. Enough has been said about Dancing Rose and Vembuli; I will merely note the pleasure there is in discovering each shade of their characters. John Vijay’s verve can be summarised in terms of the mischief he directs at Rose and Vembuli-he sings a version of Ring-a-ring of roses after drawing the boxer into a match with Kabilan, and when it ends, he is there for the last laugh, a set of pelvic thrusts in imitation as Rose is carried off. Thaniga’s nastiness is equally individualised. Tiger Thangadurai as the big-belt MC is an amazing reinvention of the chorus from classical drama-he is beautifully over-the-top in the range of the linguistic inventiveness that he is given, and constantly mirrors his audience and modulates their responses for us.
This North Madras is also a zone where the invisible process of caste reinventing itself can be reified, or made visible. The thatched houses that Kabilan and Gautaman come from are an area of darkness, while his vaadhyar Rangan and Thaniga, Raman ‘s uncle, who constantly schemes to send crooked eclipses his way, live in many-pillared houses with inner courtyards and visible bakelite switches.
Staying with the names, there is a certain way in which they line up: you have a Raman, his uncle Thaniga ( a name for Kartikeya), Rangan (another name for Vishnu), his son’s wife Lakshmi, and a kind of canonical pattern emerges. The other set of names are resolutely non-canonical, if you look at Maariamma, and the Buddhist names Kabilan and Gautaman. There is of also the very Tamizh name Vetriselvan, or he who flourishes in victory. This one seems to have been purely for it ironic potential.
There is much clueing about Kabilan’s Dalit identity in the film. I must not forget to mention the poster which keeps turning up to announce a bout between Paayum Puli Vempuli and Karunchirutthai Kabilan, or Black Panther Kabilan.
For all that boxing is about individual ability, or that the paramparai, in this case is about who trained under whom or who they fought for, the notion that the leadership of Sarpatta must be caste-appropriate drives Thaniga’s conversations with both Rangan and Kabilan. So he has a sour comment about Kabilan riding up on horseback to announce a match, and many more about uppity people who once begged for scraps. When mediations are on to settle their feud, Thaniga sets an impossible condition-he asks for Kabilan to return to a caste-role, that of cleaning his house, and taking away cattle whenever they drop dead. The final revelation of this casteist aggression is in Thaniga’s promise to have the hero killed in the same way as his father.
Something similar is visible in the micro-aggressions that Raman, and Rangan’s son Vetriselvan practise in their early conversations with Kabilan. This deepens, as Kabilan threatens to outshine them, and Vetri is seen scheming to reduce the hero to a hired goon.
Rangan is free of caste-anxiety and allied nonsense, and this seems to come from a kind of coherence drawn from his membership in the DMK. His ethical compass is unerring, and yet the film-maker offers us comment in the fact that this clarity is unavailable to his son even though he redeems himself eventually.
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There are many things that make Sarpatta seem to be a DMK film; other than Rangan’s moral stature and its connections to a kind of purity in politics. There is also his opposite ADMK number, the somewhat ridiculous Manjakannan (Maaran) who takes hero worship to the extent of injuring himself in the throat because MGR was injured thus by M. R. Radha. We learn soon that Manjakannan is a facilitator of the shady. There is a withering comment about MGR from Rangan, and apart from that, the great man only appears in the credits, or as the occasional picture, or name on a wall. I’m not entirely sure if I want to go with this way of looking at things because later events do reveal that there was shadiness of various kinds in both parties.
I will however, give Ranjith the benefit of doubt on this because he is offering us characters out of a DMK habitus, and the film itself is as much about Rangan as it is about Kabilan. There is also the moment of mild censure when you see that Vetriselvan, for all that he has his Tamizh name and DMK upbringing, is not entirely free of caste-feeling or anxiety. It is also true that the 1970s were a time of a certain political innocence which Indira Gandhi and her Emergency ended. It is not an accident that the match where Kabilan’s victory over Vempuli is stolen from him is 31 January 1976, the day on which Karunanidhi’s government was dismissed by the Centre.
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Sarpatta may be described as a great boxing/sports film, as a kind of illegitimate offspring of the Hollywood film Rocky, as a film whose primary success is in transporting us to some era, as an underdog film that doesn’t convince because of its excess, or indeed as an unequal boxing match between art and ideology with no winners. All of these accounts suffer a little from being unable to go eye to eye with the ambition that the director brings to his films.
If I look at Attakathi, or Madras, and indeed at Ranjith’s other films, and ask myself what connects all of them, a defining ambition seems to emerge. That of offering a cinema of recovery, of documenting the undocumented before it is lost to us. The ambition of trying to make films that recover the under-city, the downstairs to your upstairs, if you want a homely English analogy that doesn‘t work, the place from where the unacknowledged labour that drives our cities comes from. Ashis Nandy offers a useful phrase for the slums where labour must congregate-the unintended city-which might make the director’s purposes plainer.
In Ranjith’s account, the unpredictable results of modernity create gaps and air-pockets where unexpected things come together and take shape but are largely invisible. His job is to chase after them, and find a way to make them visible again, because the alternative is succumbing to the ideas of inevitability that are promulgated like ordinances by mythology and allegory and all the other fancy shapes that the ideologies of dominance can take. In other words, his films are here to tell received mythology, and history, and compulsory genres like tragedy and comedy to take a flying fuck at the moon.
Here’s a concession for those who don’t like bad language. D.R. Nagaraj, in a conversation with some of us in 1997, said that the duty of the subaltern who can write is to create texts that are able to oppose, to be againsters. Ranjith is a man who understands this mission.