In his quest for perfection, Mari Selvaraj is part of a triumvirate of film directors making Dalit-themed films who have transformed the Tamil film industry by making films that foreground caste, hitherto an unheard-of practice in caste-ridden Tamil cinema (the other two are Pa Ranjith and Vetrimaaran), each with distinctive aesthetic practices.
After graduating from law school in Tirunelveli, Selvaraj entered Tamil cinema and assisted director Ram. He started to write short stories when he was still an AD; his stories revolved around caste-based atrocities and violence in and around his life. These stories became central in his films. Pariyerum Perumal, Selvaraj’s debut film, was produced by Pa Ranjith’s Neelam Productions, a Dalit-led film production house. Ranjith has been responsible for building a whole ecosystem of Dalit cultural producers in Chennai.
The plot revolves around Perumal (played by Kathir), a Dalit who faces caste discrimination and humiliation for not knowing English at his law college in Tirunelveli. The story takes a gruesome turn when Perumal befriends Jyothi Mahalakshmi (played by Anandhi) from a dominant caste community. The film addresses the cruelty of caste-based honour killings in Tamil Nadu by the land-owning and intermediate caste communities — almost all the young men who are murdered in the film fall in love with upper-caste women. This closeness or romantic proximity threatens the lives of Dalit individuals. This proximity is seen as disgusting because desiring a lower-caste man or woman is disgraceful and brings shame and humiliation to the family. Does caste make a Dalit inherently disgustful, or do such romantic proximities make the Dalit body disgusting because of the fear of miscegenation, a dominant trope in White fantasies of horror based on their own exploitation of African-Americans in history, for example? When do Dalit bodies free themselves from such caste-based disgust?
Vaazhai (2024) is inspired by a truly tragic incident in 1999 Tirunelveli that led to the death of 20 plantain farm workers, when a truck carrying bananas and workers overturned and crushed them. Selvaraj’s sister was one among the victims of this accident. The film is set in 1990s Tirunelveli and almost feels like a prequel to Pariyerum Perumal. The protagonist of the film is Sivanaindhan (Ponvel), a young Dalit boy who hates to work in the banana plantation on the weekends with his friend Sekar, his older sister Vembu (Dhivya), and his mother (Janaki).
Sivanaindhan – an ambitious and bright student – loves to go to school and dreads his weekends because of the laborious task of lugging heavy banana combs from the nearby field to the lorries across the field. In school, he is more joyful because of his evident crush on his upper-caste and older teacher, Poongodi (Nikhila). He is enchanted with his teacher's beauty, and doesn’t shy away from telling her how beautiful she is. The closeness he longs for with his teacher offers a space of gentleness he couldn’t find in his scarred and rough working-class mother, whom he hates for sending him to the plantation. He is too young to know his mother’s history or understand her pain. He is only familiar with his own pain and his desire
The proximity that Sivanaindhan desires with his teacher, who is from a dominant caste, doesn’t seem to disturb caste pride, not least because he is seen as a child, and the space of the school is seen as a modern institution, where the teacher sees her pupils as children. This proximity is not seen as a threat but rather a gentle and innocent affection between teacher and student.
Mari Selvaraj’s journey from literature to cinema is a foray into visualising the art of storytelling. As a writer, his search for stories led him to write about his experiences of caste cruelty and tenderness of love, using irony and poetry. As a filmmaker, he uses his inherited traditions of storytelling from folk arts like Paavai Koothu and Sambadi Attam. These traditions give depth to how he uses his symbols and images for the dream-like sequences that populate his films.
In an interview with film critic Baradwaj Rangan, Selvaraj says that he wants his films to be like dreams, and he hopes that through this approach, people might watch his films, if not for the content. Both movies open not with idyllic scenes of lush fields, but rather shots of dry landscapes and wilderness. These shots condense and displace (the two processes Freud says mark the dream) several sensations of caste and desire.
Vaazhai begins with Sivanaindhan dreaming about carrying bananas to a nearby lake, throwing them in the water, and diving into it himself. He wakes up wetting his pants, which signifies his emotional and mental stress about working in the fields. Other recurring symbols include black ibises flying in the agricultural fields. These connected images show the braid of labour and desire that mark Vaazhai, a masterful braid that Selvaraj coils and recoils in the film.
The songs in both films are placed at crucial points to show what the protagonists are going through. The first song in Pariyerum Perumal is about Perumal’s dead dog, Karuppi. Perumal compares himself to Karuppi and asks where she disappeared. The picturisation of this is very interesting; the entire community laments Karrupi's death and performs a proper funeral rite for her. The other crucial song is Naan Yar? (Who am I?), a psychedelic song that unfolds a dream-like sequence that questions society’s ill-treatment of Dalits, and how disgust is made to stick to Dalit bodies. The song appears right after Perumal is humiliated by Joythi’s family.
In Vaazhai, the most moving song is Paadhavathi (Wretched Woman). It appears towards the end of the film when Sivanaindhan arrives home hungry and disoriented, and unable to comprehend the death of his dear friend, sister, and future brother-in-law. He goes to find some food in the kitchen, begins eating, and the moment he sees his mother, he gets scared and runs away from her, as the previous day she was angry with him for not going to the field without her knowledge.
The song has Sivanaindhan’s mother calling him back and telling him that she is a wretched woman for having chased him away in fear. The two most potent images in the song are when the mother says that she will tear up her empty breasts and give them to him, asking him to come back and when she says that she is both a loving and hating goddess. The feminine plays an interesting role in Selvaraj’s universe, something we will address in a bit.
Mari Selvaraj’s movies draw on the melodramatic repeatedly in this manner. Melodrama, historically, as film theorists and historians like Karen Gabriel and Ravi Vasudevan have told us, is a transitional form. What is Selvaraj moving toward? His films also have stunning cinematography; the aerial shots and other frames are visual metaphors that show society's indifferent and detached attitude toward Dalits. What are these images doing?
Caste and the affect of aruvaruppu
The Tamil word for disgust is aruvaruppu, an expression of total revulsion. This intense, bodily feeling has to come in when the body is in contact with an object. In her book The Cultural Politics of Emotion, Sara Ahmed argues that one does not feel disgusted in the abstract; disgust is about an object, and the feeling of sickness becomes associated with the object. Ahmed further says that disgust depends on contact, which involves a relationship between touch and proximity. Therefore, the emotion of disgust is not merely a cognitive experience but a bodily sensation. This emotion makes and shapes bodies as forms of action, which involve orientations towards others.
Ahmed shows how and when bodies become objects of disgust. There is a power relation that maintains bodily boundaries. The bodily boundaries show the relation between disgust and power, and create hierarchies in space and body. What happens to a Dalit body when it transgresses the caste boundary?
In Pariyerum Perumal, when Jyothi invites Perumal to her sister’s wedding, her father and brother seem troubled and wonder why Jyothi invited him alone. Perumal borrows a reasonably decent shirt and pants from his friend to attend the wedding. What you wear can change the emotion of disgust; Perumal wants to be presentable and appear pleasing to Jyothi and her family. He is transgressing the caste space when he decides to go to a wedding of an upper caste as a Dalit man..
Perumal’s contact with Jyothi and then her family question the caste boundaries of space and body. The men in Jyothi’s family realise the threat of breaking the caste boundaries and remind Perumal of his limits. When Perumal enters the wedding hall, Jyothi’s father sends her home to her aunt. He meets Perumal and takes him to a storage room to discuss his relationship with Jyothi. As the father interrogates Perumal, Jyothi’s brother and cousins barge into the room and start beating up Perumal. When the father is trying to calm everyone down, apparently attempting to get them out of the room, Jyothi’s brother urinates on Perumal and tells him to drink it. This abhorrent incident leaves Perumal in utter disgust for his life, and not knowing what just hit him, caste-based hate and boundaries become more real and visceral to him.
The act of being urinated upon does not just make someone feel disgusted about themselves, but humiliates their existence. When you find an object disgusting, the body recoils and stays away from that object; but when a Dalit body is threatened by caste proximity, more disgust is signified to that body, and there is the need to shame and humiliate it.
The complex social effect on the Dalit body can be captured through the term aruvaruppu, which sticks to a Dalit body. The root word of aruvaruppu is veṟupu, which means disgust, but also signifies hate towards something or someone. Dalit bodies hold aruvaruppu with the sheer thought of them for prejudiced upper castes.
In his essay Disgust and Untouchability: Towards an Affective Theory of Caste, Joel Lee explores caste hierarchy through the emotional concept of ghrnā (disgust), revealing how emotional dispositions reproduce social stratification beyond explicit ideological beliefs. Ghrnā, therefore, is not merely a personal emotion but a socially cultivated affect that regulates boundaries between ‘touchable’ and ‘untouchable’ castes.
Both Lee and Ahmed agree with the social function of disgust for maintaining hierarchies. However, for Lee, the nuances of emotional reactions like disgust are complex, and can be better understood through ghrnā, which is deeply embedded in caste hierarchies.
In his essay, Lee explores vernacular terms of disgust in north India and how upper caste communities are repulsed by Dalits. The conventional provocations of ghrnā in everyday speech are encountered with bodily secretions like mucous, saliva, menstrual blood, and bile. Misogyny meets homophobia in the enunciation of disgust. One also feels ghrnā at the sight, smell, and touch of human excrement. Indeed, it might be argued that Hindu upper castes see sex itself as excremental, and the excremental is consigned to the Dalit. It is as though upper caste people think they do not shit. The exteriorising movement of this matter across the body's boundary becomes central in provoking ghrnā. The Hindu upper caste body feels less aruvaruppu when they distance themselves from bodily excrement; in the case of Perumal, the act of urinating on him was to make him realise his proximity to it. He inherently provokes ghrnā or aruvaruppu. Lee, in his essay, talks about sanitation workers who were former manual scavengers, and how they are associated with ghrnā because of their profession, and it is ghrnā, which becomes a substantial barrier to social change.
Yet somehow disgust is intertwined with desire. In her book The Vulgarity of Caste, Shailaja Paik argues how the label ashlil (vulgar/obscene in Marathi) gets stuck to Dalit Tamasha/Laavni-performing women (Tamasha/Laavni is a folk dance form performed for the pleasure of men by lower caste Kolhati Dalit women in the state of Maharashtra, who also historically have been the concubines of the rich patrons of these dances) and the Dalit community at large. Though Dalits are considered polluted, Tamasha/Laavni performing women are considered more ashlil than others. The ashlilta/obscenity gets stuck to women who perform Tamasha/Laavni, but not the men and women who gather to watch their performance. The ashlilta prevents Dalits from being considered or treated as humans.
Paik pretends to critique Ambedkar’s position on Tamasha women because he believed that only by abandoning the profession of ashlilta could Mahar women gain manuski-ijjat (respect); but she actually airbrushes him and attempts to recuperate him by saying he was asking the community to join his project of self respect. Actually, Ambedkar’s position on the prostitutes of Kamathipura, as is clear from the description of the moment of his speech to them in Khairmode’s voluminous biography of Ambedkar, is indefensible, and shows how Dalit men replicate the oppression of Dalit women in patriarchy. Ambedkar had invited a group of women prostitutes from Kamathipura to the Damodar Hall in Parel, Mumbai. Ambedkar said to them, among other threats and abuse, "The Mahar women of Kamathipura are a shame to the community. Unless you are prepared to change your ways we shall have nothing to do with you, and we shall have no use for you. There are only two ways open to you: either you remain where you are and continue to be despised and shunned or you give up your disgusting professions and come with us. ...You must marry and settle down to normal domestic life as women of other classes do and not live under conditions that inevitably drag you into prostitution.”
Does Mari Selvaraj also reiterate the idea of disgust and ugliness associated with Perumal and Sivanaindhan?
Sara Ahmed’s notion of disgust's stickiness might be used to understand how disgust sticks to a Dalit body. However, stickiness of disgust, or how it is made to stick, is a complex social affect that goes beyond simple disgust. Vernacular terms like ghrnā, ashlil, and aruvaruppu represent a nuanced set of practices deeply embedded in the psyches of both Dalits and upper castes forming the very textures of their emotions and affect.
The abjection of desire and disgust
The relationship between desire and disgust contains contradictory impulses; they are deeply intertwined, and do not necessarily resolve themselves or lead to the same outcome. Why do Selvaraj’s heroes only desire upper caste women (barring the sister and her lover in Vaazhai, who are from the same caste but are killed off to shore up this higher love)?
Abjection might seem to challenge caste boundaries, as Saidiya V Hartman has claimed in the African-American context, but this is ambivalent and not amenable to easy recuperation. One cannot build agency, autonomy, and will easily from situations of abjection as Hartman fancifully claims. Where the attraction is deemed repellent, creating a complex emotional response in the person deemed repellent, that person is left with little room for manoeuvre.
Selvaraj’s ‘stupid’ women
We saw how Perumal was humiliated. After the humiliation, he almost involuntarily pulls away from being with Jyothi. In Pariyerum Perumal, Jyothi appears to not know how caste society functions, even after Perumal was humiliated in the class for getting admitted to the college through the “quota system.” She is portrayed as angelic and caste blind. This is exactly the case with the school teacher in Vaazhai. This is Selvaraj’s mode: to portray women as gormless and free of the disgust of caste. Indeed, Jyothi desires Perumal, and the school teacher is very fond of the boys, ruffles their hair, takes and stitches shirts off their backs while looking fondly at their nubile bodies, and indulges their adolescent desire with not inconsiderable pleasure. What is Selvaraj trying to say? That desire erases revulsion? That transgressive desire erases caste?
Though Mari Selvaraj intends to give a sense of hope through these two characters to his protagonists, they, however, are seen as weak and gullible women. The naivete of the women characters makes the protagonists desire them. In contrast to them, Sivanaindhan’s mother has no time to show love for him; she is always harsh with him and is no angel. Sivanaindhan hates his mother for being heartless because she forces him to carry the bananas, but the mother is more realistic about the family's situation and its need to survive. Poverty and caste oppression have taken an emotional and psychological toll on her and aged her prematurely.
The mother’s own love for her communist, working-class husband (she has the communist symbol of the hammer and sickle tattooed on her hand, and this is the memorial and the symbol of her love for her dead husband) has taught her that one has to fend for oneself, and that work is relentless and that love does not save you.
Distressed about Sivanaindhan’s difficulty working during the weekends and holidays, his sister asks her mother not to send him to work anymore. His sister Vembu has her own romance with one of the strapping Dalit men of her community, Kani. He also likes her. Young Sivanaindhan wants this man as his brother-in-law as he wants a father figure, and strong and principled Kani seems to be the ideal figure. Selvaraj kills off both in the film as he kills Sivanaindhan’s mother’s lover. His concern seems to be with transgressive desire.
The mother stresses to her daughter the importance of hard labour as the only thing they have in their lives, and the only thing that will help them survive, and shows her the hammer and sickle tattoo on her hand. She further laments about her husband’s love for communism and gave his life for the struggle, and now she is left only with the tattoo as his remembrance. Same-caste desire only ends in pain.
Selvaraj’s ‘peculiar’ men
In contrast to Sivanaindhan’s father, Perumal’s father is a kuthaadi (folk artist) who cross-dresses as a woman for the performance. When Perumal takes his father to his college to meet the principal because he got into trouble, terrible violence occurs. When Perumal’s father is waiting for him, Jyothi’s cousin, who is studying in the same college, humiliates Perumal’s father for his feminine traits and says his son is not manly enough because he (the father) is woman-like. Similar to the tamasha-dancing women who represent a paradoxical performance that generates fear, obscenity, and anxiety, Perumal’s father was humiliated all his life for being a kuthaadi who role-played a woman, like the hijra performer Chhapal Bhaduri in the Bengali jatra performances and his life story as a gay man (immortalised both in Anjum Katyal’s documentary The Making of a Goddess and in Kaushik Ganguly’s film with Rituparno Ghosh and Chhapal Bhaduri himself, entitled Aar Ekti Premer Golpo (2010)). All cross-dressing generates disgust. Anything that bucks the compulsory heteronormativity and bucolic masculinity of men is degenerative and disgusting. Hence, Perumal is not a man because his father is an emasculated man who plays a woman. Lower caste performers in religious and non-religious arts are always sources of disgust to the normative even as they are used sexually by Dalit and upper caste men.
The most beautiful relationship between Kani (Kalaiyarasan) and Sivanaindhan’s sister, Vembu, ends in their deaths. Kani, a leader and a rebel who stood firm on the principles of dignity and respect for the labourers, has a tragic end. Even though he is a big, muscular, strapping Dalit man, not averse to taking on sellouts to the community, he loves marudaani flowers and is gentle in his love for Vembu and wants to bring small changes to the community. Sivanaindhan sees his father in him and asks his sister to marry him; he also gives Kani his father’s communist sticker so that he can continue his father’s legacy, along with the maruthani (henna) flowers that Vembu has sent for him.
The proximity of desire between Kani and Vembu doesn’t threaten the caste hierarchy because they are from the same community, but the precarious conditions in which they perform their labour and their romance kill them. Selvaraj creates the space for Dalit desire as one that is magical – but must end in disaster. This, of course, also elides horizontal oppression among Dalit communities. Not all Dalits would marry any Dalit. The caste hierarchy within Dalit communities is alive and kicking, and we are made to believe they are just one homogenous community. For instance, in Tirunelveli district, most of the Dalits are Pallars, otherwise called Devendrakula Vellalars, who claim they don’t want to be enlisted as a Scheduled Caste community and will not marry another Dalit of any kind. Dalits have a disgust for one another.
But this is not Mari Selvaraj’s concern. He is obsessed with his own protagonist’s desire, and then guilt and punishment over transgression. The ingredients of his melodrama do not allow for sociological or historical veracity.
His desire to entrance the viewer with dream-like films means that Selvaraj has endless shots of fetishised labouring bodies. Kani’s chest, his calves, his arms, the calves and arms of all the labourers, the way they eat food – while all sources of disgust to others – are made into sites of aesthetic pleasure by Selvaraj. It is interesting that Selvaraj really objectifies the Dalit male body more than the Dalit female one. It recalls Arundhati Roy’s ghastly aestheticisation of the Dalit male body in The God of Small Things. That man also has to be gruesomely killed. The Dalit male body must be both deeply desired and brutally murdered.
But is Selvaraj overall aestheticising disgust to pull the Dalit body away from its traditional significations and valorise it?
In a deeply suggestive essay on Pariyeum Perumal, Anthony Arul Valan reads the protagonist as sexless and only internally obsessed with his own development. He also reads the caste blind Jyothi more affirmatively. Valan uses psychoanalyst D W Winnicott and his idea of play, and Periyar’s cheeky writings, to make a claim about play as a way to read both Mari Selvaraj’s film and a possible caste-affirmative future. It is a hopeful reading but, to our minds, strays away from the film text’s darker impulses.
Desire, death, and separation
The Dalit body is seen as disgusting – but also productive of a murderous desire. Disgust operates as a social practice that helps to maintain social structures and hierarchies. Disgust is also reconfigured as desire. The experience of disgust is not just a personal experience but a cultural practice that reinforces social distinction and also subverts it through the sexual and the aesthetic.
However, in the case of Tamasha-performing women, they were historically coerced to provide sexual services to dominant caste men, rendering them objects of predatory desire and vilification. Caste Hindus desired them, on the one hand, but on the other, their sexuality was considered dangerous.
Sara Ahmed’s analogy of contact transfer of disgust just by touching something already considered disgusting doesn’t seem to apply to Tamasha-dancing women. The stickiness and un-stickiness of disgust become ambivalent, and disgust does not move from one body to another by resembling the former. When does disgust become un-sticky?
Perumal's and Jyothi's closeness was not simply not accepted by her family; the entire family was disgusted with this relationship. When separation seems to be impossible, Jyothi’s family decides to kill Perumal.
Mari Selvarj in Pariyerum Perumal shows the cruelty of caste-based ‘honour’ killings. The antagonist in the film is an old man from a dominant (possibly OBC) caste who protects the dignity of his caste community by killing Dalit boys for being in love with girls from his caste community. The old man is secretly called by the families and is asked to kill the boys. He makes them look like accidents, raising no suspicion. MSS Pandian’s historical work and Ravikumar’s work on the contemporary has shown us how OBCs are the main violators and killers of Dalits in Tamil Nadu.
By depicting the ‘honour’-killing scenes, Selvaraj reminds us of Ilavarasan’s and Sankar’s deaths. Ilavarasan and Divya were the central figures in the infamous love story between a Paraiyar boy and a Vanniyar girl, which captured widespread attention in Tamil Nadu. The love story came to an end when Ilavarasan was allegedly hacked to death and his body left on a railway track. When this case was closed as suicide, another gruesome honour killing happened in Udumalpet. Sankar, a young Dalit, was killed in broad daylight by upper castes for transgressing caste boundaries.
Toward the movie's end, the old man tries to kill Perumal on a railway track. This scene recalls Ilavarasan’s murder. When the old man is not successful in killing Perumal, he sits on the railway track and kills himself. It was his caste pride that made him take his own life.
The death of the old man also recalls Imayam’s novella Pethavan (the begetter). When the protagonist, Bhakkiyam, falls in love with Periyasami, a Dalit man and police officer, the entire village, including Bhakkiyam’s family, opposes their relationship. Bhakkiyam’s death is seen as the only resolution. The story is narrated from Bhakkiyam’s perspective of what happens to a dominant caste woman when she falls in love with a Dalit man.
The entire village comes together and demands that Bhakkiyam’s father, Pazhani, kill her. Not knowing how to tolerate the transgression of caste boundaries, her father promises the angry villagers that he will kill her the following day. The desire to kill his daughter for transgressing caste boundaries is rooted in caste purity and pollution, but the desire also arises because of the repeated “speech act” by the entire village, and makes the father swear to kill his daughter. It was not just the men who demanded the gruesome act; the women were equally enraged by this transgression. “You should pour pesticide down her throat and lock her in a room. However much she screams or shouts, don’t open the door or give her even a mouthful of water. In a very short while the story will be over,” said a young woman with a baby.
Imayam examines caste minds within a community and addresses the position of a woman who is compelled to become a victim of traditional and cultural constructs, such as honor, caste, religion, and other moral standards. However, the father, towards the end of the story, lets his daughter leave home to be with Periyasami and kills himself. The father, who sacrifices his life to save his daughter, says in a village panchayat (council) that, “She is no longer my daughter. Kill her.”
In contrast to Pethavan’s plot, Mari Selvaraj in Pariyerum Perumal doesn’t kill the patriarchal symbol but reconciles with the patriarchal figure. In Vaazhai, he announces desire as the escape from a life of misery and sacrificial love that enables the desire, creates the space for it.
Vaazhai is Mari Selvarj’s memoir, and the plot replicates what happened to him and his community. The more acceptable relationship between Vembu and Kani would not have threatened the caste hierarchy, but Sivanaindhan’s caste transgression would not have been accepted by society.
Is the death of Vembu and Kani the price for Sivanandhan’s caste-transgressive desire? Vembu and Kani die apart from the direct connection to the accident, because of the plantation owners’ stubbornness in not providing a separate bus for the workers. Their lives were considered worthless and were meant to extract labour from them.
Why do Dalits often face separation or death when they desire? Is it because the disgust that people have for them and that they have for themselves overwhelms them? Sivanaindhan desired for Kani to marry his sister. The death of his father created a vacuum in him, and he wanted to replace that vacuum with Kani, the father he couldn’t have.
The animal/human interface
In both films, Mari Selvaraj shows protagonists having strong bonds with animals. In Pariyerum Perumal, the beloved dog Karrupi is Perumal. Perumal loses Karrupi, which incites the caste arrogance of the dominant caste men. In Vaazhai, Sivanaindhan is seen with a stuffed calf, which he holds close to him even after the calf is dead. One of the most painful moments in the film is his separation from the cow, which must be sold for the family to survive and pay back a debt. The mother puts a stone in her heart to sell it; the young Sivanaindhan weeps and bawls. Dalit communities are largely seen as “beef-eating,” and because of this, they are stigmatised and lynched across the Indian subcontinent. However, Mari Selvaraj doesn’t represent Dalit communities as beef-eating. This is not least because Pallars (Dalit sub-caste) don’t eat beef like other Dalit communities like the Paraiyars and Arundathiyars. This shows the differences in Dalit communities. The Pallars love their cows just like agricultural communities across the country do. The beef-eating body is considered disgusting and unclean because the proximity to cowhide and dead cow meat (offal, inedible parts) given to some Dalit communities which makes them and their bodies repulsive to upper castes. However, beef-eating has become a political statement for liberal Dalits.
Sara Ahmed’s theory of proximity and disgust shows how disgust operates as a contact zone where things come into contact with other things, creating a potential to transmit disgust. When Perumal comes into contact with Jyothi, her family is disgusted with that proximity. When Sivanaindhan comes into contact with Poongodi, all hell breaks loose for his family. This is not because of the sexual nature of his attraction to Poongodi (even as unlike what Tamil novelist Charu Nivedita has claimed, Selvaraj never shies away from acknowledging this desire) but because it coincides with the disaster that destroys his family and family-to be forever.
Ambiguous endings
Mari Selvaraj ends Pariyerum Perumal with Jyothi’s father asking Perumal why he never told Jyothi about the violence and the humiliation he endured at his family’s hands. Perumal replies that he didn’t want to destroy the image of a loving and kind father in her mind. Perumal forgives Jyothi’s father and brother, and reconciles with the father. He re-consolidates patriarchy across caste and the woman does not matter at all, and neither does his love for her.
This conversation happens when Jyothi has gone to get tea for both men. She gets black tea for Perumal and a milk tea for her father. As the curtains close on the film, the unfinished tea glasses are kept on a table, and a white flower drops in between the two tea glasses. It is a deeply sentimental and stupid ending, replacing agonism with forgiveness and the illusion of caste commensality. It is problematic on multiple other levels. The proximity of disgust disappears instantly, and Perumal forgives and forgets all the humiliation he faced. The same Perumal who was traumatised and infuriated by all the insults and violence against him and his father seems to forget all of it and reconciles with Jyothi’s father, leaving Jyothi in bliss.
Tamil Nadu and the rest of the country followed the “two tumbler” system for a long time. The movie resolves it by dropping a white flower between them. Ahmed says, "The contradictory impulses of desire and disgust do not necessarily resolve themselves.”
In Vaazhai, the transgressive desire leads to death and destruction. Once again, the female figure (the teacher) is blissfully unaware. While Selvaraj has moved from the faux reconciliatory resolution of the first film, what has he moved into? A claim that transgressive desire must be punished? A claim that transgressive desire is enabled only by sacrificial (the sister’s and the mother’s) love? A small text marks the rolling credits in the end. It speaks of a great sacrificial love. What is Mari Selvaraj eventually saying?
Prakash Raju is a Tamil Dalit Christian from Bangalore. He is a doctoral candidate in Religious Studies at Emory University, Atlanta where he researches Tamil Dalit Christian history and politics in KGF.
Ashley Tellis was born to a Marathi Dalit father and a Goan Christian mother in Bombay. He is an independent academic, journalist and editor and is completing a book on Marathi Dalit women’s autobiographies.