Progress might seem like a natural effect of passing time, but sometimes it appears to be little more than a trick of the eye, a magician’s joke. Take the cover off and you are left with something far worse than what you began with. A young woman in VS Sanoj’s film Ariku asks her frail old grandfather who tells tales of an inspiring past, “It was better then than it is now, wasn’t it?” She means caste. It does not have to be spelled out every time, but as the decades disappear in Ariku, faster than a paper rocket could fly, you end up asking the same question the girl did, over and over again.
Ariku, made as part of the Kerala government’s project to fund films by members of the Scheduled Castes/Scheduled Tribes community, came out after a lot of hassle last Friday, February 28. Led by a cast of proven actors, including Senthil Krishna, Irshad Ali, Dhanya Ananya, Santhy Balachandran, and Rony David, the film, with all its limitations, scatters across its script the various ways — plain, sophisticated, camouflaged — in which caste is rubbed in the face of the oppressed.
Ariku begins its script — also written by Sanoj — from the 1960s in Kerala, around the time of the split of the Communist Party of India. Koran (Senthil Krishna), a young Dalit man and Communist follower, experiences the more explicit slurs of discrimination, but he talks back, retaliates, and does not get pulled down by what was then his only reality. His son Shankaran grows up in a different time, going to school and wanting to be a journalist, silently witnessing the hypocrisies of the self-professed modern man. With paler skin than his father and an indistinguishable name, a man professing progress takes him to be a member of a privileged caste and complains of reservation. A woman who liked him leaves, coating the problem of caste with words like “cultural differences.”
Through the first half of the film, the situations and dialogue, though they must have looked good on paper, lack effect on the screen. The renditions often come out perfunctory, the background music unfitting and unimaginative for the most part. Only, the reality of casteism is so poignant that even an imperfect depiction of it, presented from the right side of history, deserves to be told. Sanoj’s writing is clear, not preachy, not imposing. The script does not even need comeback moments, just the briefest of nods can convey a lot. At the end of his chat with the ‘progressive’ man shunning reservation, all Shankaran has to say in reply is the name of his father — Koran — to shut the other up.
The latter half, centred on the third generation of Koran’s family — with Dhanya Ananya playing the granddaughter — is better told, with most of it happening away from Kerala. In distant Uttar Pradesh, every opposition to casteism is still met with brutality. In the granddaughter’s time, the casteists are slyer, taking digs at the colour of skin and appearance, leading her to ask that question to Koran: “Wasn’t it better at your time?” It would seem so to a young woman, learning law, understanding history, wondering how despite progress and education, the prejudices etched on the human mind would just not go away.
Sanoj’s film, with all its shortcomings, is important, if only it could help set forth more conversations on a subject many pretend to not see or claim does not exist. The ‘reformed’ responses to the reality of caste can strike home a point or two about one’s own denial of what happens around them, of preferring to remain in the dark only because you can while another can’t.
Disclaimer: This review was not paid for or commissioned by anyone associated with the film. Neither TNM nor any of its reviewers have any sort of business relationship with the film’s producers or any other members of its cast and crew.