A very dear friend of mine this morning sent me a WhatsApp message to share his one-line review of the blockbuster movie of Director, Mani Ratnam’s “Ponniyan Selvam -1” (aka PS-1) which has made waves in India and abroad too. This is what my friend’s message read:
“PS1 review: “Incompetent Therukkoothu”.Walked out at interval. Puzzle: how did it rake-in so much money?””
Another good mutual friend of ours who lives in Toronto quickly responded to the above message with his own wry, laconic comment:
“Lot of prerelease hype and marketing! Manirathnam name! Aishwarya as eye candy!”
The above exchange of messages between my two good friends suddenly triggered within me a chain of thoughts and got me soliloquising, as it were, about the general system of Cinema and Literature in Tamil society at large and how they have over the past 6 or 7 decades come to impact the artistic tastes and predilections of Tamilians. So here is what I wrote back to my two friends voicing my own views and I am sharing them below to elicit responses from any other reader of this blog who might care to react to or echo similar sentiments.
I began by asking my first friend : “Have you read Kalki’s novel?”
To which he answered: “Yes”
“No wonder you couldn’t sit through the movie”, I replied.
“No, Not really because of that …PS1 was like RRR!” , he wrote back. RRR is acronym for “RISE, ROAR, REVOLT”, the title of another blockbuster Telugu movie (dubbed into Tamil) that was released some months ago. The film is a fictionalised narration of a piece of local history in India during the British colonial times. It’s protagonist is a hero who fights the local British Government tyrant. The movie has scintillating visuals, powerful background music, jaw-dropping visual effects, and high-octane stunts. So, I could immediately understand and relate to what my friend was trying to convey to me when he likened his subjective experience of watching “PS1” on screen to that of his earlier experience of “RRR”.
So, it made me then want to share my own deeply felt views on how Cinema and Literature have evolved over the years in recent history in Tamil society to become what they are today.
Yes …. It’s a pity that the cultural tastes of Tamilians over the past 5 or 6 decades has reached this rather low and pitiable state … where now all other literary forms are getting reduced to the cinematic. And what cannot be reduced to the cinematic template is not considered by the general public to be interesting . This applies to dance, music , poetry , ….
What is not cinematic is not artistic anymore …
This is what sociologists call “lumpenization of art”.
You may not agree fully with my views … but I do feel that so long as cinema was regarded as a separate form of performing art and generically different from literature, it contributed so much to the richness of cultural variety in our lives. But the moment Cinema began to seek or explore the interpretation of Literature by using its own rules, idiom, techniques and format … I say that Cinema started then to strangulate Literature. Literature began imitating Cinema instead of the other way around as it once started out to be at first. Poets began composing lyrics for the movies. Budding Novelists or short-story writers started writing with the cinematic platform in mind and were deeply influenced by it.
Movie Screenplay writing slowly began to invade, usurp and enslave the literary muse . In fact , it’s not difficult to discern Novelists of today writing novels not so much for the sake of excelling in the genre but instead they write with dreams about their novel perhaps attracting attention of some Cinema producer or director, like Mani Ratnam for instance, who would then convert it into a movie screenplay script and make a blockbuster movie for the masses fetching lots and lots of money and fame from it.
Thus, I would say, Cinema from once upon a time being just another popular and appealing form of visual-art has today become like Frankenstein a sort of stalking swamp-monster of an art form…. it looms over the cultural landscape of Tamil Nadu and it threatens to simply grip and smother Literature in its crushing asphyxiating embrace and then remould and refashion it nearer its very “own heart’s desire” . Cinema thus now in our times… maketh Literature in its own image.
And that’s precisely what I believe makes PS1 – the cinematic rendering of the classic novel of Kalki’s Ponniyan Selvan – not so much a genuine celebration of Tamil literary values but merely its sensational memorialisation. The movie is making humongous amounts of money at the box-office, no doubt … but whether Mani Ratnam’s cinematic piece de resistance is truly adding one bit to the enrichment of artistic life in Tamil culture is a moot question. At least it is , for me.
But one thing must be said to the credit of PS-1. It is thanks to this popular movie after all that at least the young Tamilian generations that are aware that there was a 1950s novel written by Kalki which is an enduring Tamil literary classic masterpiece .
Sudarshan Madabushi