Farhan Wahab
Tribal self-determination is the logical endpoint of colonisation. Decolonisation is political equality under democratic decision-making. It means finally overthrowing British, overthrowing the idea of nation and replacing it with the idea of the state without nation. The state, governed by all of its residents, each of whom speaks with voice no more or less valued than that of any other.
– Mahmood Mamdani
Neither Settler nor Native (The Making and Unmaking of Permanent Minorities)
Podiyankulam is a hermetically isolated village in modern India. A community of people live there while confronting poverty, segregation and humiliation of casteism, abandoned by the national collective /state and not assimilated into the mainstream society due to their caste background. A little girl is having a seizure in the middle of the road. Her tragedy and her existence are invisible to the passer-by busses and the people. No vehicle stops to reach out to her for rescue. A village without a bus stop and people without rights would have to walk to the upper caste village to access public transport. In such a setting, we are introduced to Karnan, along with his elderly friend, Yaman. During a ritualistic ceremony, Karnan manages to gain the trust of his villagers and becomes the symbolic leader of his people. The villagers are deprived of their basic human rights- from a bus stop to everything in ordinary life. Karnan is dreaming of joining the armed forces. Because, along with his villagers, he naively believes that it would boost up the upward mobility of his people to overcome their oppression. In such a situation, Karnan and the villagers are forced to take serious measures regarding their emancipation. They collide with the state that appears in defence of the privileged caste’s interest. The story revolves around how Karnan and his people fought along with their deities for their emancipation against the oppression of the post-colonial- nation-state.
This attempt to understand Mari Selvaraj’s Karnan is to write about the reflections it made in myself in concern of nation-state and the shared experiences of the Global-South. It focuses on the people belonging to minority communities and their place in the national collective. It is true that I wasn’t born in a caste society and hadn’t been subjected to caste violence. But as a survivor of modernity under a post-colonial nation-state and as someone who is a member of an eternally condemned minority, it gives me a little privilege of comradeship to own up the story, that reflects our experiences in encountering the nation-state and its power that is -either with genocidal impulses or bearing as a final solution building rehabilitation camps -ever omnipresent in our vicinity, radically refusing to acknowledge our political existence and degrade us as sub citizens, as it is in the case of its characters where fiction painfully blends with history and the reality of our time. In the anti-apartheid struggle in South Africa, the oppressed among the whites joined the blacks against the white apartheid state. Yet, regardless of ethnicity, the oppression itself made them all be considered as blacks. In such a context, I find kinship with the people in Mari Selvaraj’s world.
Before the inception of the Sinhala nation-state in 1948, I was more than a Muslim man, and my Sinhala compatriots hadn’t possessed the monopolised power to subjugate myself and my Tamil compatriots. But, they (the Sinhalese) had their historical bitterness towards us. But, right after the arrival of capitalist /colonial modernity, it gave birth to a nation-state. Though it has democratically emerged, the native majoritarian elites sought to secure power by pushing the virtue of their ethnic majority. Consequently, the newly emerged nation-state adopted a series of majoritarian measures to establish racial supremacy.
In a way, the highly diverse population of my country came under a centralised modern nation-state that identified itself with the Sinhala race. The Aryan theory that had until then been at the margins was brought to the center and wheeled out as legitimate justification for its ethnocracy and the subjugation of mine and my fellow Tamil compatriot.
The modern nation-state gave birth to majoritarianism that politicised its subjects’ identities, which marks the birth of permanent minorities who are neither settlers nor natives and have no share in the sovereignty. Also, the empowered racial group that holds the rights of sovereignty, monopolised the violence to use in the coming days to subjugate, humiliate, and carry out a genocide in the future. (Mullivaikal genocide in 2009).
Tagore saw the modern state as a soul-crushing machinery, a monster organisation. The grip of it tightened to the point of suffocation around every man, woman and child of a vast population, for whom no escape is imaginable in their own country or even in any country outside their own.
In such a context, I tend to emphasise Mari Selvaraj’s position. His hero Karnan is well aware that the upper caste from his neighbouring block wouldn’t accept his humanity, even he isn’t interested in it.
All he tries to do is neutralising their interference by his occasional confrontations. Halfway through, Karnan is aware of who he has to fight and what would potentially descend him into that battle. Here, Mari Selvaraj is not fighting the caste system by seeing it as a cultural phenomenon that is a remnant of the pre-modern past but as a political reality that continues to dis-empower his agency under the modern nation-state. So, it demands immediate political action that recognises his place in the modern nation-state. Karnan and his people are put in a position to fight against the police force, which consists predominantly of the oppressing castes, categorically refusing the basic political and human rights. Caste could have emerged in pre-modern times. Following independence from colonial rule, the nation-state’s formation, with the promise of equal rights and sovereignty, tended to unify the people under a unified authority. Instead of liberating the historically oppressed Dalit’s, it handed them over to a centralised and predominantly Hindu-Brahmin capitalist state, which has been equipped with monopolised violence. Until before, everybody knew that they were living in a hierarchical society where nobody was equal and didn’t face segregation and violence from a centralised state machinery, which is the extension of upper class /caste. Under the modern nation-state, they came to realise that the promise was bogus. Nobody was equal here too. As the state was empowering the oppressing castes, it had monopolised the violence that can always be unleashed on the oppressed castes to crush, dismantle, and annihilate them. Instead of annihilating the caste, it tended to annihilate oppressed caste subjects by equipping the upper caste.
Here, I regard the state as the continuation of colonial capitalist modernity, bearing local hegemonic identities. Post-colonial modernity, which marks the independence in our collective political memory, was in its naked sense a power transfer from the white masters to the locally cultivated native elite, who have become the enforcers of white modernity through the inherited nation-state. Therefore, in that sense, they represent the white oppressive system enforced by the colonialists.
Though the movie initially begins by depicting the oppression carried out by the upper caste frontier, it turns out to be the struggle against the state, carried out by the oppressed masses represented by Karnan. As Fanon puts it, “They now know They aren’t animals. And at the very moment they discover their Humanity, they begin to sharpen their weapons to secure their victory”. As he foresaw in his iconic work, the decolonising process is bloody. The violence is a Door out of an empty room, a way out from the dirty world of colonists, in which colonists and the colonised are sick, dehumanised colonised confronts the sick dirty coloniser ridden with hypocrisy. As Sartre said, ‘through violence, the oppressed reconstructs himself, in that he ceases oppression altogether.’ This violence, Sartre claims, is man constructing himself. Killing a coloniser to him is like killing two birds with one stone: the oppressor and the oppressed.
Modernity did not liberate people. On the contrary, it politicised their identity and handed it over to the casteist nation-state (post-colonial nation-state), with a legal framework that became a monolithic belief system, which demanded a collective allegiance and yet, treated unequally on the old hierarchical line. Thus, Mari aims his fight against the modern nation-state that continues to be the ecosystem of his oppression.
In its structure and content, Karnan attempts to explore the place of violence in seeking racial justice, while narrating the human struggle. But this struggle isn’t unique to the characters in this film. Apart from the caste factor, the history of post-colonial modernity is filled with such experiences from blacks of America to Arabs of Algeria to the Dalit’s in the Indian village, along with their many other counterparts in the global south. Thus, the manufactured permanent minorities under the nation-state are forced by the political reality to struggle against racial injustice.
Also, Karnan frames its discourse around the notion of the necessity of emancipatory violence -of the internally oppressed sub citizens -as opposed to the racial / casteist injustice of the nation-state in a post-colonial modernity. Both the state and the oppressive variants feed on each other to sustain the power. The stakeholders of sovereignty are the upper class/caste native elite. It defines nationhood as its own collective, which comprises men and women of varied power-related identities (intersectionality of the power domain). Those outside of this category are subjects to be ruled and have no part in the sovereignty. Therefore, the promise of the body politic of a nation-state (equality, rights, and protection) does not apply to these internally colonised subjects within the state.
As Karnan tends to tell the emancipatory struggle of internally oppressed subjects, the question of violence is a Fanonian tragedy, where the colonised men/ women liberate themselves through deploying violence that has become a necessity. As a pragmatic idealist, Gandhi, too, found this to be inevitable. Decentralising the power machine requires a certain use of violence, which he thinks is unavoidable under such circumstances. Max Weber recognises this condition as “political modernity depended upon the centralised state monopolising violence”. But, on the other hand, monopolised violence of the nation-state empowers the upper caste /class that is ever hostile to oppressed masses of the colonised world.
The first half of the film revolves around the hostility posed by the oppressing caste/class. In the second part, it takes a transition, and the apparatus of the state enters the scene and takes up the cause of the upper caste men. This clearly indicates that there is no upper caste/class without being empowered by the authority, and there is no authority without being embodied by the upper caste/class. As Arendt emphasises, “for them indeed the state had always been only a well -organised police force, the false modesty, however had the curious consequences of keeping the bourgeois class out of the body politic and above the law.”
Power is always omnipresent in their lives but is hardly visible in their surroundings. But, whenever they come out of their cupola, it is ever ready to strike upon them mercilessly. This is brilliantly portrayed in the film. Their each and every encounter with the power makes them even submissive to it. The innocent confrontational attempts are sterile and not potent enough to even make fractures in the power wall. The stone-throwing of a boy marks the first act of rebellion. This event makes them manifest their resistance in the subsequent two significant instances: Demolishing the bus, and later on, the vandalism of the police station. After these defining phases of resistance, things get heated up, and the ultimate horror is waiting to be unfolded.
In a film, which is ridiculously self-conscious about its every frame, reflecting the popular post-colonial resistances of our time, the imagery of resistance cannot be coincidental. Stone-throwing women and children have more similarities to stone-throwing kids and women in Kashmir, Palestine and beyond. The self-immolation of Yeman kind of reflecting the popular resistance deployed by Vietnamese Buddhist monks, who self-immolated in the face of American brutality, not out of cowardliness but out of virtue derived from pacifism. We could also find a headless statue of Buddha in the film. They inflicted violence on themselves to put an end to the oppression. Such framing of discourse around violence and emancipation of the oppressed makes it relevant to the oppressed subjects of post-colonial modernity worldwide. In such a sense, beyond its cultural and geographical specificities, Karnan becomes the story of the wretched of the earth.
Rosa Parks’ refusal to stand up from the bus seat marks the symbolic resistance against racial injustice within the American democracy, which had institutionalised segregation as an official practice in the American polity. Moreover, her nonconformity stirred up the black conscience, which was later organised as a civil rights movement that emerged from the left church led by Martin Luther King (who believed that violence is inexcusable on moral and practical grounds). Meanwhile, Malcolm X was highly influenced by the Fanonian approach to black liberation, “the necessary violence”.
But both emphasise have their respective places in the black resistance, rather than sticking to totalising views. Mari’s Karnan doesn’t explore such conflicting opinions by highlighting the ambiguities of violence vs non-violence. Instead, he tries to explore the transition from centuries of complete submission to necessary counter-violence, which aims to end caste oppression. But, he doesn’t fail to juxtapose both arguments on violence. (Yaman’s self-immolation amidst perpetrated violence.) Karnan’s position in the struggle for racial justice is a mirror image of young Malcolm, who thought violence is an inevitable result of centuries of oppression. As Fanon conceived it, “the colonised man liberates himself in and through violence”. This was a description of the violence of the colonial system, of the fact that violence was central to producing and sustaining the relationship between the oppressed native and the power machine that is in place. It could either be a colonial white oppressive system or the nation-state run by the native elites. So, the violence for racial justice is not an irrational manifestation but belongs to the script of modernity and progress. As the political scientist Mahmood Mamdani puts it, “violence is indeed the midwife of progress”.
As long as the nation-state incorporates racial segregation in its body politic, the violence of the oppressed is inevitable in the course of liberation. Mari Selvaraj doesn’t blatantly advocate violence or fetishise it. As an observer of history, he simply spells out the historical reality, that, as long as the nation-state remains arrogant and succumbs to incorporated racial injustice, the violence of the oppressed is inevitable in the process of liberation.
The gory violence in the film can put the ordinary liberal mind into unease. Its outer appearance of advocating violence and some of the endorsements in the film may disturb the liberal bourgeois sensibilities. The notion of non-violence hides the ugliness of history by teaching non-violence to the oppressed. That’s what Jean-Paul Sartre called liberal hypocrisy. He further writes, “if violence were only a thing of the future, if exploitation and oppression never existed on earth, perhaps displays of non-violence might relieve the conflict. But if the entire regime, even your nonviolent thoughts, is governed by a thousand-year-old oppression, your passiveness serves no other purpose but to put you on the side of the oppressors.”
As we all are the products of this history, violence becomes the by-product of colonial modernity, and it is inevitable. It is a reflection of our history. In the film, the protagonist negotiates with the oppressor in the face of dire violence to rid himself of violence or to rid the oppressor of his violence. But, the power insists either way violence has to exist, so he uses violence as a means to end the oppression by slitting the throat of the oppressor. As Stokey Carmichael once put it, “in order for non- violence to work, your oppressor must have a conscience”. Whether we like it or not, history is ever ready to give plenty of instances as examples. The civil wars that emerged in the post-colonial world have always ended either with genocides or liberation through extreme violence. Yet, the price has always been heavy. The unsettled question of the societies that come out from colonial experiences always finds or tries to find the answers through violence. Suppose the defensive violence of the oppressed in the film is unacceptable. In that case, we have to re-examine our post-colonial history and the political system that we produced and has produced us and our history.
Whether we like it or not, the nation-state has become the reality of our time. Imagining a political system beyond that is impossible at this juncture of history. The bus in Karnan, is in a way, reminding me of the nation-state. Its ideation is bound to include all its subjects in its territory, regardless of their differences. And it ought to be indifferent to the differences of people in regards to their rights, protection and sharing of sovereignty.
In the film, the people of Podiyankulam are deprived of such a part in the body politic of the nation-state. As the bus in the film refuses to acknowledge the existence of the people from the village, it is ready to serve them through the upper caste frontier (the empowered agents of the state). But, it isn’t prepared to carry them on the bus. Since the state uses the caste as an instrument to oppress them further, the fight for the bus stop is the first step towards the struggle aimed at the state to recognise them as a political community.
The colonists showed the colonised the path to liberation through their own posture. The coloniser only understood the language of force ,yet denying it and pretending to uphold the law while being peaceful and rational.
The colonised is left with nothing but violence, and here, it is not optional, but it becomes a tool for liberation when no other means exists to unshackle the chains.
Left is absolutely absent in the film. I reckon it as a conscious choice of Mari Selvaraj. As the second child of modernity, in most of the places, the mainstream left understands the racial injustice and other oppression of the post-colonial modernity, as a dysfunction of the bourgeois political system that has failed to adapt to the principles of science and rationality and also as an ultimate outcome of the class society. However, the mainstream left could not understand the inherent flaw of the centralised nation-state and power structures. As Egyptian-French Marxist Samir Amin claims, Marxism – as a second child of modernity- that he believed, humanised the Eurocentric capitalist enlightenment”.
Nonetheless, as a product of European modernity and as an ideology that interprets history as an economic struggle of classes, it also claims to possess either key to history or the solution for all the riddles of the universe. It has also developed into obligatory patterns of thought, and it no longer accepts a presentation of the past or present that differs from their views. Earlier, Fanon and Aime Cesaire critiqued the monolithic approach of Marxism that had somehow reduced the indigenous in class lines. Fanon went a little further and claimed that beneficiaries of the colonisation include the white working class of the mother country.
Most of the time, its class theory fails to understand the social structures of the global south. Also, as a part of modernity, the ultimate solution it offers somehow focuses on recreating a homogenised/centralised nation-state on a class line. In our part of the world, the mainstream left, which is more inclined to nationalism, sees the indigenous resistances from the framework of modernity. One can see plenty of rhetoric of modernity and the logic of colonialism in their discourses. As a result, it is committed to saving the unitary state while having serious claims that identify other struggles as interruptions to its sovereignty (Sovereignty of majoritarianism). So, from the point of view of the mainstream left, the national liberation of minorities become petite bourgeois struggles. During the Eelam Tamil resistance for self-autonomy, Sinhala denim wearing leftists from a Buddhist monastery in Sri Lanka and Indian secular (pro-Ram temple) leftists (in future who accepted the Supreme Court verdict of Babri Masjid to build Ram Temple) turned a blind eye to the demand for a separate Tamil Polity. They even became more blind to the Tamil genocide carried out by the Sinhala Ethno-state.
On the other hand, we can’t blame the organised left in our part of the world. As Samir Amin considers, Marxism is the second modernity, of the bourgeois enlightenment triplets of liberty, equality property to working-class enlightenment triplets of liberty, equality and fraternity, which subsequently gave a working-class edge to the modernity also posing challenges on its own accord. The mainstream Marxist movements are inherently Eurocentric despite the counter-cultural and political culture they created. Fanon argued that the battle of socialism vs capitalism is not the problem of the colonised people. Before they talk about the reformations of the nation-state and the power politics it created, where the binary line is the Centre of the discourse, they must liberate themselves and their everything from colonialism. Why mainstream Marxism is always as alien as capitalism to people in the colony is because of the literalist nature of the organised Marxist movement that is imagining everything from the central thesis of Marxism written with a European experience. None of this argument is about denying Marx’s contribution or the Marxist political culture it created, but about expanding the political imagination of colonial subjects beyond the boundary of Eurocentrism and its capitalist modernity, which is what Walter Mignolo called “border thinking or delinking”.
Highly diverse communities have governments with a centralised authority and homogenising tendencies on the majoritarian lines. Post-colonial political turmoil is common in every former colonies. We all have more or less similar experiences, where every post-colonial country is bearing a greater tendency for civil wars and conflicts. This phenomenon cannot be confronted only with Marxism. We need something more to fight such political structures that we have inherited from colonialism.
Mari’s film not only tells the story of his people. It also describes the story of his people’s gods, rituals and beliefs. For Marxist subjectivity, which is inspired by modernity, folk gods, rituals, and beliefs are irrational and superstitious. For the white man, Christianity could have helped him to colonise the world. Still, for the people of the global south, for instance, to the Latin American people, Christian liberation theology helped to decolonise themselves. Martin Luther King’s left church played a crucial role in his resistance against racial injustice. The Left’s totalising view on religion has always been problematic. For its Eurocentric rationality, religion still remains as the dope seller, stemming up from its distant European memory (given the context of its anti-clerical stance in Europe is completely justifiable). Still, we are no longer living under the tyranny of the church empowered by pre-modern European monarchy. Politically informed Critique of religion and mechanistic views of anti-religiosity are two distinct positions that are hardly distinguished in the mainstream left discourses.
Marx and Engels encouraged the French- colonisation of Algeria because they were convinced that Algeria stood outside of history, which had to be initiated into history through European colonisation. Hegel even wrote, “China and India have shown no development so that we cannot concern ourselves with them any further, they lie outside the course of world history.”
Therefore, everything that is about the global south becomes superstitious mythologies that needn’t be taken seriously. Thus, the anti-religious lens is often deployed to take up this snobbish hatred towards religious communities. For them, gods of the oppressed and gods of the oppressor are the same. Hence, it is considered as fighting against religion as a part of its anti-clerical struggle. But we are no longer living under European monarchy or the Christian church or respective religions in that matter.
On the contrary, we live under a secular church that goes by the name of a modern nation-state, empowered by Eurocentric capitalist modernity (Hindutva is a modern secular phenomenon with a religious edge). So now, it’s not the religiously heterodox people who are branded as heretics and produced before catholic inquisitors. Instead, the clerics belong to the minority communities that are being made before secular courts and tried in media trial rooms that function by secular public reasoning. And, of course, to ensure that they are not engaging in blasphemy against the secular church in the disguise of a nation-state.
Karnan and his people even need their Gods and rituals in the battle for their freedom. What could a Marxist possibly offer to those people and their emancipatory radicalism in such an anti-Eurocentric setting? So, it justifies the absence of leftists and demonstrates how mainstream leftists can be an alienating force for the indigenous resistances in a post-colonial modernity.
On the other hand, a simple explanation for the absence of the Left is the apparent absence of the proletariat in the community that is considered a collective of social outcasts -pushed away -from the proletariat and general class strata. So, orthodox Marxism proved less used in that particular struggle for racial justice, which is not to say that we must abandon the Marxian impetus that gives class struggle its energy.
Every post-colonial nation-state that harbours dispossessed and volatile minorities has apartheid features in its political system. Though it has been openly manifested in places like Israel or Sri Lanka, most of the time, the hidden beast is unleashed on its minorities at one point or the other. This has been the common reality of any nation-state that unofficially/officially adopted majoritarian measures. Unsurprisingly, Indian secularism is also not an exemption to this fact. Hindu majoritarianism has always existed in the Indian political system (in the name of national sovereignty). The treatments of Dalit’s, Muslims, Nagas and Kashmiris have potentially exhibited this fact over the years. It’s just that nobody understood that violence is in such terms. After the re-emergence of the BJP, the liberal elites are beginning to feel its heat since it has reached their doorsteps -which Congress has managed to conceal over the years- because of the level of vulgarity displayed by the BJP government. But this was always there. It’s only now we get to see the rotten side of it.
The film is based on actual events that unfolded in the mid-1990s. karnan isn’t the exact historical account of what had taken place in that particular village. Instead, it is Mari Selvaraj’s take on the issue. My analysis is solely about the film, and real events haven’t been examined here. Also, I’m not trying to imply that Mari Selvaraj made his movie based on adopting the post-colonial theories or reading Franz Fanon, but as an observer of the history given the post-colonial condition. When one delves into the understanding of the predicaments of our time and our oppression, this is the very place one might end up in. As an artist with a profound understanding of their time, Dostoevsky was a man of his time who understood modernity as an iron cage. This is completely dependent on the man or woman who tries to understand the time and the political calamities of their world. As E.L. Doctorow once put it, “the historian will tell you what happened. The novelist will tell you what it felt like, cinema slowly replaces literature”. Mari Selvaraj tells us what is it like to live as an internally oppressed subject under post-colonial modernity and how it can be agonising. Karnan not only tells the story of the colonised, but it is also reserving its place in history as the greatest cinema, which has tried to register the painful and agonising post-colonial history of the wretched of the earth.
