NINAIVIN NAGARAM [Work in progress]

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• published: 11 Apr 2016
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Notes from the Underground What is half a village? The Mahabharata, at one level, a narrative of a fratricidal war between kinsmen, serves another function in villages all across Tamilnadu. The Mahabharata is celebrated, performed as a village festival to create communities of belonging. The Mahabharata becomes a vehicle for the village residents to affirm their belonging to their village, while simultaneously forging stronger bonds between individual members of the village. The Mahabharata which is performed in these villages is a ‘doubled’ Mahabharata; it is both the epic while simultaneously being a vehicle to preserve the memories of the region where it is performed. Any act of reciting the Mahabharata becomes doubled; while narrating the epic, the narrator also narrates their own story. Each region seems to have specific narratives which actually reframe the epic within the context of the region where the epic is being celebrated. In North Arcot district of Tamilnadu, the framing narrative is of Draupadi’s second birth at Senji and her efforts to negotiate peace for her people for whom she becomes a self= appointed representative; In Ramnathapuram district where I have been shooting, this elaborate framing narrative is absent as the memories recounted in that framing narrative are memories of a different region. The memories of Ramnathapuram region are of a different order. These memories reframe the epic making the epic the narrative of this specific region. But one commonality exists in the Draupadi Amman temples of North Arcot and Ramnathapuram; the guardian deity of the temple is Pottu Raja. Pottu Raja was how the Pallava kings were known among the people, and the Pallava kings seem to have left behind a legacy which has long since survived even after the extinction of the dynasty. In curious places I have stumbled on traces of the Pallavas, impelling me to make a ‘detective’ film “In search of the Pallavas” Once, in an idle conversation with my friend Chalam Bennurakar, I casually mentioned some information, which triggered a reflection from Chalam. It seems that in the villages around his village, the head man is an elected post and the head man is called ‘Pottu Raja”! Every year, it seems, there would be a meeting of all Pottu Raja’s of the region in which they would take out a procession. The way Chalam described the procession it sounded curiously similar to the annual procession taken out by the Vanniyar community in North Tamilnadu, called the “Vanniyar Padai” or the Vanniyar army. Chalam belongs to a jati called the Valmikis’, who had migrated to Karnataka from Kalahasthi in Andhra. Kalahasthi is very strongly associated with the Pallavas’ and was their capital before they made Kanchipuram their capital. I was shooting in a temple town called Thiruvadanai. A few kilometres away was a village named after the Pallava king Narasimha Varman. It seems that when Narasimha Varman was camping in that village, there were false reports of an opposing armies intrusion to the north. The Pallava king promptly sent his army to combat the threat. The opposing army used this opportunity to attack the unguarded village where the king was camping. Narasimha Varman knew that his position was helpless, and to save the village, offered to surrender to the opposing army on condition that they leave the villagers unharmed. The villagers were aghast at this proposal of the king and decided to defend the king, till his army could return and fight the opposing forces. There is an inscription of the Pallava king granting some lands to the village as a mark of his gratitude. The Pallavas’ seem to have invested a lot of thought into community building and decentralised notions of governance. In some places, even the vestigial forms of these structures seem more powerful compared to the ‘modern’ institutions we have built post independence. When I see these structures I can understand the visceral anger that the historian Dharampal felt towards Nehru. It seems he used to say that the India that Nehru ‘discovered’ was the India of the colonial administrators. The real India forever eluded Nehru’s imagination. When the Indian constitution was framed, one can understand Ambedkar’s position. The discrimination he had faced in his village could only make him reject the idea of a village as a viable unit. From his life experiences the village could only be ‘a sea of iniquity, oppression’, Nehru seemed to have had no idea of a village and anyhow was too seduced by the organisational skills of the colonial administration; consequently the Gandhian dream of a country populated by hard working villages, villagers got short shrift. Very little work has gone in reimagining communities in the changed times we live in with its own demands and needs. Sporadic efforts seem to have been made to create interdependent communities of belonging, but