Collective sounds: Pa. Ranjith’s cinema, Gaana, and fusion music

ABSTRACT

This article studies the Tamil film director Pa. Ranjith as a phenomenon and evaluates the sensorial signification of his experiments with performance and music (Aadalum-Paadalum) in the filmic medium. Foregrounding the music band that Ranjith initiated, ‘The Casteless Collective’ – inspired by the 20^th century anti-caste Tamil intellectual Iyothee Thass – which features Gaana (Tamil music form mainly performed by Dalits in urban slums), hip-hop, and fusions of world music; I discuss the debates on music and caste as well as analyze the song-performances in his films Attakathi (Cardboard Knife), Madras, Kabali, Kaala, and Sarpatta Parambarai (The Sarpatta Clan), which I suggest, re-script anti-caste sensibilities in popular culture. This article demonstrates that Ranjith’s interventions not only expose inscriptions of caste but also creatively stage acts of a collective against caste, which is a casteless becoming.

KEYWORDS:

• New Tamil Cinema
• Pa. Ranjith
• Caste and Music
• Madras and Gaana

Acknowledgments

The ideas expressed in this article owe a great deal to a year-long engagement on new Indian cinemas with Madhava P, Nikhila H, Sathish P, Uma B, Hrishikesh I, and Parthasarathy M at Hyderabad, and as well to the online discussions on Pa. Ranjith at the Dalit Intellectual Collective, India. Comments on an earlier draft by Gajendran A, Haritha R, Narmadha P, Satish C, Rajat R, Nidhin D, Vellaisamy, Manju E, and particularly, the anonymous peer reviewer are gratefully acknowledged. This article is dedicated to the memory of bell hooks (1952-2021) and Jean-Luc Nancy (1940-2021).

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Correction Statement

This article has been corrected with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Notes

1. Pa. Ranjith is a director and producer of films, largely in Tamil language. He debuted with the film Attakkathi in 2012. However, the success of his second film Madras sealed his place in Tamil cinema. Hailing from Dalit background, Ranjith is vociferous about caste discrimination and violence within and outside cinema. Ranjith owns a production house named ‘Neelam Productions’ which makes anti-caste films. He also started a music band called ‘The Casteless Collective’ which features Gaana (a Tamil folk variety of music mainly performed by Dalits), hip hop, and other forms of world music (Meiners). Moreover, Ranjith established a publishing house called ‘Neelam Publications’ that prioritizes anti-caste culture and thought as well as ‘Neelam Cultural Centre’ that throws open stage to fusion-music artistes, including Gaana-singers and performers. Like the Dalit political movements as well as the literary magazine movements of the 1990s, Pa. Ranjith is also instrumental in organizing and running the Koogai Thiraipada Iyakkam (The Owl Film Movement) today which runs a library that is open all days of the week becoming a meeting ground in Chennai for aspiring assistant directors to read and discuss. Krishnan states that he is ‘building a new world’ by revolutionizing the mainstream not only through films but also through ‘YouTube shows, a media platform, library on Ambedkar and a band with Arivu’ (‘Film, YouTube, Ambedkar’).

2. Many films have recently brought the anti-caste narrative to the fore with hard-hitting portrayals with detail. Reports have circulated about contemporary Tamil directors such as Vetrimaaran and Mari Selvaraj along with Pa. Ranjith, amongst others, who have opened the discussion ranging from caste discrimination to the daily struggles faced by people from marginalized communities in their films. Nevertheless, not many have studied them as re-scripting anti-caste sensibilities. These cinematic interventions should also be investigated as not only exposing inscriptions of caste but also how they creatively stage acts of a collective against caste.

3. Although outside the purview of this article, there is indeed hardly any work that has studied the social role of film music, within the industry, that have extensively contributed to Tamil social history and cultural politics. Such a study would inherently foreground the musical sensibilities that were sensitized by the contributions of eminent musicians such as M.S. Viswanathan, Ilaiyaraja, A.R. Rahman, and others, in the success and reception of a phenomenon such as the Casteless Collective.

4. French philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy introduces the term ‘exscription’ to refer ‘becoming-other-than-itself,’ whereby writing and reading exposes oneself to the other – to ‘exscription.’ He states that ‘writing, and reading, is to be exposed, to expose oneself … to “exscription.” The exscribed is … that opening into itself, of writing to itself, to its own inscription as the infinite discharge of meaning’ (64). He differentiates it from inscription thus – ‘the being of existence can be presented … when exscribed … where writing at every moment discharges itself, unburdens itself’ (64). Moreover, it ‘distances signification and which itself would be communication … they communicate as complete what was only written in pieces and by chance’ (65). It is an exscription of finitude, Nancy argues. This could be applied to any ‘script’ that is against caste and Brahminism, especially, with critical deconstruction and creative reconstructions of caste-less communities–as these scripts would then expose, discharge, and unburden itself to the other of caste.

5. It is interesting to note that A S Ajith Kumar, musician, film maker and writer, in Kelkatha Sapthangal also deals with the ideology of sound and the influence of ‘the technology on music’ in Kerala to explain how the classification of some musical genre as pure and some others as impure is problematic. Unravelling how ‘classical’ music discourses demand the performer to control his body and voice, while separating them from each other, Kumar argues by studying select Malayalee Dalit musicians and singers, that ‘Dalit music’ does not separate the body from voice as, generally, the performers dance while they sing. His book in Malayalam is one of the few that attempts to understand how caste plays a key role in determining the practices of music, i.e. through music making, performance and listening habits (13-27).

6. Iyothee Thassar (1845-1914) organized his community in the name of Sathi Betha Matra Dravida Mahajana Sabha (Casteless Dravida Mahajana Sabha) and gave content to the idea of casteless-ness, Buddhism, and Tamil community prior to any contemporary debates on castelessness and merit. His was a concrete agenda that relied not only on self-identification as an emancipatory process, but also on the idea of anti-caste community as a cosmic imaginary, in the early twentieth century Tamil society. It was a Buddhist universal, whose material was local, limited, finite, ordinary and the everyday; yet the untouched. Scholarship on Iyothee Thass, along with other 19^th and 20^th century anti-caste intellectuals as wordsmiths from the most oppressed locations in the subcontinent such as Jotirao Phule, Bhima Boi, Poikkayil Appachan, Mangoo Ram, and Swami Achootanand although prior to the Ambedkarite and Periyarite century.

7. Studies on Indian cinema have generally focused on spectatorial identification, spectator subject, and the spatial gaze. Nevertheless, cinema also continuously engages with sound along with the image-movement as an embodiment and experience of what is being-heard along with the life of the image; perhaps the sound of cinema in India may have a different story to tell on caste in/of cinema. As film music creates ‘an aural force’ that carries ‘an affective charge’ (Jhingan 91), which is not studied with care by academics until recently in India; Jhingan thus states that rarely attention is given to ‘background scores, orchestration, and the use of chorus’ as much as to the study of ‘new aesthetic practices and digital sound cultures’ (93) in the broader context of regional films and the many cinemas of India. This aspect of enquiry, although outside the purview of this article, could be a subject of study on art against caste which needs to be explored more and this may call for a concerted research effort as well as show the future directions of film studies in India.

8. Ilaiyaraja is one of the earliest Indian film composers who experimented with the fusion of different musical genres in film music by largely integrating folk and carnatic musical instrumentation with western classical music techniques. Also known for composing western classical music harmonies and string arrangements in Tamil film music, he was the first south Asian to compose a full symphony (Ganesh D). The film composer, singer, songwriter, instrumentalist, orchestrator, and conductor-arranger’s career has spanned more than four decades, with over 7000 songs and 1000 films in at least seven languages (Rajamani). Given the strong aural culture in the Tamil context, it is interesting to note that Ilaiyaraja’s life in the cinema industry has a story of democratization to be told as it is nothing short of a legend. Born to a Dalit family in Tamil Nadu, hailing from a humble background in rural hinterlands, although never claiming the same outrightly unlike Pa. Ranjith; the composer took elements of everyday life and effectively ‘debrahmanised music and devalourised hierarchical values’ attached to the use of various musical instruments in popular cultural practice in India (Damodaran). Thus, ‘Madai Thirandhu’ (Open the Flood Gate) in Nizhalgal (Shadows, Bharathiraja), co-written by lyricists Vaali and Gangai Amaran (Ilaiyaraja’s younger brother), although picturizing and focusing on the exclusive/excluded space of Marina Beach in Chennai, metaphorically, depicts the rise of Raja as a music composer. Perhaps, as Damodaran argues, Ilaiyaraja not only paved the way for ‘a new generation of musical composers,’ but his phenomenal achievements brought in ‘structural changes within the Tamil film world’ (ibid); and Rajamani only reiterates that Ilaiyaraja single-handedly struck ‘the core of Brahminical hegemony’ in cinema music, making it accessible to the masses, and thereby ‘altering the course’ of Tamil cinema itself (‘To Appreciate’). Arguably, he succinctly paved a way for ‘collective sounds’ against caste in cinema long before Pa. Ranjith’s interventions.

9. Sarpatta Parambarai, Ranjith’s latest film that was directly released in Amazon Prime Video, the streaming platform, became the second-most watched regional film on the platform. The film narrates the story of the North Madras Port labourers and their ‘boxing clan’ cultures in the 1970s. Inspired by real life prominent boxers for characters in the film, and an array of complex characters, the period drama also comments and reflects on the changing political climate of the post-colonial Indian public sphere in the backdrop. From wall paint to the kind of pigments that were used in the 1970s, the film was well researched. The music for the film evokes memories of percussion instruments prominently, which were made of skin, and that were largely used in the period (Ramnath; Rangan; Wankhede).

10. Rajnikanth is one of the most popular super stars of Indian cinema. His films, and especially his characters, are known for their mass dialogues. Most of his blockbuster films have punch taglines such as ‘Nan oru thadavu sonna nooru thadavu sonna mathiri’ (‘If I tell once, it’s equal to hundred times’) from Baasha, ‘Aandavan solran, Arunachalam seiran’ (‘God tells, Arunachalam does’) from Arunachalam and ‘En vazhi, thani vazhi’ (‘My route is a single one’) from Padayappa. Unlike these dialogues, which enhance the power of his characters, Magizhchi is an affect which transforms and inspires one to become human (Edachira).

11. Kabali‘s tag line Magizhchi is strikingly different from the superstar’s history of taglines from earlier movies. Ranjith notes that he does not want to make films of Dalit suffering and humiliation, instead he wants to present the colourful lifeworld of happiness and festivities in his productions. This is significantly different from the (in)tensions of defining Dalit literature and aesthetics, as Ranjith readily rejects the categorization of ‘Dalit Cinema’ (Yengde 503-518). This anti-caste aesthetics, which rejects any essentialism, by questioning the preconceived notions of Dalit identity, towards an emancipatory future is the philosophy which Ranjith offers through Magizhchi, in extension through his films (Edachira 53).

12. The colour blue is symbolically identified with the Ambedkarite anti-caste movement in the Indian subcontinent. Blue was also the colour of the flags of the Scheduled Castes Federation of India, and the Republican Party later, floated by Dr. Ambedkar in 1942 and 1956, respectively. The blue-coloured flag (in comparison to the red or the saffron-ones) is often referred to as well as highlighted by Bahujan political movements as well as Dalit activists.

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Dickens Leonard

Dickens Leonard is an Assistant Professor at the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, IIT Delhi. He earlier taught at the Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, Calcutta, and the University of Hyderabad. For his PhD, he researched the writings of the 19th-century Tamil intellectual Iyothee Thass. In 2020 he received a Fulbright post-doc grant to work in the United States on a monograph titled ‘Ethical Dimension of Caste-less Community’ which extends his PhD. He was formerly a DAAD-visiting PhD fellow (2016) at the Centre for Modern Indian Studies, Göttingen, Germany. He has published journal articles and chapters on Tamil Cinema and Anti-caste Thought.