Tamil Heroes: The Avengers’ Day Out

THERE’S AN OLD journalistic conceit, thought to have originated at the New York Times, which holds that ‘once is happenstance, twice is coincidence, but three times is a trend’.

In the space of a few weeks I’ve watched two startling movies, each featuring a Tamil avenger in foreign lands. Although there isn’t a third such film, and hence no apparent trend, I’m quite happy to wallow in the wonders of a mere coincidence.

In each movie, the main character is an angry and irrepressible Tamil man, bent on righting wrongs in the most violent way possible. Neither is set in India, except for fleeting scenes in Tamil Nadu. The first, Dheepan, is by the Frenchman Jacques Audiard, best known previously for A Prophet. Although he made Dheepan in 2015, it has had its wider global release only this year.

After the opening minutes set in war-ravaged northern Sri Lanka, the action moves to France—to the squalid and aggressive banlieues, or proletarian immigrant outskirts, of Paris. Dheepan, the protagonist, is a Tamil Tiger guerilla who has faked his way to refugee status in France, where he seeks to rebuild his life (alongside a Tamil woman and girl who pretend to be his wife and daughter, respectively). Families aroused fewer suspicions in the minds of French immigration screeners than single Tamil men did, so the domestic ruse was their best way to get out of hell. Dheepan finds a job as a caretaker in a set of dilapidated high-rise residential buildings, infested with gangs and drug-dealers of predominantly North African origin. So vile is his new milieu that the viewer wonders, in no time at all, whether it really is an improvement on postwar Jaffna.

The second film I saw was Kabali, Rajinikanth’s latest ego-odyssey, centred on the beleaguered Tamils of Malaysia, who number a million and three- quarter people, many of whom are on the very lowest rungs of a corrupt and ethnocentric Malaysian society. For all its garish (and yes, endearing) Rajinikanthisms, its whipcrack dialogue and delicious Tamil repartee, Kabali is a startlingly political film. I’ve read that parts of it did not escape the attention of Malaysian censors.

Although the film takes enormous liberties with history—wrongly depicting Tamil gangs of the sort that Kabali/ Rajinikanth heads as saviours of the downtrodden Malaysian Tamil—it offers numerous scenes in which characters discuss the plight of Tamils in terms that are overtly political and propagandistic. Malaysia, it is repeatedly said by Kabali and others, is a land that was built by the sweat of the Tamil brow. Tamils cleared the swamps and forests upon which plantations were set up by the British, and built the city of Kuala Lumpur with their physical labour.

The film asserts—nay, shrieks aloud—that the contribution of Malaysia’s Tamils has gone largely unrewarded. There was discrimination against Tamils in the past; and that discrimination continues, even if somewhat reduced, to this day—in favour of the ethnic Chinese and Malays (the ‘Bumiputra’, or sons of the soil). Malaysian commentators have observed that director Pa Ranjith probably escaped further censors’ cuts in Malaysia by depicting most of the Tamil political agitation in flashback form—suggesting, thereby, that these iniquities were largely a thing of the past, not of the present. There are Tamil-pride touches: Kabali’s political mentor is a man called Tamilnesan, whose name echoes that of Malaysia’s oldest Tamil newspaper (as well as offering up ‘Tamil Nation’ as a bilingual pun).

Kabali vindicates the rights of his Tamilian ‘protectorate’ by waging war against other gang leaders who would do Tamils down, particularly a Chinese don called Tony Lee, whose Oriental Otherness is reinforced by his blindingly gaudy silk jackets. The violence is quite explicit at times, with throats punctured by machetes and limbs hacked off, but most of it is of the stylised variety that is a staple of the Rajinikanth repertoire: improbable back-flips and drop-kicks, acoustically enhanced punches, and a wide range of gunplay. Kabali is also reliably indestructible, taking several bullets to the chest and needing, afterward, no more than a bit of gauzy bandage where there should have been gaping wounds.

Rajinikanth is often an avenger in his movies, but in Kabali he is an overtly political Tamil one. Given the jittery nature of Malaysian domestic politics—and, especially, that country’s obnoxious system of racial quotas and preferences—it is a surprise that Kabali hasn’t caused more of a stir among Malay ideologues. In one scene, a very senior Tamil police officer tells Kabali that even his exalted rank doesn’t prevent Malay colleagues in the force from looking askance at him. This, surely, must set off a frisson among viewers in Malaysia.

The violence in Dheepan is much more explicit, and disconcerting—in keeping with Audiard’s cinematic style and the bloody culture of the banlieues, as well as with Dheepan’s own past as a (presumably) ruthless Tamil Tiger. As events spiral out of hand in the buildings on which he has oversight, Dheepan settles matters in a hair-raising but also morally comforting way. He is a Tamil Dirty Harry of the banlieues, liquidating the scum that the conventional forces of law and order leave largely unmolested.

This film could be seen as a dark French fantasy about the type of immigrant they’d rather have—industrious, law-abiding, intolerant of crime—taking on and defeating the type of immigrants they wish weren’t in their midst. In the cathartic bloodbath carried out by Dheepan, France finds itself imagining a cleansing of the banlieue, a wiping out of decades of ill-judged social policies, of thoughtless and brutalist housing that has rendered people unassimilable.

Having performed his moral cleansing, Dheepan—the Tamil Tiger with a halo—moves on to Britain with his faux- family. France was but a way-station for him. Kabali brings light to his downtrodden people, but, by contrast, stays in their midst to bask in their adulation. For avengers—even Tamil ones—moving on is often the best idea. Dheepan starts his life afresh in London. Kabali, caught in an eternal circle of criminal damnation, has no such novelty, no such luck.

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