Taking coins out of a jar

In conversation with Sharanya Manivannan

AQUAMARINE: Sharanya Manivannan's Witchcraft traverses questions of identity and gender.

The first time I met Sharanya Manivannan was at a reading at the Park Hotel in Chennai, early in January. A friend of mine, Mridula Koshy, a writer based in Delhi was reading at the event and had invited me. Later, some of us had gone for a drink at the Bamboo Bar in Savera Hotel, on Radhakrishnan Salai. Sharanya and I barely spoke that evening, although she did give me a card with her e-mail address.

Therefore, I could only vaguely summon up her appearance after she agreed to meet me for an interview. We meet at The French Loaf, a charming cafe on Harrington Road, sitting comfortably on wooden benches under the shade of two huge trees. “I was born in Madras,” she says, as I try to sound interesting, despite itching for the facts.

Born in 1985, she spent the early years of her life in Sri Lanka (her mother is Sri Lankan Tamil) before moving to Malaysia. “It was the worst decision my family ever made,” she says. In 2007, Sharanya caused a controversy by terming the practice of racism in Malaysia as ‘apartheid’. “I thought I was stating the obvious,” she says. “Any country that practices segregation, based on race and class, can be accused of apartheid. And to name something is to give it power.” She recounts horrendous incidents of being at the receiving end of a backlash by the Malaysian establishment. Finally, she gave up, left college and moved to Chennai 15 months ago.

This condition of exile and dislocation permeates her work at some level or another in her debut collection of poetry, Witchcraft.  Described as a “startling, sensual book of poems heralding the debut of a new voice”, Witchcraft traverses the questions of identity and gender. It is a mature work, and belies the voice of someone so young. Sharanya says that being brought up by her grandmother has made her ‘wiser’ and while listening to her, there is clarity of thought unusual for a 23-year-old. It is almost as if she has lived many parallel lives, and her perception is the aggregate result of the experiences she has accumulated.

I mention her poem Blood Lotus, and how I feel that the conflict between nature and culture underpins many of her poems. Suddenly, she gives a shriek of delight (“You’re very perceptive. You just made me understand my work better”) and then goes on to talk about the social taboos linked with menstruation. “The ancient idea was that a force rests in objects and the body. But this has been appropriated by conservative thinkers to see menstruating women as a polluting force.”

She takes out a copy of Witchcraft and talks about her poem Ananku, which deals with the trauma of the ceremony that accompanies female puberty. She says, “The poem is about the relationship with my parents.” Towards the end of Ananku, there is a line where without any warning or explanation, the script changes from English to Tamil. The question of language is a delicate one, for anyone from the subcontinent writing in English, and I found this innovation particularly striking.

She says, “The language in my head is a hybrid of Sri Lankan Tamil and English, though English was my first language.” She points out the use of non-italicised Romanised Tamil in other sections of the book and then says, “The idea is also to obscure things from the reader. I’m saying to them – Listen, I’ve already told you too much. So, this is a medium of inaccessibility to me for a largely non-Tamil audience.”

I tell her that one of my favourite poems is the powerful and nostalgic You Bring Out the Sri Lankan In Me. She says, almost immediately, “I would like to say here that, in that poem, I made some politically irresponsible statements purely in the interest of lyricism. I do not and have never supported or believed in the separatist terrorism that the country suffers under.”

The statement has a rehearsed quality to it, but when I talk about the various protests across the state, she pounces on it. “Oh, these armchair activists! They don’t understand our culture and let me say that we are a different culture. We are a clannish community (laughs) and like all clannish communities, we look down on other cultures.”

She mentions with dismay about the self-immolation of Muthukumar and saves her contempt for the irresponsibility of the political class. “They go for their own motives, and get the people excited by making them feel part of something bigger. Now, we have schools and colleges closing down. They don’t understand conflict and history. I don’t understand it either, but they just pontificate to serve their own interests.”

She talks with passion and feeling about the Sri Lankan issue, but the conversation moves away when I ask about the novel she is working on, Constellation of Scars. “It’s got all the usual clichés – love, loss, longing,” she says. “It is the tale of a 20-something photographer, who is obsessed with the preservation of transitory moments.” She expects the novel to be finished in a few months and says, “The protagonist has been in my head since I was fifteen. It’s been inconsistent over a lot of years. Only now, I have found the right voice. But I want to finish it first and then talk about it.”

We hang around for a little while more, talking informally. She tells me she is looking for an opportunity to move out of Chennai, where she currently lives with her family in Nungambakkam. She is considering writing the rest of her novel in Pondicherry, and quitting her job as a copywriter. “I need to quit my job,” she says, while asking me not to take it down.

“I have a really cushy job. And someone once asked me – do you want to be a full woman or a writer? Because a full woman is supposed to have money and financial independence, all the feminist nonsense about the woman who pays her way. But a writer is someone who, at times, takes coins out of a jar.”  On this final, beautiful note, we end our conversation. Sharanya walks away, stops an auto, mutters something in Tamil, and then she’s gone.

The indefinite deferral of closure

Naseem’s continuing narrative can be defined by all that has happened since 1992

Watching Naseem with the advantage of the retrospective context of the last 14 years, one can only admire Saeed Mirza’s prescience. Released in 1995, Naseem was created with the clay of those tumultuous times, following the demolition of the Babri Masjid in 1992. Through the relationship between the young girl Naseem and her grandfather, it portrays the escalating communal atmosphere of that period.

Yet Naseem is not a secular film, not at least in the way secularism is conventionally defined. Naseem’s grandfather, who represents the epitome of religious tolerance, frequently delves into the nostalgia of his days in Agra, spent with his mates Tripathi and Niyaz. In recounting memories of his youthful days, he never emphasizes even once on Tripathi’s Hindu religion. Mirza is drawing our attention to the matter-of-fact nature of such inter-religious social relationships. The grandfather’s Agra of pre-Independence is not just an idyll of religious tolerance, but united by language and regional culture. Mirza is interested not in the nature of erstwhile secular ethos, but in the inextricable syncretism of the two religions that held society like glue.

Therefore, the deteriorating health and inevitable death of the grandfather (on December 6, 1992) with his love of poetry and ethos of religious tolerance is seen as the irreversible decline of shared values. The death of a Hindu shopkeeper’s wife, with whom Naseem shared a friendship, is a metaphor for the severing of communication links and inter-religious interaction in the increasingly fractured social climate. What may be seen as an ‘ending’ in Naseem could also be interpreted as an indefinite deferral of closure. The continuation of the film’s narrative can be defined and described in all that has happened since, including the 2002 Gujarat pogrom.

As a nation dies slowly

Two decades on, Amma Ariyan has lost none of its evocative power and political relevance

CONTEMPORARY RESONANCE: Released in 1986, Amma Ariyan remains a masterpiece

Early in Amma Ariyan, Purushan enters a hospital in Calicut where he has come to identify a dead body. As he walks in the hospital compound looking for the mortuary, we can hear the seething cries of a newly born child. It is not coincidence, for this death of a former acquaintance would midwife the birth of a new movement.

It becomes clear in Amma Ariyan, or Report to Mother, that the mother is a metaphor for something much larger, the nation itself. Purushan has set out to Delhi to pursue his research, promising to write to his mother from wherever he is. After finding the dead body of a person he faintly recognises, which is later revealed to be that of Hari, he decides to go to Hari’s house to inform his mother about her son’s death. The film takes the form of a letter written by Purushan to his mother.

Amma Ariyan therefore becomes the account of those who have been left outside the system and the narrative of the nation that promised to embrace all its citizens. On the way, Purushan meets some of Hari’s friends and they join the journey. Director John Abraham traverses the memory of this group to unravel the character of Hari, and this is closely interwoven with the turbulent political history of Kerala in the 1970’s. Brilliantly shot in black-and-white, the film weaves fact and fiction (Abraham filmed actual protests) to create a powerful narrative of political unrest faced with an increasingly corrupt and oppressive state.

Towards the end, the group finally reaches Hari’s mother to give her the news. Soon we find that the group has metamorphosed into a crowd, which Abraham uses to suggest that the journey begun by Purushan will not end here. The ending of the film could be seen as the people finally uniting to question those in power, but critics have often wondered if Abraham prophetically was satirising the de-ideologised tamasha of political activity which never endeavours to investigate and demolish root causes of oppression.

In one memorable scene, the travelling group reads from Guatemalan revolutionary Otto Rene Castillo’s poem Apolitical Intellectuals – “One day the apolitical intellectuals of my country will be interrogated by the simplest of our people. They will be asked what they did when their nation died out slowly, like a sweet fire small and alone.” This is of immense resonance in an age such as ours when civil society begins to speak the language of power instead of representing the concerns of the subaltern.

Amma Ariyan was released in 1986 as the first film of the Odessa Collective, which obtained the funds by collecting money from the ordinary people of Kerala. An example of effective cooperative filmmaking, the film also serves as a reminder of the social and political possibilities of cinema once it is let loose from the hegemony of business and power interests.

This review was published in Mise en Scene, the journal of the 2nd Women’s Film Festival in Chennai.

Occupying an imaginative space

Even the most dedicated cineastes often struggle to name 10 women filmmakers in response to an impromptu ambush. This is because filmmaking has almost entirely been seen as a masculine enterprise. The intention here is not to disregard the enormous achievements of women in all fields of the filmmaking craft. All evidence suggests, especially in the last decade or so, that women are increasingly occupying spaces that were previously considered exclusively domains of men.

Therefore, it is surprising that despite their pedigree and excellence and increasingly substantial contribution to the craft of filmmaking, they have occupied very little imaginative space in the psyche of the film viewer. Even today, it is far easier to spark furious debate and discussion on the films of Jean-Luc Godard than on the work of women filmmakers such as Agnes Varda and Sally Potter .

This failure to occupy the imaginative space is a peculiar predicament. On the one hand, we have more women filmmakers than ever before yet they are only a footnote in the dominant canonical history of film. No woman has ever won the Oscar for Best Director in the 81 years since the conception of the Academy Awards. It is not to say that the Oscars are the pinnacle of cinematic achievement or confer a greater legitimacy to any body of work. But it is only evidence of how hard it has been for woman filmmakers to find equal representation in mainstream cinema.

Thus, anybody who is dismissive of the idea of a women’s film festival must put into perspective the lack of proportion between achievement and recognition. The battle has not been won. The purpose is not only to positively discriminate in favour of filmmakers of a particular gender. The idea is also to challenge the hegemony of mass culture that has effortlessly seamed into the status quo of society reproducing ideas not only of patriarchy, but of class and power.

In its breathtaking range of films, the 2^nd women’s film festival has the possibility of not only broadening the horizons of those who love film, but also posing as a site of contestation of the dominant narratives that today pervade our lives.

This piece was published in Mise en Scene, the journal of the 2nd Women’s Film Festival in Chennai.