Let me post what I wrote about the film last year (with slight changes to connect the loose ends). These are scribblings written at different points, was essentially a work in progress that I later abandoned, so please pardon the lack of coherence and the abrupt manner in which it ends.
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A great moment occurs in மகாநதி (1994) when an image of Krishna behind bars, gazing directly at the audience, dissolves into an image of a deity (Garudar) in the famous Srirangam temple, also “behind bars.” [1] This is not the first instance a prison is juxtaposed with a temple in the film. The film’s opening itself – clear, swift currents of a river (presumably Cauvery?) dissolve into a bird’s eye view of the stagnant Cooum River which in turn dissolves into a high-angle view of the Madras Central Jail – is an inversion of the tradition of opening a film with the image of something auspicious, a temple or a deity. The camera then pans over the prison along its fence wall, and takes us into the prison passing its gates through a series of dissolves.
It is Krishnasami’s first day in jail. “இந்த பாருங்க! நான் திருடன் இல்ல, முட்டாள்.” He snaps at his inquisitive cellmate (Poornam Viswanathan). And the thematic rigour of the film is already set. (This is not a moralistic film that will lament the loss of innocence and wallow in the characters’ misery.) As he’s lying down trying to catch some sleep, his past opens up as if it were a dream with the opening of the gates of his “home,” revealing one of the recurring visual motifs of the film, that of a man trapped in confined spaces. Indeed many of the indelible images of the film are ones that place Krishna “behind bars,” so to say. It wouldn’t be an exaggeration to say that, almost half the film’s running time, the camera “blocks” Krishnasami within an enclosed space and frames him from the outside, which subliminally evokes a sense of many things – that of being in the safe confines of one’s home, that of a fish out of water, that of an imprisoned man. As Krishna finds his way out of or into these enclosed spaces, one of the many questions the film subliminally seems to raise is, what’s a man’s ultimate haven? Can we afford to draw an imaginary line between “the good” and “the bad,” the temples and the outside world, and, in turn, the outside world and the prisons?
Krishnasami is a well-to-do small town businessman, a widower leading a comfortable life with his two children and mother-in-law. Everything is alright but there’s a strange sense of dissatisfaction that life invariably introduces. An NRI friend’s visit to their hometown acts a catalyst to this and Krishna’s sense of a happy bourgeois man/family is suddenly disturbed as he’s reduced to gawk at the sophisticated ways of his old friend’s English-speaking family, check his little son’s eagerness with silent stares, uneasily laugh at their patronizing jokes at the expense of his daughter, reach out to a barely-listening kid his daughter’s age as if she were his peer and clarify, “A/C… போட்டுக்கல.”
He subsequently makes the acquaintance of a crooked businessman who tries to lure him into a more comfortable and prosperous city life. And thus he moves to Madras in the hopes of a more comfortable and prosperous life in the urban sphere and starts a chit fund company in collaboration with a crooked businessman, which lands him in jail.
One needs to pause at this moment and consider Krishna’s migration to the big city. A common reading of the film (a misreading to my mind) is to see the whole of Krishna’s story as a cautionary tale about moving away from one’s roots – i.e. one’s native village to the callous urban spaces or some such thing. Indeed this is precisely the mode in which a lot of standard happy-family melodramas operate. But what this film offer is anything but a fatalistic narrative of a family that’s irretrievably disintegrated once it moves to the big, bad city. (As I intend to argue later, the film never gives its palm to a fatalistic closure at any point. Even as the film closes with an ellipsis of what happens to Krishna later, we’re reassured that the family is indeed reunited.) What we instead get is an archetypal mythical narrative of a headman of sorts who’s taken to a new place and stripped off his powers. In other words, to this film, the essence of Krishna’s stepping-out isn’t an inward-looking tale that manufactures an elegiac melodrama, but an outward-looking tale of what he actually sees when he gets out. Note how seamlessly the film always introduces us to newer scenarios. The film’s second hour, Krishna’s time in jail has very little to do with his past. And the film strikes the kernel of the “ruler wandering outside his kingdom” narrative when Krishna raises his voice against the corruptions and transgressions in the prison. Krishna raises these questions not simply because he can’t stand wrongdoings at a personal level (insofar as one could risk such a coordinate!), but also because he’s not used to being so powerless. This sort of headman-like concerns has always been part and parcel of his social standing.
Krishna: “adhu eppadi sir irukka mudiyum? Edhukku irukkaNumnu kEkkaREn? romba aniyAyamA irukku sir..”
Panchapakesan: “namakku edhukku idhellAm, Krishna…”
Krishna: “adichchadhula andhALukku pottunnu uyir pOyirundhudhunA? appa? idhellAm yArAvadhu oruththar niyAyamnu kEk—”
Many of the standard tropes of “pastoral native village vs. big bad city” is subsequently raised within the film and firmly rejected. The most obvious one’s in fact offered by the villain himself in a crude way, when he says, “ammAvukku pattaNam pidikkAdhO? [...] sAr, kettavan girAmaththila iruppAn, city’la iruppAn… thUNila iruppAn, thurumbilum iruppAn… nAmba dhAn jAkkiradhaiyA irukkaNum.” Which is incidentally another instance where god is juxtaposed with what essentially stands for its opposite. In the prison, Krishna tries to be nice and respectable to everyone, expecting it to work well for him and others too, but he’s repeatedly humiliated, at the hand of Thulukkanam and others. This does make him resent the city at a conscious level, something he’s able to articulate (“nInga sonnadhu dhAmmA correctu, indhap pattaNaththula mariyAdhaiyE kedaiyAdhummA…”), but at a deeper level, he also becomes acutely aware that he was doing well and good in his past life not because he was nice and system-abiding, but merely because he was already well placed in the system.
It’s important to note that it’s precisely at this moment the film introduces the other great supporting character of the film, Muthusamy. Muthusamy is the person at the other end of what the urban space offers to Krishna. A warm friendship, a fraternal relationship devoid of the feudal respects Krishna is likely to be familiar with.
