Foregrounding the multitude: How Mari Selvaraj's Karnan attains a universality and humanity rarely seen on screen

Karnan (2021) matches the power of the climax of Spike Lee's Do the Right Thing (1989) in its depiction of a transformative anger. By the time it does this, it has only reached its interval. As the climax arrives, it has succeeded more than any film in nearly placing us at the site of the confrontation between the villagers and the police, between the might of the state and those rendered invisible by it, between the ruling class and the subject class. We feel and imagine its impact in all its forms with a crushing immediacy: physical, emotional, mental, psychological. It brings us to within a step of imagining, for a while, what it must feel like to fight the world as you know it with all that you have, which is nothing, apart from your spirit and your labour. No war scene between foreign nations with historical fantastic armies, whatever its proportions, can match its emotional and psychic impact.

A film is not what it is about, but how it is about it, as Roger Ebert used to say. Karnan is one of the finest illustrations of this dictum. It gives a people whose existence, dignity and humanity are refused to be recognised by their neighbours, administration and so-called representatives, the epic treatment. The landscapes of the village fill up the screen, sweeping us up in the lives, trials and dreams of its inhabitants to the extent that we fully sense Karnan’s (played by Dhanush) indignation as a bus conductor calls his village a wasteland not worthy of a halt. It accords not just dignity but a harmonic, metaphoric presence to animals we share our existence with: the donkey, the horse, the moth, the dog, the pigs, the fish, the cattle, and even the predatory hawk.  It tests the bounds of our sclerotic, callous hearts and minds, sidesteps our cynicism and floods us with emotion. We are used to seeing entire lives and worlds reduced to a series of statistics and news reports; this film animates them fully (at times it can barely contain them) and places them before us in overwhelming sensory detail.

As I watched the film, the word 'multitude' kept surfacing in my mind, seemingly unbidden. Edmund Burke's statement about the impossibility of prosecuting the multitude was its source. Presently, it struck me how most films are about individual characters seen individually, not as a part of a larger collective. Protagonists usually have their own well-defined traits, and the films they inhabit usually delineate how they change over the course of the narrative through a series of trials aided or threatened by various characters and situations. It is important to note that each prominent character has their own individual standing, and the sense of tension, resulting in either drama or humour, comes from how they interact with each other. There may, of course, be many of them, but they are not seen as a multitude, except in scenes of dancing, fighting or in thrall to the oratory or valiant leadership of the hero. Mukul Anand’s massively crowded slum scenes in Agneepath (1990), Mani Ratnam’s song picturisations in Thalapathi (1991), Aayutha Ezhuthu/Yuva (2004) and Raavanan/Raavan (2010), or the political rallies of Iruvar (1997) come to mind.

It is the very nature of storytelling that themes, morals and emotions are conveyed using definite characters as focal points or loci. As a corollary, it is these definite characters that form the focus of a story; conveying the author’s view and speech is their ultimate purpose. The audio-visual medium has a protean ability to magnify, diminish, juxtapose, shift focus onto or away from its objects and characters of choice and interest. It is, as a result, fraught with endless possibilities of fine, careful calibration and curation of the thought and belief systems of its practitioners. Mari Selvaraj doesn’t want us to merely know that the people of Pozhiyankulam are one: he wants us to feel it consummately, in our bones. The starkly stylised ‘Kandaa vara sollunga’ brands us with nameless faces uttering a common refrain iteratively, becoming a strident litany seemingly without any immediate consequence. Only later do we comprehend the enormous payoffs this sequence yields, serving as the sensory bedrock to establish the powerful spiritual unity of the people. This unity is built up through several more visual, narrative and aural cues throughout the film, be it the numerous overhead shots of the whole village, master shots of all the villagers gathered for a communal debate, the scene in which nearly the whole village spills on to the highway to celebrate one among them, the protagonist framed with his people in the same focus as them, the overwhelming shrieks and cries of a single birthing woman standing in for the collective anguish of the village, or even the economy of their predicament that makes them travel in large groups to their destinations. The whole film, as it were, holds Karnan and his people in a focus as deep as it is wide. And yet, the village is gracious enough to urge Karnan on towards the fruits of his labour: a central government appointment in the armed forces, against his will.

It would be instructive here to compare Karnan to Vetrimaaran’s Asuran (2019), also starring Dhanush as a small farmer facing oppression in a similar pastoral southern Tamil milieu. However, the predicament and denouement of Sivasamy and Karnan could not be more different. Sivasamy is a lone warrior trying to protect his family, and the primary conflict of the film is his own with upper caste landlords trying to usurp his lands. Vetrimaaran adumbrates the conflict over Panchama lands largely through the story of Sivasamy and his family alone. In the bloody climax, Sivasamy and his son singlehandedly fight the upper caste family and its goons nearly to their deaths before the rest of the villagers turn up for help. The entire narrative foregrounds Sivasamy’s son first, and then Sivasamy himself, while the larger background systemic oppression of landless labourers by upper caste landlords appears in focus only at a crucial moment.

Pa Ranjith’s Kaala (2018), by contrast, places the protagonist squarely and resolutely among the residents of Dharavi, as they collectively oppose the demolition of their homes by upper caste gentrifying builders. In a film filled with frames bursting with living, breathing people, his individual story is narrated with the same focus as that of his people and his ecosystem, for they are intricately entwined through a shared, lived existence. His rift with his eldest son and his past with one of his sympathisers Zareena are explored in dignified detail, not simply papered over for the sake of creating an artificial, attractive solidarity against the enemy. The stunning climax of Kaala, in which a veritable roiling sea of humanity, infused with the spirit of the protagonist, literally drowns the antagonist, would have hardly felt earned or rung true in that case. In Karnan too, the differences between the inhabitants are not simply glossed over, but allowed to reach their natural conclusions through all their messiness. Individuality is not sacrificed for a fake sense of comradeship.

It is thus that Kaala, and even more so, Karnan, perform the near-impossible task of portraying a people, a multitude, in all their fractious, obstreperous coexistence converging into a synergetic unison in a way that we feel their collective presence and flinch at their collective pain. We respond to the joys and sorrows of not just the hero, but his entire community. Or rather, we come to realise that the joys and sorrows of the hero are drawn from those of his community, and that together, they form a corporate, sentient being. This realisation serves as a blessed balm to the apathy and disregard of the opening scene. In making us attain it, the film itself attains a universality and humanity rarely seen on screen. In putting up the face and the voice of a multitude on screen, it attains a democracy far beyond real life. To achieve this is a miracle.

Bishaldeb loves film noir, thinks films are a distillation of society and believes aesthetic brilliance is overrated.