The Brahmin and the Citizen

Shankar’s Anniyan
The film Anniyan that was a recent box-office success in the southern states, works within an
ideological framework that constructs the brahmin and the non-brahmin as naturally
opposed to each other. The film’s narrative poses the brahmin as the citizen ideal and
the non-brahmin as its lawless all-pervasive “other”. However, the film is in effect a statement
about actually existing democracies wherein the brahmin and the citizen can exist only as
never realisable ideals. The brahmin’s individuality is overridden by his caste identity, which
thus contradicts his claim to being a citizen. At the same time, for very many citizens,
citizenship remains an unrealisable concept, for access to power and justice in a modern state,
as the film demonstrates, relies very often on extra-legal means. The film thus raises several
binaries that are opposed to each other, for instance those between a citizen and
a non-citizen, caste and citizenship, democracy and mass participation, etc,
failing in the end to resolve the contradictions it raises.
RAJAN KRISHNAN, M S S PANDIAN

I exist only as never realisable ideals. Indeed, the very act of

Introduction pursuing these ideals leads the chief protagonist of the film, a
young brahmin lawyer with “unwavering” fidelity to law, to
contaminate both the brahmin and citizen ideals.

T
he recent multi-lingual film by Shankar, Anniyan (‘The
Stranger’, 2005), invited adverse criticism from different
quarters in Tamil Nadu, despite being a box-office success
in the four southern states. Primarily Tamil in terms of its mise
en scene, the film has been read and dismissed by critics as pro-
brahmin and fascistic. Shankar has been subjected to similar
criticism for his previous films as well. His film Gentleman (1993)
was widely viewed in the state and elsewhere as offering a defence
of the anti-Mandal agitation. In a political milieu where the
categories of the brahmin and the non-brahmin have, in their bi-
polar opposition, acquired a self-evident naturalised presence,
such criticisms function within an unreflexive framework of
political common sense.1 Interestingly, in Andhra Pradesh, where
mainstream politics is not framed by these categories, the film
grossed the maximum revenue and appears to have been primarily
viewed as “mega-entertainment”. In this context, it is necessary
to fashion alternative strategies of reading which are conscious
of how sedimented categories – in this case, the brahmin and
the non-brahmin – reiterate pre-existing political commonsense
and also render the film’s other meanings invisible. This is a
necessary task both to unsettle what William Connolly calls the
“inertia of shared vocabularies”2 and to account for the non-
brahmin’s pleasure in watching the film which is apparently pro-
brahmin.
It is indeed true that Anniyan performs its ideological work
within the conceptual framework that views the constructs of the
brahmin and the non-brahmin as natural and opposed to one
another. It sets in opposition the brahmin as the citizen ideal and
the non-brahmin as its lawless all-pervasive Other. After all,
Shankar, as much as his critics, is a product of the same political
milieu framed by these categories. However, what seems to us
to be interesting in the film is the unresolved pathos and angst
that surrounds the efforts to produce the brahmin as the “citizen
ideal” and its unrealisability. By failing to affirm the brahmin-
citizen, the film unwittingly becomes a statement about actually
existing democracies wherein the brahmin and the citizen can
The failure of the normative citizen, the normative brahmin
and the incompatibility between the two figures leads to schizo-
phrenic delusion and an incoherent narrative in the film. Releas-
ing pleasurable affect, this delusion and the incoherence are also
the most productive elements of the film that can help us excavate
its other meanings that cannot be contained within the opposition
of the brahmin and the non-brahmin. On the one hand, as the
incoherence of the narrative stems from the contradictions of
modern political arrangement comprising the state, the civil
society, populations and the unreachable ideal of enlightened
citizenry, it offers the possibility to reflect on larger questions
such as citizen-making and democracy. On the other, it also
provides an occasion to look at the inassimilable nature of the
brahmin ideal as the organising principle of democratic society.
We intend to follow these leads in the present paper. Let us begin
with a brief synopsis of the film.
II
Anniyan
“Rules” Ramanujam, aka Ambi (Vikram), an unmarried brahmin
lawyer, begins his day by itinerating as part of a bhajan-singing
group, casting a secretive glance at his love, Nandini (Sada). As
he leaves for the court, an anonymous postcard announcing the
incarnation of Anniyan who would remove all social ills arrives.
On his way, a cyclist accidentally spits on his face but refuses
to apologise. Midway in his travel, the break-wire of his two-
wheeler snaps and he barely manages to reach the automobile
shop. He gets into a crowded bus only to find Nandini being
physically harassed by a local ruffian. With the help of fellow
passengers and the bus crew, Ambi gets him to the police station.
He admonishes the police officer for beating up the ruffian and
advises him to secure his conviction in the court of law.
Ambi is then seen in the court appearing for a poor woman
who is unable to pay the excessive rent charged in violation of

Economic and Political Weekly July 8-15, 2006 3055

the Rent Control Act. He loses the case as he fails to produce
stamped receipts as proof of the rent collected. Walking on the
road, he notices a crowd standing around an accident victim.
Ambi’s effort to stop a car so as to transport him to the hospital,
turns out to be fruitless. By the time Ambi manages to take him
to the hospital in an ambulance, he dies.
The cumulative effect of the day’s experiences makes Ambi
anguish over the state of the society. As he sits in front of his
computer, the anonymous postcard that arrived in the morning
gets swept in the wind and lands on the keyboard. Ambi enters
the portal of Anniyan and complains about the owner of the car
who refused to transport the accident victim. In the following
sequence, a ghostly and forbidding Anniyan hijacks the car with
its owner to a buffalo pen. The buffalos run over the car owner
and turn him into a mass of human pulp. Police officer Prabhakar
(Prakash Raj) and his assistant Chari (Vivek), the latter a close
friend of Ambi, find a indecipherable jumble scribbled in blood
on the car.
In Ambi’s house Chari finds him hiding mementos and greeting
cards meant for Nandini. Ambi confesses his love towards Nandini
and worries that it will be improper to express it. At Chari’s
suggestion, Ambi accompanies the neighbouring families includ-
ing Nandini’s, to the Thiravaiyaru music festival. Chari’s re-
peated attempts during the train journey to make Ambi express
his love to Nandini fail. Constantly complaining about the lack
of amenities in the train, Ambi forbids everyone from eating the
substandard meals supplied by the railway kitchen. Once again,
he returns to Anniyan’s portal and files a complaint against the
kitchen contractor, Chokkan. Anniyan confronts Chokkan in the
railway kitchen and kills him by throwing into a cauldron of
boiling oil. Prabhakar and Chari who come to investigate the
crime discover a jumble scribbled on the cauldron.
Succumbing to Chari’s constant prodding, Ambi writes a letter
in the form of a formal application to Nandini. But he gives it
to her parents claiming that it is not proper to give it to Nandini
without their consent. Nandini responds by characterising Ambi
as a dull, uninteresting, rule-bound character, and rejects his offer
of love. Soon she receives gifts of rose plants and parrots from
one Remo. At his invitation, she goes to a fashion show featuring
him and gets totally charmed by the English-speaking and western-
dressed Remo.
Meanwhile, Ambi gets kidnapped by the hirelings of the break-
wire manufacturer who is about to lose the case filed by Ambi
in a consumer court. Despite his pleading that he is a curd rice-
eating brahmin who cannot match them in physical prowess, they
beat him black and blue. We for the first time see the metamor-
phosis of Ambi into Anniyan. Ambi as Anniyan not only thrashes
his tormentors, but also kills the break-wire manufacturer by
letting dozens of leeches to feed on him. Next morning, Prabhakar
and Chari find the body of the victim as well as a jumble scribbled
on a tin sheet in its vicinity. Unable to decipher the meaning
of the jumbles, they seek the help of Ambi whose knowledge
of Sanskrit is commendable. Ambi explains that the jumbles are
taken from Garuda Puranam and they refer to punishments that
wrongdoers would get in their afterlife in the court of Yama,
the lord of death.
At the request of Nandini’s mother, Ambi accompanies Nandini
to register the sale of their land. He objects to her effort to
undervalue the transaction to avoid stamp duty and, in return,
draws her displeasure. Meanwhile, Remo takes her to a posh hotel
but she wants to leave so as to handle the formalities of the land
sale. At the mention of land sale, Remo violently transforms into
Anniyan and tries to kill Nandini for cheating the state exchequer.
Nandini realises that Anniyan, Remo and Ambi are one and the
3056
same person. She calls out for Ambi. Anniyan stops, becomes
Ambi and swoons.
Doctors diagnose that Ambi is suffering from multiple per-
sonality disorder. Under hypnosis he recounts how during his
boyhood, his sister got electrocuted because of the wilful neg-
ligence of a linesman of the electricity department and his father’s
efforts to get justice failed. A visibly shattered young Ambi asks
his grandmother how justice would be delivered. She tells him
about Yama’s court and Garuda Puranam. Ambi claims that he
became obsessed with rules in his life after this early tragedy.
Anniyan finally makes a public appearance in a stadium.
Addressing a large gathering, he compares India’s poor economic
performance with that of Singapore, Japan and Korea and declares
that callousness is a national disease that prevents India from
prospering. He warns the people that unless they mend their ways,
their fate will be similar to that of his victims. People cheer him
and in the melee, he gives the slip to the police dragnet set up
by Prabhakar. Working on video images of Anniyan, Prabhakar
finds a close resemblance between Ambi and Anniyan. He also
finds that the telephone number that was used to lodge complaints
to the Anniyan portal is from Ambi’s area. Prabhakar raids
Ambi’s house and arrests him. Under torture, Ambi transforms
into Anniyan and roughs up Prabhakar and other policemen. On
the weight of the video clippings of the psychiatric session and
the police interrogation and the psychiatrist’s evidence, the judge
refuses to punish Ambi for the doings of Anniyan and commits
Ambi to two years of custodial clinical supervision. Two years
later, Ambi emerges from the clinic cured.
A visibly changed Ambi marries Nandini and embarks on a
honeymoon trip. They run into a man publicly consuming alcohol
in the train and Ambi takes Nandini away from the scene instead
of fighting with him. However, we soon see that he is able to
throw the offender out of the train without batting an eyelid. The
film ends with the suggestion that in his new integrated persona,
Ambi would keep eliminating enemies of civic life without having
to transform into beastly alien.
III
Brahmin as Citizen
Perhaps the most productive way of looking at Anniyan is to
contemplate as to what Ambi’s transitions into Anniyan and
Remo mean. Both the transitions, which are intense moments
of narrative incoherence in the film, are meant to compensate
for the failures of Ambi. In the first case, it is the failure of Ambi
as the law-abiding citizen-brahmin to enforce the will of the state
and in the second, Ambi as an emasculated tradition-bound
brahmin-citizen. Both these flaws and the compensatory tran-
sitions into the figures of Anniyan and Remo are, as we will see,
closely intertwined. We will show how these transitions, despite
being moves to recover ideals unrealisable in the figure of Ambi,
render the very ideals even more deeply problematic.
Before we engage with the transitions of Ambi into the figures
of Anniyan and Remo, it is useful to reflect on two general aspects
of actually existing democracy as an overall backdrop to unravel
the ambiguities of the film. First, how the ideal of citizenship
attracts the pre-existing template of the ideal brahmin, even when
citizenship is claimed to be a deracinated concept. Second, the
relationship between extra-legal, citizenship and democracy.
In order to speculate on how it becomes possible to imagine
the brahmin as encapsulating the ideals of the citizen, it may be
worthwhile to take a brief look at the instructively ambiguous
manner in which the figure of the brahmin is represented in French
anthropologist Marcel Mauss’s well known classic The Gift.
Economic and Political Weekly July 8-15, 2006
Mauss uses the brahmins in his book as one of several instances
to make an argument against the market economy which, in his
opinion, has reduced man to an economic animal. Citing several
texts, he discerns three main characteristics of the brahmin:
(i) kings and others were enjoined to bestow gifts on the brahmins
which guaranteed wealth in this life as well as in future births
of the gift-giver; (ii) The brahmins are wary of accepting gifts
from kings; and (iii) brahmins extol the virtue of giving and in
one instance a brahmin was chided by a spirit in the forest for
giving away too much. On the basis of these schematised features
of the brahminic order, Mauss sees in the brahmin a survival
of a defiance of the market economy. However, his deployment
of brahmins as an example of gift exchange is equally marked
by certain critical ambivalences. He speculates whether brahmins
evolved the norms to suit themselves as they solicited and re-
ceived gift, but did not reciprocate it but for their religious service:
“The codes and the epic books that have as much authority were
drawn up by the brahmins, and, one may say, if not for them,
at least for their advantage, in the very era of their triumph…
In the event, the theory, the “law of the gift” that we are about
to describe, the danadharma, is only really applicable to the
brahmins, to the way they solicit and receive a gift – without
reciprocating it save through their religious services – and also
to the way a gift is their due.”3
Thus, in the scheme of Mauss, the brahmin is an ambivalent
example of a system outside the market economy, as he doesn’t
seem to integrate with the society through exchange but is rather
a self-alienating law-giver enforcing injunctions on others. In a
footnote Mauss remarks, “The cunning brahmins in fact entrusted
the gods and the shades with the task of returning gifts that had
been made to themselves… For his part, the brahmin did not
return gifts, did not invite, and did not even, all said and done,
accept invitations.”4 The brahmins exceptional status, being “a
divinity among divinities”, is grounded in the theory of his
disinterested service to society in his own terms and not soliciting
rewards (except for the injunction already made that others ought
to give him the needs of life).
With this long-time penchant for norm-giving and being the
putative ideal for society, the brahmin’s eagerness to subsume
himself into the normative citizenship is more or less predictable.
In the opening sequence of the film, as Ambi leaves for the court,
he finds things at home in a disarray. Combining the notion of
cleanliness with civic order, he declares “I hate disorder”. As
we will see, this love for “order” “oscillates between its use as
a verb of command (to order) and a noun of harmonious design
(the order).”5 It is also important to bear in mind here that his
predecessor, the colonial modern brahmin was an embattled
personality. He joined the contractual economy in full vigour
while at the same time claiming to retain his ritual superiority.6
Such being his genealogy, the post-colonial brahmin is tragically
laden with all the contradictions of multiple idealities he is eager
to assume. The most profound irony of Anniyan is that, while
Ambi wants to employ archaic punishments enjoined in Garuda
Puranam to realise norms of citizenship and to enlarge notions
of justice, his ultimate goal is to reinvent India as an economic
superpower, a haven of free-market economy like Singapore –
a long way from the concerns of Marcel Mauss indeed.
Now let us turn to the question of the extra-legal. As evident
from the synopsis of the film, Anniyan is as much about the
brahmin as citizen ideal as about the contradiction between the
ideal citizenship and the extra-legal that marks the negotiations
of everyday existence of the most. While Ambi as citizen con-
cedes the monopoly of violence to the state (as evident from the
sequence involving the local ruffian who misbehaves with
Economic and Political Weekly July 8-15, 2006
Nandini), Anniyan not only leaves the bounds of legality, but
also wrenches from Yama the right to punish wrongdoers. This
makes Anniyan a beastly, menacing anti-thesis to the ideals of
brahmin-citizen combination, which he purports to champion.
In important ways, this ambiguity captures the classic contra-
diction between mass democracy and modernity as enshrined in
citizenship ideal. As Partha Chatterjee has argued, for large
sections of the population in most democracies, extra-legal is a
way of negotiating livelihoods. He names the domain of these
negotiations as the political society in opposition to the civil
society which is rule-bound, normative and governed by canons
of law. Importantly, despite their participation in the extra-legal,
the state cannot ignore the members of the political society. Their
departure from the citizen ideal has to be tolerated as the politics
of mass democracy critically depends on them. This leads to the
persistent lament of the civil societal elite that mass democracy
comes in the way of modernity: “…in actual practice, govern-
mental agencies must descend from the high ground to the terrain
of political society in order to renew their legitimacy as providers
of well-being and then to confront whatever is the current
configuration of politically mobilised demands. In the process,
one is liable to hear complaints from the protagonists of civil
society and the constitutional state that modernity is facing an
unexpected rival in the form of democracy.”7 The unrelieved
angst of the film about the political society cannot but lead to
a position against mass democracy while claiming to recover the
citizen ideal in its purity.
Against the general backdrop of these two points about the
relationship between the figure of the brahmin, citizen ideal and
democracy, and between democracy and the extra-legal, let us
now turn to Ambi’s ambiguous journeys that transform him into
the beastly Anniyan and the seductively masculine Remo.
IV
Transitions
With a deftly drawn Iyengar caste mark, ‘thiruman’, on his
forehead and a well-kept tuft adorning his head, Ambi is an
exemplary brahmin – bhajan-singing, religious, and not giving
away any external marks of his brahmin-ness. But his idyllic,
exclusive and conflict-free brahmin world does not survive beyond
the boundaries of the ‘agraharam’, the exclusive brahmin resi-
dential quarters, and the extended space of the Thiruvaiyaru music
festival. Being a lawyer and a rule-bound citizen, he has to
encounter the larger world of others. The film marks this outside
world as distinctly non-brahmin and extra-legal. But for a music
sabha secretary who initially refuses Nadini a chance to sing in
the sabha but gets away with his life by heeding to the decree
of Anniyan, and Nandini who escapes death by appealing to love,
the rest of the law-breakers, who die violently at the hands of
Anniyan, are non-brahmins. (Truthful to the injunction of
brahminism, Anniyan shuns brahminocide.) The world of the
non-brahmin extra-legal challenges Ambi both as a brahmin and
a rule-bound ideal citizen. While his fidelity to law is mocked
at as not knowing how to negotiate the real world, his brahmin
identity incites irreverence. He gets contemptuously addressed
as ‘poosari’ (temple priest) because of his tuft; and his attempt
to assure that he is a lawyer are ignored – an allusion to the
imagined or real marginality of the brahmin in contemporary
Tamil Nadu.
The rule-bound citizen ideal has other domains of revenge too.
It is the inner world of emotions and affect. When Nandini rejects
Ambi’s offer of love, she compares him to a calculator and
algorithm. After all, Ambi could write his avowal of love only
3057
in the style of a formal application. In other words, he has to
leave behind passionless governmental rationality and traverse
the path of fantasy and spontaneity. An unconscious victim of
rule-bound modernity that is super-imposed on his tradition-
bound brahmin persona, Ambi can only pathetically ask Nandini
whether his love will be accepted if he dons jeans and t-shirts
like the pop singer Michael Jackson. The outer world of non-
brahmins and the inner world of romance are, thus, available to
Ambi only on the basis of abandoning brahmin-citizen ideals.
Ambi’s way of overcoming these lacks is to transit into the figure
of Anniyan and Remo.
Transition 1
Let us first engage with Ambi’s transition into the figure of
Anniyan. Anniyan, the vigilante, is a figure outside the realm
of law. Modes of punishment that he inflicts on those whom he
perceives as wrong-doers, belong to the archaic Garuda Puranam
and not to modern law books. As a brahmin, he exceeds his caste-
bound brief by coveting the role of Yama, the god of death.
Appropriately, in the first execution that he carries out as Anniyan,
he mounts a buffalo, the vehicle of the Yama in mythologies.
Significantly, the punishments are, according to the invoked text,
to be meted out only to the dead after taking stock of their whole
life. Ambi, as part of his psychosis, punishes the living, collapsing
the distinction between the after life and the life in this world.
This will be similar to a devout Christian enacting scenes of
Dante’s Divine Comedy by establishing torture chambers in
contemporary Italian society. As a “citizen”, he takes to violence
which is the exclusive prerogative of the state as per the social
contract – a trait common to all vigilante films. It becomes a
glaring source of contradiction in Anniyan since Ambi’s very
ideal is steadfast subservience to law. The rule-bound brahmin-
citizen Ambi will not let police officers take law into their hands
and furthermore will not allow himself to commit suicide (after
Nandini rejects him) as it is illegal. But Ambi as Anniyan performs
gruesome murders with absolute impunity using wildly arbitrary
criteria.
Though the film justifies this by enacting a split between justice
and law, the very move distances Anniyan from the citizen ideal.
In other words, only by giving up the citizen ideal, Ambi as
Anniyan could ensure justice. In the sequence where Ambi
transits into Anniyan for the first time on screen, we initially
hear his voice speaking a swear word, a non-brahmin slang, as
if from nowhere. This disembodied voice signals the so-called
physical and psychic violence of the non-brahmin world becom-
ing the vehicle for Anniyan to ensure justice. The very partici-
pation in the extra-legal thus gives Ambi as Anniyan a non-
brahmin quality. After all, the film, in its effort to recover the
brahmin-citizen, scripts the extra-legal as belonging to the world
of non-brahmins. Tellingly, the caste identity of Anniyan is
ambiguous in the film. While his demeanour and language are
manifestly non-brahmin, the reference to the Garuda Puranam
and his chanting verses in Sanskrit as he kills his victims are
attempts to recover him as a brahmin. This ambiguity is a result
of an attempt to shelter the brahmin-citizen from the world of
extra-legal and the simultaneous impossibility of realising that
ideal.
The ambiguous caste identity of Anniyan is once again sug-
gested in the film by the transformation of Ambi’s brahmin tuft
while he transforms into Anniyan. Seen as the sign of innocence
and virtue by his friend Chari, the transition of Ambi into Anniyan
is marked by Ambi’s tuft unfurling and falling in front of his
eyes in the form of menacing locks. While one is reminded of
3058
the famous case of Chanakya, who allegedly untied his tuft
swearing to tie it up only after liberating the kingdom,8 the very
masculinity which the unfurled locks evoke, distances Anniyan
from the brahmin ideal and gives him a non-brahmin gloss. After
all, it is a well known stereotype drawn from the origin myth
of varnas that the brain belongs to the brahmin and the brawn
to the non-brahmin.
Transition 2
As we have mentioned earlier, the transition of Ambi into the
figure of Remo is a move to compensate for his lack of mas-
culinity. Before we proceed to analyse the implications of this,
we need to signpost the fact that this lack of masculinity is not
an individual trait of Ambi, but something intimately connected
with the ideal figure of the brahmin-citizen. As a citizen he is
emasculated since a rule-bound citizen has to surrender at the
altar of state any claim to violence. In other words, violence
becomes the monopoly of the law/state and not of the citizen
– a feature fundamental to social contract. However, a citizen
being an individual can treat marriage as a contract outside the
realm of the so-called public and as a matter of individual
“choice”. This is where the brahmin identity of Ambi becomes
emasculating. As a brahmin Ambi is bound by traditions and
cannot act as an individual seeking the hand of the girl he loves.
Girls are given away only as a gift by parents (‘kanniga danam’)
to the person they choose. Hence Ambi, in his anomalous self
as brahmin-citizen, hands over his love letter meant for Nandini,
not to her but to her parents.
There is more to Ambi’s emasculation as a brahmin. His
emasculated identity is, importantly, not based on his status as
an individual but on his belonging to a caste-community. If the
notional citizen figure is a deracinated individual, the figure of
the brahmin-citizen is not. The norms of caste negate individual
choices and enforce caste rules. The closely-knit world of
“agraharam”, bhajan-singing groups, children learning Carnatic
music in public mantaps, and the Thiruvaiyaru music festival
offer, at the first look, an idyllic picture of conflict-free caste-
community. However, it is equally a world of surveillance and
social control. Ambi could only cast a secretive look at Nandini
when she is teaching Carnatic music at a public ‘mandop’, and
keeps in hiding the gifts and greeting cards he wishes to give
her. In short, surrendering one’s individual identity to the
demands of the caste-community is the other source of Ambi’s
emasculation. Further, the brahmin’s own self-definition works
in the Tamil context (and perhaps elsewhere too) within the binary
opposition between mental and manual labour, a point which we
have referred to earlier, (while the brain belongs to the brahmin,
the sinews to the non-brahmin). Discounting the body is thus
a source of brahmin power. Simultaneously, it also works as a
source of his lacking certain forms of masculinity. When Ambi
pleads with the hirelings of the break-wire manufacturer that he
cannot take the beating because he is a curd rice-eater, he at once
asserts his brahmin identity and acknowledges his lack of access
to embodied forms of masculinity.
In understanding the figure of Remo as compensating for
Ambi’s lack of masculinity, we need to first take a look at the
way Nandini is represented in the film. She emerges as a figure
rejecting both state and community. She is accustomed to the
extra-legal as evident from her dissuading Ambi – albeit un-
successfully – not to get into a row with the ruffian who physically
harasses her in the bus. She also willingly courts the extra-legal
in trying to register a property by undervaluing it. And it is not
the community-bound Ambi, but the ultra-modish Remo carrying
Economic and Political Weekly July 8-15, 2006
a Christian-like name and marked as thoroughly western, who
wins her love. In her first encounter with Remo, a usually demure
Nandini oversteps the norms of caste community in being dazzled
by the ultra-modern fashion show in which Remo features. Of
course, the film tries to recover Nandini for the community. In
one of the last sequences of the film, Nandini, as suggested by
the psychiatrist, tells Remo that she loves only Ambi, thereby
rendering the personality of Remo redundant. However, when
she marries Ambi at the end, it was an Ambi without the dis-
tinguishing marks of his brahmin-ness – the tuft and ‘thiruman’.
In sharp contrast to community-bound Ambi, Remo is a sign
of deracinated individualism in the film. Despite being marked
as a Christian, his desire is unencumbered by community identity.
He could desire and impress upon Nandini, a brahmin woman
living in an agraharam immersed in brahminic practices such as
singing Carnatic music in the Thiruvaiyaru music festival. Thus,
his desire too is represented as deracinated. This individualism,
unencumbered by the community, is his source of masculinity.
The self-indulgent narcissism of the song with the refrain
‘R-E-M-O, Remo, Remo’ is a tribute to his unmatched individu-
alism. Thus, Remo is a figure antithetical to Ambi, the latter
functioning within community norms, the former outside them.
Given this opposition between Remo and Ambi, Ambi as Remo
cannot but be a figure of contamination. Ambi recovers his
masculinity, which is surrendered to the caste-community, by
ceasing to be a brahmin. In short, if Anniyan makes the citizen
ideal unrealisable, Remo does the same for the brahmin ideal.
The brahmin-citizen thus emerges as a mirage, though the film
tries to affirm it. Getting deracinated as Remo and breaking free
from caste-bound restrictions, Ambi’s brahmin selfhood is com-
promised and his claim to uncontaminated brahmin authenticity
is no longer a possibility.
V who could eat more chicken biryani – he or brahmin me…” Thus,
A Political Instance
The deeply contradictory and hybrid outcomes which the
brahmin-citizen ideal produces in the film do not belong to the
world of cinema alone. Significantly, it has real life resonance
– both in the domains of the personal and the political. Before
concluding the paper, we will give an illustration that shows how
the actual existing democratic politics cannot recover the brahmin-
citizen ideal. It is well known that the ideal citizen, who is
deracinated, is expected to partake in rational public debate by
means of the so-called veil of ignorance. In other words, the public
debates should keep identities in the hiding and the civic ideal
should be based on the “common good”. In the specific Indian
context, one of the forms this ideal takes is to demand that caste
should be kept out of political discourse and should be confined
to the domain of the personal. Let us now turn to the fate of
such an ideal in the actual domain of the political. We will do
this by taking up, as an instance, the case of Mani Shankar Aiyar’s
election campaign during the 1991 parliamentary elections in
Tamil Nadu where talking caste in the political domain has a
history of almost a century.
The 1991 parliamentary election in Tamil Nadu was preceded
by the premature and controversial dismissal of the Dravida
Munnetra Kazhagam (DMK) government on the basis of a high-
pitch campaign by opposition parties. The campaign had all the
ingredients which would make it a brahmin conspiracy. As the
Sunday Observer noted, “Unfortunately for the brahmins of
Tamil Nadu, all those involved in the ouster of the DMK gov-
ernment were brahmins. Apart from Jayalalithaa who had taken
it up as a mission, there was Subramaniya Swamy (a Madurai
Economic and Political Weekly July 8-15, 2006
Iyer), Rajiv Gandhi (seen in Tamil Nadu as a Kashmiri brahmin)
and of course president R Venkatraman, who signed the sack
order, is a Puttukottai Iyer.”9 Within hours of the dismissal of
the DMK government, the brahmin association of Pallavaram,
a Madras neighbourhood, brought out handbills describing the
dismissal as the decimation of the sudra rule.
The overt presence of caste in terms of brahmin vs non-brahmin
in the political discourse of the region was captured by Mani
Shankar Aiyar when he described his victory as a Congress (I)
candidate, thus: “Most significant of all, I, a brahmin by birth
(if not by conviction) with “Aiyar” emblazoned (for reasons of
regional identity) on my name and on the ballot paper, contested
from a constituency of Thanjavur district, the very citadel of the
Dravida movement. And became the first brahmin in a generation
to be elected from a Tamil Nadu constituency other than Madras
South.”10 In the course of the election campaign, Aiyar’s brahmin
identity was made an issue by his DMK rival K P Kalyanam.
Going by the ideals of deracinated citizenship, bringing the issue
of caste into the election campaign is to depart from that ideal.
For instance, before the elections, the Tamil magazine Kalki (May
5, 1991) noted, “Caste divisions and religious differences are the
first enemies of the nation.” A peeved Mani Shankar Aiyar noted,
“…Kalyanam (moderately) and his DMK cohorts (viciously)
went around talking neither of development nor of justice nor
of national honour but how I was – dare they say it? – a brahmin,
no less…” He did not want the play of caste-based differences
in the realm of politics. Instead, he was for development, justice
and national honour, all of which could partake in the civic ideal
of “common good”. Since his caste identity had already been
politicised by the DMK, he had no option but to respond to: “I
went for the DMK arguments with a string of Kalyanam jokes
– challenging him to find the sacred thread on my body; chal-
lenging him to a open competition in the village square to see
under conditions of mass democracy, the brahmin’s political
survival as upholders of what is claimed to be citizen ideal and
modernity, hinges on his denial of the brahmin identity. Only
by occupying the space of the non-brahmin and giving up the
language of deracinated citizenship, Mani Shankar Aiyar could
confront the challenge posed by Kalyanam.
Mani Shankar Aiyar’s angst at departing from the ideal lan-
guage of citizenship and denying his brahmin identity is precisely
what Ambi, the brahmin-citizen, tries to negotiate in Anniyan.
Like Aiyar who had to step into the shoes of Kalyanam, Ambi
too has to approximate his extra-legal non-brahmin other in the
very act of enacting revenge on the violators of the citizen ideal.
In bringing out the contradiction between caste-community and
masculinity in the field of actually existing democratic politics,
let us once again stay with the 1991 elections in Tamil Nadu.
Responding to the DMK’s campaign that the dismissal of its
government was a brahmin conspiracy, K A Krishnaswmay of
the All-India Anna Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (AIADMK),
a non-brahmin, claimed, “It was past when the brahmins took
all kinds of abuses. Once brahmins were carrying ‘tharuppai pull’
(a grass used in rituals); but now they are carrying AK-47s.”11
Arming the brahmin with AK-47s is an act of endowing him with
a hitherto unavailable masculinity. But the acquisition of this new
masculinity comes with a price. The brahmin had to give up his
traditional tharuppai pull which amounts to giving up the ideal
brahminhood.
The semiotics of AK-47 needs a little more elaboration here.
AK-47 was a key campaign theme of the brahmin-controlled
press, the AIADMK (which openly courted the brahmins and
advised them to set up Tamil Nadu brahmins’ associations) and
3059
the Congress (I), pitted against the DMK government. Their
argument claimed that with the support of the DMK, the
Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE), with all its AK-47s,
was having a free run in Tamil Nadu. The argument won its day
when the democratically elected DMK government was dis-
missed from power by the president of India. Significantly, while
the leadership and cadres of the LTTE are drawn from the lower
castes, its support in Tamil Nadu has been and is primarily drawn
from the non-brahmins and non-brahmin political outfits. In other
words, K A Krishnaswamy’s masculine brahmin attains his
masculinity by courting what is essentially treated as the attribute
of non-brahmins – carrying the lethal AK-47. Thus, his mascu-
linity is predicated on a clear loss of his so-called authentic
brahmin selfhood. The parallel between the substitution of
tharuppai pull with AK-47 and Ambi’s transformation into Remo/
Anniyan to recover his masculinity lost to the caste-community,
is thus unmistakable.
VI
Resolutions
We shall conclude by engaging briefly with the “failure” of
the film – a theme that we have explored throughout the paper
– to affirm at its closure the brahmin-citizen ideal. We will
delineate two critical moments in the closure of the film to
illustrate this.
The first moment that we will take up is when Anniyan appears
in the public in a stadium filled with people. His passionate
speech, which ends with a threat to all law-breakers is set in
opposition to abstract nation and its progress, and the not-yet-
formed citizens. Paradoxically, Anniyan, being a vigilante, does
not address the law-breakers as an ideal law-abiding citizen,
but as a law-breaker himself. His threat to the law-breakers does
not emanate from the location of upholding law but as a
dispenser of justice outside the folds of law. In short, the citizen
ideal is irrecoverably lost. The very fact that only the threat of
violence from Anniyan ensures the affirmation of law further
diminishes the citizen ideal. It signifies the end of the so-called
social contract. The day after his public threat, the traffic in
the city flows smoothly; a Mylapore brahmin boasts to his
foreign interlocutor on phone that Chennai is cleansed of its
beggars and disorder; and the income-tax department registers
a record collection. Only psychotic avengers can make the society
function.
The second important moment in the closure of the film that
merits attention is Ambi’s persona after he was cured of
multiple personality disorder. As he emerges from custodial
care, Ambi, to the surprise of his family and Nandini, lacks his
brahminic tuft and ‘thiruman’ on his forehead. His friend Chari
expresses his dismay about Ambi’s loss of tuft and compares
it to castration. And after he is cured, he does not incarnate into
Anniyan to push out the law-breaker from the train. He could
partake in the extra-illegal as Ambi. Thus, Anniyan has been
fully assimilated into the new integrated persona of Ambi. This
fusing together of Ambi and Anniyan is the ultimate moment
of contamination of the self-righteous Ambi as the law-abiding
brahmin citizen figure.
As Bruno Latour has eloquently shown, acts of epistemological
purification that modernity endlessly enacts by building dichoto-
mies like nature/culture, people/things, humans/non-humans, etc,
are indeed acts of covering up the hybrids that endlessly pro-
liferate underneath. For him, hybrids are “just about everything”.
He notes, “…the proliferation of hybrids… saturate the consti-
tutional framework of the modern.”12 In his opinion, only by
3060
openly acknowledging the ontology of hybrids, and not by
rendering them invisible, we can forge radical politics of inclusivity
and tolerance. In a different register, William Connolly also
suggests a similar position. He shows that “imagination of
wholeness” – in the case of Anniyan, the brahmin-citizen ideal
– “readily spawns arbitrary violence…”13 And he continues
elsewhere, “In a world in which the quest for wholeness can foster
evil unless tempered by other forces, a certain amount of rest-
lessness becomes salutary.”14 While the film Anniyan fails to
affirm the ideal of brahmin-citizen, it also fails to recognise the
possibilities that are opened up by the hybrids it unwittingly
produces by transcending the brahmin-non-brahmin/citizen-non-
citizen dichotomies. The very contamination of the brahmin-
citizen ideal signals the possibility of a politics that complicates
the opposition between the self and other and opens up a potential
space for empathy, finding the self in the other and vice versa.
Instead of elaborating these radical possibilities, the film slides
into a schizophrenic delusion. In merely rejecting the film as pro-
brahmin or fascist, we too will cease to engage with the hybrids,
which are welcome results of the failure of the film to affirm
the brahmin citizen. It is only by appropriating the enabling
possibilities such hybrids offer, we can forge new political strategies
by departing from the sterile ideal of the uncontaminated citizen
and the bipolar opposition between the brahmin and the non-
brahmin. The popular appeal of the film perhaps lies in its
invalidation of such ideals and dichotomies. -29
Email: mathiaspandian@gmail.com
Notes
1 For a detailed genealogical account of how the categories of the brahmin
and the non-brahmin have acquired a self-evident quality in the Tamil
political milieu, see M S S Pandian, ‘Brahmin and Non-Brahmin:
Genealogies of the Tamil Political Present’ (New Delhi: Permanent Black
(forthcoming)).
2 William E Connolly, The Ethos of Pluralization (Minneapolis and London:
University of Minnesota Press, 1996 (1995)), p 103.
3 Marcel Mauss, The Gift (London: Routledge, 2001 (1925)), p 70.
4 Ibid, p 180.
5 Connolly, The Ethos of Pluralization, p 27.
6 For a discussion on this theme, see M S S Pandian, ‘One Step Outside
Modernity: Caste, Identity Politics and Public Sphere’, Economic and
Political Weekly, Vol 17, No 18, May 4, 2002.
7 Partha Chatterjee, The Politics of the Governed: Reflections on Popular
Politics in Most of the World (Permanent Black: Delhi, 2004), pp 40-
41. While this elegant formulation accounts for contemporary subaltern
politics in mass democracies, we need to be alert to the fact that extra-
illegal is not merely means of subaltern negotiations. The extra-legal is
a world in which elite too participates for reasons other than livelihood.
In other words, the political society is only part of the domain of the
extra-legal.
8 For a brilliant discussion of the TV serial Chanakya and the juxtaposition
of celibacy and emasculation, see Uma Chakravarty, ‘Inventing Saffron
History: A Celibate Hero Rescues an Emasculated Nation’ in Mary E
John and Janaki Nair (eds), A Question of Silence? The Sexual Economies
of Modern India (New Delhi: Kali for Women, 1998).
9 M S S Pandian, ‘Chicken Biryani and the Inconsequential Brahmin’,
Economic and Political Weekly, Vol XXVI, No 35, August 31, 1991,
p 2043.
10 Sunday Observer, July 7, 1991.
11 M S S Pandian, ‘Chicken Biryani and the Inconsequential Brahmin’.
12 Bruno Latour, We have Never Been Modern (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard
University Press, 1999 (1993)), p 51.
13 William E Connolly, Why I Am Not A Secularist (Minneapolis and London:
University of Minnesota Press, 1999), p 143.
14 Ibid, p 159.
Economic and Political Weekly July 8-15, 2006