Kammattippadam(2016)
By Aashiq S- India
aashiq.jnv09@gmail.com
@seamless_self
Every part of the deep, dynamic world is different. But a set of eyes looking beyond the footsteps over trodden roads and untrodden sights might reveal the untold tales that might spoil the lippy-flappy selfie mood for the traveler. All those diverse skin tones, sounds, songs will feel different at a glance. But for ears and eyes that enable cache, it will trigger some strange connections to literally impossible, yet still existing beads across the globe, connected with an invisible string which seems forged in one feeling – Belongingness. Yes, the world belongs to its original inhabitants, in every part their tale is the same, that of dread, displacement, defense and death.
Southern India’s coastal city Kochi(a.k.a Ernakulam/Cochin) has a history of several centuries as a prominent hub of trade. Ancient kings from China to the Jews in exodus found it as a safe haven and thence the city was nicknamed as the ‘Queen of Arabian Sea’. Different communities settled, traded and trod over the soil of this ancient city in harmony and conflict. The land of Kerala, where the city is situated is famous for its green patches, mountains, forests, beaches and wetlands. The original inhabitants who were dependent and closely connected with this geography, faced a lot of atrocities due to the indigenous caste system but fought and acquired equal rights eventually. Yet the modern world had its own way of relapse and unknowingly the unwritten law of the land led them away and made them strangers in their own soil.
The movie Kammattippadam is a Malayalam language film which is an amalgamation of real events represented as fiction. It is a dark movie mourning the misfortunes occurred to the Dalits (the original inhabitants of the land who suffered caste based oppression from other groups) of Kerala expressed through the personification of exploited nature. The green patches and the men who lived in compliance with it were systemically outdated and eliminated as their profession (i.e. agriculture), land, and people were led away from their ethnicity, and way of being. The mainstream city and its versatile persona led the novel generation of the above mentioned to adapt to its characteristics in order to fit in and their own space.
Thus the story portrays the latent history behind the building up of ‘the modern city of Cochin’ where the neo-caste based system and upper caste real estate people used the youth of Dalits as goons to dislocate their own people to sell lands where flats and buildings came.
Parallels of the same are seen across the world from ancient times to the modern globalized age, where for the sake of political, business and development interests, native people, languages, and cultures are maintained, manipulated, and wiped out of existence once proved ‘no more useful’ by the powerful, as a part and parcel of the systems and their making. The American natives or Red Indians of the North and Southern Americas, who lost their identity, languages and roots to Spaniards, Portuguese and the British, the indigenous Africans who were subjected to slavery across the seas and were led to becoming alien communities in the modern America and several pre-colonial lands facing racism, the aborigines of the Australia etc. are all examples of the same. In the movie, this model has been beautifully symbolized through the dual protagonist balance of Ganga and Krishnan, their friendship, conflicts and their circle of existence. The murder of Ganga by the same businessman who used him, within the same apartment built over his ancestor’s land and the retribution by Krishnan in the climax are examples of this extended metaphor
As incidentally mentioned, the undertones and essence of narratives are not only of similar, but speaks the sane language of emotion, experience, and endurance across the world. That is where the still green patches and uncovered wetlands of Cochin announces its in depth spirit, that is the real Kammattippadam (a type of agricultural wet land, which was later developed into the townships and residence areas of the current Ernakulam/cochin city) which is the nature’s reminder of a remnant, that makes it transcontinental and universal.
Movie: Kammattippadam(2016)
Country : Language : Malayalam
Director : Rajeev Ravi
Production : Global United Media
Major cast : Vinayakan, Manikandan R. Achari, Dulqer Salman, Shaun Romy,
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