There is an unseemly controversy, evidently political, which is erupting, over the portrayal of Eelam Tamils in the trailer of The Family Man Season 2. The show, as people would be aware, is pan-Indian television in the true sense since it uses South Indians who speak their own languages, alongside Hindi-speaking North-Indians.
Manoj Bajpayee played Srikanth Tiwari of NIA, and his Tamil wife Suchitra Iyer is played by South-Indian actress Priyamani. As an action show about terrorists, it tried to introduce an element of plausibility into an arena overcrowded with absurdity. Multilingual television is a step forward for culture in India since it is an admission of India’s cultural plurality in which the spoken language plays a key part. Season 1 of The Family Man brought in Malayalis played by Malayalis and Kashmiris played by Kashmiri actors.
To give the reader an idea of earlier pan-Indian action cinema about terrorists, the last big saga was Saaho. If one were to describe what Saaho is about, one could say that it was about foreign criminal syndicate led by gangsters with Indian names and operating from a haven ‘Waaji’ that might be Wakanda from Black Panther.
Saaho was touted as pan-Indian entertainment in which no attention is paid to where people in India come from, and the relationship between name, language, and region. What, for instance, are we to make of Narantak Roy (presumably Bengali) played by Jackie Shroff? Or Amritha Nair (presumably from Kerala) played by Shraddha Kapoor? Saaho himself is Siddanth Nandan Saaho (the alias of Ashok Chakravarthy), and if the name cannot be placed regionally, one may be sure that a numerologist was responsible for it rather than the scriptwriter.
The issue is that given India’s diversity, homogeneous ‘pan-Indianness’ is at best an urban phenomenon among people who talk to each other in English.
Any film that claims to deal with ‘Indian’ issues should accommodate people from different regions and ethnicities speaking a variety of languages. Since this would be founded in India’s plurality, the issue of some region presented in bad light would not arise. People across India know the characteristics of people from the regions and their special qualities.
I still remember a journey in the Himalayas 40 years ago when a landslide blocked the road, and the PWD was struggling with it. I overheard a local telling another at this moment with distant admiration tinged with envy, “Agar koi Madarasi yahan hota toh bees minute mein kaam khatam ho jata.”
It is in this context that we must see the trailer of The Family Man Season 2. The film is an espionage thriller, and there is monotony in looking for terrorist threats only to the North-West. If there has to be a Season 2, an espionage series has to look elsewhere in another direction and looking southward towards Eelam Tamils, who have already had a history of terrorism, seems the most obvious choice. That the LTTE has been decimated in Sri Lanka is not of much consequence, and no one should seriously object to the ploy in fiction since the LTTE assassinated India’s former prime minister Rajiv Gandhi. When the LTTE was active, the DMK was known to be sympathetic but all that should merely be water under the bridge.
Unfortunately, for the producers of The Family Man, elections happened, and the DMK came to power after being in the political wilderness for a decade. MK Stalin is enjoying his first stint as chief minister without having had much to show in his political career. It would seem that the first act of a newly elected government is to change names of places, lash out against its predecessors’ decisions and reverse them if possible, and lodge protests to make its presence felt. The previous AIADMK government had aligned itself with the centre – implying its lack of divergence with national issues - and the new government therefore demarcates itself. A thriller serial on terrorism on OTT is essentially ‘national,’ and protesting against regional representations in pan-national television, it could have been felt, would achieve that.
The Tamil Nadu government has now requested the Centre to take immediate action either to stop or ban the release of Season 2, saying it depicted the Eelam Tamils in a “highly objectionable manner.” Claiming there were “condemnable, inappropriate, and malicious contents” in the show, IT Minister T Mano Thangaraj said the trailer released by Amazon Prime Video India on social media was aimed at discrediting and distorting the historical struggle of the Eelam Tamils in Sri Lanka. “I would like to state that the above serial has not only hurt the sentiments of Eelam Tamils but also the feelings of the people of Tamil Nadu in large scale, and if allowed to broadcast, it would be prejudicial to the maintenance of harmony in the state,” Thangaraj said in a letter to Information & Broadcasting Minister Prakash Javadekar.
Does one seriously believe that ‘harmony will be disrupted’ by a television serial on OTT — unless the ruling party took it upon itself to foment political unrest?
It should be noted here that Pakistan is not the only source of terrorism ever named in Indian films, and the ‘unnamed enemy’ was the earliest ploy. In Govind Nihalani’s film Drohkaal (1994), the terrorist group with its haunt in tribal India was headed by Commander Bhadra (Ashish Vidyarthi) without his ethnicity being elaborated upon. There have been films like Madras Café (2013) about the LTTE and the Sri Lankan civil war, and no public disturbances were noted. South-Indian filmmaker Santosh Sivan made a Tamil film The Terrorist (1998), naming Tamil terrorists, and the film even won the Best Tamil Film Award at the National Film Awards.
Although political parties in Tamil Nadu have feted leaders of separatist Eelam movements, there has never been open support for Eelam militants in Tamil Nadu. Ironically, the DMK fought the recent elections with the Congress as ally, and its leader Rajiv Gandhi was assassinated by an Eelam Tamil. Some of those involved in that conspiracy are still in jail, and there has been no outcry for their release, which makes the present controversy seem artificial.
The producers of The Family Man and the lead actor have pleaded with the Tamil Nadu government that they have the highest respect for Tamil Nadu, and one can see the catastrophe awaiting them if the serial is banned. They have vehemently protested that the serial is not ‘anti-Tamil,’ and there is no reason to disagree. Seeing the trailer itself, the very fact that the enemy named is Tamil-speaking is hardly a slur on Tamilians since there are large Tamil populations in other countries like Malaysia and Sri Lanka.
It seems reasonable to say that the outcry against The Family Man Season 2 is political and should be ignored. If anything, it emphasises the plurality of India by using actors from all over India playing people from their respective regions.
The Family Man Season 2 will release on Amazon Prime Video India on 4 June.
source https://www.firstpost.com/entertainment/claims-against-the-family-man-season-2-of-being-anti-tamil-are-a-farce-raj-dks-show-is-true-pan-indian-television-9656201.html
