The immediate inspiration for Papilio Buddha (the name of an endangered butterfly species in Kerala) came from a news report about the Dalit Human Rights Movement (DHRM) that the police had identified as a ‘terrorist movement’ while in fact, it is a peaceful movement upholding Dalit dignity, encouraging education among Dalits and supporting sub-altern struggles for basic human rights in Kerala.
Papilio Buddha imaginatively recreates some of the politically significant real-life incidents that happened in Kerala during the last decade symptomatic of the society’s growing amnesia about its own past and the authorities’ callous conspiracy against the landless and the downtrodden. Though Kerala’s Left movement was made possible by the earlier social reforms pioneered by leaders from the backward and Dalit communities like Sree Narayana Guru and Ayyankali, the mainstream Left has shown scant regard for the rights of the Dalits and tribals and little sympathy for their independent struggles for land rights and dignity. Even the land reforms undertaken by the Left hardly benefited the landless Dalit peasant. The Right and the Left alike seem to be scared of the new independence shown by women, Dalits and Adivasis, often sharing platforms with minority organisations that they write off as manifestations of ‘identity politics,’ as if they had nothing to do with the question of class.
Two incidents narrated in the film have revealed the anti-Dalit stance of the civil society in Kerala with its caste hindu hegemony. One is the experience of the DHRM, mentioned earlier in this article, that has been trying to redefine Dalit subjectivity by promoting self-help, creating new family and community models different from the individualistic unitary family, by urging its members to follow a unisex dress-code with jeans and black shirts with Ambedkar’s picture on them and asking each to cook for others. They were ‘extremists’ to the police and the Shiv Sena and were even falsely implicated in a murder. The other is the case of Chitralekha, a Dalit woman from Payyannur in North Kerala who challenged CITU diktats and drove an autorickshaw – a male preserve in the state. She was abused as a ‘loose woman’ and a ‘drunkard,’ beaten up and her vehicle was burnt leading to a campaign by feminists and Dalits in support of her.
One of the links that connects the diverse episodes is Shankaran, a young Dalit who helps a white man in his research on butterflies; they also are in a transient gay relationship. Shankaran is finally arrested and tortured by the police as a ‘terrorist.’ The discriminatory treatment teaches him the meaning of being a Dalit, even to one like Shankaran with a good education and a degree from Jawaharlal Nehru University. Another is Shankaran’s father, Karayan, played by Pokkoodan, a Dalit environmental activist himself who had begun as a communist, driven by disillusionment to Dalit struggles and local environmental regeneration. The third is Manjusree, an enlightened and educated Dalit woman who is punished with rape by a group of unionised autorickshaw drivers as she, a Dalit and a woman, dared to run an autorickshaw and resisted lechers and was teaching Dalit children with the money she earned from her vehicle.
Manjusree, the Dalit activist is at the very centre of the film, carrying it forward. She refuses to surrender even after the group-rape, shaves her head, becomes a Buddhist along with other Dalits of the locality, pledges her allegiance to Ambedkar and leads the land struggle when the police step in and beat her up. She challenges patriarchal violence, upper caste violence and state violence at the same time and realises their tacit collusion in the oppression of Dalits and women.
The film brings to the surface the caste feeling that survives in Kerala’s society despite the average ‘enlightened’ Keralite’s attempts to brush it under the carpet. The protagonists have full faith in the democratic constitution Ambedkar has drawn up for independent India but they are disillusioned to find how that sacred document is violated by the rulers themselves during every critical attempt the poor and the oppressed make to emancipate themselves from the crushing hegemony of caste, class and gender in our society. The critique of Gandhi, never flippant or overstated, is made precisely in this context and is an organic part of the film, inseparable from the total social critique the film attempts.
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