Visaaranai, India’s official Oscar entry, exposes our horror
In her last published book, Regarding the Pain of Others (2003), Susan Sontag argued that the proliferation of war images in the late 20th century was a good thing. People did not become inured, she said, due to the sheer amount of blood or gore that they see in front of them; quite the opposite, in fact.
The constant exposure to images that showed us what we do to each other had helped to remove the naiveté and the misguided optimism around the true nature of human beings. This process, she believes, goes a long way in countering the visual fetish that consumerism relies heavily on.
She writes: “Someone who is permanently surprised that depravity exists, who continues to feel disillusioned (even incredulous) when confronted with evidence of what humans are capable of inflicting in the way of gruesome, hands-on cruelties upon other humans, has not reached moral or psychological adulthood.”
Visaaranai (Interrogation), India’s official Oscar entry for Best Foreign Film this year, is a film Sontag would have been proud of.
Directed by Vetrimaaran, it is the story of four immigrant Tamil men trapped in a cycle of interrogation, custodial torture and framing at a Guntur police station. Remarkably, the film is based on Lock Up, a novel by M Chandrakumar, aka "Auto Chandran", a Coimbatore-based 54-year-old auto-rickshaw driver.
Filmmaker Anurag Kashyap (known for creating outrage through his films) was so moved by the film, he stated that it “marks a new language in Indian cinema”.
As I watched the film thrice with a gradual growth in my internal level of tolerance for on-screen violence, I am convinced that Kashyap’s statement holds some merit after all.
Scenes of violence are not your typical Bollywood ones, where hard-rock background score tends to desensitise audience. Violence functions at many levels - visual, verbal, psychological and physical.
Since the story entails a deep-rooted migrant anxiety among the cops, there is a lot of violence and rage brought alive through language, and indeed linguistic difference. The director says, “It is not a film for the weak-hearted”. The violence is raw, stark and right on your face.
However uncomfortable it might make you, there is no pretence to hide it behind instrumental music. In one scene, the cops release the four hungry Tamil men temporarily in what may seem like a relief, but once they return after having food, the real picture is shown to us.
The inspector tells the boys, “Couldn’t bring myself to hit starving young men. So I had to make you eat. I don’t have a choice. I must get you to accept."
When Pandi (one among the wrongly accused) doesn’t accept, all his friends are brutally beaten up with freshly-made hitting canes. The sound of flesh being torn apart by the hitting is horrific, it echoes long after one has finished the film.
Custodial torture is one of the most abused subjects in the country. Recently in October, Minhaj Ansari from Jamtara district in Jharkhand had died in police custody. He was accused of "sharing an objectionable comment on beef" via WhatsApp.
It has been suspected that he was beaten to death in custody, although the cops have a different story to tell.
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| In Visaaranai, there are many instances where the four workers are accused because they do not know how to speak Telugu. |
Similarly, accounts of institutionalised torture are obfuscated because people have “blind faith” in these judicial systems. Inevitably, the victim’s true story will never even be heard, let alone be written down.
In Colours of the Cage (2014), a prison memoir by Arun Ferreira, we get records of people who have suffered years of torture for false and fabricated cases. The most vulnerable among them were the ones without lawyers, as is shown in Visaaranai too.
The wretchedness of their condition makes them more susceptible to police exploitation and inhumane methods of interrogation.
Vetrimaaran has studied the migrant condition - a pertinent question in the contemporary world, effectively in his film.
A lot of workers who are displaced in towns and cities that are of a different cultural origin than their own, are often treated as sewage. It is a kind of social consensus that legitimises such behaviour.
In Visaaranai, there are many instances where the four workers are accused because they do not know how to speak Telugu. They are addressed as "criminals" without any rhyme or reason just because they happen to be “Tamil folks”.
This film tells us that it is high time we challenge how institutionalised violence is kept under cover, be in inside prisons or outside them.
It also meditates upon the sadism and the existential dread that cops like Inspector Vishweshara Rao exhibit in their personalities.
They are the big pawns under bigger pawns who are now in the quest for creating more pawns in the system. It’s a vicious cycle.
All of these events in the film remind me of how delicately violence has been studied here. Every image leading the viewer to a more brutal reality, a more devastating language of the image.
For those who have appreciated the film, let me tell you an essential fact: It has been mentioned that when Visaaranai was screened in festivals outside India, a lot of questions were asked as to why the film is not in Hindi, the language that represents the "nation".
While I share the director’s joy that a regional language film (Tamil) has achieved attention outside India, I am also proud that the world will have to move out of their comfort shells to understand the horrors of this very nation.
The often "exoticised" global audience and native consumers of commercial cinema must actually see and come to terms with this corrupted face of India led by the ACPs, the DCPs, the ministers and the police force: brutal, gory and blinkered.