Leena Manimekalai miserably misconstrues the meaning of 'Freedom of Expression'

Leena Manimekalai feels for the downtrodden. Her directorial debut Mathamma in 2002 was a look at the practice of sacrificing female offsprings to the gods in the Arundhatiyar community in Mangattucheri village near Arakkonam, Chennai.

And now Leena, God bless her liberated soul, has hit Hindus all over the world in the solar plexus with the poster of her new documentary entitled I in which we will see the Goddess Kaali roaming the streets of Toronto smoking and doing other things injurious to health.

Before we get the privilege of seeing this startling documentary Leena shared a poster where we see a woman dressed as Kaali smoking a cigarette. After years of being told that cigarette smoking is injurious to health, one doesn’t really know how injurious it is. But we do know that the Gods would never set the wrong example. And to show any God doing something intrinsically unhealthy is not acceptable in any community or religion.

So when Leena speaks of this pointedly provocative poster as a manifestation of her right to freedom of expression (“I have nothing to lose. Till the time I live, I wish to live with a voice that speaks what I believe without fear. If the price for that is my life, it can be given,”) I am not convinced of her sincerity and integrity. Even Toronto the city where the Goddess is going to be seen letting Her hair down, is not convinced. Canada has expressed its disapproval at Leena’s alarmingly panoramic vision of what the Gods can do, and can’t.

The aa-bayal-mujhe-maar poster couldn’t be more ill-timed. Everyone knows India is going through a crisis of faith. People are being beheaded in the name of religion. Barely a month after Nupur Sharma opened her mouth to utter nonsense, Leena Manimekalai wants us to believe that putting a bohemian spin to the image of the gods is a cool thing to do.

It is not. And anyone who thinks freedom of expression is tantamount to freedom to abuse that freedom is knowingly courting trouble.

I would like to ask Leena one question: what was she thinking when she decided the Goddess Kaali was actually a smoker from before cigarettes were invented? Did she think Indians would develop a sense of humour about religion overnight just to accommodate her poster in the bandwidth of their tolerance? Did she think people would actually laud her lewd liberalism?

No. This is deliberate, Manimekalai, and you know it. You wanted to make a splash. By giving you attention we have fallen into your clap-trap.

It is a pity that the world didn’t wake up to Leena Manimekalai’s cinematic skills when she made the Tamil feature film Maadathy a few years ago (in 2017). If she had been noticed then she may have spared us this new attempt at being noticed. Madaathy was a very disturbing film. It featured two reprehensible rape sequences, one of them a gangrape of a minor. Leena Manimekalai’s basic premise was loosely applicable to social reality. She wanted us to feel a collective outrage when her free-spirited young protagonist Yosana (Ajmina Kasim) is brutalized. Of course, we did. But the underlying subtext of rebellion—that Yosana will roam freely in the dark jungles in the night no matter what the price—was blinding in its naivete.

When in the jungle, self-preservation is only possible when one follows the laws of the jungle. Yosana was treated as some kind of inviolable deity for most of the film. She was free to roam the jungles, explore her sexuality. There was a beautiful moment when she watched a man bathe nude from behind the rocks, a Ram Teri Ganga Maili in reverse. Like Kaali Mata out on a smoke, Yosana defied all the norms of safety and wellbeing…only to pay a heavy price for her insistence on being a butterfly among wolves. Spirit crushed, Yosana was elevated to deification, miraculously replacing the face of the goddess in a temple with hers.

In the way the narrative fused a contemporary fable of men using, deifying and defiling women at will, with the myth of the empowered goddess whose power comes at a great price, the director seemed to have taken on thematic thrusts that were far wider than the spectrum offered in the narrative. What worked were the wonderful visuals of the forest: primeval, pristine, predatory, throbbing with an unharnessed energy, Yosana romping in the forest unheedful of the dangers, was a sturdy if somewhat over-intellectualized metaphor for the dangers that women face everyday.

What was tragically absent in Maadathy  was a dependable voice of reason behind the impassioned cry for female empowerment that ran across the narrative.The end-result was an inconsistent but important film. At times the visual and emotional content coalesced effortlessly. At other times, the two elements of the storytelling seemed far distanced from one another.

Kaali, smoking, on the poster reminded me of Leena Manimekalai’s fellow-Malayali Sanal Sasirdharan ’s controversial film Sexy Durga. The title had to be changed to S Durga . This was not an easy film to watch. Its aura of uncertainty makes you uncomfortable and queazy. As the scriptless voyage into the unknown reaches an end, you will find yourself sending up a prayer for Durga–who is sexy because she is not doing what sexy people normally do in films, namely act wounded vulnerable and hysterical under stress–and Kabeer–who is Muslim and in the company of his Hindu soulmate on a desolate highway…can it get any scarier? Can we ever hope for a balanced social order when two young adults can’t feel safe together? It was a thoroughly unpredictable and frequently out-of-control film .

In hindsight do we need films that draw attention to the fear psychosis that grips all communities in India? Or given the tense atmosphere isn’t the blues-chaser Bhool Bhulaiyaa 2 just what the doctors would prescribe? It offends none, except maybe good taste. Tabu ’s Mata Kaali dance in Bhool Bhulaiyaa 2 was a hoot. Even without a smoke break.

Subhash K Jha is a Patna-based film critic who has been writing about Bollywood for long enough to know the industry inside out. He tweets at @SubhashK_Jha.

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