Agraharathil Kazhutai

Agraharathil Kazhuthai is inspired by Robert Bresson’s 1966 French drama Au Hasard Balthazar, which itself was based on a passage from a part of Dostoyevsky’s novel .

The plot revolves around a donkey whose mother was lynched to death by the local mob. Abandoned, the donkey eventually ends up with a Brahmin professor (Narayanaswami ) , a faculty member at Loyola. The progressive Narayanaswami takes care of the donkey, named Chinna, and decides to keep him.

He encounters several resentments from the systems around him, eventually forcing him to leave Chinna with his parents in the village. Chinna is taken care of by the professor's maid. Chinna is seen as an irony among the circles and is dragged into occasions by corrupt cousins and villagers, eventually getting blamed for things he hasn't done. This slowly creates a huge uprising against Chinna, and he meets the same fate as his mother: beaten to death.

However, something shifts after Chinna is killed. A few villagers start reporting sightings of him, believing that he is either still alive or a ghost. Chinna’s corpse is retrieved from the mountain he was killed on, and miracles start to occur in the village. Previously infertile women become pregnant, and a paralyzed woman walks again. Notably, the beneficiaries of what are believed to be Chinna’s miracles are Brahmin women.

Upon learning about the miracles of Chinna’s corpse, the agraharam decides that he is worthy of worship. They want to build a temple in devotion to him, so that his blessings continue to benefit the agraharam and its inhabitants.

Uncomfortable with the agraharam’s actions, and mourning the death of Chinna, Narayanaswami and Uma decide to hit back at the village and avenge Chinna. They retrieve Chinna’s skull and set it aflame, giving him a fiery funeral. The fire spreads, and the entire agraharam is reduced to ashes, killing most or all of its residents. The only survivors are Narayana and Uma,The blazing spark of Chinna’s death seeks to destroy the agraharam — the brahmanical society that not only killed him and his mother, but sentenced them to a life devoid of dignity simply for the crime of their birth.

The donkey in a Brahmin village packed some of the complex ideological ideas of Brahminical ideology into a 1.5-hour movie, which is pretty much practiced by any regular Indian on a day-to-day basis. Starting with the representation of the donkey, which is the most working-class animal, it lifts weight for its master yet is portrayed as dumb and incompetent, drawing parallels with the larger Bahujan population of the country. Where anything and everything is defined on the idea of purity and pollution, where white becomes pure and black corresponds to impurity. A low-productive cow is pure and the black-skinned buffalo is impure. A temple premise is considered pure and a toilet or a drain an impure entity, thus you never see a toilet inside a temple premise. This complex idea of space, and its interference with a low-living creature, is explored several times in the movie. With the internal contradiction and the social hypocrisy of making a temple for the donkey.

Metaphorically, this irony has other implications within contemporary Indian society as well, how the reforms peddled by several Bahujan groups and individuals (starting with the Hindu Code Bill) have radically transformed the lives of upper-caste women, thus right-wing Hindutva forces are seeking to appropriate Dalit leaders and their anti-caste movements into Hindu history.

What does it mean to be educated? Is it the mere upliftment of skills, or is it being compassionate toward the living? How does a compassionate mode of education challenge pre-existing social conditions? The man's simple act of bringing the donkey home is a shock to his social system It challenges pre-existing conditions in several concrete ways ,The villagers are outraged not because they are inherently evil, but because their "normal" has been violated. Their system, which they see as natural and proper, is revealed to be built on a foundation of cruelty. Compassionate education refuses to look away from uncomfortable truths. It drags the marginalized from the periphery to the center of the conversation.