A Tamil proverb says that a half-nosed person is the king among noseless persons, This proverb can be applied with precision in the modern Tamil literary sphere where anything vaguely resembling political writing and everything that is made to seem revolutionary is hailed. The mere mention of a worker, revolution, Lenin or Mao is enough to set up the writer as a revolutionary one. How does one distinguish a genuine literary work from these vulgarized attempts to make revolution seem like a saleable commodity? Maybe one could usefully recall what George Lukacs said about the novel genre having a caricatural twin with identical formal characteristics, only the caricatural twin is based on nothing. Let us see what lies beneath Kurudhi Punal, winner of the Academy Award in Tamil this year.
It is generally believed that this novel is based on the incident of an entire Harijan basti being burnt down by a landlord in Kizhavenmani, in South India.
In actuality, the novel is nothing but the ego trip of an intellectual by name Gopal from Delhi who has a doctorate in Sociology. After this horrible incident Gopal imagines himself to be the epic figure Parasurama who swore that he would bathe in the blood of the Kshatriya kings, Gopal is the hero of this novel. The exploited Harijans and the politically committed persons in and around the village do not qualify for this exalted position of hero.