Readers Write In #762: Pushpa – a Demi-God of the Oppressed

By Vinu Karthick

When the wisdom and emotions of the oppressed wild encapsulate into a human body and electrify that human mind, can it apply itself through the strategic mechanics of the man-made part of the world? Can it surpass the limitations of the tamed and colonially cultivated minds that have limited its capacities to imagine within the functionalities of those uniformed tea estates, police institutes, and swimming pools?

The wild waters of the forest can gently find their ways around the solid rocks that stand in their path. When infuriated, however, they can kick those rocks off their entitled thrones like they were made of paper balls.

I entered Pushpa 2 with the memories of the ‘felt senses’ of the dense forest and the ritually bathed colors of the Tirupati earth hills that the first movie passed on. I was mildly craving this density and expecting an immersion into this rural nativity—to breathe into its freshness and breathe out of the leafless Berlin winter, for a while.

The movie opened inside a harbor in Japan—I felt like a fish was removed or hooked out of the water. I could breathe again when Pushpa falls and transitions into the underwater of his childhood. The wildness surrounded me again.

With an outrageous 3 hr 20 min runtime, Pushpa 2 was an uncompromising wildflower, blooming larger than contemporary expectations, among shrinking timelines, joining hands with its cinematic ancestors of theater and Koothu.

Pushpa as a framework stays loyal to the rituals in Koothu. It finishes with a cinematically enhanced 'Soora Samhaaram' where the Godhead emerges into a human and exorcises the arrogant demons that have entered the smirking, entitled, and privileged human heads.

Rituals are essentially a repetition that people use individually and collectively to cycle into everyday life. With Pushpa 2this collective ritual has Pushpa emerging as the god-shark head, with cinematic luxuries.

I used to wonder how the human psyche ran into the imagery of a vampire—a blood-sucking entity that takes the form of humans. Was it perhaps the needy and never-satisfied capitalism that sucked out the life resources on earth and people’s sweat and blood? What if one of the most popular godheads from Indian mythology, who could transmute into the big fish or transgender into a woman, or even emerge out of the underwater with a five-headed snake behind him, reemerged as ‘the chosen one,’ this time as the son of a shamed and disrupted woman, contrasting the virgin mother figure, to avenge and prevent the shaming and disruption of another woman by sinking its teeth into those vampires, for a change?

That’s the thing! Pushpa indulges in capturing mythical images that inspire wild connecting of dots, resulting in a wild 'Pool.'

Pushpa caters to the American playwright Tennessee Williams’ reflections on the duties of theater, like:

• ● Providing catharsis: where the audience can collectively confront their own emotions and experiences.
• ● Challenging society: Art forms being ‘essentially revolutionary.’ Pushpa’s voice could easily be an anthem that resonates with the emotions of many communities around the world, where greedy foreign forces have entered and demonized their culture and tradition, taxed and restricted their wealth, only to loot their own resources and use their people as their slave laborers. Pushpa could be that revolutionary voice of those communities who were not allowed to pick up the fruits that fell from the forests they grew into by ruling forces that capitalized and tried to own them.
• ● Celebrating vulnerability: He wrote about characters who struggle with inner demons, memory, and societal pressures, showing the fragility and resilience of individuals in a complex world.
• ● Creating universality through specificity: For Williams, theater’s duty was to turn the intensely personal into something universal. Pushpa enters the native soils of Tirupati specifically with the mark of the ‘chosen one’ (the scarred and bent shoulder) destined to challenge the established authority. Universal and ancient archetypes invite themselves into this symbolic narrative, spread with mythical images. This narrative captures the fresh geography of cinematically unexplored wild forests and blends with the familiar tellings of the myth. The Chosen one The core signature of the Victorian Era was in the shaming and taming of women. Pushpa becomes the ‘Chosen One’ with this shame imposed on his mother. The movie chooses to explore this person, his ways and choices, and write a destiny that leads him to rise. Sexuality — A Core Element for Liberation For Victorian colonizers, Indigenous women were considered 'hypersexual.' They eroded indigenous forest soils, traditions, and demonized the wisdom of women by ‘witching’ them, extending from their ‘witch-hunting’ era. They propagated their seeds of beliefs around the world with fundamental values of shame, guilt, and taming. They structured the uniformed police training in India based on submission through punishments. Kids in India are still wearing uniforms to schools. We still glorify European languages and Eurocentric beauty standards in mainstream movies. To mark someone as superior, make them look white, wear Western attire, and speak English. The storytellers mostly are still submissive to our colonizers. Pushpa ridicules this mainstream narrative, as much as a mainstream movie could. Like the half-brothers of Pushpa, big religious organizations in India dehumanized and kept people like him out of their temples. They wanted him with folded hands and a bent head outside their walls. Look at the one thing that all his opponents want Pushpa to do. They want him to submit and obey. Who does he choose to submit and obey?

Pushpa did not climb the mountains with temples to light lamps of prayer to the gods within those walls. His steps were towards Sri Valli. He feeds her eroticism to bloom as a wildflower by submitting and listening to her again and again. He says it out loud.

The representation of the sexual oppressors was spot on for me in this part. They explicitly represented the qualities of hunting for pride—trying to tame the wild. The Nirbhaya incident was a case of a woman punished for having a voice. It was an act of punishment, to show her place in their world. Living among an education system continuous from the sexually repressive colonial era, that has little space for sex education in a patriarchal society, viewing and objectifying women as properties of men, sexual crimes are relatable for the audience.

Sexual crimes and domestic violence are minimal to sometimes even zero in some forest tribes in India. Some of these tribes are matriarchal or matrilineal.

In the final face-off, it was a clash of this contrasting social dynamic. After having seen a nurturing safe space for female eroticism through Sri Valli, we see Pushpa faced with the wealthy and entitled trying to consume a woman with submission and power.

If Pushpa was ‘saving the girl,’ as he is saving his pride or property, it would be disturbing.

However, I sensed an emotional depth in Pushpa’s wild resilience. He had to be tied down to a helpless state, to face his lifelong trauma — a woman being humiliated and tarnished by a bunch of men. His attack could have been an act of avenging the bloodsuckers that robbed him of an innocent childhood. This emotional gear works along with the social heat of the audience and grants him cinematic boons. His act ends up putting the shame on his original offenders. An exorcism of the monsters in and out — from the past and present.

Could This Be a Rajini Padam?

Pushpa is first of all a ‘Coolie.’

“I am a flower that flowered on fire,” said the Superstar on his becoming, relating to the harsh criticisms, humiliations, and obstacles that flamed his light. Somehow his words tie him to the name, the catchline ‘Fire’ and the larger-than-life character arc of Pushpa. Rajinikanth recalls taking his first car back to AVM studios, a place where he was forced to walk back from in humiliation years earlier, only to light up a cigarette and kill that chapter — in style. A colonially colored therapy/celebration of self-esteem. Pushpa drives back to take a pee on the tamed and restricted swimming waters of a place where he was humiliated in front of a few entitled men with power — Pushpa fulfills Rajini’s words by dancing on the flames.

Why are Rajini’s movie characters celebrated? Where we turn cinema halls into a place of rituals with lights, movements, and sounds, relaxing our reasons repeatedly, when he rises to big heights? Because the emotions are amplified when he gives life to them. He takes the working class along with him in this cinematic rise, becoming a Demi-God, a symbol. His ‘Coolie’ roots are with him.

Jigarthanda 2 also raised and projected a Demi-God with Superstar references destined to the liberation of the forest people, only to be massacred with his people and coming back to life with the power of cinema. Pushpa rises out of the wild underwater and reaches mountaintops with metallic feathers, with the power of cinema.

When Superstar or Pushpa win our empathy, they easily overcome our logical hurdles and find a place in us as an enigmatic Demi-God with an unknown deal with death to surface back to life, stronger and fierier than before — stepping on top of those very monsters that tried to drown him.

The land, water, and fire of the forest grow Pushpa into a democratic representative of his community—a person with a deeper and personal understanding of their collective pain of generational oppression. They stand with him. The forest stands with him.

The Man of the Masses

What does it mean?

I understand him as a representative of the people who takes steps that light the imagination of the masses, a light where the masses burn the dust and trash that their everyday lives throw at them and celebrate freedom with their own ‘Coolie’ — 'Party undhi.'

This is also where justice could be done to cinematic liberties, with conviction. This is where the ritual of 'Soora Samhaaram' from the Koothu times is enacted, where the audience is fed with the fuming flames that straighten their backs bent into submission, by everyday life, allowing them to see the light of the next day.