Thread by @rajamanirajesh

Wrote this last October - on Achal Mishra's 'Gamak Ghar' and Leena Manimekalai's 'Maadathy, an Unfairy Tale'.

It seemed like a strange coincidence to watch both these films on the same day, because they tell stories of people at the two extreme ends of the caste hierarchy.

Mishra's film is about a Brahmin household or rather house. A gentle tale of the most privileged group in a caste society, but told with lot of empathy and endearment. The film runs like a series of poignant Instagram images, which I think is deliberately intended.

Because the movie does try to posture itself as a family photo album that you revisit with a sense of overwhelming nostalgia. The characters and the house are humanized and even romanticized.

We see everything in abundance in this house - the mangoes, the sweets and even the fish and meat. The movie however never has a social commentary on why everything seems so easy and abundant in this household. Even their problems seem so mild and tender.

The resources that are accumulated in the caste society are passed off as a casteless everyday reality. The film reminded me of RK Naraynan's 'Malgudi Days' and how a romanticized Brahmin town was constructed in it and sold off to readers as an universal reality.

On the other hand, in Leena Manimekalai's 'Maadathy, an Unfairy Tale' that tells the tale of a unseeable, untouchable family of Puthirai Vannars, no romanticization or even humanization seems possible.

Leena's film too is brilliantly shot, like the wilderness in a National Geographic episode. And the music and sound blend so well too.

However, the movie is quite merciless and seems too obsessed with the sexuality, sexual lives and the sexual violence that this Puthirai Vannar family deals with.

If that wasn't enough, it makes every character repeatedly reiterate their lowest of the low position in the caste structure. Apart from the themes of sexuality, sexual violence and discrimination, the movie hardly offers anything else.

There is very little in the movie to humanize these characters or their lives.

The abundance in 'Gamak Ghar' becomes scarcity in 'Maadathy' - whether it is the rice the village allots for the family or the meat the man eats or the fruits that Yosanna picks at the temple location.

While you can hear the loud moaning of the couple secretly having sex in 'Maadathy', in 'Gamak Ghar', you hear no such thing.

Instead, reproduction becomes about the family getting together when a new baby is born or a pregnant woman being extra cautious because she has had a miscarriage in the past.

The nostalgic recording of the Brahmin lives through camera shots clicked regularly and stored in family albums in 'Gamak Ghar' morph into the violent documentation of Maadathy and her death in the form of a local deity.

One might argue that both these movies are merely documenting the extremes of caste reality and that might be a good thing in itself. Well, I don't think we can look at these movies as just innocent documentations of reality.

Rather, both these films are themselves a product of the caste structure which reinforce and further the role of romanticizing the privileged through gentle images while victimizing the oppressed through violent images.