Ponniyin Selvan-1. sailor of

Mani Ratnam Ponniyin Selvan-1either PS-1, is billed as a pan-India film. The story, based on the historical legend of Kalki Krishnamurthy by the same name, appears in the early years of the Chola dynasty of the 10th century CE. Speaking at a promotional event in Mumbai, the film’s lead actor, Vikram told the audience, “Think of our culture, how advanced we were. We need to be proud of this. It has nothing to do with North India, South India, East India, West India. We are Indians. We need to feel proud of it.” Thus, ‘Pan-India’ signifies much more than a film’s release in five languages.

read also Ponniyin Selvan-1 Could have helped in removing anti-Chol perception among Sinhalese sections: Writer

Regardless of how we view our past, we must acknowledge that a lot has changed between us and us over the thousands of years. Chola of PS-1. Think of Poonguzhali, the handsome and powerful fisherman who transports the key figures of the story to the Palk Strait, between Chozha Nadu and Eelam. While the character is fictional, his character-defining act is not. At that time, the expanse of sea separating these two geographic regions formed a porous boundary: people, goods and culture flowed freely between their shores. Sailing or sailing across the strait took all night for Poonguzhali. With motorized boats, the same journey – from Kodiakarai in southeast Tamil Nadu to the islands of northwestern Jaffna – should take a little over an hour. Still, the two beaches are different today than at any point in history. What was an everyday practice for Poonguzhali is criminal today. What was open before is now closed.

strait lines

In a scene in the film, the chief Buddhist bishop of Sri Lanka invites Prince Arulmozhi Varman, who would later rule as Rajaraja Chola, to accept the island’s throne. During the conversation, the bishops regularly switch between Sinhalese and Tamil. As a Tamil native of Sri Lanka, this struck me as strange. Because in the original story that the modern nation state of Sri Lanka tells about itself, Buddhism is the only preserve of the Sinhalese people. Today, the state’s archeology department interprets any indication of the presence of Buddhism in the Tamil-speaking northeast of Sri Lanka as evidence of Sinhalese settlements. This major discourse completely ignores what is a fundamental fact of history to the contrary: Tamil Buddhists, including clergy, were present in large numbers in both Sri Lanka and Tamil Nadu.

We Tamils, from both sides of the strait, are largely ignorant of the rich diversity in the history of our land. why. Subbarayalu, Inn A Brief History of South India, notes that archival evidence suggests that Buddhism and Jainism predate Brahmanical traditions in the region. Buddhist and Jain monks made significant contributions to Tamil literature, jointly accounted for Emperam Kapiangal, Five great epics. In the early years of the medieval Chola dynasty, when PS-1 Set, the Buddhists dominated the urban centers of the state. At that time, the northern city of Kanchipuram, if not a Buddhist-majority city, had a large part of the Buddhist population. In Tamil: A BiographyDavid Shulman writes that the main Chola trading port of Nagapattinam on the Coromandel Coast was not only multi-religious but also multilingual with deep ties to Southeast Asia.

when everything was pure

What once was is now lost. However, this loss is not included in any of today’s popular ‘Restoring our delightful past’ projects. Because, in the origin story that the ruling BJP builds for India – or, more correctly, India, the Hindu nation – before the ill-effects of the colonialists, everything was pure and everyone was a Hindu. It is blasphemy to accept the existence of separate aspects of Brahmanical traditions like Shaivism and Vaishnavism. Questioning Rajaraja Chola’s portrayal as a Hindu king, film director Vetrimaaran highlights a murky point in the Hindu Rashtra origin story.

Inadvertently projecting our present self-awareness into the past, as Vikram did at the press meet, is problematic. When the Chola prince Vikrama acted on screen, Aditha Karikalan, looked north-west from Thanjavur’s royal hall, he did not see the states of Karnataka and Maharashtra with strictly fixed boundaries, posing no existential threat to him. . Instead, he looked to the Rashtrakuta kingdom, which had defeated the Cholas at the Battle of Takkolam and whose warriors killed Rajaditya, his grandfather’s brother, in 949 CE.

Painting of Sailor by artist Maniam. , photo credit: WikiCommons

Similarly, people move forward with language; People and language are not the same. Tamil, the language, flourished under the Cholas, but not all Chola subjects were Tamil in an ethnic or racial sense. Did the Cholas or their subjects maintain any notion of a unified Tamil ethnicity or race? After all, his chief enemies were the Pandyas who were also ‘Tamils’. Poonguzhali saw himself as a subject of the Chola throne. Did he see himself as an Indian? Certainly not in the spirit of the modern, post-British Empire nationality. How did he see Eelam? It was not a land that was foreign to him. She was well acquainted with its northern coastline and the surrounding islands. How did she see the people she met there? We are sure that he did not see them as Sri Lankan. Certainly not in the spirit of the modern, post-British Empire nationality.

When we recognize that there is no clear and continuous line between our present and our ancestors, when we recognize that their social, religious and physical geography was very different from ours, we will realize that our ancestors were very different from ours. were very different. When we learn the fact that there is nothing eternal about nations, we will avoid turning the caricatures of our complicated history into our current nation-building agenda.

The author is an engineer with an interest in Tamil culture and politics, which lie on either side of the Palk Strait.