Articles by M S S Pandian

The film Anniyan that was a recent box-office success in the southern states, works within an ideological framework that constructs the brahmin and the non-brahmin as naturally opposed to each other. The film's narrative poses the brahmin as the citizen ideal and the non-brahmin as its lawless all-pervasive "other". However, the film is in effect a statement about actually existing democracies wherein the brahmin and the citizen can exist only as never realisable ideals. The brahmin's individuality is overridden by his caste identity, which thus contradicts his claim to being a citizen. At the same time, for very many citizens, citizenship remains an unrealisable concept, for access to power and justice in a modern state, as the film demonstrates, relies very often on extra-legal means. The film thus raises several binaries that are opposed to each other, for instance those between a citizen and a non-citizen, caste and citizenship, democracy and mass participation, etc, failing in the end to resolve the contradictions it raise

The opposition between the secular and the religious is a construct for, in reality, both often co-produce notions of culture that are intimately connected with violence. To recognise this intimacy could be the beginning of imagining a new political language which transcends the secular and religious through a process of creative contamination. The search for a new political language begins in this paper with two sets of descriptions of animal sacrifice from the past - one by the Tamil Saivites, who were at the forefront of campaigning against animal sacrifices in temples during the late 19th and early 20th centuries and the other by the Madras legislative assembly in 1950, when it debated a bill to abolish animal and bird sacrifices in temple precincts.

The contradictory engagement with mdoernity by the lower castes has an important message: being one step outside modernity alone can guarantee them a public where the politics of difference can articulate itself, and caste can emerge as a legitimate category of democratic politics. Being one step outside modernity is indeed being one step ahead of modernity.

Sriman L Ganesan, the general secretary of the Tamil Nadu state unit of the BJP, is a man of many roles. With an unmatched skill in political masquerade, his new avatar is one of a passionate defender of Tamil and its much-celebrated classicism.