The zenith of police power is described in an oft-repeated scene in Tamil cinema. A cop struts into the cell. The inmate cowers as he removes his belt and flashes a menacing grin. He enunciates a few chosen expletives and he rolls the belt over his fist. A whip and a flash later, the inmate admits to his crime.
How did a deed that reeked of totalitarian force display gain--not so subtly--acceptance? When the cop wields his power, doesn’t everyone bow?
This was the question running in the mind of filmmaker Vetrimaaran as he wrote the script for Visaranai, a movie that revealed all that was twisted about the criminal justice system, and how abjectly the rights of suspected law violator can be wrung and put up for drying by the police system if they wanted it. Amid a sea of movies that glorified the bad cop, Visaranai (Feb-2016) called him out.
Vetrimaaran had dramatized the book of “Auto" Chandrakumar, who had written a book (Lock Up) about the custodial torture he had gone through in the early 80s. The story was deeply impactful for Vetrimaaran, a boy from a small town who looked at the city and its ways with the curious eyes of a five-year-old. “The movie was based on a personal life experiences of Chandrakumar who had gone through the whole procedural torture in the early 80s. He had written a book on them. Nothing has changed. His pain, agony and experiences were set in the early 1980s. This same thing has happened during the Emergency times as well. Police brutality has not changed. The callousness of the cops and their unquestionable power has been increasing day by day to out the world and that is hurting the people…"
Vetrimaaran had grown up in an era where Tamil Cinema was fixated on archetypal cop-villain faceoffs. A villain had to be a non-state actor, someone from another country, or at least another state. The villain cannot be the neighbourhood police officer. Even now, Tamil Cinema has the trapping: a villain has to be a Hindi-speaking thug. Vetrimaaran was hunting for stories closer home: “ As a boy from a small town, I saw the power of police being used in the right and wrong ways. I have seen both. When the power given to police is used wrongly. it bothered me a lot. What made me do Visaranai film was this boy refusing to follow the instructions of the Police, an abject surrender... Once we started working on it, so many people came out and said this happened to me..that happened to me..."
While Vetrimaaran had the craft to make Visaranai a compelling film, the real experience lies with Chandrakumar, who spent months in a jail in Guntur in Andhra Pradesh for a theft crime that he swore he did not commit. “There are many forms and intentions of torture. In my torture, killing me was not their motive; breaking my spirit was their intention. The ultimate aim was to make me say something they wanted heard… to become a man they wanted me to be. To bring my soul under their authority." he told CNN News18.
Speaking of his own story, Chandrakumar said only about a third of what was in his book became Visaranai. “The torture happened forty years ago… but I remember what happened...They'll make us sit with our backs to the wall and legs stretched out together. A man sits astride our laps to hold us down. They'll focus on the top-end of our feet and rain blows. Each will send up a shock that reach our scalps. Kneecaps, knuckles, and other areas with sensitivity will be targeted. The flesh at the points where the blows landed had decomposed over time, leaving behind barren holes. I knew of a remedy that I'd learnt when I was young. It was Siddha. You convert the lathi-wound into a burn, so that it heals over. Hot coal is sharpened to have pointed ends and laid on the wounds to enable the flesh and skin to tide over the wounds..."
Vetrimaaran belongs in a crop of moviemakers, populated by the eccentric Mysskin and the tenacious Ram, who have attempted to portray the anomalies in the criminal justice system as they were; secondly, this crop makes an honest bid for realism in their movies. No one is overtly heroic-- the protagonists are shown with their warts. As far as police brutality is concerned, Vetrimaaran believes Tamil Cinema needs to do a soul-searching: “First and foremost...film writers and actors should stop glorifying custodial violence and police brutality in the name of heroism. Cops trying to take the judicial system in hand are being glorified as the greatest heroes on screen...every cop is doing that, feeding the wrong notion in people... and it feels right for the common man when a cop does this. However grave the mistake is or unpardonable of the mistakes..but there is a system. You put that man in the court!"
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