In the news this week was the Tamil movie "Kanchivaram" for winning the Indian Government's National Award for the best film of the year. A thorough and in depth review of the movie and it's historic sources and significance can be found in this Frontline magazine article. The nature of communism and its origins in India are shown in the movie. But what is of greater interest is the message about Marxist ideals' uncomfortable existence in the Indian setting.
Tamil film : Kanchivaram
The criticism of an egalitarian utopian society is easily made on the grounds of feasibility or realism. These arguments have been supported and upheld in many states around the world over the past century. The almost ritualistic cycle of unrest - revolution - reform - decay - collapse are seen in various current and former red states. But the romanticism of true equality persists none the less. And although democratic values could in theory espouse these notions of parity, we see today that democracy rarely mixes with communism.
For some, the failure of Communism was inevitable owing to its dichotomy with Human Nature. The argument is that communist ideology is at loggerheads with the basic human instinct of self preservation and greed. But Leon Trotsky saw this contrast as a sign of the human race breaking away from its animal origins and taking the reigns of its destiny into its own hands - a response to the cognition of biological evolution.
The movie "Kanchivaram" deals with this very disconnect between our ideals and our human condition. In an anti-thesis for communism in the Indian context, poverty and customs are shown as as the trigger for the protagonist to abandon the greater cause for a narrower call of personal importance. Sacrifices are a luxury the poor cannot afford. And in showing this betrayal of doctrine, the film reveals that in contrast to the popular thought of poverty as a precondition for the establishment of communism, in India poverty in fact also moves the desperate away from communism.
The failure of the idyllic vision of a revolution leading its citizenry to evolve into greater beings has been aptly captured in the following soliloquy by a soviet officer in the 2001 movie "Enemy at the Gates" set in the Battle for Stalingrad.
"Man will always be man; there is no 'New Man'. We tried so hard to create a society that was equal where there will be nothing to envy your neighbor. But there is always something to envy – a smile, a friendship, something you don’t have and want to appropriate. In this world, even a soviet one, there will always be rich and poor: rich in gifts, poor in gifts – rich in love, poor in love."
