Precarious Identity and Vulnerable Enunciations: The Problem of Language in Jai Bhim

Abstract

T.J Ganavel’s 2021 Tamil language film Jai Bhim portrays the lives of the Irula/Iruga community, a Dravidian ethnic group, and their struggles to survive in a casteist society. The community, comprising more than 200000 people, lives around the states of Kerala, Karnataka, and Tamil Nadu. Based on a real case from 1993, the film focuses on the violence and discrimination against the Irula community by the upper caste and state agencies. It tells the story of Rajakannu, an Irula community member, who is arrested by the police for an alleged theft in an upper-class family household. The police refuse to accept his innocence and, later, cook up a story against him to prove before the court that they have caught the actual perpetrator. Then Sengeni, Rajakannu’s wife, seeks legal help from the advocate cum activist Chandru, modelled on Justice Krishnaswami Chandru, a former judge of Madras High Court. This paper explores the representations of language and argues that the politics of caste portrayed in Jai Bhim are manifested by constructing a persuading narrative made by verbal language.