Tyagaraja controversy reflects poorly, but not on Kamal

In the Indian Internet space, outrage and petitions to get someone to apologise are quite commonplace. Thankfully, if you stop paying attention long enough, they usually go away.

But outrage, very often the result of misunderstanding, can often be more revealing about those who are outraged rather than who they are outraged at.

The latest controversy to sweep the world of Indian entertainment is over a live Instagram conversation by two actors from the Tamil film industry.

Kamal Haasan, in conversation with Vijay Sethupathi, talks about the difficulty in committing to meaningful cinema when the masses would like the more formulaic commercial aesthetic.

He says that if an actor wants money, he would have to cater to popular tastes rather than be in pursuit of artistic ideals.

And it is interesting to have Kamal Haasan, whose interests in cinema have revolved around the likes of Ingmar Bergman and Akira Kurosawa, while dabbling in commercial Tamil cinema, talk about this.

But within a couple of days, the topic was side-tracked to something completely unrelated.

During the conversation, Kamal had used the example of the 18th-century musician Tyagaraja to describe what an austere artist would be like.

Saying that Tyagaraja had resorted to begging (“pichai”) to express his love for Lord Ram, Kamal was describing an uncorrupted artist, someone for whom money did not come in the way of art.

He was also comparing himself unfavourably to Tyagaraja, pulling himself down a peg for not being as austere in the search for quality. As far as Tyagaraja was concerned, only high praise was intended.

But the rude reactions that sprang up in the next couple of days decided that Kamal was saying the exact opposite of what he did.

An online petition was launched demanding that Kamal apologise for the “insult”. There were even claims that since the comment included a reference to Lord Ram, it must be against Hindus.

The outrage has more cultural baggage than it first appears. It feeds off Kamal’s reputation as an atheist whose previous comments have rubbed certain sections of the Hindu community the wrong way.

But central to the controversy is the word ‘beggar’ and all the connotations that it carries in the Indian public space.

Some Internet users who ventured to explain their anger at Kamal beyond abuses said the problem is that he used the word ‘begging’ (pichai) instead of ‘unchavritti’, which is when a person chooses a simple way of living in the service of god by collecting leftovers.

There is a point here: this indeed would have been the better word for Kamal to use. But in that case, a simple correction would have sufficed; why the anger?

But as I said, it all comes down to the word ‘begging’. We don’t look at a beggar as someone out of luck or unable to work for a legitimate reason; instead notions of being an anti-social element or a pest are attached. We look at them with suspicion instead of sympathy.

While the suspicion comes from the fact that begging has often rightly been connected to criminal rackets in the past, it also reflects how there is little social mobility or interventions when it comes to this group.

It is particularly cruel that it takes little for workers in the lowest strata to lose their jobs to resort to such a life, something made clearer by what is happening with migrant workers during the Lockdown.

Coming now, this controversy is not just unnecessary but uninformed.

What we need to do here, as with most other controversies, is to read the situation better. Not enough has happened here to get angry.