Thoughts on The Hunt, LTTE, and Language Wars

Why are OTT dialogue writers so bad?

This post is 5000 words long. A short summary:

• I watched the series The Hunt - The Rajiv Gandhi Assassination Case. I mostly liked it, especially that it was shot with original languages - CBI cops from Delhi are investigating a case in Tamil Nadu and Karnataka, so they speak in whatever language is natural in the moment - Hindi with each other, Tamil while interviewing suspects, and so on.

• I happen to be a Tamilian raised in Karnataka, whose parents were raised partly in Andhra and Kerala, and my neighbors were Marwari, so… this is what the chatter in my head sounds like. But, the dialogue writers are WEAK and it leaves me annoyed AF.

• This resulting annoyance ties into the language wars that so dominate popular discourse these days. I talk about what I feel about “Speak Kannada in Bangalore” type fights.

• And, the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam. The LTTE arose from the language chauvinism of the Sri Lankan government and the violence they perpetrated on minority Tamils. I was in Kindergarten when Rajiv Gandhi was assassinated, but Tamil Tigers in Sri Lanka were an ever-present theme throughout the ‘80s, ‘90s, and 2000s in Tamil media, be it jokes about Sivarasan’s diary, or death by cyanide, or characters speaking Ceylon Tamil in movies. Tamil Tiger propaganda was top-notch, their cause seemed righteous enough, their big names seemed principled… I’m still not sure what’s propaganda and what isn’t.

• The 90s were full of all these issues and crimes between Karnataka and Tamil Nadu. First, there was the Kaveri water sharing issue. Then Rajiv Gandhi’s assassins were holed up in Bangalore, where they were cornered (and they ended themselves). And then, there was Veerappan, who proved to be hell on both state governments and police forces. I somehow felt very gross about how both my Kannadiga friends and my Tamilian relatives spoke about all these issues. The media seemed heavily skewed towards the Tamil Nadu perspective, which I felt was not fair in any of these cases. The Hunt is no exception, and that’s why I’m glad Cyanide was made, on the saga of capturing Sivarasan in Bangalore.

• Finally, the Rajiv Gandhi assassination saga itself. Sure, LTTE did it. But then, the Jain commission report, which has never been released to the public, apparently calls it a CIA-Mossad plot, and points to Subramanian Swamy, among others. Wild, right? What’s the truth? Who knows! Even if you know it, who’ll confirm it?

The Hunt

I don’t like watching TV series much these days, much less series based on recent Indian history. I have phases now and then when I go down a rabbit hole based on the Rajiv Gandhi assassination, and I didn’t think I’d learn anything new from watching a series about it.

So I don’t know how I got suckered into watching The Hunt, but…. I couldn’t stop watching.

Mind, I’m not a fan of the whole bureaucrat aesthetic, with the fucking oilslick hair, safari suits, Reynolds pen in pocket, and 80s mustaches, and I don’t like how filmmakers try to make shit authentic. But they weave a compelling narrative, combining the Special Investigation with what the culprits are doing. Makes it an exciting cat-and-mouse story.

Can we please not anymore

Taking compelling Indian nonfiction and turning it into narrative has proven to be a big challenge. People throng to watch if it’s an important subject matter not mentioned in the media, but fatigue soon sets in. At the end of the day, people just want an entertaining story.

A lot of filmmakers fail because they don’t manage to create a compelling character with an engaging emotional journey. Nagesh Kukunoor isn’t one of them. The Hunt takes us through the eyes of Superintendent Amit Verma, who is highly lovable, in no small part due to perfectly portraying a Punjabi policeman of the Tamil Nadu cadre. Sahil Vaid, who plays the part, grew up in Salem, so the part fits him like a glove.

And he is one of the few characters who actually speaks Tamil naturally in the series.

Oh god, the Tamil.

At the outset, we’re told to believe a guy who looks like this is named Karthikeyan:

And then we are led through insipid ass TN cadre cop dialogue that sounds nothing like Kollywood cop dialogue. No angry “Yeyyyy!”. No “muttiki-mutti thattiduven” threats. No “Ey ey ey, do what I say”. No big mustache. No talk of the value of the khaki-chattai. Like, sure, I don’t expect flying kicks, but come on. Honor the classic Tamil cop.

The reason the dialogue is insipid is that it seems to be written in Hindi and then translated into Tamil, and spoken by actors who don’t actually speak Tamil. The choice of words and cadence is all wrong, wrong, wrong.

Is it that hard to hire a dialogue writer from the Tamil industry? This could have been knocked up several notches by just that - lines written by someone who actually watches Tamil movies and speaks Tamil in Tamil Nadu.

And then there’s the Sri Lankan Tamil. Like, sure, there is a classic Radio Ceylon Tamil accent that is used even in the Tamil industry to show that a character is a Lankan. But then, the prevalent Tamil accent among Sri Lankan Tamils I’ve known seems indistinguishable from Tamil Nadu accents. They laughed in my face when I asked them why they don’t speak like Nandita Das in Kannathil Muthamitaal. I’m not aware of what makes that stereotypical SL Tamil accent, but it’s far from universal.

If anything, the only real distinguishing feature I’ve found is that SL Tamils speak a lot more respectfully with everyone (e.g. they’d say neenga to even a baby instead of the informal nee), and… they don’t throw in random English words while speaking Tamil.

There’s this bit where Sivarasan reminds Dhanu to “speak like you belong here”. I’d have loved her to start talking more rudely and throwing in English words… because that’s literally what it sounds like.

But then, the action shifts to Bangalore, and I got fucking angry. No one, NO ONE bothers to speak in Kannada, not even the folks supposed to be Karnataka officers. Not even among each other. They instead speak in — wait for it — Hindi.

At this point, I’m like fuck you. Not only because they put in the effort to speak in Tamil and then completely don’t do Kannada, but also because they make the Karnataka officers look incompetent.

If you grew up watching Sangliana or Operation Diamond Racket, this feels like a real insult. Plus, this is something every Tamil tale of Veerappan tries to do, but if you listen to the interviews of the cops who worked on the Veerappan case since the ‘80s, you get a very very different picture. The Hunt fits that pattern, too. And this is where I wanted to give up and rewatch the Rangayana Raghu starrer, Cyanide. It covered the end of Sivarasan quite well, and TBH got much deeper into the psychology of Sivarasan and Dhanu than The Hunt does. Plus, it’s so insightful about the thought processes of those who supported the LTTE in India, even if they weren’t Tamil.

So overall, I think The Hunt starts strong, but doesn’t do that great on the internal journey of the villains. Just skip the last two episodes and watch Cyanide instead.

Too many languages in my head

If you’ve noticed above, I’m outraged on behalf of Tamil speakers as well as Kannada speakers.

I’m not great with Indian languages IMO. I can’t read and write in Tamil, but I speak it well. I can read and write in Hindi, but I have been asked by those from the Hindi heartland to “please speak in English”. The only language I can read, write and speak decently is Kannada, and even there, my vocabulary is iffy.

There are a few other complications with how I consider language.

Having grown up in Karnataka, all the children’s songs I know are in Kannada, all the classical poetry I know is in Kannada, and I much prefer reading Sanskrit prayers in Kannada script. So…. the language I’m best equipped to teach my daughter is… Kannada! Except, I seem to consume most of my media in Tamil.

Additionally, there’s this issue of culture.

Any Tamilian raised outside of TN seems to look down on TN culture as being “too filmi”, and I’m no exception. The combining of movies with politics, movies with religion, movies with… everything, is too much to take. There was a spate of building temples for movie stars, for instance, and that just felt a little too insane to young me.

When I was eight and went to visit a cousin in Chennai, she pointed to the apartment opposite hers which had a Rajinikanth poster on the wall, and said “The anna who lives there, he is willing to die for Rajinikanth.” I was shocked, disgusted, and, above all, confused. Who on earth wants to die for a movie star?! My reaction towards Tamil Nadu culture hasn’t changed since then. And neither has Tamil Nadu culture.

This attitude is one of old - I saw the same attitude in the memoirs of RK Narayan and RK Laxman.

In comparison, Kannada movies seemed more focused on it as an art medium, and people might elevate Dr. Rajkumar as a kind of God, but it was mostly for the dedication and depth he brought to his carefully chosen roles, and unlike MGR who did the same in Tamil movies, he had no political aspirations he was strategically using those roles for.

Now, of course, all movies are garbage, and all culture is tending towards a monocultural blob. But… from the body of work I grew up on, I’d much rather transmit the Kannada bits. Irrespective, I seem to watch movies in six or seven languages regularly.

At the same time, when my husband asks me to teach him any Indian language, I start with some words, and then decide it isn’t sufficient to learn just the words, but also the roots and how the words change across languages. Which, of course, goes nowhere, and my husband’s knowledge of Indian languages seems to be at the level of baby talk.

So… you see the structured chaos in my head when it comes to language.

Imagine being in the midst of language wars with this mindset.

Language wars

When I was 2, my grandpa decided I had to be fluent in Kannada. So he made up a rule for me - Tamil inside the house, Kannada when we step out.

It worked quite great…. until I went to primary school. School was English medium, and most of my classmates spoke Telugu. Over the years, I lost fluency in Kannada, despite studying it in school. Still, I maintained the rule of speaking Kannada outside the house. I did retain fluency in Tamil due to the industrial quantity of movies I watched in Tamil (thanks, Maran family).

And then, I went to college, and there were no more rules about not speaking in Indian languages. I got much more fluent in Kannada, as well as Tamil. I mainlined Telugu media as well.

What was missing for me all through, though, was ease. I spoke all languages other than English like they were written by a Sony Liv dialogue writer. And this had its problems.

For a couple of years, I was in a school where the teachers interacted with the students informally in Kannada. Coming from English medium, I struggled with the ease. And this was mistaken to be arrogance by my teacher, which led to minor-league drama. My strong determination to speak in Kannada outside the house kept me going.

This would have all been dramatic by itself, but imagine the backdrop this was happening in - at the slightest provocation, there would be riots over language. Issues with Kaveri water sharing — riots. Veerappan kidnapped Dr. Rajkumar — riots. Sivarasan found in Konankunte — riots. They’d beat up cable TV operators if they were showing Tamil channels, and then ban theaters from showing Tamil movies.

I remember going to watch Rajinikanth’s Basha in Hosur, across the border in Tamil Nadu, an hour-long bus ride away. But then the rioters got wise and started destroying buses coming from TN, so we stopped doing that.

I wasn’t sure if there was this kind of rioting on the streets of Chennai. I suspected there weren’t, and the rioting was restricted to Hosur, Dharmapuri, and other border districts. Upendra and Prabhudeva starred in a movie called H2O, where this woman named Kaveri had to choose between two men, one a Tamilian and another a Kannadiga, and there was the backdrop of Kaveri riots…. cheesy? Yes. On the nose? Also yes. But I imagined it was some kind of emotive issue for Prabhudeva, who was from those parts of the region where you felt equally at home in both states.

Language wars always sounded stupid, especially since no one I knew in Karnataka considered it an emotive issue. Most people I knew were like me - they didn’t speak Kannada at home, but were quite comfortable speaking it outside. I went years thinking some people were Kannadigas (as they did me), and then would find out they spoke something else at home, like Coorgi, or Marathi, or Saurashtri. We understood that the only people who’d riot over this were unemployed folks who’d get paid to, and politicians.

And now, those language wars are back, with organized campaigns on social media to stoke linguistic tensions across multiple states.

It’s tempting to just dismiss it all as politically motivated nonsense, but much water has flowed down the Kaveri since the ‘90s, and the issues are slightly different now.

For one, there’s a huge influx of people from all over to Bangalore (Thanks, SM Krishna), and they work jobs that don’t require them to learn Kannada. There’s a lot more resentment over this, much like my teachers thought I was arrogant for speaking English with them.

And, frankly, I feel insecure about the state of Kannada as well. If I hear Modi say Tamil is the “oldest language” one more time, I’ll riot. With the LTTE mindset and other separatist forces active in TN, it’s the squeaky wheel that gets the grease from the center, and gets disproportionately boosted. I don’t see the same level of importance accorded to Kannada.

Most Kannadigas I know don’t watch Kannada movies very much themselves. The state of the industry is probably to blame, but I don’t see the same level of media consumption in Kannada as I do in Tamil. And there isn’t the same positive fervor to speak in one’s language to the same extent as I see in Tamil.

Which wouldn’t be such a big deal, but now I don’t see as much Kannada spoken in public spaces in Bangalore. I mostly believe things will sort themselves out, but on this, I wonder if we should be more worried.

At the same time, all the kinds of panic people have over language issues seem like they’ll demonize me. There’s such a crazy focus on mother tongue being Kannada/Marathi and speaking up for the “rights” of native speakers…. but the folks in the previous generation who grew up speaking Kannada in Bangalore or Marathi in Mumbai tend to be those whose mother tongue is something else. And if you’re alienating those people, who will you have left?

It seems silly to demonize English as the cause of all this rift, but… really, that’s the thing I’m concerned about in general. English medium schools with rules about speaking in English seem to stop kids from learning Indian languages from each other. But there isn’t a rush to put children in Kannada medium schools, for a very simple reason - everyone’s worried about future opportunities and having those shut down by lack of English fluency.

I watched the Veerappan documentary when it came out, and the thing that bothered me the most is, the unlettered people of the village of Gopinatham, deep in the Western Ghats, who spent most of their life smuggling sandalwood and ivory in the forest, can’t seem to speak a single sentence without an English word in it. I feel ashamed when my husband says, “I can usually follow what your cousins and you are saying to each other, there are lots of English nouns and verbs in your sentences.”

What’s the solution? I don’t know. But it’s going to require immense political maturity to lead this situation. It’s pretty dire how hair-trigger this situation is, and it shouldn’t be used for political brownie points (but it obviously will be).

Long story short, we’re fucked. The best we can do is to try and speak languages well, and learn as many languages as we can.

An annoying friend of mine refuses to speak English with friends and will always respond in an Indian language that he thinks you’ll understand. I realized over the years that he’s right. We need to try.

But at the same time, this Hindi hegemony makes non-Hindi speakers insecure.

For one, the anxiety was that they’d corner central government jobs just due to the language advantage in the exams, and we’d be left behind, unrepresented. That same anxiety persists everywhere now - you don’t want to be evaluated on Hindi proficiency anywhere because if you’re not a native speaker, you have a distinct disadvantage. Plus, it will also lead to your languages to flounder.

Already, several Indian languages have been left to flounder because they aren’t among the fourteen official languages. Few have heard of Sankethi or Tulu or the weird Marathi spoken in Thanjavur. Studying history, it feels like we’ll lose our connection to the past if we don’t become proficient in Indian languages. Offering them all up at the altar of Hindi doesn’t seem right either.

There’s a whole set of people who say things like “Come to UP/Delhi/Gurgaon, you can speak any language, no one will beat you up”… yeah, that’s because everyone’s going to only respond in Hindi and expect you to understand, and everything is already in Hindi. When your defaults are secure, there’s nothing to be worried about and you can be chill. The problem in places like Karnataka and Maharashtra is the defaults are getting changed over time and the best solution any leadership can offer is mandating things that don’t matter and beating up those who don’t comply with their weird demands.

On the other hand, you do want to make places like hospitals and government offices language-agnostic, because you don’t want your government benefits or health to be held hostage to language wars. And yet, how do you promote people speaking your language in public? Especially when the Kannadiga default is to speak to people in their own language?

I don’t quite see solutions popping up and working so that the direction of future work is clear. This uncertainty is killing me.

Idk, should we just have AI translate everything into every language on the internet? And on streaming services? It feels like entertainment is the only way to get through to people on language.

LTTE and Tamil Exceptionalism

One of the things I find disgusting in Tamil Nadu culture is the weird separatist mindset. Like, not everyone wants to secede into their own Tamil country, but the mindset still bothers me. I met a Tamilian friend at the Sunnyvale temple, which is one of those US temples that try to please everyone with the murtis they have, and the result is a temple that feels unreal. She said something like “I don’t come here often, these Gods don’t feel like our Gods”. On the one hand, I felt like sure, that makes sense, I don’t quite feel at home at a temple unless the idols are black stone or metal. But on the other hand… the Gods are Gods, and Hanuman Chalisa is the same as the Aditya Hridayam (apart from key theological differences, but come on).

On the one hand, everyone’s a little us-versus-them about everything. On the other hand, when you study at college with a slice of the whole country, it’s really hard to be too precious about your specific way of life. When you, a Vaishnavite, help your Kali-worshipping Assamese friend perform a sacrifice to the Gods of coastal Karnataka to help with a personal problem with no end, and it works….. You stop thinking in terms of ‘us’ and ‘them’. It becomes obscenely clear that any them-ing just serves to keep you away from achieving your full potential.

Of course, there is a lot of discourse in the air in Tamil Nadu that prevents people from thinking like this.

Tamil Eelam was one of those ideas that were prominent in the ‘80s and ‘90s. The Sri Lankan government was actively genociding Tamils. Plus, there were stateless Tamil migrants in Sri Lanka whom neither the Indian nor the Lankan government helped. And it was easy to think then that the Indian government didn’t care, and you could manage better if you had your own country. Many are invested in the idea of a Balkanized India, who fan these flames. So, the idea of an independent Tamil homeland was tempting.

My folks, of course, mocked the idea enough that I didn’t consider it a realistic option. But there were many who felt ‘why not’. The top-notch LTTE propaganda didn’t hurt.

Like, they’d somehow developed a great army and navy while being a rebel force. And there were legendary figures in their movement whose tales were highly publicized. They seemed highly disciplined and ready for sacrifice. They even had cool-sounding nom-de-guerres. And they were pushed to the brink badly enough to consider suicide a realistic option if it helped their aims. Plus, gender equality.

Even mainstream movies like Kannathil Muthamitaal, about a child of LTTE soldiers, or The Terrorist, about a pregnant suicide bomber, or even Tenali, about a quirky man with anxiety, made the LTTE seem like a sympathetic enough group. Heck, there’s Punnagai Mannan with Kamal Haasan and Revathi, where Revathi is revealed halfway through to be a Sinhalese, whose family objects to her relationship with a Tamil, and she wears a cyanide capsule around her neck in case they decide to send her back to Colombo. It made suicide seem heroic, something that 13 Reasons Why tried to do and failed.

This propaganda was really hard to avoid as a young person in the ‘90s and 2000s.

So, given all of this, I’m actually surprised that the situation in Sri Lanka ended up as it did.

I’d have to read up on all the stuff that led to this, but I increasingly feel like the core of it was INCOMPETENCE in the Indian leadership. Indira Gandhi gave away Katchaitheevu to Sirimavo Bandaranaike not to disrupt their friendship, which is probably among the top 5 ways to not conduct politics.

And how Rajiv Gandhi handled the issue of Tamil discrimination and the rise of the LTTE seems more rife with incompetence than anything else. It feels hard to point to any specific entity and say they are worse than all the other players in the game, but it does feel like the incompetence of Rajiv Gandhi is what led to whatever happened, and it’s all been a colossal waste of human resources in death, war, and violence.

At least that line of Tamil exceptionalism is now gone, but there are several others.

I wonder if the core of all these differences between how Tamilians vs Kannadigas think is all again due to the British. Madras Presidency was highly impoverished, leading to an exodus of people to literally everywhere else - the Mysore kingdom, the rubber plantations of Malaysia, the sugar fields of the Caribbean, and as administrators in distant corners of the British Empire. British conversion efforts also played havoc on the minds of those in the Madras presidency, distorting the sense of history.

When the diaspora was threatened after the British Empire unravelled, with riots and exoduses in Myanmar, genocide and dispossession in Sri Lanka, and threats from rising Islamism in Malaysia and Indonesia, the Indian government didn’t handle it satisfactorily. It didn’t help that Bal Thackeray came to power in Maharashtra on the back of Tamil hate. It’s easy then to feel persecuted and like you could do better for the diaspora if you had an independent homeland that spoke for your interests.

Kannadigas, OTOH had no reason to go elsewhere with their cultural core being preserved by the Mysore kingdom, which was happy to absorb those coming from other, much less fortunate places. And, without the bogey of persecution or exceptionalism, it was easy to integrate wherever they went.

But once states were organized on linguistic lines, all this Tamil exceptionalism affected Kannadigas too. They began seeing how the squeaky Tamil wheel got the grease, and asked, “Why can’t we do that as well?” If states are linguistic, then Tamil Nadu and Maharashtra set the template for how to advocate for the state language. That was the template Kannadigas decided to follow, too, as Bangaloreans experienced the tech boom, water disputes, and the growing pains of a megacity.

I’ll end this topic with one thought - the man who sheltered Sivarasan in Bangalore was a Kannadiga named Ranganath. When he was a student in Europe, he donated money to the LTTE. And that’s how Sivarasan knew to reach out to him in his hour of need. Ranganath, by all accounts, led a normal civilian life and was held at gunpoint by Sivarasan’s gang to help them hide. But as is obvious in the movie Cyanide, he is quite a willing participant. Because he was sympathetic to the LTTE cause. (And, he said in a later deposition, that politicians very high up, including Chandraswami, assured him safe passage to Europe if he agreed to help… didn’t work, he was in prison for 8 years and then died from diabetes complications).

There’s a lot you can infer about the kind of person who donates to the LTTE, even in the ‘80s, and he is probably not the average person. But everyone is sympathetic to persecution. Where you lose people is when you threaten the sovereignty and territorial integrity of India. It doesn’t matter then how righteous your cause is or how disciplined your ranks are. You’re the enemy.

Rajiv Gandhi Assassination Investigation

A former Prime Minister’s assassination would be the wildest thing ever, if it wasn’t for the fact that his mother was assassinated while she was a sitting Prime Minister.

I don’t have organized thoughts on this, but here are some disorganized thoughts:

• Seems like the actual assassination plot was solved - LTTE did it. Sivarasan, Shubha, and Dhanu did it. But why did the LTTE do it? Did they do it on their own steam? This is highly, highly unclear.

• The funniest part to me is that the assassination team, including Sivarasan, Dhanu, Shubha, Athirai, were all related, and they were chosen for one reason - their familial face structure makes it so they have wildly different front and side profiles, making them hard to identify.

• The Jain Commission report calls it a CIA-Mossad plot, and names Chandraswami, Subramanian Swamy, and Pinaki Mishra (Mahua Moitra’s new husband), among others. I’m yet to read the entire report, and Chandraswami is dead, but the rest of them… WTF?

• Investigator Ragothaman (played by Bagavathi Perumal in The Hunt) has a book out on the assassination investigation and the larger conspiracy. He says in an interview that Yasser Arafat told the Indian government that Rajiv Gandhi’s life is in danger. But the government didn’t take it seriously. Possibly on purpose. MK Narayanan, the then director of IB, wrote to the government that Rajiv Gandhi’s life is in danger, just shortly before the assassination. Ragothaman interprets this as a cover-your-ass move by the MK Narayanan because the logical move would have been to give Rajiv Gandhi more security.

• The lawyer of Nalini (who was Indian, highly educated, and accommodated the assassins) makes several more crazy accusations about the larger conspiracy. He alleges that it was an ‘inside job’. He points to how members of the Congress have suspicious behaviors around this incident. He brings up foreign connections, like investigator Srikumar going to London for investigation and that a box of documents went missing. There are apparently uninvestigated names and money trails in Sivarasan’s diary.

• It’s notable that Nalini had a baby in jail, who was then sent to live with relatives in Sri Lanka, and is now a doctor in Glasgow. Nalini was eventually freed after 30 years in prison. Her daughter got married while she was in prison, and she took 30 days out of prison to plan and organize the wedding. I find her whole demeanor disgusting TBH - posing in silk sarees outside the prison, and giving shameless interviews on national TV. Plus, somehow Priyanka and Rahul Gandhi have “forgiven” her… as if it is their loss to forgive and not the nation’s. All of it is extremely disgusting.

• No one got the noose for this assassination!

• Ranganath, who accommodated Sivarasan and Shubha in Bangalore, claimed much after the investigation was over that Chandraswami offered him safe passage out of India if he cooperated with Sivarasan.

• Remember the lovable cop, Amit Verma, through whose eyes this plot unfolds? I was surprised he wasn’t out there talking about the case like Ragothaman or writing books. Turns out, there’s a reason for that:

  

• I need to really read the book this series is based on. And the Jain Commission report which is finally available online.

This whole era of goes-all-the-way-to-the-top crime, like Rajiv Gandhi Assassination and Veerappan antics, are very intrinsically tied to who I am, where I’m from, and how I think about the world. Thanks for reading all my thoughts on this.