The boatwoman of  Ponniyin Selvan-1

How our geographies have dramatically shifted in the thousand years since the Cholas

Mani Ratnam’s Ponniyin Selvan-1, or  PS-1, is billed as a pan-India movie. The story, based on Kalki Krishnamurthy’s historical fiction by the same name, unfolds in the early years of the Chola dynasty of 10th century CE. Speaking at a promotional event in Mumbai, Vikram, a lead actor in the film, told an engaged audience, “Think about our culture, how advanced we were. We need to be proud of this. This has nothing to do with North India, South India, East India, West India. We are Indians. We need to feel proud about that.” ‘Pan-India’, thus, denotes much more than the release of the film in five languages.

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Regardless of how we view our past, we must acknowledge that a lot has changed in the thousand years between us and the Cholas of  PS-1. Think of Poonguzhali, the pretty and powerful fisherwoman who transports key figures in the story across the Palk Strait, between Chozha Nadu and Eelam. While the character is fictional, her character-defining act is not. At the time, the stretch of sea that separates these two geographies formed a porous border: people, goods, and culture flowed freely between their shores. Sailing or rowing across the strait took an entire night for Poonguzhali. With motorised boats, the same journey — from Kodiyakarai in southeast Tamil Nadu to the isles that surround northwestern Jaffna — should take little more than an hour. Yet, the two coastlines are further apart today than at any point in history. What was an everyday act for Poonguzhali is criminal today. What was then open is now shut.

In one scene in the film, Sri Lanka’s chief Buddhist prelate invites Prince Arulmozhi Varman, who would later rule as Rajaraja Chola, to accept the island’s throne. During the conversation, the prelate routinely switches between Sinhalese and Tamil. As a Tamil native of Sri Lanka, this struck me as odd. Because in the origin story that the modern nation state of Sri Lanka tells of itself, Buddhism is the sole preserve of the Sinhalese. Today, the state’s archaeological department interprets any sign of the presence of Buddhism in Sri Lanka’s Tamil speaking northeast as evidence of Sinhalese settlements. This dominant discourse outright ignores what is a rather basic fact of history to the contrary: Tamil Buddhists, including clergy, existed in large numbers both in Sri Lanka and in Tamil Nadu.

We Tamils, from either side of the strait, too, remain largely ignorant of the rich diversity that permeates the histories of our lands. Y. Subbarayalu, in  A Concise History of South India, notes that inscriptional evidence suggests that Buddhism and Jainism predate Brahmanical traditions in the region. Buddhist and Jain monks made significant contributions to Tamil literature, jointly accounting for all of the  Aimperum Kappiyangal, the five great epics. In the early years of the medieval Chola dynasty, when  PS-1 is set, Buddhists dominated the urban centres of the kingdom. At the time, the northern city of Kancheepuram, if not a Buddhist majority town, had a sizeable Buddhist population. In  Tamil: a Biography, David Shulman writes that the main Chola trading port of Nagapattinam on the Coromandel Coast was not merely multi-religious but also polyglot with deep links to Southeast Asia.

What once was, is now lost. But, this loss does not feature in any of the popular ‘restoring our idyllic past’ projects of today. Because, in the genesis narrative that the ruling BJP constructs for India — or, more correctly, Bharat, the Hindu Rashtra — before the evil influence of colonisers, everything was pure and everyone was Hindu. To acknowledge the existence of divergent strands of Brahmanical traditions, namely Shaivism and Vaishnavism, is blasphemous. In questioning the portrayal of Rajaraja Chola as a Hindu king, the film director Vetrimaaran highlighted a messy point of discontinuity in the Hindu Rashtra origin story.

Uncritically projecting our present self-awareness into the past, as Vikram did in the press meet, is problematic. When Aditha Karikalan, the Chola prince Vikram enacted on screen, looked northwest from the imperial halls of Thanjavur, he did not see the States of Karnataka and Maharashtra with strictly fixed borders, posing no existential threat to him. Instead, he saw the Rashtrakuta kingdom which had defeated the Cholas in the Battle of Takkolam and whose warriors had killed his grandfather’s brother, Rajaditya, in 949 CE.