Jai Bhim — few thoughts
New Tamil movie
2 min readNov 4, 2021
Jay Bhim — the latest Tamil movie shook me to the core. The movie portrays a savage (words are inadequate) killing of an innocent tribal man (Rajakannan) and the fight for the justice by a lawyer (Chandru — the hero of the movie) and the wife of the deceased person (Senggeni). The movie is inspired by a real-life incident. I am not going to do a classical movie review (for which I don’t have any ability), but share some of some sentiments during and after the movie.
What moved me?
- The cruelty endured by Rajakannan in the jail is showed with such rawness. Rarely we like to see such raw-horror, but that is the reality endured by many.
- The suffering endured by Senggeni and many other tribals in the movie is equally horrifying.
- Indian movies are famous for dance and action scenes. But the director makes a choice to show the raw-suffering and the fight for the justice without any special attempts to entertain people.
- It is not easy to become part of a system of power. But once you are inside, the system normally tries to protect you, even at the expense of many innocent lives.
Kudos to all who tried to show the reality with all its raw-ness. Hopefully it will pierce many hearts.
What next??
- It is easy to hide in the glory of a hero who did a marvellous job to bring justice and forget many tribals (or people belonging to many other suppressed groups) who face death for no-reason of theirs. I am in no-way de-valourising those courageous individual heroes-heroines, but our eyes, ears and hearts shouldn’t stop there.
- The fight for justice gets such victories in rare occasions (even here, whether it is a victory, is a good question). Most of the times, it remains a failure from all sides because of the lack of means to access the system of justice.
After-thought
- In Christian tradition, it is said that you should stay with the pain and suffering of the crucifiction before moving into the joy of resurrection. I think this is equally true with the movie. Staying with that raw-horror is important. (None of the movie postures show that… most of them show the fight)… Staying with the horror is only important for us; the oppressed are already living it. That experience can probably bring a transformation.
