At Arm's Length

I was watching Princess Mononoke, and it sent me down a rabbit hole.. well it often happens for this Alice in Wonderland. I have seen a few Ghibli films before—Kiki's Delivery Service.. Spirited Away.  Love the spirit of these movies. But to be honest, these Japanese anime films, I don't always get them. I once walked into PVR Audi 6 playing the Jujutsu Kaisen 0. A world I knew nothing about. I tried to keep up with the subtitles, my eyes moving between the frantic action on screen and the text at the bottom, feeling like I was missing a conversation everyone else was already a part of. But even then, I liked the feel of it. If I like the feel of it, I savor it.

So where were we..? 

Yeah.. watching Princess Mononoke. I was hit by how strangely/deeply similar it felt to Kantara. I watched Kantara in its original Kannada, surrounded by a handful of Kannadigas in a theater that was far from packed. This was way before the hype. I literally had to drag my friend with me, and I can still hear her complaining the whole way, "Why the hell should I watch a rural Kannada movie?!" Her opinion, of course, did a complete 180 by the time the end credits rolled. It was only a week or so later, after Prithviraj picked up the Malayalam distribution, that the hype wave hit—and the theaters were overflowing. But we found it on our own. I like that feeling. And if I like the feeling, I savor it.

That memory reminds me of seeing Kammattipadam. The opening credits began to roll, and a song kicked in:

വന്നുദിച്ചേ നിന്നുദിച്ചേ ആദിത്യഭഗവാനും

ഇന്നെന്തേ ഭഗവാനോ വന്നുദിക്കാനിത്ര താമസിച്ചേ..

പറപറ പറപറ..

കഥപറ പറപറ 

പറപറ കഥപറ...

ചിങ്ങം കന്നി തുലാങ്ങളിൽ മലങ്കൊയിത്തും കഴിഞ്ഞ്

പൊല്ലത്തിലും പുട്ടലിലും നെല്ലും കെട്ടിയെടുത്തും കൊ-

ണ്ടോരായിരം പുലക്കൈയ്യും വീശിവരും കാരണോരേ,

പെരുവയൽപൂമിയിലെ പുലയോരെ കഥ പറ

പുലമകൾ സരസ്വതി നാവിലാടും കഥ പറ..

The raw music, the lyrics with a certain grit to it. It felt different from that moment. I knew something was coming. Not ten minutes into the film, a ruthless murder happens, just like that. We didn't even know it was an 'A' rated movie. The entire runtime, I was just utterly surprised by its audacity. By the end, I was in a certain mix of emotions—partly awe at the unflinching theme, and partly a profound lack of understanding of the world it had just dragged me through. (I admit, my privileged habitus was a huge barrier to any deeper understanding of the theme; the lives we haven't lived are external to us.)

Well, that was the way we used to watch movies. We went in with zero idea, with nothing more than the director's name and the main cast. 'Hype' wasn't even a common word back then. No one hyped anything! I remember watching breakthrough Malayalam movies exactly this way. We saw Traffic like that, and we saw Chappa Kurish like that. We just showed up, the film started, and the entire theater would be collectively stunned by the end. As the lights came up, you could hear whispers spreading through the rows, everyone turning to each other and asking, "What did we just see?!" (with a hundred exclamation marks hanging in that cold air). The 'A' rating was an afterthought, a detail you noticed on the poster on your way out, which felt right. The experience came first, the label later. I like that feeling. And I miss savoring that feeling, very much, in these hyped up days.

At this point, I don't know whether I should write about the art of experiencing these films raw or the raw feeling left by these films. I often talk a lot about the former. So, we pick the latter.

Watching Princess Mononoke, I kept thinking of this. In Miyazaki’s world, the forest gods are not allegories — they are the forest itself. Shinto, Japan’s indigenous belief system, doesn’t draw a strict line between the human, animal, and spiritual. This means Ashitaka can speak with wolf god Moro without breaking the story’s logic because, in that worldview, dialogue across species or realms is simply a form of diplomacy between neighbors. There are long still shots of trees swaying or boars breathing, not as some background narrative device for its human characters. You see the same in Totoro, Spirited Away, or Ponyo. Every river, mountain, tree, or creature can be inhabited by a kami, and those presences aren’t above or below humans. They are part of the same community of beings. In Princess Mononoke, we are in the first stage — the pre-collapse world — where the forest gods, the animal clans, and the human settlements all acknowledge each other as sovereigns. The land itself is a site of negotiation, bound together by a fragile treaty that can be broken but not yet forgotten.

Mononoke is set in medieval Japan, but you could just as well be watching Kantara. Rishab Shetty’s coastal Karnataka is similarly alive with presences — Daiva spirits who are integral to the ordering of the world, who however mediate through the Bhoota Kola. Unlike the Forest Spirit in Mononoke, which is a physical sovereign in the world, the Daiva's presence is mediated, taking form only through ritual. The land was once given under the witness of this spirit; its protection is conditional on human gratitude and ritual upkeep. However the modern state do not recognize this sacred pact as anything legitimate. The pact is reframed as a folklore and the land becomes just property to be traded. Kantara catches us at the fracture point.

By the time we arrive in Kammattipadam, the pact is long gone. There are no spirits left to negotiate with, no rituals left to invoke. Rajeev Ravi’s Kochi is laid bare in concrete and blood. In Kammattipadam, we see the endpoint of displacement: the spiritual, ritual, and ecological sovereignties have already been erased. The Dalit community’s connection to land manifests through an embodied history wherein their ancestor's labour built the city’s foundations. As we know, this is not the familiar textbook history, but pure oral history. The unheard voice of the subaltern. With no Daiva left to fight for them, no forest god to negotiate with, all that remains is the cold logic of speculative development.. and occasionally, the memory of a song:

അഴകി അനസി കാളി കുഞ്ഞളരി കുറുമ്പയും

അണിഞ്ചനും കരിമ്പനും കൊച്ചുറുമ്പൻ കാവലനും

കട്ടതട്ടി ചാലുകീറി ഉഴുതിട്ട കഥയല്ലേ

വിത്തെറിഞ്ഞു മുളപ്പിച്ചു ഞാറുനട്ട കഥയല്ലേ..

What is the common thread in these three random movies? I say, land. 

In the worlds these films show us — whether Shinto animism or the Bhoota Kola — the land is alive. It has a personality, it can fight back, it can heal, it can punish.

So when did land start losing its epistemic meaning? 

With the modern world's 'development gaze', the living land turned into a dead commodity to be surveyed, fenced off, and put to use. Epistemic loss, in this context, is irreversible in the same way extinction is irreversible. Boaventura Santos called it 'epistemicide'—a process where, in his words, "unequal exchanges amongst cultures have always implied the death of the knowledge of the subordinated culture, and hence the death of the social groups that possessed it." The death of the place/land is the death of the knowledge; the death of the knowledge is the slow death of the people who once moved within it — just like the kodama in Princess Mononoke, the small tree spirits who vanish when their forest is felled.

And watching them vanish from the safety of my screen, I'm forced to confront the fact that I have not lived these knowledges. I can study and appreciate them, mourn their loss even, but there is always that arm’s length distance. This is the paradox: I can walk out of Kammattipadam in awe of its rawness, but I also walk into a neighborhood that will never face the fate of Kammattipadam. My nostalgia for Bhoota Kola or the grit of a folk song — it costs me nothing. For those whose lives are interwoven with these systems, the cost is everything.

ചെല്ലിപ്പുല്ലും കൊച്ചമ്പ്രാൻ്റെ കള്ളക്കണ്ണും പറിച്ചെറി-

ഞ്ഞില്ലപ്പടി കടന്നു പോം നീലിപ്പുലക്കള്ളിക്കഥ..

പെരുവയൽപ്പൂമികളിൽ പലപൂവു കൊയ്തെടുത്ത്

വരുങ്കാലക്കളം നോറ്റ പുലയോരടെ പഴങ്കഥ..

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