Kamal Haasan is one of the greatest actors of India, if not the world. But he should really keep away from political affairs. He is an avowed atheist. So whether the Chola chaps were Hindus, Muslims or Parsis, shouldn’t concern him.
But the question is, why this question? Why do we need to recheck the dynasty’s religious identity so many centuries after their existence? Mani Ratnam’s abysmally dull film Ponniyin Selvan brings the Chola dynasty back to life.
That brilliant filmmaker Vetrimaaran kicked off the controversy by saying the BJP was trying to wrongly saffronize the Chola dynasty, For reasons best known to him, Kamal Hassan joined the chorus of this anti-saffron song. I wonder what was the purpose of this religious scanning. Whether the hundred-century old Chola king Rajaraja was basanti (yellow) or kesar (saffron) or green, is a matter for scholarly scrutiny.
For an actor who has himself been a victim of religious scanning in the past, this sort of cultural leverage seems nothing but petty political manoeuvring.
To scan our memory, on April 27,2002 , Kamal Haasan was prevented from boarding a flight in Toronto to Los Angeles. Reason? He was suspected to be a terrorist! To the Americans, Kamal Haasan sounded like a Muslim name. Kamal Haasan, who was in Toronto shooting for his comedy in Tamil Panchathanthiram, replayed the entire harrowing and humiliating incident on the Toronto airport to me.
It started quite comically, actually. The customs authorities asked Kamal Haasan what he was doing in that part of the world. He told them he was shooting for a film. Then they asked him why he was flying to Los Angeles. He told them he was going for prosthetic makeup. They evidently didn’t know what that was. Reliving the incredible hours on the alien airport, Kamal Haasan said he requested the airport authorities to let him make a call. The customs authorities refused pointblank, saying cellphones weren’t allowed. They made him wait for half an hour and then interrogated him again .
This time, Kamal told me he was grilled like a terrorist. Then they suddenly said he could leave. Stranded in Toronto on a Sunday, a non-working day, Kamal Haasan woke up all his friends in the American embassy. When the customs guys were asked about their treatment to him, they said Kamal Haasan wasn’t polite.
Recalling the incident a week after it happened, Kamal Haasan said, “I’m a great fan of Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi. If the immigration authorities expected me to grovel, I would rather not travel. No, I wasn’t impolite. They were impolite. September 11 (the 9/11 attack, a year previously in 2001) was impolite. So the customs authorities in Toronto were impolite to me. I didn’t know what hit me. I was upset because people were waiting for me in LA. My Tamil fans and friends in Toronto are very upset. But it wasn’t as humiliating as Gandhiji being thrown out of a train in South Africa. We can’t get away with Islamic names like these after what bin Laden did. As a matter of fact, when I landed in LA earlier this month, I was given a completely cold treatment. All the customs authorities gave me why-are-you-here looks. Other Indians in the queue rushed to my rescue. But in Toronto, I was all alone. They were no fans in the queue. It’s basically their way of saving face. In spite of all the security bandobast they’ve been properly had by Laden. What better way to take revenge than to harass the entire brown-skinned population of the world? If you have an Islamic sounding name then it’s even easier for them. And if there’s beard to go with the name like mine, nothing like it. ”
So Kamal Haasan knows what a confusion of religious or cultural identity can do to an individual, especially if he is important to history. Rajaraja must be smiling and wondering why his religious identity is important to an actor a hundred centuries later. We are wondering the same.
Subhash K Jha is a Patna-based film critic who has been writing about Bollywood for long enough to know the industry inside out. He tweets at @SubhashK_Jha.
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