By Sneha Rajaram
The title of Kiragoorina Gayyaaligalu, although it sounds like a mouthful, simply means The Rowdy Women of Kiragooru. And the title isn’t abstract either – the film’s poster, on which several women carrying sticks look like they mean business, says it all. Adapted from a short story by the late critically acclaimed, Sahitya Akademi award-winning Kannada author Poornachandra Tejaswi, the film is no lightweight; it asks for serious critical attention.
But first things first. (Spoiler alert.) Daanamma (Shwetha Srivatsav) is a Gowda (loosely, upper caste) woman and the alpha of a pack of deliciously angry, rowdy, foul-mouthed married women in the village of Kiragooru. (Sadly, many of their cuss words have been muted by the censor board.) Her friends Rudri (Sukratha Wagle) and Bhadri (Manasa Joshi) are similarly no-nonsense. Naagamma (Sonu Gowda), however, is a more introverted person who nevertheless hangs out with the group. There seems to be no caste-based discrimination in the group, but yes, Rudri and Bhadri’s husbands work for Daanamma and Naagamma’s husbands in a clearly caste-based hierarchy of landowner and wage labourer. There are plenty of fights and issues in the village, but they get sorted out, often with the intervention of the ‘rowdy women’.
This homeostatic status quo is maintained until Bhoota Swamy (Sharath Lohithashwa), a tantrik, decides to play the two castes against each other in order to extort the Gowdas’ land. A false Dalit atrocity case is slapped on the Gowda men and he tells them that their labourers have filed it. The Dalit labourers in turn are angry at being fired for no apparent reason and the tantrik poisons their minds against the Gowdas too.
The wheels of circumstance turn like the grinding of Rudri’s chakki, and this misunderstanding leads to a series of events that culminate in Kaale Gowda’s (Kishore) neglected and abused wife Naagamma leaving him for a handsome lecherous priest (played by Dharma).
But Naagamma returns, which leads to a panchayat meeting to decide her punishment. Bhoota Swamy thinks that if he beats Naagamma in front of the entire panchayat, it will be a good lesson to the ‘rowdy’ women of the village. Long story short, the women, led by Daanamma, beat him, his assistant, and the constable who filed the false case with thick sticks, and then beat their husbands for falling for Bhoota Swamy’s disinformation. That being checked off their list, Daanamma says, “Ivatthondu theermaana aagali. (Let there be a reckoning today.)” They then tie up loose ends by setting fire to the local bar where the men hang out and drink.
Director Sumana Kittur is no novice – she was nominated for Best Director for her film Edegarike. And her collaboration with Agni Sridhar, who wrote the screenplay and dialogues, isn’t new either. Whether the film remains faithful to Tejaswi’s original short story or not, it’s an ambitious venture, addressing a number of social issues while simultaneously maintaining the discipline of making every scene, no matter how socially themed, work for its place in the plot. Every minute is entertaining, and every minute is going somewhere. And it’s this very neatness that provokes suspicion. The rowdy women’s bindis are too perfectly placed, the squares on their checked blouses too geometrically pleasing, their sticks all the exact same length.
This disconcerting sense of order is reflected in both the caste and gender questions that the film addresses. The viewer who thinks the tantrik Bhoota Swamy is Villain No. 1 in the film is mistaken. Bhoota Swamy is not an omnipotent time-traveller. He didn’t create caste; he merely exploited it. One might be fooled into thinking the village was fine until he turned up and ‘politicised’ it along caste lines – but we can clearly see that the Dalits’ living quarters are more bare, that they labour for the Gowdas, that they stand to lose their livelihood if their relationship with the Gowdas sours, whereas the Gowdas can replace them in a second.
As for gender, the film falls into a trap that the male gaze is often stuck in – that of putting women on a pedestal. The terrifying vengeful goddess trope isn’t just tired and overused; it’s also being used against us, because it sets women up to fail. If a woman in the real world kicked her husband off the conjugal bed for keeping a secret from her, or brandished a stick at a senior government official, there might not always be happy consequences. And the problem with vengeful goddesses is, they often have to direct their vengeful feelings at men. Don’t get me wrong – it’s always richly satisfying to watch women turn the air blue and beat men to a pulp. But that pleasure need not be a particularly feminist one.
Yes, we need to smash patriarchy to smithereens. And I love a good emasculation as much as the next gal. But surely feminism doesn’t always mean attacking men? That sounds exhausting.
In a movie like Kiragoorina Gayyaaligalu, set in an idyllic world where happily ‘rowdy’ women gossip and wash clothes by the river, even passing the Bechdel test, would it be so hard to demonstrate that sometimes, ignoring men is a fun kind of feminism too?