Somaratne Dissanayake's Saroja was screened at Columbia [University, New York] this week.

It is a well-made film: naturalistic, well-acted, neatly told. Rather remarkably for a South Asian movie featuring two doe-eyed little girls, there are few moments of cloying sentimentality. But Saroja has the problems to be expected from a film that invokes communal harmony through the metaphor of child friendship, and the discussion after the screening was contentious to say the least.

Despite the title, the movie is less about the eponymous Thamizh girl or her friendship with a Sinhala child, Varuni, than it is about Panchi Banda, Varuni's father, who takes Sarojini and her injured LTTE conscript father (!) into his house.

Panchi Banda the schoolmaster is a thoughtful, credible opponent of Sinhala chauvinism who deserves better than the implausible story he is in. His mettle deserves the test of unhappy reality, rather than the diluted folk prejudices of other Sinhala villagers, which are conveniently evaporated by one poignant event or another. This is a movie in which anti-Thamizh prejudices are only expressed at the margins, by the wife whose initial views are over-ruled by Panchi Banda, by the town drunks and illiterates who change their minds at the movie's end, by the parents of Panchi Banda's pupils who do not get screen time to explain their views.

Of state-sponsored injustice, the movie tells nothing but lies. The Sri Lankan military is, if you believe the film, staffed by angels, who are absurdly kind to armed LTTE cadres in fatigues, much less Sinhala villagers. The film opens with a Sri Lankan soldier letting Sarojini and her father Sundaram escape, is shot through with Sinhala soldiers with exquisite manners, and climaxes with the judiciary letting Panchi Banda and Sundaram go free despite the former's lies and the latter's being a LTTE cadre! Every act of (anti-Thamizh) violence, from the murder of Sundaram's wife to Sundaram's own death, is committed by a Thamizh person. And while there may be some truth on the side of the film's portrayal of  the LTTE, it looks like prejudice because it exists in utter isolation from any social, much less political or historical, context.

The film's metaphors work in concert with its patronizing view of communal harmony. Varuni describes her relationship with Sarojini — the bond at the heart of the movie — as that between an elder sister and a younger sister. When Sarojini tells Varuni her name, Varuni renames her Saroja after another girl in Varuni's school — and the film proceeds to reify this name change by making it the movie's title! Sundaram is not just implicitly emasculated by his injury and his inability to protect his own daughter, but by the fact that he has to play mute for most of the film. Even within Panchi Banda's home, where he does not have to pretend, he gets hardly a line of dialogue. And in the end, when he finally rises to speak for himself (at Panchi Banda's invitation, of course), he is shot by LTTE cadres before he can get a word out! Can the subaltern speak, already? Apparently not.

After the screening of Saroja, the editors of Lines Magazine, Vasuki Nesiah, Ahilan Kadirgamar and S. Nanthikesan, struggled to recoup some radical potential from the film. Nanthikesan made some skin-crawlingly drippy remarks about his inability to criticize such a warmly humanist movie. He also remarked that the film was interesting in its admission of deep-rooted Sinhala chauvinism, in its refusal to pretend that prejudices were manufactured by the state.

Nesiah pointed out that the film draws on Sinhalese prejudices against rural idiocy in its depiction of the chauvinist villagers, and in its location of the way forward in the intelligensia. I drew a comparison to American race movies like No Way Out, in which racism is displaced onto the "redneck," and middle-class whites are portrayed as avatars of liberal equitability. Nesiah conceded that the film's failure to address the ways in which Sinhalese have also suffered at the hands of the military and militarization, the ways in which they have been used as human shields against the LTTE, was a missed opportunity to locate a rapprochement between Thamizh and Sinhala within a shared experience of both state and anti-state violence.

Nesiah argued that it was important to consider the film's radicalism in its historical context, rather than to claim some neutral objective point outside history. Now of course, the film is used as a military recruitment tool by the state, but the film's recognition of Thamizh humanity, the distinction it draws between Thamizh and terrorist, its criticism of Sinhala chauvinism made it unique in Sinhalese cinema, and a radical statement in the moment of its making. I replied that my argument about its lack of radicalism did not pretend to some acontextual neutrality. To which Nesiah quite sensibly asked what context I was speaking from. I said "the truth" or some such unsatsifactory thing, but consider this in l'espirit d'escalier:

It's true that there are historical junctures in which any admission of Thamizh humanity can seem alarming to Sinhala minds. But I do not outsource my judgement to the prejudices of Sinhala minds. There is a real danger to defining radicalism as opposition to the oppressor's views, for many reasons, not least of which is that the oppressor's views are remolded according to his interests and today's radical film is tomorrow's army recruitment tool. It is impossible to be both radical and mendacious: the least radicalism demands is to tell as much of the truth as is known at any moment. Mendacity is an invitation to misappropriation. And a film cannot speak credibly about the humanity of Thamizh people when it does not believe in their humanity enough to address itself to Thamizhar: this film subverts its own message by being crafted completely for the Sinhala gaze. Bien pensant remarks about the humanity of the oppressed are patronizing when they do not take the arguments and understandings of the oppressed seriously. Radicalism should speak to the knowledge of the oppressed, not the limitations of the oppressor.

Another audience member remarked that after another Gujarat or two, communalist films like Roja or Bombay will look progressive. To this I can only say, no, no, a thousand times, no. Just as the Sri Lankan government supported Saroja, Bal Thackeray supported Bombay because such "humanizations" are hardly any response at all to communalism. Movies which ask whether the oppressed are human cannot be radical even when they answer yes — the radical question would be for the oppressors to confront the question of whether they themselves are human.

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Darshana Medis' fine review of Saroja mentions that film's success in foreign film festivals has shaped its positive reception within Sri Lanka. Perhaps it wasn't just the Sinhala gaze after all.