Motherland woes: reviewing Aba

“To a Tamil viewer and a bemused Tamil viewer at that, Aba may seem like a call by Prabakaran and the LTTE to fight for the motherland. Tamils have only a scanty knowledge of ancient Sinhala history; and the story of Yakkhas, a marginal minority, fighting for their motherland, overthrowing an oppressive rule might sound a positive chord in the nationalist mind. The motherland concept has long caught the imagination of Tamil nationalism. But such a reading, though quite plausible, is not something I actively seek to promote as this would not in any way be subversive or radical. Such a reading begs the same kind of questions raised above.”

by Sivamohan Sumathy

(September 17, Colombo, Sri Lanka Guardian) "For the motherland" was the final call made to the audience at the close of the film Aba as the young ‘hero, historically the would be Pandukabaya, holds high and in a majestic position, a ‘sacred’ sword at the top of a rising hill, framed by towering mountain peaks all around him. Why did I go to see Aba? My curiosity was first raised by an interview I watched about the film, an interview with Jackson Anthony the director of the film. In that interview Mr. Anthony claims that a true hero is one who fights for his motherland.

I of course have no idea what the motherland means in actual terms to struggling people. I grew up as a child and young person alongside Tamil nationalism and have seen only its destructive side. The interview was clearly propagandist, unabashedly so. But it also spoke of the film as one of its kind in Sri Lanka and spoke of it as occupying an iconic status within Sri Lankan films. I puzzled about this; how a serious artist could label patriotism as an empowering sentiment particularly at this current juncture, when the country is at war with itself. I was even more curious about the particular nature of its call. Is the texture of heroic patriotism in the film one of a revolutionary spirit? Is it of a martial nature? Is it about peace and compromise? And importantly, whom does it try to mobilize in its claims to grandeur and epicness? In other words, what is the texture of its hegemonic call?

So, with these questions in mind, I went to see the film. My point of entry into the film is through semiotics and by positioning myself as a viewer. For the purposes of analysis, I create a position for myself as a ‘disinterested’ viewer. A disinterested viewer may be a myth. But as we are discussing ‘myth’ in any case, I shall say that this construction of a disinterested viewer will not be without interest to the reader. The film I am told is an avowedly patriotic one, and its semiosis does suggest a manipulation of all the signs of patriotism, not the least, the resounding call to fight for one’s motherland. Historically speaking, the call to protect the motherland sounds anachronistic. The film abounds in historical anachronisms. But that is not my focal point. I am not too interested in the construction of a historically ‘true’ picture of the period. The anachronistic details are in the service of a ‘true’ patriotism—the call to fight for the motherland as Jackson Anthony suggests.

As I returned from the theatre, a friend asked me about how the film was and I said, "If I were to sum it up in one line, I would say that it is a film with a singular lack of all feeling. "It fails as a patriotic film" I said. In turn I was told that the film was drawing large crowds to its fold. But I stick to my analysis; ‘crowds’ go to watch films for many reasons. People’s curiosity might have been aroused by the approbation given to the film by President Rajapaksa. There can be other reasons. I am also a ‘crowd.’ In speaking about crowds and crowd, and the various reasons for its failure and success, I am also thinking of ‘crowd’ as a metaphor and as a subject. What does the film mean for ‘crowds? My analysis relies rather heavily on the semiosis of the film and its place within the genre of patriotic films that we are generally used to, the semioses of the standard icons of patriotic films of the western and Indian film industries; I also wish to in turn examine the connections between the ideological bent of those films and Aba. I do not wish to get into a discussion of films like Ben Hur, Mughal e Azam, Roja and similar films that are hegemonically nationalistic and patriotic. I will for the purposes of this review merely focus on connecting the filmsemiosis, its thrust and the different registers of patriotism that are available at this current moment, politically and aesthetically.

My desire to situate the film within the genre of patriotic and heroic films is prompted by Jackson Anthony himself. At the interview, he spoke a great deal about heroism as a trait, a genre and drew parallels between Spider Man, Bat Man and the likes and Aba. Also, given the semiosis of the film, when one notices the borrowings of motifs from say a film like Lord of the Rings, the compulsion to view it as part of the genre of modern commercial/non-commercial films about heroism is amply justified. For any progressive thinker the film will pose major ideological issues. But the issues I raise are of a slightly different nature though they impinge on the imperatives of the former as well. Generically speaking, the film fails in my view, as creating a compelling aesthetic for patriotism. The rhetorical impress of the film accompanies the imperatives and prerogatives of a small ruling elite or group, in an unmediated and unqualified manner. Its failures I will hold are not dramatic or tragic. They spell the danger that is usually hinted at by the rise to success of mediocrity. The very failure of a patriotic aesthetic that I discern in the film is what is driving its success within the current moment of politics. Its ‘failure’ aesthetically and its purported success ‘politically’ underscore the growing trend of totalitarianism and fascism in the south. These may be strong words, but I am unable to find other terms to describe the culture of fear and political quietism of our times.

Patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel says Dr. Johnson. In the film we may see scoundrels but no refuge. As I left the cinema hall I was acutely puzzled. Why did it fail to evoke ‘feeling’ (for me)? At one level this has to do with the lack of a concerted ideological vision for the film. A mish mash of technological manipulations of grandeur, borrowed without a grounding principle of motif and borrowed rather arbitrarily from orientalist films and from say films like Lord of the Rings, the film fails to register any lasting identification of the viewer with the subject, the ‘motherland.’ I have been puzzling over this for about a week. The film is produced on a large canvas, with panoramic compositions of landscape (motherland?). It builds up a sense of the grandeur of the kingdom evoking awe at the ruling Sinhala dynasty, corrupt as it is; the spectacular invocations of myth and the supernatural underlines the awesomeness of the spirit of resistance. Yet, the film fails to create a lasting subject and identification either with its protagonists and young hero or with the land, purportedly oppressed and marginalized.

Why has it failed to evoke this sense of pathos at suffering and victimization? Is it the mediocre acting? The portrayal of young Aba is weak indeed, and that of the rest rather pedestrian. But the weakness cannot be attributed to the individuals’ understanding of their characters and portrayals. There is a semiotic ‘weakness’ in the film, a looseness, a glossy and uninvolved treatment of the subject that leaves one at the end of the film really cold and untouched by any of the phenomenal happenings. They are too phenomenal to make sense to a modern viewer. Let me do a more involved analysis of the film’s narrtology and its import for the modern Sri Lankan subject.

The film is linear in form, and relies on a linear narrative development. Yet, the narrativity of the film—the story telling process and the progression of the cinematic narrative-is weak; and as much as the film tries to make up for this by technological glitz, the film fails to rise to the greatness of vision that it purportedly tries to achieve. For one, the film’s call to patriotism lies outside its diegesis, outside the story within the film. The film draws upon, for an understanding of and identification with the heroism of the story, a knowledge of ‘history’, the knowledge that Aba as Pandukabaya would form the dynastic rule, bringing the native, the Yakkha and the aristocratic together into a ruling dynasty; it is in this assumption that that the pathos and the heroics of the film lie. The film relies too heavily on this knowledge and on the unmediated acceptance of this ‘truth’ of history; given this all too ready reliance, the film does little to evoke a sense of participation on the part of the audience with the life story of the hero Aba.

For me the film’s semiotic misery lies in its failure to grasp the idiom of patriotism cinematically in the construction of the modern subject as a patriotic one. A patriotic film has to work at gaining the consent of the viewer toward its ideological message. It has to centre a hero who is convincing and meaningful. Also, within the ‘democracy’ that popular film has unleashed, what is usually termed populism, consent has to be worked at through a negotiation, through a sharing of perceptions. Semiotically, the modern hero has to win the consent of the public at some level, at the level of patriotism or at the level of revolution/revolt. We no longer take a hero for granted, even one provided tailor made by ‘history.’ The tragic and the heroic have to be invented over and over to win over, to gain consent. One sees that in all the Jesus films and the Roman films applauding and extolling the virtues of ‘Hellenic’ and ‘Christian’ values. Aba supposedly works at both levels but in fact churns up a thoroughly reactionary (read ‘feudal’) idiom to couch its vision in. In comparison with other iconic films espousing patriotism and heroism, Aba remains static, undynamic in its narrative development.

What does the film hold for the film goer? He is a man of the city, the town, the village. He is a small person. Nobody cares for him any longer in this city. He is tired when he gets back from work. He has family or other material cares. He comes with disbelief to the film. The film has to centre his concerns to obtain belief. Let me elaborate on this displacement. The film places the hero as a child in the care of a community. But this hero, except for dancing and swimming in the stream and getting involved in useless displays of fighting, exhibits no trace of leadership in his character. What does the community, he of the ‘crowd’ get out of this child, this hero? Is he there as a son of this soil, the mother land? Is he the oppressed, the resistant, citizen and subject? The community apparently makes great sacrifices. But these sacrifices are neither celebrated nor mourned for in the film. The weakness in the composition of the story and the tenuousness of the link between his-story and the visual narrative makes one question the ideological basis of the patriotism involved. The film centres the young man Aba; and in its inexorable logic, destiny. Given this, it is heedless of all else, and dangerously, of the people, the oppressed.

There is a scene in the film where the King and his brothers, enraged at discovering that the prince was still alive, order the burning of all villages in order to bring the young men out and to destroy them indiscriminately. One would have expected a feeling of great emotional strain at this potentially gut wrenching sequence, at the great injustice done to the people. Yet, despite the panoramic frames and composition, or precisely because of them, the scene fails to create tension and identification.

The film’s linearity is under great strain as well. The story is nice but rather thin. Parallels to the story abound in Indian and other mythologies. One is reminded of the Krishna story. I am certain similar stories exist in the ‘Russian’ folk lore and Greek and Roman mythology. But in modern versions of Krishna, even in the most ludicrously patriotic and conventional ones, there is a concern for the people and the love between Krishna and the community is carefully detailed in song and dance. Some years ago, I saw a spectacular theatrical production of the Irish myth of ‘Baliol’; the story is almost the exact same as that of Aba. While the play rests on the spectacle and the spectacular like Aba, the play works at bringing alive a ‘folk’ idiom to construct the subject of the oppressed. In the film, the ‘folk’, the people, the natives, the Yakkhas are portrayed in a lifeless robotic manner, bereft of character and substance. The only rationale for their existence, apart from the silly antics that they take part in, is that of serving the prince in exile and protecting him.

"For the motherland"—rhetorically that is the motif that sticks. It’s a recurring cry, and is accompanied by an overpowering glossy panoramic landscape. But the landscape does not foreground oppression; it foregrounds the divine and the greatness bestowed upon the young prince by the divine. The divine does not negotiate with the people for their consent. The divine negotiates only with the rulers and the ruling dynasty. The artificiality of the figure of Pandula Brahmana and the school he runs for disciples with its Sanskrit chanting might be historically anachronistic. But that does not bother me too much.


They all jar because the depictions of these institutions reinforce the hand of a divine, of a power beyond that of the people, one that is disassociated from the people. The divine is heedless of the concerns and the welfare of the people. The strained linearity of the film relies too heavily on creating an aura of greatness around Aba but without creating a rationale for that aura, for that greatness. Heroes exist for the benefit of the people; at least in the common understanding of patriotism. But in Aba the land as motif, signifies on the glory of the prince (to be) and does not give succour to the people. Conversely, land is not an oppressed character here.

On the other hand, the film calls for an identification with history as we know it. The patriotism, failed as it is, lies in that call. It makes a call to the viewer to identify himself/ herself with the dominant narrative of (Sinhala) history, turning that history into one of aristocratic/dynastic/feudal destiny rather than that of a liberation of a people. The music score is grand, operatic and overpowering, lending to the sense of ‘unfeelingness’ that the semiotics evoke. A barren historicity predominates in the end.

Here I would like to turn my attention to the current moment of our history, the history of war making and the making of histories. The hero as Jackson Anthony says is one who fights for his motherland. In this, he is in great agreement with some of the worst scoundrels of this world, including Prabakaran. But the point I make is not about Prabakaran here. My query is about the war mongering culture besetting the country today. The call to heroism and patriotism can be looked at through an analysis of our cultural and political context and through an analysis of "Who is the modern hero." And here lies the rub—the contradictions of our times and of the film.

We are often told that the soldier is a hero and that he is a people’s hero. We are told this in excoriations by the President and by the endless stream of song and visual representation on television and in other places glorifying war. But this hero, and the sacrifices that this hero makes point to other figures who are greater heroes; leaders of the country, who are protected by the divine (and the soldier). What is the political significance of a film today that upholds the figure of a hero who is for the most part protected by the sacrifices made by other ordinary people and whose sacrifices are not even properly narrativized. What is the political significance of a hero who does not fight, but at every turn is saved by divine intervention? The film does not record the suffering of the people at any great length; its only focus is on the prince, and the need to save the prince. What is so great about this hero, who brings suffering to the people? The film’s ‘final’ signification, its meaning and meaningfulness today is part of the hegemonic undertaking of hero making as divine. Does this have a resonance with the texture of our political culture, what I call the political culture of dominance and acceptance—a political culture of increasing hostility toward democracy and the democratic principle.

Sociologists of film, like Siegfried Kracauer and others have noted the connections between German expressionism and the rise of Nazism. The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari and Nosferatu are some examples of this. Here I want to look at the salience of our film for questions of democracy. Does the film create an idiom of nobility and aristocratic splendour where heroes exist for their own sake, for their own dynastic (already existing or emerging ones) gratification? I will not ordinarily make comparisons between a visually uninspiring film like Aba and one of the most powerful visual representations of darkness and light such as Nosferatu by Murnau (1922). But am compelled to do so given the direction my review is taking: totalitarianism. In Nosferatu what we see is the collapse of the conventional notion of an accepted common or garden variety of power, the rule of law and order, which is to be undermined by dark forces. Nosferatu is prescientic in its representation of the ‘dark’ forces, with its ambiguous take on the forces of admixture of magic and science that are to envelope Germany. There is little that is prescientic about Aba. Yet, it has apparently received the acclaim and patronage of President Rajapaksa (in the sense that he organized a show for ministers as I have been informed) who today lords over an increasingly repressive political apparatus; While the might of the Rajapaksa regime might be very transient and have nothing to do with the ‘dark’ times to come, the transient idiom of power that we are accosted with today, bespeaks a hegemony of moral and ‘dynastic’ might. It bespeaks a culture of political quietism and submission that one witnesses in the days before the hey day of Nazi rule.

Political leadership today is at one level disassociated from the democratic principle. Within the culture of war and war mongering that we live in we see Prabakaran using people as human shields and the politicians of the country at the highest levels ensconcing themselves in barricaded castles and deserted streets while ordinary people face the wrath of shelling and of suicide bombers, in the north, the east and the south. The meaning of a hero has to be negotiated through this understanding of political leadership and the modern subject. The film works within this culture, extolling a non-democratic political leadership.

Let me get back to the idea of heroes. In the play Galileo Brecht discusses heroes and heroism and the challenges prompting and driving one toward heroism. Does Galileo fail in the ‘heroic’ task of challenging the authority of the Church? Who is the modern hero? The hero in Aba is of a thoroughly retrograde nature. He might belong partially to a peripheral and resistant community. But his heroic ambition is not to serve the people, but to usurp the throne. What are the challenges that we face today that calls upon us to perform heroic tasks? As an academic and a cultural activist, I look to other academics and cultural activists for an answer, a response.

Film has long been a hegemonic force in our midst. But both film and theatre have had the power to raise questions as well, about hierarchy, authority, injustice and above all, of the hegemonic and counter hegemonic work of culture. What is the task facing Galileo today? Here I am thinking of Saumya Liyanage and Nadeeka Guruge both of whom played pivotal roles in the film. Saumya Liyanage played the role of Habara, a crucial Yakkha character. Nadeeka Guruge did the score for the film. Both friends of mine on the cultural scene and persons I have long associated with progressive thinking; of challenging the system. But here they fail the test of heroism, unfortunately. As Galileo says in the play, ‘it is unfortunate we need heroes today."

Today, when people are being called traitors when they challenge authority and journalists are threatened and incarcerated for their right of assertion, we may need to think of an activism of counter-hegemony. It’s not merely political work. It is also ‘artistry.’ I shed no tears over the failures of the film. Whether it is a box office hit or not is not my concern. I know that it is not going to whip people up to sign up for the war. But I was a bit saddened to see Saumya Liyanage act the ‘savage’ in the stupid orientalist fashion of third rate Hollywood films. I recently met him at a pan university meeting and asked him about what prompted him to act in the film and why he acted in that disgusting fashion, which was not only ludicrous but also contributed to the feel of the superficiality of the film.

I would like to close this review with a note on another film, a film annoyingly patriotic, but stirringly revolutionary in its visual compass, Alexander Nevsky (1938) by Eisenstein. Alexander Nevsky is considered by most critics as one of Eisenstein’s weakest and most patriotic of films, more patriotic than Ivan the Terrible Part I. Like Aba, the depiction of the hero is rather unconvincing. But the film retains the character of the epic throughout; its cinematic language suggests a contrariness that is of epic proportions harking back to the ideological content of say Battleship Potemkin. The single hero in Alexander Nevsky might have been weak. But there was another heroic subject in the film, the people of the land. While I understand the ludicrousness of drawing parallels between Aba and Alexander Nevsky, even if it is done with the intention of undermining the value of the former, I bring in the parallel in order to elucidate my point. I also draw this parallel because of the way Jackson Anthony in the interview spoke of the film as an epic of Sri Lankan cinema. For an epic, we need an epic subject and that subject has to have meaning for our times. The hero in Alexander Nevsky is the people, the people of the land. Its landscape and panoramic scenes are devoted to foregrounding the people as a totality of subject, a collective subject. If it’s patriotic at one level at another it breaks with the Hollywood tradition of projecting a single hero. Alexander Nevsky may point toward Andrei Rublev by Tarkovsky; one can find overtones of its war scenes in Akira Kurosawa’s epic films, Ran, Throne of Blood and Kagemusha, a point little noted by most critics. Unlike Nadeeka’s resounding harmonic orchestration, Prokofiev’s haunting quizzical tone inserts a spoken idiom into the martial chording, coding, bringing out the pathetic, and the ‘folk’ as concerns of the people. One is almost tempted to say that Eisenstein produced a subversive film, exploiting the allowances made for culturalists by the Stalinist regime. Despite the grandiose claims made by Jackson Anthony about the epic stature of Aba, the film fails to rise to any such great heights. He fails to grasp both in his film making and in his later pronouncements, the contradictions inherent in the visioning of the film’s hero and the material. He hails the film as an iconic tribute to heroism and patriotism, but makes his vision for patriotism, feudal and paternalistic. Ultimately it’s mimicry that predominates, a poor mimicry of history, myth, technology and modernity.

I would like to end with one last query. What is the import of the film for a non-Sinhala person? Subtitled in English, the film invites non-Sinhala speakers too to view the film on a mass scale. I wonder here whether for a non-Sinhala speaker and a non-Sinhala person this hero fighting for the motherland could be somebody fighting against the Sri Lankan state as well? To a Tamil viewer and a bemused Tamil viewer at that, Aba may seem like a call by Prabakaran and the LTTE to fight for the motherland. Tamils have only a scanty knowledge of ancient Sinhala history; and the story of Yakkhas, a marginal minority, fighting for their motherland, overthrowing an oppressive rule might sound a positive chord in the nationalist mind. The motherland concept has long caught the imagination of Tamil nationalism. But such a reading, though quite plausible, is not something I actively seek to promote as this would not in any way be subversive or radical. Such a reading begs the same kind of questions raised above.

But I am not remarking on this facetiously. It raises an important related question. What is the mother land, and who are our heroes? Where are they today? How do we perform heroism today in a time of war, abductions, murder, displacements, forced child conscription, caste, class and gender dominations and the increasing hold of a totalitarian regime on the lives of ordinary people. How do we remake heroes who are in active struggle against authoritarianism and oppression?

(The Writer is a senior Lecture the Department of English in the University of Peradeniya )- Sri Lanka Guardian