Both a love song and a political statement, the “Manjanathi Puranam” refuses to choose between artistic beauty and political resistance, insisting they’re inseparable.
Why Are We Surprised By Dalit Love Stories?
When Santhosh Narayanan’s “Manjanathi Puranam” plays in Mari Selvaraj’s Karnan (2021), it presents something that should be utterly ordinary: a love story. A man recalls a woman who captivated him, whose beauty he compares to hibiscus flowers, whose gaze made him swoon. Yet the song’s existence in mainstream Tamil cinema, told through parai melam (a historically stigmatized drum), oppari (a public mourning form) structures, and gaana-inflected vocals rooted in working-class communities, is radical. This reveals a troubling question: why is a Dalit love story, told in Dalit aesthetic forms, considered subversive at all? The answer lies in how thoroughly caste hierarchy has policed not just who gets to love, but who gets to narrate love —and in what aesthetic language.
The deeper subversion of “Manjanathi Puranam” operates on multiple levels. First, the collision of form and content: “puranam” traditionally narrates stories of gods and brahminical myths, yet here it recounts a Dalit romance. Second, the insistence on using cultural forms marked as “polluting” by caste hierarchy to express universal human emotion. Third, and most significantly, the refusal to center trauma in favor of celebrating life, desire, and memory. This article examines how the song refuses “oppression porn” narratives, asserting instead that Dalit communities deserve to tell any story — including love stories — on their own terms, in their own voice.
“Manjanathi Puranam” functions as an elegy — a form dedicated to remembering and celebrating a life, not merely mourning death. The distinction matters. Elegies in literary tradition honour the deceased by emphasizing their vitality, their impact on the living, and the beauty they brought into the world. The song recalls Manjanathi’s enchanting gaze, her beauty like a sembaruthi (hibiscus) flower, and the physical intimacy of cloth on the shoulder, leaving marks “like garlands” on the skin. These are images of life being lived — desire, play, sensuality, connection.
This stands in stark contrast to “oppression porn,” which reduces marginalized communities to spectacles of suffering for privileged consumption. Films trafficking in oppression porn show Dalit bodies only as labouring, beaten, humiliated — never loving, never desiring, never at play. The audience leaves feeling enlightened about injustice, while the community remains flattened into a state of victimhood. “Manjanathi Puranam” refuses this transaction. It says: before you consume our trauma, witness our joy. Before you pity us, recognize our capacity for beauty and tenderness.
The Manjanathi tree itself — referenced in the community’s name and the woman’s name — carries symbolic weight. In Tamil folk tradition, certain trees are considered medicinal, helpful, protective, and feminine. By centring this imagery, the song draws on genealogies of care and protection within Dalit communities themselves, not seeking validation from brahminical frameworks.
The Puranam Paradox: Sacred Narratives and Who Gets to Tell Them
The choice to call this a “puranam” is audacious. Puranas in Hindu tradition are ancient texts that narrate the deeds of the gods — Vishnu, Shiva, and Brahma — and their avatars. They establish cosmic order, divine genealogies, and the very structure of dharma. They are brahminical texts, written in Sanskrit, transmitted through upper-caste priestly classes. To call a Dalit love story a “puranam” is to make several radical claims simultaneously.
First, it asserts that Dalit lives and loves are as worthy of mythic status as the exploits of gods. Second, it challenges who has the authority to narrate sacred stories. Third, it creates what we might call a “secular puranam”— a origin story not of deities but of a community, told not to reinforce caste hierarchy but to honor those pushed to its margins.
Films trafficking in oppression porn show Dalit bodies only as labouring, beaten, humiliated — never loving, never desiring, never at play. The audience leaves feeling enlightened about injustice, while the community remains flattened into a state of victimhood. “Manjanathi Puranam” refuses this transaction. It says: before you consume our trauma, witness our joy. Before you pity us, recognize our capacity for beauty and tenderness.
Yet the song pairs this brahminical genre with the parai, the drum most associated with Dalit death rituals, historically stigmatized as “inauspicious” and “polluting.” This collision is the subversion. The parai doesn’t accompany stories of Vishnu; it accompanies Manjanathi and Emaraja. The sound marked as contaminating becomes the sound of the sacred.
This connects to complex negotiations within Dalit communities about caste identity itself. The line “we gave away our caste to the gods” (or “sacrificed our castes”) suggests a fraught relationship: perhaps caste was never divinely ordained but imposed, perhaps gods didn’t create caste, but humans weaponized divine authority to justify hierarchy. By creating a puranam that centers Dalit lives without seeking brahminical legitimacy, the song enacts a reclamation — these stories don’t need divine sanction to matter.
Kuladeivams vs. Mainstream Gods: Spiritual Autonomy
Karnan frequently references kuladeivams — folk deities specific to particular communities, regions, and lineages. These deities often carry weapons not for cosmic battles but for protection — guarding their devotees from immediate, earthly threats. This stands in stark contrast to the sanitized, universalized gods of brahminical Hinduism, increasingly removed from the everyday struggles of marginalized communities.
Kuladeivams represent spiritual autonomy. They don’t require brahmin priests as intermediaries. Their worship happens in village squares, under trees, at crossroads — not in temples barred to Dalits by untouchability. They’re healers, protectors, witnesses to community histories that dominant narratives erase. In Western contexts, we might compare this to how “witches” — often women with healing knowledge — were persecuted, their wisdom demonized. In Tamil contexts, folk deities and their associated practices have been marked as “superstitious” or “backward” by both colonial modernity and upper-caste hinduization efforts.
By situating “Manjanathi Puranam” within a film rich with kuladeivam references, the song participates in this reclamation of spiritual and narrative authority. The puranam doesn’t narrate brahminical gods; it narrates people whose community likely has its own kuladeivam, its own protected spiritual genealogy.
Form as Argument: The Ballad’s Political Work
In Tamil poetic tradition, songs often begin with their form — the meter, the structure, the mode. Form isn’t decorative; it’s foundational, carrying meaning before a single word is spoken. “Manjanathi Puranam” announces itself through its sonic architecture: the driving parai rhythm, the oppari’s keening vocal lines, the gaana’s call-and-response energy. The form is the argument.
The ballad/elegy tradition in poetry emphasizes lyrical qualities: descriptions of nature, intimate detail, the play of metaphor. “Manjanathi Puranam” does this work: the hibiscus flower, the pecking eyes like a bird, the cloth on the shoulder, the marks on the skin like garland traces. This is sophisticated poetic craft operating within folk and working-class musical traditions, refusing the false binary between “high” literary culture and “low” folk forms.
This matters because tragedy — the genre Karnan as a film engages — has historically been considered a “highbrow” form. Classical tragedy involves protagonists trapped by fate, finding no way out from irreconcilable conflicts. It’s associated with western elite theatrical traditions. Yet here, tragedy is told through parai and oppari, through gaana energy and folk imagery. The form democratizes tragedy, insisting that working-class Dalit communities experience conflicts just as profound, loves just as worthy of elevated artistic treatment.
The art used to subvert is itself subversive. The parai isn’t just delivering a resistant message; its very sound in this context resists. The oppari structure isn’t just mourning Manjanathi; it’s claiming public sonic space that caste hierarchy tries to silence.
Contamination and Mobility: The Cholera Subtext
The song concludes with a grim revelation that Emaraja’s beloved was taken away from him. Not by some cosmic foe or a caste tyrant, but cholera. In Karnan, the village’s lack of bus service becomes a central conflict. This isn’t merely infrastructure — it’s about mobility, both literal and social. Communities denied transportation are denied access to education, healthcare, and economic opportunity. They’re kept immobile, contained.
Historically, Dalit communities were spatially segregated under the logic of “pollution” — upper castes couldn’t risk “contamination” from proximity. Cholera and other diseases were often blamed on Dalit neighbourhoods, justifying further segregation and neglect. The lack of mobility enforces this containment.
“Manjanathi Puranam” refuses contamination logic. The love story isn’t quarantined or hidden. The parai — the “polluting” sound — plays openly, loudly, centrally. The song insists on claiming space, sonic and social, rejecting the idea that Dalit cultural forms contaminate “respectable” cinema. The very act of playing parai in a mainstream film’s love song breaks the containment and demands mobility across aesthetic hierarchies.
Gender Dynamics: The Manjanathi Tree and Feminine Care
The Manjanathi tree, as feminine, helpful, and protective, introduces gender dimensions worth exploring. In Tamil culture, trees often have gendered associations — certain trees are maternal, sheltering, and life-giving. Naming both the community and the woman after such a tree suggests genealogies of care, protection, and sustenance that flow through feminine labour and presence.
Yet the song is sung from Emaraja’s perspective—a man mourning lost love. The dynamics of care operate in multiple directions: Manjanathi “pecking” with her eyes suggests agency, playfulness, and power to captivate. She isn’t passive. The marks left on skin suggest mutual touch, reciprocal intimacy.
This disrupts both casteist stereotypes (Dalit women as only labouring bodies) and patriarchal framings (women as objects rather than subjects of desire). Manjanathi is simultaneously vulnerable (she dies young) and powerful (she’s remembered as light, an enchantress, the force that makes someone swoon). The feminine here holds complexity — protector and protected, mortal and mythic.
There’s also potential to examine how mainstream Carnatic music traditions have sanitized erotica, sublimating desire into devotional metaphor. Folk forms like oppari and gaana retain more direct expressions of longing, grief, and sensuality. By centering these forms, “Manjanathi Puranam” refuses the sanitization, insisting on embodied, frank expressions of love and loss.
“We Cannot Take Away What We Always Had”: On Surprise and Normalization
Perhaps the most profound question the song raises is this: why does a Dalit love story surprise us? Love isn’t a privilege granted by caste hierarchy — it’s a human experience everyone has always had. Yet dominant narratives have been so effective at erasing Dalit interiority, Dalit joy, Dalit romance, that when these appear in mainstream cinema, they register as novel, even subversive.
This is the insidiousness of oppression: it trains us to expect only certain stories from certain communities. We’ve been conditioned to see Dalit people as victims, labourers, symbols of injustice—rarely as lovers, dreamers, people whose inner emotional lives matter independent of their oppression. When “Manjanathi Puranam” centres desire and memory, we recognize something both utterly ordinary and somehow radical.
The song asks: Why is this out of lane? Why am I surprised that Dalit people love deeply, mourn publicly, and create beauty to honour their dead? These have always been human universals. The surprise itself reveals how thoroughly dominant culture has worked to silence these narratives, denying space for Dalit voices to tell their own stories in their own aesthetic languages.
Conclusion: Their Voice, Their Narratives
“Manjanathi Puranam” succeeds as subversive art because it operates on multiple registers simultaneously. It’s a love song and a political statement. It’s an elegy and a reclamation. It’s rooted in specific Dalit cultural forms while expressing universal human emotion. It refuses to choose between artistic beauty and political resistance — it insists they’re inseparable.
The parai proclaims. The oppari mourns and testifies. The puranam framework elevates. Together, they assert aesthetic sovereignty: Dalit communities don’t need permission to tell any story they choose, in the musical languages they’ve developed, through instruments they’ve played for generations. Love, loss, desire, memory — these aren’t privileges to be granted. They’re human experiences that have always existed, and “Manjanathi Puranam” demands they be recognized as such.
The song’s greatest subversion may be its refusal to justify itself. It doesn’t argue for its right to exist. It simply exists — beautifully, powerfully, unapologetically. In a cultural context that has systematically silenced Dalit voices and stigmatized Dalit art forms, that existence alone is revolutionary.
