Vijay Kumar's Uriyadi

This episode is brought to you by MUBI, a curated streaming service showing exceptional films from around the globe. Every day, MUBI premieres a new film, each one thoughtfully hand-picked. From new directors to award-winners. Beautiful, interesting, incredible movies—there is always something new to discover. In this episode, we talk about Vijay Kumar's 2016 film Uriyadi. A debut film as actor, writer and director for Vijay Kumar the film had several debutantes in its cast along with Mime Gopi, Citizen Sivakumar among others. The film, set in and around an engineering college outside Trichy, touched upon many issues like caste outfits, caste violence, clashing ideologies and transformation of such outfits into political politics. The film is visceral in its depiction of violence and though it does not name names, Tamil Nadu has a storied history for us to join the dots and talk about the various topics associated with the theme of the film. Joining Aditya and Anantha for this episode are Niranjana, urban researcher working on everyday life of cities at London School of Economics and Political Science and Vignesh, researcher at King's College London focusing on democracy and politics of mobilization. Along with the thoughts on the film we also talk about the history of caste outfits in Tamil Nadu, the mobilization of such organizations, history of Vanniyar Sangam and PMK as an example and how the Dravidian movement morphed through the decades. You can try MUBI for a hugely discounted price by signing up on https://mubi.com/theotherbanana or click here. Participants: Niranjana Vignesh Aditya Anantha Episode edited by Anantha.