Material Girl

Some thoughts on Nandini from the Ponniyin Selvan movies

Spoilers ahead for both parts of PS the movies

As I watched Nandini scheme, smile snugly and seduce, I kept going back to Ramya Krishnan as Neelambari in Padayappa. Neelambari to a certain generation of Tamizh and quasi-Tamizh kids defined the ‘villi.’ Smart, beautiful and vengeful. The wrong woman. But she was also the wronged woman. The woman who would kill to get what she wants. But she is also the woman who kills herself, promising to take her revenge in the next life.

Shrayana Bhattacharya, in the fantastic ‘Desperately Seeking Shah Rukh’ notes how the Indian celluloid woman is caught fitting into three rigid boxes - she is either the Beauty, Bitch or the Bechari. The Beauty, apart from dancing in scanty chiffon sarees in exotic locations, may have a screen time of about 8 minutes where her job description is summed up in the words “look pretty.” The Bechari, usually a sister or a single mother, might be victims of anything from acid attacks to rapes. No surprise then sometimes, that a female watcher ends up rooting for the Bitch. At least she’s interesting. And Neelambari, with her salt-and-pepper hair in a proud updo, clicking away in heels on a spiral stairway, was fascinating. Nandini, glowing, in shiny textile and sharp eyeliner, seems like the mythical mother of Neelambari.

But the Nandini/Neelambari comparison does begin to crack down when we look at what really occupies the mental spaces of these women. Neelambari is the jilted woman, locking herself up for 18 years in a heartbreak-induced self-exile. But Nandini is more than just a woman scorned. Her desires are explicitly more material. In a fantastic scene in the first movie, she imagines her younger self, the very same girl who was chased out of the kingdom by the princess Kundavai, sitting on the imperial throne, poised in royal elan. When her still-hurting former lover suggests they leave everything for a life together, she resists. She wants the jewels, the silk and the palaces. I do not believe that there has been a clearer, more graceful articulation of a woman’s desire for material possessions in the history of Tamizh celluloid women. She even appears to move other men around her - from Chola leaders to a vanquished Pandya tribe - to achieve those desires. One roots for her not only with relation to the epic story, but also to simply show there are new ways to be a woman onscreen.

Yet, this difference does not save Nandini from Neelambari’s fate. Towards the end, something shifts in the narrative weaved around her. A woman who seemed to be playing peekaboo with male power, suddenly seems to succumb to it. All the power that we had previously seen her simmer with seems almost cruelly snatched away with her. She is the Bitch, she is the Beauty, but now is also the Bechari. The screen does not know what to do with her any longer, even as the men who were her accomplices till now get their redemption arc.

And there, in the waters where Nandini dies, dissolves every interesting possibility of women on the Tamizh screen.