Experts believe that caste politics and Tamil cinema have a symbiotic relationship, since film as a medium often constitutes a cultural sphere that contains representations of caste and patriarchal relationships. The tragic end to the love story of Divya and Ilavarasan and the related incidents of violence and the anti-Dalit campaign that preceded the events may necessitate a close look at onscreen depiction of inter-caste based love relationships in Tamil films, especially if it involves a Dalit protagonist.

One of the important aspects of screen narrative pertains to how idioms of caste are represented. Films have an important role and life outside cinema halls. Anand Pandian, Associate Professor, Department of Anthropology, Johns Hopkins University, argues that films “have come to provide a language for the social life of kinship and attachment.”

Kaadhal (2004) – a low budget film about a romance between a couple of unspecified castes who are nevertheless identifiable as a girl from a dominant caste in Madurai and a Dalit boy – is one such example the narrative excludes the possibility that love between a Dalit boy and an intermediate caste girl could blossom into a happily married life. In the film, when the couple elope to Chennai, the director creates clever plot devices to ensure that they are not shown sleeping together in the three nights they spend in Chennai. The third day they get married, but the heroine’s relatives separate them and the boy is beaten to pulp. Here, caste purity is kept intact by denying the possibility of conjugality. The film ends with the heroine, an unhappily wedded mother pillion-riding her same-caste husband, spotting the hero as a mad man at a traffic signal.

Dalit writer Stalin Rajangam says that although the central narrative of film Kaadhal (2004) and later Paruthi Veeran (2007) are supportive of the idea of love marriage, they operate on a different plane of social understanding when examined from a different angle. The films have authentic markers which glorify a particular caste’s subculture and also cleverly depict that inter-caste marriage is not a possible reality between the dominant and Dalit castes.

Cinematic offerings that closely adhere to the subcultures of intermediate castes have not only provided a framework for discussing caste, but also a template by which dominant castes have sought to reinforce their dominance, according to Hugo Gorringe, Senior Lecturer, University of Edinburgh. One could see a relationship between the portrayal of intermediate caste valour on the silver screen and the mobilisation of these castes around such concepts in the political sphere.

In the film Bharathi Kannamma (1997), which came during a time when large-scale violence and caste clashes rocked southern Tamil Nadu, is a story of a dominant caste girl falling for a Dalit boy who works in their home.

The film ends with the heroine committing suicide as she is neither able to break the patriarchal nor caste code and the hero, a Dalit who is unable to bear the loss, jumps into the pyre.

The recent hit Kumki (2012), a story involving love between an elephant herdsman and a girl from a traditional hill tribe that preserves caste purity and tradition at any cost also reiterated that inter-caste marriages are not healthy for society and the film’s narrative sends out a message that it would be disastrous to do such a thing. The film’s reviews did not highlight this aspect of preserving tradition against modernity through caste rigidity.

In fact, Pattali Makkal Katchi founder S.Ramadoss had appreciated the movie for its narrative and theme against inter-caste love marriage.

Research Scholar, A. Jaganathan of Madurai Kamaraj University, who has worked on caste in Tamil films says this trend has persisted for long.

“Films which have Dalits as male protagonists always end with the hero’s death, and he dies to prove his sincerity in love, the fact that gets hidden here is that by showing the non-mixing of blood with sacrifice, caste purity is kept intact.”

Some of them glorify particular caste’s subculture, while others uphold caste purity