The gender-fluid struggle

Thirty minutes into the film, the protagonist of Harikatha Prasanga (Chronicles Of Hari), in a moment of quiet contemplation, asks a fellow stage performer: “Who am I? I play the role of a woman at night and sleep the entire day. When I am supposed to be a man? The eponymous character’s existential crisis emerging from this self enquiry forms the basis of Ananya Kasaravalli’s debut Kannada feature that casts light on gender-fluidity through an ancient folk theatre form. Since its inception in 13th century AD, Yakshagana (the song of the demigods), popular in coastal Karnataka, has featured men essaying the roles of women.

A film within a film, Harikatha, was part of the MAMI festival and will be screened at the 47th International Film Festival of India to be held in Goa. It’s a vehicle through which the 32-year-old Kasaravalli traverses the mindscape of a gifted artiste who becomes the victim of an oppressive patriarchal society. “Hari is not a transgender. He is a human being who is comfortable both as a man and a woman. He doesn’t fit into the binaries of gender,” explains the graduate from LV Prasad Film and TV Academy.

In the film, Hari’s self-doubts crop up for the first time when his would-be bride’s father rejects him for being a Yakshagana performer. Heartbroken, Hari visits a sex worker, which adds to his confusion. Meanwhile, he cuts his long hair and tries to cast himself in a male role only to be rebuffed by his theatre group’s director who wants to capitalise on Hari’s on-stage popularity as a woman. Finally, in an act of rebellion against society, he discards men’s clothes and drapes a sari.

Hari’s struggle to find his identity is compounded in a male-dominated system that views him with suspicion and anger. “It’s almost Kafkaesque in the sense that Hari too, like Gregor Samsa in Metamorphosis, is crushed by an identity crisis,” says Kasaravalli. The hostility he faces is borne out of society’s all-round rejection of a person who doesn’t fit the conventional gender role. “Gender is a performance linked to a human being’s perception of oneself,” says the director. But, in Harikatha, Kasaravalli also questions this hostility and tries to raise awareness about such marginal people who fall through the cracks and fade into oblivion.

The film looks at Hari through the eyes of the people once associated with him to highlight several shades of his character. In these personal accounts, he comes across as a bundle of contradictions. Some found him mischievous and untrustworthy, a few considered him talented. But nobody actually knew Hari.

The film is deliberately open-ended because Hari’s struggles are far from over. “As the mystery over Hari’s disappearance lingers, the travails of people like Hari continues to remind us how insensitive we are towards fellow human beings. “Is Hari’s gender-fluidity a crime for which he was castigated?” asks Kasaravalli to underscore how society’s rigidity and calcified beliefs ends up destroying people like Hari. She also points out that our mythologies and scriptures are populated by characters who can’t be called either men or women. “Towards the end of Harikatha..., a Yakshagana performance shows Amba’s confrontation with Bhishma. In Mahabharata, the former returns as the transvestite Shikhandi to kill the patriarch of the Kaurava clan. “It means that some of these people were powerful enough to bring down mighty warriors,” she says.

Kasaravalli is effusive in praise for Shrunga Vasudevan who plays Hari. Vasudevan is a theatre actor associated with Ranga Shankara, a noted repertory in Bangalore. “He didn’t know how to dance in the Yakshagana style, but he mastered it to deliver a sterling performance,” says the director.