Vaadivaasal Reimagined: How a Jallikattu Tale Became a Graphic Novel of Tamil Pride and Politics

The traditional Tamil bull-taming sport of jallikattu is integrally linked to the cultural politics of Tamil Nadu. When this review was being written, the Tamil Nadu Deputy Chief Minister Udhayanidhi Stalin had just laid the foundation stone for a new jallikattu arena near Tiruchy.

Film actor Suriya and Tamil film director Vetrimaaran recently announced that they are to start filming their adaptation of C.S. Chellappa’s 1949 novella, centred around the sport. In this context, the recent publication of a graphic novel adaptation of the novella comes as no surprise.

Appupen, nom de plume of George Mathen, the Bengaluru-based comics artist (Moonward: Stories from Halahala, The Snake and the Lotus, Dream Machine: AI and the Real World), has created the graphics based on acclaimed writer Perumal Murugan’s script. The surprise may be in the collaboration itself. Appupen is known for satirical comics like Rashtrayana and this adaptation of a Tamil literary work is a first for him.

Murugan, on the other hand, is an established Tamil writer of works like One Part Woman and Poonachi: Or the Story of a Black Goat. The role of a comics writer is a new one for him as well. It is somewhat like a supergroup rock band, a well-known writer teaming up with a well-known graphic novelist. The expectation is that such a team will produce the best possible results. It was put together by Kannan Sundaram, editor and publisher of Kalachuvadu Publications, which owns the rights to the novella. Sundaram had republished the novella in the early 2000s.

The agitations in Tamil Nadu against the banning of jallikattu in the 2010s no doubt gave a new lease of life to Chellappa’s novel and has partly led to this graphic novel adaptation. Murugan has had a close literary association with Chellappa, having edited a selection of his stories and written an introduction to it. Chellappa’s influential Tamil literary magazine Ezhuthu (Writing) was formative in Murugan’s own literary evolution.

Speaking at Vaadivaasal’s launch in Bengaluru, Murugan mentioned that Chellappa had told him once that he was inspired by Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea, but added that Chellappa’s novella bears no relation to Hemingway’s work. Indeed, The Old Man and the Sea was published in 1952, and Vaadivaasal was published three years earlier. Nevertheless, one can find connections between the two, given that both use the human-animal relationship in symbolic ways.

A jallikattu story

The entire story takes place in one afternoon at a jallikattu event. The title refers to the name of the narrow gate through which the bulls enter the arena. In the novel, everything is going on as usual except that one of the contenders for the prize, Pichi, is nursing wounded pride. His father had been gored to death by the bull Kaari, and Pichi wants to avenge his father’s death. The story follows this premise to its conclusion.

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The story is initially told in the omniscient narrator’s voice. It is only on the seventh page that the voices of the characters emerge. There are voices of the spectators too: the last couple of word balloons belong to the anonymous crowd. There is also the figure of an old man, who acts as witness and well-wisher to the protagonist.

The old man is an intriguing character. He appears to manipulate the players by taunting Pichi’s rival Murugu, the zamindar’s man. He physically holds back Pichi’s friend Maruthan to allow Pichi to confront a bull that he knows Pichi would be able to subdue.

So, there are too many voices—the narrator’s, the crowd’s, the old man’s. Pichi’s motivations are mediated via these voices, and so are the bull’s, so to speak. It turns the reader also into an anonymous spectator, slightly removed from the thick of action. Given that at least a third of the book is the bullfight, this narrative approach might wear the reader down. What keeps the narrative moving is Pichi’s relentless focus on winning the contest.

One spectator who is not anonymous is the zamindar, though he too is left unnamed. There is no mention of caste, even of the protagonist Pichi. Traditionally, the Thevar community has patronised the sport. Thevars, classified as Other Backward Classes, are a significant and dominant social group in Tamil politics. The zamindar can be assumed to be of that group.

Pichi’s fight is against the zamindar’s prized bull, Kaari. The bull remains an ambiguous metaphor. One can easily associate it with the zamindar, but that is too simplistic. The animal does have a mind of its own, and Appupen’s drawing emphasises that. Whose pride does the animal really symbolise? Or, does it bring out the animal in the human?

Pride and honour

To keep the action visually interesting, the artist has chosen to freeze iconic frames of the bullfight, rather than emphasise motion. Therefore, a commonly used comics technique of drawing action lines (or “speed lines”) is employed sparingly. Here one must comment on the choice of black & white for the comics.

While it can be justified as an aesthetic choice, as Appupen said during the Bengaluru launch, it is even more important as an economic choice since it makes graphic novels affordable. That way, the book is a model for future graphic adaptations of the jewels of Indian literature.

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Another seemingly deliberate aesthetic omission relates to the use of sound effects. The use of inventive onomatopoeic text to visually represent sound has been a unique hallmark of comics. The lack of sound effects, even when drums are beating, also creates a certain distance here. One can speculate as to why this has been done.

Sound effects in comics were seen as a kind of juvenile technique by those who wanted to produce comics for an adult readership, particularly in the Anglosphere. When serious graphic novels began to be produced in the West in the 1980s, the minimal use or complete omission of sound effects was one of the ways in which comics tried to self-consciously present itself as a medium for adults. Vaadivaasal seems to follow this trend.

In the end, pride and honour are strong themes in the book, and they extend into the cultural politics of Tamil Nadu. The PETA (People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals) case against jallikattu in the Supreme Court played out, as in this story, as a contest of hurt pride. This pride, of course, is all male. Needless to say, there are no women characters in the book.

Bharath Murthy is a comics author, and editor-publisher of the independent comics label, Comix India.