Pongal, Parasakthi, and the Fear of the Spoken Word
Pongal.
My second favourite festival and my third favourite holiday period.
My earliest Pongal memory is an உடுக்கை (damaru), a red two-headed drum small enough to fit into my palm and large enough to fit into everyone else’s headache. On Bhogi day, I would run around enthusiastically beating it, only for it to be regulated by my parents and relatives. Silence, I was made to understand then, is also an integral part of culture.
As I grew older, Pongal revealed a different temptation. For four days, Bhogi, Pongal, Maatu Pongal, and Kaanum Pongal, television channels competed in the noble mission of showing ten films per channel. I remember maintaining an A4 sheet with a handwritten timetable of films across channels, tracking what I watched and what I missed. School conversations after the holidays revolved around two questions: how many films did you watch, and which ones did you miss?
Eventually, television gave way to theatres. Twice, once in 2016 and again in 2023, I watched four films back-to-back during the Pongal period. Doctors called it irresponsible. The body agreed. But the heart refused to listen.
Which brings me to Pongal 2026, when the conversations were defined as much by absence as by presence. The cuts and changes in Parasakthi (2026) and the complete non-release of Jananayagan. Two other films, Vaa Vaathiyaar and Thalaivar Thambi Thalaimaiyil, stepped in to occupy the gap, but conversations in person and in WhatsApp groups were firmly centred on the Central Board of Film Certification. Ever present. Always silent. An integral part of our culture.
Summer
The CBFC, in its present form, traces its origins to the Cinematograph Act of 1952. A pivotal year. In Tamil Nadu, it marked the release of Parasakthi. In India, it marked the moment independent India’s first elected government under Jawaharlal Nehru took office. These events would come to shape Tamil Nadu and Indian public discourse for decades.
But this discourse was not shaped overnight. Its roots lay in the years immediately before them. The real drama unfolded between 26 January 1950, when the Constitution came into force, and 18 June 1951, when the First Amendment was passed. During this brief period, courts repeatedly struck down laws that restricted speech and affirmed that the individual, not the executive, lay at the constitutional centre. Food shortages, inflation, and low life expectancy were daily realities, but for a short while, citizens and the press possessed an expansive, near-absolute freedom of speech and a right to question authority.
The Congress leadership of the early 1950s was navigating an unimaginably difficult transition from colonial rule to self-governance. Jawaharlal Nehru was, in many ways, a caretaker prime minister. I do not envy his position. But the most precious inheritance of that moment was not a leader, even one as towering as Nehru. It was the Constitution, and its promise that the individual would stand above the State.
Power, however, is rarely patient.
Once tasted, it is intoxicating.
It makes stewards forget that they are not kings.
Autumn
The First Amendment reflected the State’s emerging discomfort with unrestrained dissent. Over time, this discomfort would echo across political lines, manifesting later in the authoritarian tendencies of Indira Gandhi and, decades on, in a different ideological register under Narendra Modi. States, too, would learn the same lesson. The executive and the legislature would increasingly assert themselves above the judiciary, the press, and ultimately, the citizen.
Cinema was never far from this struggle.
Marmayogi became the first film in independent India to receive an ‘A’ certificate, officially due to the presence of a ghost. Unofficially, one could argue that the real spectre haunting the establishment was cinema itself. The film would go on to cement the stardom of M. G. Ramachandran, a figure who would later translate cinematic devotion into political power.
C. Rajagopalachari, or Rajaji, occupies a complicated place in this story. A constitutionalist, a scholar, and the author of beloved English retellings of the Mahabharata and Ramayana, he later came to support restrictions on free speech during his time as Home Minister. Under his chief ministership in Madras State, the government requested the re-certification of Parasakthi months after its release. The film starred a young Sivaji Ganesan and was written by M. Karunanidhi, a future chief minister who understood cinema’s power as well as anyone in Indian politics.
Tamil Nadu would remain a persistent irritant to the Union government during this period. Anti-Hindi agitations, beginning in the 1930s and resurfacing forcefully after independence, challenged attempts at linguistic and cultural homogenisation.
These protests were not simply about language. They were about the right to speak, dissent, and exist without imposition.
The political consequences were lasting. After 1967, no Congress government would comfortably command power in Tamil Nadu. The State’s politics would be shaped for decades by leaders who understood cinema intimately and who would, in turn, attempt to manage it once in power.
Knowing the potency of the medium however did not make them immune to the temptation to control it.
Winter
Seventy-five years after the First Amendment, the fear of the spoken word persists.
Governments across eras and ideologies have sought to discipline speech. Commercial radio news remains restricted. Advertising is withdrawn from critical newspapers. Films and series are delayed, cut, or stalled. Actors, directors, and writers, along with their families, are hounded. The message is consistent.
Freedom of speech and expression is treated not as a right, but as a permission.
The digital age complicates this further. Social media has undeniably expanded the range of voices, but it has also blurred the line between speech and incitement. When outrage is engineered for reach and attention becomes fragmented, the State finds new justifications for intervention.
Trust between the Indian State and its citizens has eroded steadily since the early 1950s, and today it feels especially fragile.
Spring
Pongal is a festival of trust. It marks the return of warmth, the burning of what no longer serves us, and the faith that what we sow will return. It is an act of trust between nature and humans, and the உடுக்கை, which predates organised religion, sounds the arrival of hope.
These days, I do not hear an உடுக்கை anymore, either during or long after the festival period has ended. The silence is deafening. The silence is telling. Silence is an integral part of culture, I remember from my younger days.
As Tamil Nadu heads into elections later this year, silence will be sought after in everyday life. But it is the silence of political parties, when confronted with choices before them, that should define our voting.
Will they treat cinema as propaganda, as threat, or as conversation?
Citizens should not demand agreement from every film they watch. What we should demand instead is predictability in certification, transparency in objection, timeliness in decision-making, and the freedom to appeal without turning the process itself into punishment.
Will political parties uphold the right to speak, dissent, and exist without imposition, for supporters and opponents alike?
A democracy survives only as long as those in power remember that they are stewards, not kings.
And cinema, inconvenient and unruly as it is, and all of us whose lives are inextricably intertwined with it, for better and worse, will and should keep reminding them.
