Leena Manimekalai on why Maadathy is not a docu

When filmmaker Leena Manimekalai, director of Maadathy, An Unfairy Tale, learnt about the Puthirai Vannar community, she was in shock. Hailing from Tamil Nadu, she was aware of the caste prejudices prevalent in India, but the fact that there is a whole community that is not just ‘untouchable’ but also ‘unseeable’, scared her out of her wits. It is believed that if an upper caste

Hindu

even sees someone from the Puthirai Vannar community, they will lose their purity. While people from the community are forced to wash clothes of other Dalits, the dead and the menstruating women, they are allowed to work or venture out of their houses only during sundown, when people from upper castes are not out.

“Their situation pained me so much that I went to their villages and started shooting them randomly. Initially my idea was to make a documentary out of the footages. But as time passed, I realised that the content was exactly suited for a fiction. Their lives, folklores and cultures are shrouded in mystery and only a fiction film could capture the true essence,” said Leena. She added that her film is a tale about a young girl who grew up in the slave caste group and how she was immortalised as their local deity, Maadathy.. Besides their lives, Leena was attracted to the topic for another reason – the women of the community who are subjected to rampant sexual harassment. “Since the community does not have any social security, their women are being tortured every now and then. So, I couldn’t stop myself from making the film,” she signed off.