Don’t take this bull by the horns

Gaurav Kanthwal

Thanks to the Supreme Court ban and subsequent protests in Tamil Nadu, Jallikattu is now the most talked about indigenous sport in India.

More thanks are due to Jallikattu enthusiasts, PETA activists and successive state governments, as their support and dissent resuscitated a lesser known sport that was dying a decade ago. It will survive, at least in the public consciousness, for another decade.

It has turned out to be a win-win situation for every concerned party, except the hapless bull.

It is fascinating to see how a state which has seen rapid urbanisation, 50 per cent — the highest in the country in past one decade — is so passionate about its rural sport.

The bigger issue though is not of the survival of an indigenous sport or the bull itself, it is the recurrent boiling over of Tamil alienation in one form or the other.

N Sathiya Moorthy’s Jallikattu: A New Symbol of Tamil Angst analyses this dissatisfaction and the socio-political reasons behind it. Quite expectedly, anti-Hindi agitations in the past, protests over state’s demand over the Cauvery waters’ dispute, Mullaperiyar Dam storage issue, Kudankulam protests and the Sri Lankan Tamils’ cause dominate this analytical narrative.

Jallikattu roughly translated as bull-taming — as opposed to Spain’s bull-fighting — now evokes interest all over India, though for different reasons, but a few decades ago it was just a martial sport with its base restricted to some central and southern parts of the state. It was mostly identified with the martial community of Mukkulathores, an erstwhile ruling class, for whom it was a sort of show of their valour.

Why Jallikattu ban touches a raw chord with the Tamilians across the board is because it denies them the festivities integrally associated with Pongal. And anything associated with Pongal has great economic, emotional and psychological significance and value for Tamils.

Moorthy claims that Jallikattu tradition is some 2,000 years old, there are references to this martial sport in Sangam literature. Numerous films, short stories and poems have been written on this subject by many celebrated Tamil authors and poets since. Vaadivaasal, a modern literary classic by CS Chellappa (1949), is an iconic Tamil novella about the hurt pride of a man and an animal.

The author’s passionate description of January 2017 protest at the Marina Beach leaves no one in doubt where his sympathies lie on this emotional issue, but at the same time, Moorthy admits that over a period of time the practice (bull taming) may have denigrated into some kind of cruelty.

It is also the failure of state government and organisers why they could not enforce the regulations for human handling of the animals and orderly conduct of the game as outlined in the provisions of the law, he says.

The author, currently the director of Chennai Chapter of the Observer Research Foundation, makes it clear that Jallikattu is an age-old practice and the explanations in support of it are also age-old. However, in present situation, what is needed is an immediate solution, one which co-opts both past and present.

The book is nowhere close to offering any solution and only hopes that the Animal Welfare Board of India will come out with new guidelines to keep the sport going. Moorthy’s immediate trigger for writing a book on Tamil angst is the massive spontaneous protests in the state against the Jallikattu ban in 2017. Not only the writer’s thoughts, the text,too, is repetitive in many chapters of the book. Many a times Moorthy goes off the target, straying into issues which have no concern with the subject at hand.