A few days ago, I began watching a Tamil movie - கெணத்தை காணோம் - 'The Well is missing' - The title is based on a popular comedy sequence. The movie is about a parched village, its people, an accidental discovery of a dinosaur fossil and its consequences. It has rustic village humor and portrays people as they are - lazy, some of them cunning, indifferent bureaucracy and brutal police. In the past 5-7 years, Tamil movies are marked by sob stories of common man being wronged by the "system". There has been consistent propaganda against the state (that is Bharat as a nation), its system and governments. This movie comes close.
The hero, a sculptor and the disinterested priest in the local temple offers his land to dig a well for the villagers' benefit. While digging, the villagers find fossils of a dinosaur. The government departments get alerted. An ambitious and cunning researcher and her (archaeology) department are shown as the villains. They use the state power to expand the digging area. The much awaited rain arrives as the people had prayed for it. The fossils go missing after the rain. Police brutality is unleashed to recover the fossils. And finally a minister arrives and resolves the issue.
In the earlier liberal movies in which an industrialist or a capitalist were portrayed as villains. I hated those movies for the sloppy one-sided presentation of the issue. The difference in this movie is the importance given to the water scarcity in the region. The bureaucracy simply accepts petitions and does nothing to address it. Thankfully no fair skinned Brahmin or North Indian looking person was shown as the villain. As in reality, no MLA or MP comes to address the issue. So, I see some honesty in the narration against pure propaganda in the earlier movies.
On the question of archaeology given more importance than to the livelihood of people - let me expand it step by step. Is archaeology more important than the flora and fauna? Should knowledge be given more importance to life or nature? Will the knowledge be available to all humans? Do they even need that for their daily lives - most of them cannot even comprehend anything beyond a few years of changes? When knowledge is not pursued uniformly, do we have the right to harm anyone for the sake of knowledge?
Traditionally, in the Indian context, great events that caused wonder or trauma were encoded as stories and songs and were passed on to the next generations. They weren't limited to a few academics. I am not aware of any destructive academic pursuit in Indian tradition. Even to learn anatomy, ancient Hindu physicians didn't dissect animals as modern researches do. The objective of killing was limited to survival. The killed ones were either prey or enemies - not specimens.
Academic fields like archaeology are often destructive and the destruction was usually on a colonized land. I haven't heard of displaced residents of Rome or Athens to let the researchers do their job.
Does the modern Indian state have a policy on Dharmic pursuit of knowledge?
