For dons8217; descendant,a film disappoints

Karnan is the son of SKR and grandson of SSK,and he has filed a plaint in a civil court in Chennai,alleging that the two mens lives have been wrongly depicted in the film. The film,which also faced some political protests and a bomb threat,did not release in Tamil Nadu on Friday,and Karnan travelled to Mumbai to catch the first show.

The world that SKR and SSK inhabited was Dharavi,where many castes and communities merged seamlessly in tiny shanty homes,and workshops were filled with cowering armies of insecure,fearful migrants,fighting their daily battles of survival in the big city.

In their uncertain world,the Scheduled Caste migrant community of Tirunelveli Adi Dravidas chose S S Kandasamy as protector,said Samuel Thiraviaraj,Karnans brother-in-law.

K M Perumal,a 75-year-old former mill worker who used to be SSKs close confidant,said that for his people,the don was friend,adviser,judge and arbiter rolled into one.

Nobody went to police stations,he was their leader. Marital discord,property matters and issues with business rivals,all were brought before him. People travelled in trains from as far away as Dombivili, Perumal said. At large meetings attended by many people,SSK would sit cross-legged,listening intently before giving his decision.

Kandasamy was in his teens when he came to Mumbai,and he did odd jobs before settling down in the tannery business. The animal carcasses would come from the Deonar slaughterhouses and his men would skillfully shave the hair and treat the leather. The heat inside the workshop hardened him, Perumal said.

While the more famous Vardarajan Mudaliar whose life was portrayed in the celluloid Nayakan set up a popular base in Antop Hill,Sion-Koliwada and other Dharavi pockets,the Adi Dravidas went to the father-son duo of SSK and SKR. SKR and Mudaliar were friends once Karnan claims it was Mudaliar who gave him his name.

Kandasamy was killed on the night of February 15,1977,and Perumal claims to be the person who last spoke to him. He spoke of life and the various struggles people faced. He had attended court on some property matter that day,and was a bit unsettled. I got a call later at the mill that three men had poured acid on his face and hacked him to death. He died there,just like that, Perumal said.

Ten years later,Ramaswamy died of a heart attack in Seethaparpanallur,Tirunelveli. A grieving Dharavi declared an impromptu bandh for three days.

In his plaint,Karnan has told the court that in all promotional interviews,the makers of the film have maintained the story was of an underworld don from the 1980s,around the same time as Vardarajan Mudaliar ruled the underworld.

This is wrong. Further,the storyline is that after the rivals kill the father,the son takes revenge. Dons by definition are not men who react8230; things never happened this way, Karnan said. The film,he has argued,is defamatory to the 25 legal heirs of Kandasamy,including a great granddaughter who is married to an IAS officer.

It was later found that the killers were rivals from the same organisation South Indian Adi Dravida Mahajan Sangh,Mumbai,of which Kandasamy was a vice-president. The family feels cheated that the film shows him dying in a bomb blast. It was 1977,tell me,was there a blast then? Perumal asked.

To Perumal,his master and friend was someone who would stop in the middle of the road to play with children. Who does that at that age? Perumal asked.

Kandasamy always wore a white shirt and white dhoti,and a black umbrella hung perpetually on his right arm. And boots. He never wore anything but boots,even to the courts, Perumal said. And he would travel all the way to Masjid Bundar to buy scents,and would shut himself in a room and smear the scents on rupee notes which he would then distribute to people.

Karnan said his father Ramasamy never took revenge on the men who attacked his grandfather. I think time is a good healer,our families are friends now. But in the movie,Vijay,who plays the role of my father,is shown avenging the murder.

After a spell in jail during the Emergency,Ramasamy came out to take over his fathers business. He moved to dealing in scrap,and slowly entered the property market, said son-in-law Thiraviaraj. Phatak Ramasamy so named after the many plots he owned in and around Dharavi and Mahim railway crossing slowly shaped himself as the leader of the Adi Dravida community.

He offered protection to vulnerable south Indians in Mumbai. The Congress regularly used him to increase their vote bank. But later,when he didnt get a ticket from them,he shifted his allegiance to underworld don Haji Mastans Dalit Muslim minority Suraksha Mahasangh and eventually became a city councillor, Thiraviaraj said.

In the early albums of the family,Haji Mastan,Ramaswamy and Vardarajan Mudaliar are seen hugging each other and smiling at the camera. There is a lot to be said for them. They earned a living the hard way and helped people. They built temples,schools and hospitals,most of which dont stand today. But they remind me of that dialogue in Nayakan where the hero says that for four men to live a good life,one has to go the wrong way, said Karnan.

He added,Tell our story,but tell it right.