In a groundbreaking move for Tamil cinema, debutant director Samyuktha Vijayan has created Neela Nira Sooriyan, the first-ever Tamil film centred on the journey of gender transition. With her unique perspective as a transgender person, Samyuktha has made a film that has opened dialogues about understanding transgender people’s lives, not just among the LGBTQ community, but across society as a whole.
Born in Pollachi, a semi-urban town in Tamil Nadu, Samyuktha grew up in a remarkably supportive environment. “My parents never told me, ‘You’re a boy, you cannot do this,’” she recalls. Instead, they encouraged her to explore her identity freely. “It was my mother who put me in a dance school, a Bharatanatyam dance school, which turned out to be the safe space for exploring everything I wanted to.”
In contrast to the protagonist in her film, Samyuktha had a supportive household. Hence, she wanted to concentrate more on the internal struggle in the movie. “The gender identity crisis that you see transgender people go through was not that important to me. Because as I said, I was allowed to do whatever I wanted to. My mother and I would fight about which color lipstick we should buy. And think about a household in Pollachi with three boys and the mother talking about which lipstick should be bought (laughs).”
Such an understanding enabled Samyuktha to concentrate more on her academics which resulted in a flourishing career in the IT sector. She secured the second-highest mark in the district in her 12th exam. She graduated from PSG Tech with an engineering degree, joined Amazon, and spent 10 years in Europe, the US and India.
She transitioned from male to female in 2016 while she was in Siachen. “Frankly, it was a cakewalk. To be honest, I was, how do I say, disappointed with the almost drama-less reception of my transition that I’d actually written a speech about how it is my right to be whoever I wanted to be and I never got an opportunity to read that speech to anybody so far. But I know that is not how anybody else’s experience would be, especially the transition piece. It would be much more difficult, even in cities like Chennai or Bangalore. And think about a small town like Pollachi, which is where I come from. And when I decided to fill the gap of transgender representation in Tamil cinema or even in Indian cinema, I thought, okay, I’m going to set the story in Pollachi. A high school teacher wanting to transition from male to female and everything that ensues is the movie.”
Even while she was busy with her corporate job, Samyuktha was following Tamil cinema and admits to being inspired by filmmakers like Pa Ranjith, Ram, and Mari Selvaraj. So, when she was approached by producer Mala Manyan to play the role of a transgender person in a film, though she was interested in it at first, she had to back out of the project as it wasn’t coming from the perspective of the person with lived experience. “I wasn’t convinced with the director’s script because it comes from the angle of a third person who had absolutely no experience with a trans person’s journey. And I did not think it captured all the nuances and the subtleties.” However, the thought lingered which propelled her to come up with her script, which turned out to be Neela Nira Sooriyan.
Despite being a hard-hitting film, Neela Nira Sooriya doesn’t take the easy route of evoking pity. The tone of the film is sober, and Samyuktha admits that it was a conscious decision. “A product like this does not reach a wider audience, which is who the movie is aimed at. This movie is not for the LGBTQ community. This movie is not for transgender people. This movie is for everybody else to understand the life of a trans person. So that when such people come into the mainstream context, as a neighbour, as a friend, as a teacher to your kid, you will know how to react to something like that. It was a very conscious decision to make the movie matter-of-factly rather than crying at the top of my voice that this is my place and I demand my rights. It’s more of a ‘Hey, some people are different from you and all they’re trying to do is just live their lives and continue their existence with some dignity. Probably there are some do’s and don’ts.’ There are some interesting things, things you could ask and you cannot ask.”
If you ask Samyuktha what is something that you can’t ask a transgender person, she would say not to treat them as a supernatural being. She recounts an experience where she was asked by an acquaintance to bless a child, which she denied instantly. “So, my brother and I were going to invite his friend to the opening of our music studio. When we were leaving, my brother’s friend came running after us and asked my brother, ‘Hey, my mother wants my kid to be blessed by your sister. Is it okay and all that?’ I was like, ‘No, I was not going to do that because I understand why. They see me as a trans woman who is separate from a woman and as if I have some kind of power. In reality, I’m just a woman trying to exist and have fun in the way that I’m doing. And I find such things derogatory simply because they think that I’m special one way or the other. Either this is a person that we should isolate or this is a person who is a God, I’m neither.”
She adds, “In India, everybody says, we respect women. We pray to women because they are goddesses. We put them on a pedestal. The context is again, putting them in a box that they can’t easily get out of. Then they use the same argument to say, ‘You cannot wear sleeveless because you are a worshipable person. So you can’t do certain things.’ Now let us say, this person asks for my blessings for their child simply because I am a trans person. And let us say, I do that. And then they later see me doing an item dance in a movie. The same set of people are going to criticize my choice saying, “Is this the person that I got blessings from?’ Who asked you to get my blessings in the first place? Do not put me on a pedestal.”
Samyuktha is now heading back to the US, and she is looking forward to doing more projects in Tamil cinema. Meanwhile, Neela Nira Sooriyan, which is currently running on limited screens across Tamil Nadu, will soon be out on a leading OTT streaming platform. “We are in discussion with Amazon Prime. Let’s see,” Samyuktha signs off.
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