The Games People Play: A Psychological Analysis of Dalit Victimization in Ozhivudivasathe Kali

Characters as Tropes

The characters are delineated in a methodical fashion. Their behaviour is dictated by their names. The four friends who play the off-day game are named Dharmapalan, Ashokan, Vinayan and Das. There is clearly a method in their names. The first three have individual sounding names whereas the fourth ‘Das’ has a generic ring to it, meaning a servant. The literal meanings of their names are also insightful. Dharmapalan means protector of dharma/faith. He takes his role as king rather seriously and dominates the whole game. He is the one who tells the others about the rules of the game and insists on having all toe his line. The other three men appear powerless before him. He does all the ordering and judging. Ashoka means ‘without sorrow’ and like his namesake he tries to be a valiant cop! Vinayan means humble/subdued. Of the three upper-class characters, he is the only one who seems to have some humane qualities. For instance, he tries to prevent Dharmapalan from kicking Das. But he is rather subdued which makes it easier for Dharmapalan to order him around. Das literally means a servant. He is a representative of the lowest and the voiceless in society.

Also, the names can be seen as corresponding to the four varnas. Dharmapalan is the Brahmin who comes across as arrogant and with a sense of entitlement. He gets to play the role of the king. Ashokan, the journalist, is representative of the Kshatriya varna and gets to play the cop. He uses his power to impress upon the king about the lowly and dangerous thief. Vinayan who plays the minister can be seen as an overlap between a Kshatriya and a Vaishya wherein the trait of the Vaishya appears dominant given his mercenary nature. Meanwhile Das clearly stands for the least in the social order, that of a Shudra. The Dalit angle gets clearly reflected in their names and deeds. The game pits the low caste against the united front of the upper castes.

The symbolism in the characters’ names and deeds can appear to be rather contrived and deliberate. However, the effective and convincing portrayal of the characters and the plot make the story appear realistic.

The Metaphor of Game

The writer cleverly uses the device of ‘game-playing’ to frame the whole narrative. The characters resort to the game of cop and thief in order to escape the trouble of storytelling. Storytelling is presumed to be emotionally demanding and draining, whereas a game is supposed to be relaxing and easy. This perception of theirs, however, is proved to be wrong as the plot unfolds.

The characters’ idiosyncrasies, deep-rooted prejudices, hatred and fear of the other come to the fore during the course of the story. What aids in this uninhibited display of raw emotions reeking of misanthropy and cruelty is their consumption of alcohol. Proprieties break down and the worm-infested minds are displayed before the reader. The metaphor of game can be analysed from two psychological perspectives: Jungian ‘collective unconscious’ and Eric Berne’s ‘transactional analysis’ (Berne, 1961; Jung, 1969).

While playing games people unknowingly resort to what Jung describes as ‘primordial images and symbols found in the collective unconscious, which—in contrast to the personal unconscious—gathers together and passes on the experiences of previous generations, preserving traces of humanity’s evolutionary development over time’ (De Koven, 2015). The collective unconscious of society is brought to the fore by the game played by the characters. The unconscious Kerala psyche is exposed. Though we no longer practice or follow discrimination based on caste openly, the tendency is still lurking in many of the unconscious minds and surreptitiously lurks beneath the ‘open’ and ‘liberal’ masks we project. For centuries Kerala had practiced the inhuman practice of casteism. The lower castes were treated as sub-human whose humanity was systematically and deliberately denied to them. They could not even dress properly. Tales of Nangeli and other such characters still resound from the pages of history. With independence we claim to have become a nation sanitized and promise ‘liberty, equality and fraternity’ as enshrined in our Constitution to all citizens. Reality, however, tells a different tale. This hidden rot is brought to the fore by the characters during their play.

The four friends Dharmapalan, Ashokan, Vinayan and Das decide to play the classic cop and thief game. The choice of game too merits some deep analysis. This game is played out at two levels. From the Jungian point of view, the cop and thief game can be seen as an ‘archetype of heroism’ wherein the unwanted and the illegal are defeated by the dominant forces. So, for the cop Ashokan and the king Dharmapalan, the game gives them legitimacy to show their bravado and machismo and ‘punish’ Das, the thief. In the due course of the enactment of the game, the characters of Dharmapalan and Ashokan take their roles seriously to another level altogether. Alcohol adds to their passionate enactment. They cease being the regular guys they were at the beginning of the story. The collective unconscious about caste hierarchy raises its ugly head and indicts Das. Ashokan presents his case against Das in the following words:

He has boasted that he will redistribute the wealth in the palace among the people and that he would send in exile all the kings and ministers who are wastrels and lust after women. He has also told me that people are unhappy with this rule and that low caste people will rule this land. So instead of being a slave-police to you, he has asked me to join him (Loose translation. Unni, 2016, p. 65).

This enrages the ‘king’ and he kicks Das in the face for his audacity. In the melee that ensues, the distraught Das tries to reason with Dharmapalan. His pleas fall on deaf ears and in a spine-chilling climax, Dharmapalan stabs the hapless Das with a broken alcohol bottle.

Another way of analysing the meaning of the story and the motives of the characters is by applying the theory behind Eric Berne’s Transactional Analysis. According to this theory, people interact at three levels: parent, adult and child. The parent ego state stands for impressions learnt from parental/authoritative figures. Social taboos, prejudices and norms come under this ego state. The child ego state is characterized by the emotional feelings experienced by a person in his/her childhood. Many of these are later recollected by a person. The adult ego state is the stage wherein all experiences learned from life are gathered and made to go through a ‘reality check’. In an ideal transaction between two people, corresponding ego states should interact with each other. That is, the adult state should interact with the adult state, the child state with the child state and so on.

Seen from this perspective, Berne defines games as ‘an ongoing series of complementary ulterior transactions progressing to a well-defined, predictable outcome. Descriptively, it is a recurring set of transactions… with a concealed motivation… or gimmick’. In the story OK, the game that the four characters play has motives. The conscious motive for them to play the game was to do something other than their routine gossiping. They decide against telling stories due to the dangerous and deceptive nature of storytelling. It was thus with a simple plan to while away their time that they began playing the game of cop and thief. These characters interact with each other by means of this game. Now, according to transactional analysis, a game can be seen ‘as a series of interactions (words, body language, facial expressions, etc.) between two or more people that follow a predictable pattern. The interactions ultimately progress to an outcome in which one individual obtains a “payoff” or “goal.” In most cases, the participants of the games are unaware that they are “playing.”’ (Berne, n. d).

In the story, the characters while playing the game interact from two different ego states. The group consisting of Dharmapalan, Ashokan and Vinayan operate from the parent and child ego states whereas Das operates from the adult ego state. The trio behaves on the basis of what they seem to have internalized as part of their socialization process, that of subjugating and repressing the weakest among them. The game becomes a pretext to unmask their deep-rooted prejudices and contempt of the ‘other.’ Dharmapalan playing ‘king’ in all seriousness and both Ashokan and Vinayan helping him to carry on with the game exemplify how social structures and caste systems work. The upper castes act out their sense of entitlement and derision for the poor and the weak. Dharmapalan exults ‘I am the king’ and finally orders Das to be hanged to death on account of being an anti-national/seditionist.

It is Das alone who interacts from the mature adult ego state even though he is also drunk like the others. When the others get in the skin of their roles in all seriousness, Das also joins them sportingly. Even after he gets kicked in the face by Dharmapalan, he continues with his good-natured behaviour. In fact, he finds the sight of the drunken Dharmapalan with his legs raised as in a Chavittunadakam funny and it makes him smile. He tells him that he is a tuition teacher and that he teaches children for a living. However, this realistic statement is taken by them as ramblings of a mad man. Ashokan says Das is too drunk! In reality it is these three men who behave in an inebriated manner. They had the luxury not to indulge in their adult ego states whereas for Das it is a necessity to be in touch with reality. The transactions from the parent and child ego states make it impossible for the united gang of men to discern and separate facts from make-belief. Deeply entrenched beliefs of caste make the trio gang up against Das and in the end Dharmapalan stabs him, indicting the Kerala society.

Conclusion

The short story OK can be seen as an indirect indictment of the fissures that exist in the society even after seven decades of independence. On the surface it appears to be a story about four drunk men and a brawl that ends fatally for one of them. A closer look would reveal the unsettling reality where low castes still continue to be discriminated against. It takes a drunken revelry to expose the deep-seated prejudices and filth that are otherwise masked by education and progressive talks.