ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the Indian police station portrayed in Visaranai as a contradiction of its own conceived function. It presents the notion that the independent filmmaking sector in India can afford cinematic agency and provide vicarious space for oppressed subaltern subjects to speak, whilst they may not be accorded basic human rights in the real everyday alleyways of their lived experience. The film charts the precarious existence of four migrant Tamil workers, Pandi, Murugan, Kumar and Afsal. The chapter argues that the film’s subalterns are trapped in a third space that is unlike others commonly cited in pedagogical and philosophical theories. Visaranai discloses how in the police station space, the authority of law and judiciary is not only transgressed it is transmogrified into an instrument of torture and arbitrary detention. The chapter explains how the Tamil Indie Visaranai shares the general ethos of the overarching Indian Indie New Wave, in terms of articulating narratives of subordinated and dispossessed subalterns.
