The promotional materials of the upcoming mega-project starring Tollywood heavyweight Jr NTR and directed by hitmaker Trivikram Srinivas hints at an enormous, cross-border non secular canvas anchored by Lord Murugan.
The movie’s promo carried this line: “Born within the North. Cast within the Heartland. Worshipped within the South.”
Inside minutes of the promo dropping on the web, hyper-vigilant digital factions of ‘D stockists’ on X (previously Twitter) launched a fierce counter-offensive.
To them, the tagline was a theological hijacking. Murugan is Tamil Kadavul, the God of the Tamils. He belongs to the traditional, blood-red soil of the Kurinji (mountainous) panorama documented in Sangam literature.
To market Him as “Born within the North” — an obvious nod to His identification as Skanda or Kartikeya, the son of Shiva born within the Himalayas — is being seen as cultural erasure.
The digital skirmish shortly spiralled previous routine fan-war banter, forcing a deeper, multi-layered query to the floor: Who owns God?
Gods too evolve
Can anybody declare unique rights over a divine being? When non secular beliefs and attendant sagas journey throughout geographies, languages and regimes for over two millennia, the thought of static possession begins to fracture.
Within the classical northern narrative, Kartikeya is the celibate commander-in-chief of the Devas, born from the sparks of Shiva’s third eye within the chilly landscapes of the north. He’s the god of struggle, austere and distant.
However in Tamil traditions, He’s Murugan, the colourful, youthfully stunning god related to love, warfare and the Tamil language itself. Right here, He’s wedded to 2 consorts, Deivanai and Valli — the latter a tribal maiden, grounding Him fully in native folklore.
This fluid evolution is how religion survives. Gods should not frozen in stone. For a purported pan-Indian movie to all of the sudden flatten a wealthy, localised evolution right into a singular company advertising and marketing pitch is an train in historic tone-deafness.
The anthropological mirage
However this obsessive urge to parse a God’s birthplace appears to disregard the elemental angst of human existence. When the origins of humankind itself are muddled in a dense, evolutionary fog, how can something definitive be mentioned in regards to the beginning of Gods?
Science tells us that humanity’s story shouldn’t be a straight line however a messy, tangled bush of migrations, interbreeding and forgotten lineages. If we can’t map our personal genesis with absolute certainty, the declare {that a} divine, everlasting power belongs strictly to a northern peak or a southern valley is absurd.
And Gods, like people, are travellers — migrating, in a way, alongside tribes, altering their names, their armour and their meals to match the geography of their followers. They don’t seem to be historic figures with beginning certificates. They’re dwelling mirrors of human perception, evolving over millennia.
The silence of the self-styled custodians
But the sudden, fierce protectiveness displayed by some on-line regional custodians exposes an interesting however ironic hypocrisy. The very digital factions that erupted in rage over a Telugu movie poster’s menace to Murugan’s Tamil identification have been conspicuously silent through the real-world flashpoint involving the very same deity simply months earlier.
When an enormous authorized and political battle erupted over Thiruparankundram in Madurai — revered as the primary of Lord Murugan’s Arupadai Veedu (six sacred abodes) — these sections of the Dravidian ideology have been conspicuous by their silence.
The battle centred on the traditional Deepathoon, a sacred stone lamp pillar located atop the Thiruparankundram hill, positioned close to a historic dargah. For generations, lighting the ceremonial flame on this pillar through the Karthigai Deepam pageant was a foundational act of Tamil Hindu devotion.
When devotees sought to revive this custom, the Dravidian Tamil Nadu state administration clamped down. Citing law-and-order anxieties, heritage preservation and communal concord, the federal government actively fought to dam the ritual.
Even after the Madurai Bench of the Madras Excessive Court docket categorically dominated that “lighting a lamp is a sacred act” and “can’t offend anyone’s sensibilities”, and ordered the ritual to proceed, the manager equipment resisted, imposing strict prohibitory orders throughout the hill.
However the digital warriors of cultural satisfaction have been sheepishly silent then. No hashtags trended, no livid essays have been penned defending the traditional, lived traditions of the Tamil deity towards State overreach.
This selective amnesia exposes the truth that for sure ideological sections, Murugan’s identification shouldn’t be a matter of real, lived religion however an ideological soccer. He’s fiercely defended when He may be weaponised towards the ‘North’ or a rival movie trade, however comfortably deserted when defending Him requires standing as much as home political and administrative buildings, and spiritual adversaries.
The company flattening of religion
The broader lesson right here extends far past on-line hypocrisy or movie advertising and marketing. It lands on the doorstep of the Indian leisure trade’s obsession with the pan-India components.
Ever since Baahubali and Kantara proved that deeply rooted cultural tales might generate astronomical field workplace returns, filmmakers have handled Indian non secular traditions and tales like a company goldmine. However of their rush to scale up, creators are falling right into a harmful entice.
To make a film play equally properly in Lucknow, Bengaluru and Patna, characters and deities are being scrubbed of their background nuances. The Jr NTR–Trivikram film controversy is a symptom of this company laziness.
Somewhat than doing the artistic heavy lifting required to clarify the attractive, advanced duality of a God who’s each the Himalayan Skanda and the Tamil Murugan, the advertising and marketing division opted for a reductive shorthand that alienated the very base that holds the deity dearest.
The purpose is, a God belongs to the individuals who sing to Him, inform tales about Him and hold His rituals alive. Possession can’t be claimed by a Twitter hashtag, nor can or not it’s manufactured by a movie manufacturing home’s advertising and marketing technique.
You can’t commodify a God with out respecting the soil He stands on. And should you solely defend your God on a timeline, do not be shocked when His lamps exit on the hilltops.
