Varna on Wheels

Snowpiercer is your garden-variety sci-fi movie. Misdirected science ushers in the apocalypse, in this case a super ice age, and a modern Noah’s Ark, in the form of a train, houses all that is left of humanity. But this is no biblical story, so it has everything: a tyrant, a rising hero, good versus bad, drama, intelligent lines along the way and a few scientific titbits. Basically, all the masala.

The film, Bong Joon-ho’s 2013 English-language debut, began life as a French graphic novel. Le Transperceneige (“the snow-piercer”) was started in 1982 by writer Jacques Lob and artist Jean-Marc Rochette, and later continued by Benjamin Legrand with Rochette. In the book, the train is a thousand and one carriages long, racing endlessly through a frozen world, its passengers sorted by where they sit. The film keeps the ice, the train and the class war, and tells its own story through them.

The train circles the world once every 365 days, and it is laden with symbolism. Apart from the obvious Noah’s Ark, the train has its own class system. This metal box, piercing the ice as it crosses the globe, is a closed system, and a closed system is, by definition, limited in resources.

Wilford, the visionary who built the train in anticipation of the ice age, naturally assumes the role of King God. Symbolically, he sits at the front of the train, the top of the pyramid. The labourers whose work keeps the train running form the underclass, the bottom of the pyramid, and live at its tail end.

In between are the transactional classes. Below the King sits a class that arbitrates the resources and controls their distribution, essentially deciding who gets what. It includes the professionals (doctors, scientists, teachers, the odd artist), which makes it a very influential class. The closed system is also fragile: any exposure to the outside means certain death. Such a fragile system needs protectors, and they too sit below the King.

The protectors and the professionals interact fluidly; their roles have to work in symbiosis, and together they occupy the middle of the train. The two classes kept isolated sit at the two extremes. The King God, being exalted, cannot mingle with mere mortals. The underclass, being merely unskilled labour with a propensity for violence and disruption, must be kept at the tail end. Interestingly, the film calls them “freeloaders,” because they were loaded onto the train without a ticket, whereas everyone else bought their place. The tail-enders were the last-minute “compassionate” passengers.

In the West, this might play out as a treatise on class, along the lines of Marxist theory. From my vantage point as an Indian, however, it is a treatise on the Varna system.

The Indian caste (Varna) system is organised, in theory, around classes of occupation. As on the train, the King God sits at the top of the pyramid. Next come the warriors, the Kshatriyas, followed by an intellectual-cum-professional class, the Brahmins. A trading community, the Vaishyas, is in the mix too. And at the base is the underclass, the Shudras. Some may argue that Varna and caste are different things, but for most purposes they are interchangeable.

Again in theory, the system is a rational distribution of occupations: a warrior by occupation is a Kshatriya.

On the train, many characters drive home one idea: a closed system needs “balance.” Rationally speaking, it’s a very sound argument. Resources are limited, and if the consumers outnumber the producers, the system risks collapse. So everything has to be distributed rationally. Who gets what food, and when. Who does what work, and for how long. Everyone’s role has to be defined rationally to keep the system in “balance.”

A very sound argument. But many arguments that are sound in theory turn erratic in practice.

The major flaw in the “rational distribution” argument is that one key thing is never distributed rationally.

Power!

The system never distributes power rationally. The tail-enders are defined not as humans but as “freeloaders.” Not having paid for their place on the train makes them “less” human. And once you strip people of their humanity, and of power, they can be treated any which way, like animals.

In the Varna system, somehow, the Shudras end up as less human. It is the “compassion” of the upper classes that merely allows them to live. The compassion argument is the most sinister of all: it is our compassion that lets them live; without it, they would starve. The argument is so sinister that even the African slave traders deployed it. They were merely “rescuing” Africans from the barbarity of hunger and deprivation; on the plantations, the enslaved got better food and living conditions than they ever would have back home. So it doesn’t matter that they are given “feed” of the lowest quality. What matters is that they are fed.

In the Varna system, this asymmetrical distribution of power turns a “rational”-looking system into a machine of tyranny. Because the caste system has another flaw: caste is inherited. Your place in the hierarchy depends not on talent but on the accident of birth.

The underclass are the underclass because they didn’t “pay” their way onto the train, so their children will serve in the underclass too. Yes, someone skilful, like a violin player, might be allowed into the upper class, but entirely at the “whim” of the upper classes. And that whim is, once again, an expression of their power.

The powerful classes on the train and the powerful castes in the nation both draw their power entirely from the rigidity of the system. So both have a vested interest in keeping it rigid.

On the train, the slightest deviation is punished, whether with a cell in the prison car or with an arm thrust out into the icy air until it freezes solid and shatters. The rigidity of the system is sacrosanct, and every argument must be used to maintain it: religious arguments like Karma, scientific ones like genetic IQ. All the rules are codified to maintain “balance.”

No wonder honour killings and khap panchayats are a reality. The upper classes have to maintain the rigidity of the system at all costs, even at the cost of their own children’s lives.

If the upper classes are so unforgiving of deviations by their very own, you can imagine the fury they unleash on the underclasses for any transgression.

The metaphors lay out the problem; Snowpiercer goes looking for solutions.

Curtis, the leader of the tail-enders, believes revolution is the answer to their suffering.

Along the way he meets challengers who firmly believe in the system, or rather in its indispensability, such as Minister Mason. She believes dogmatically in the “balance” argument. Whatever her own beginnings, she has made herself into a true believer. The children at the front of the train are taught this dogma at school from a young age by a lovely-looking, soft-spoken, pregnant teacher. (Has anybody heard of the re-education camps in Xinjiang?)

Extreme dogmatism is on full display. The same pregnant teacher, a harbinger of the life within her, has no hesitation in picking up a gun and shooting people indiscriminately, because of her ardent faith in the dogma of “balance.” Barbarity is unleashed in the name of preserving civilisation.

For Curtis, the problem is simply that the wrong people are in charge. He is all in on changing the people who run the train, and willing to sacrifice anything and anyone for the revolution. Like Lenin, he wants the workers in charge of the system and sees that as the panacea for all ills: put the right-minded people in power, and they will prevent tyranny, injustice and every social ill.

Gilliam, Curtis’s guiding light in the rebellion, sees it differently. Gilliam is the instigator of the rebellion, but in a plot twist he turns out to be a co-conspirator of the King God, Wilford. Both Liams, Wilford and Gilliam, believe in the dogma of “balance” and accept the tyranny of power as its inevitable outcome. They are willing to sacrifice people, even their own limbs, for the cause. For them, maintaining “balance” is the “higher” purpose. All they want is for the strong-willed Curtis to take over at the top of the pyramid; he is the chosen one. With Wilford’s health declining, they need a “believer” in the higher purpose.

Our society has its share of false demigods who preach “suffering” as the underclass’s path to mukti, liberation.

Only one person on the train is thinking outside the box: Namgoong, the security expert who designed the train’s doors and is now locked up in its prison car. And he is thinking really outside the box, outside the metal box of the train. Rather than clinging to any dogma, he gathers evidence of the ice slowly melting and concludes that the temperature outside is rising steadily, and that there is no need to stay stuck in a closed system. He wants to venture out into the open snow and make a life for himself and his daughter, Yona.

Curtis makes the long journey from the tail of the train to its front, a brutal, arduous journey soaked in blood. Just as arduous is his journey from believing in the revolution to accepting the role of King. But when he sees the enslaved children below the deck, turned into zombies, mere parts of a machine, he snaps. He realises the unbearable cost of the power he is about to inherit. Is it all worth it? Is it really worth saving? Can humanity be salvaged this way? What does it even mean to salvage humanity?

The fatalism of every scenario stares him in the face, and he chooses total revolution: blowing up the train, destroying everything, crashing it to its end.

Nothing on the train was worth saving; everything and everyone on it was corrupted in one way or another. Only two innocent children survive: Yona, and Timmy, the tail-end boy taken to work as a part beneath the engine. A polar bear stares at them from a distance, a sign that Namgoong was right: life is possible outside. What happens now? No one knows. Maybe the two children end up as food for the bear, maybe they link up with other survivors outside, maybe this, maybe that. It is open-ended.

Only one conclusion is firm: the train was not worth saving! Maybe that’s why Dr Ambedkar never called for the reform of the caste system.

Snowpiercer is an excellent critique of closed, rigid systems. A closed system is not worth saving. It will inevitably descend into tyranny unless it opens up, unless the people within it have the option to leave. History is full of closed societies that collapsed. Even Julius Caesar advocated making the people of conquered territories Roman citizens, because he realised that keeping citizenship within a closed circle in Rome was unsustainable. What followed were the glorious centuries of the Roman Empire. The USA prides itself on being “a nation of immigrants.”

Maybe that’s why we need to explore the frontiers of space, Mars and beyond: to keep our Earth from becoming a closed system. Even Chanakya, recently resurgent, advised against staying in a kingdom where you are not respected and cannot earn a decent living. It should be a warning to all the nativists and advocates of closed borders:

Another important critique I found in the film is the emergence of a fifth class, which I shall call the “Frivolous Class.”

Once you have established the rigidity of the system as essential dogma, there is an interesting side effect. Some children of the upper classes are utterly unfit for any profession. They are misfits in the occupational structure, through either a lack of intellectual bandwidth or sheer disinterest. But once the rigidity of the classes or castes is established, you can’t just throw them out; discarding them would look like fluidity, the antithesis of rigidity. So what do you do with such misplaced people? Nothing. You just maintain them and let them slide into their vices, going berserk on drugs. These are the people I call the “Frivolous Class.”

The rigidity of the system creates this good-for-nothing upper class: members who are present but not part of the conversation, best forgotten.

In the long run, this frivolous class threatens the system. It adds to the system’s inefficiencies, its dead weight, and when a tipping point is reached, it triggers a collapse. History is full of examples, like “Let them eat cake,” ushering in chaos.

Only one thing remains to ponder. Once something has been established so succinctly in the concise format of a film, why do we need an elaborate, multi-season web series?