The last quarter of the 20th century saw the emergence of New Malayalam Cinema as an important body of artistic and political work. This development was possible largely because of the exertions of three rare dissimilar artists—Adoor Gopalakrishnan, Govindan Aravindan, and John Abraham. Their combined creativity made film aficionados all over India—and beyond—sit up and take notice. It is a matter of deep sadness that Aravindan and John died in the prime of their lives and their careers, leaving Adoor to plough a lonely furrow, which he did with distinction for many years.
Neither Aravindan, who passed on at only 56, nor John, who lived only for 49 years, had to cope with the highs and lows of old age. But, judging by his verbal indiscretions committed almost serially in the past few years, it would seem that Adoor is having serious problems coping with what can perhaps be described as an unbearably heavy accumulation of time.
The recent heated controversy in Kerala around what is being widely construed as the artist’s disparaging comments about women and the so-called lower castes is a matter more of sadness than shame. That the controversy should have happened soon after Adoor had stepped into his 85th year, this year, adds its own pathos to the unfortunate occurrence. Having known this exceptionally brilliant mind for many years; eaten at his and his wife Sunanda’s table more than once; been enthused by the critical success of his early and middle period films, I cannot even think of enjoying at his sufferance in the manner of many turncoats in Thiruvananthapuram and other parts of the State, but nor can I demean myself in my own eyes by refusing to condemn not just my friend’s misdemeanours but, worse still, his obstinacy in maintaining that he had said nothing wrong.
It is almost half a century since Adoor stunned everyone with his third film, Elippathayam (Rat Trap, 1982), a quietly eloquent exploration of a changing social order and the tragedy of an individual who refuses to, or does not know how to, change. Among the numerous honours that Elippathayam brought to Malayalam cinema, the most notable was the prestigious annual prize of the British Film Institute (BFI). The only other Indian to have won the prize is Satyajit Ray for Aparajito (The Unvanquished, 1956), the second part of the Apu trilogy which deals with the death of the young man’s parents and his coming of age in the grime and chaos of Calcutta.
If Swayamvaram (One’s Own Choice, 1974), a romantic tragedy in a semi-urban setting showing neo-realist influences that also made an attempt to articulate a distinctive personal language, and even more significantly, Kodiyettam (Ascent, 1979), about a rural vagabond being gradually transformed into a responsible person, projected Adoor as an important young filmmaker, Elippathayam confirmed and consolidated that reputation. Among other things, cineastes saluted the arrival of what seemed like an heir to the Ray tradition of quiet, subtle, and humane cinema. Surprisingly, the mantle of the master appeared to have fallen not on any of the young directors in his native Bengal, but on someone working a thousand miles away in the deep south.
A still from the movie Swayamvaram. | Photo Credit: SPECIAL AARANGEMENT
In this context, decades later, Adoor was to say: “There is this widespread notion among critics that I belong to the Ray School. On the one hand, I am pleased and honoured because I am a diehard admirer of Satyajit Ray. On the other, straight-jacketing film-making into schools and gharanas, however illustrious the company be, is not a particularly welcome idea. If my films were indistinguishable from his work, Ray would have had only scorn for me. As a master craftsman, what he saw in my work was departures, I believe. We, his admirers, should pay tribute to him not by making photocopies of Ray but by taking creative inspiration and working in directions that are our own.” (Satyajit Ray Memorial Lecture, 2004, at Satyajit Ray Film & Television Institute, Kolkata)
The world of Elippathayam
The pivotal character in Elippathayam is Unni (played by Karamana Janardanan, a noted theatre artiste and an old Adoor friend), who represents a familial and societal order that is shown rapidly disintegrating in the face of change. In terms of both training and temperament, Unni is so engrossed in himself that he cannot feel for others.
For instance, every moment of the day and into the late hours of the night, he is a witness to his second sister Rajamma’s sacrifice; to the back-breaking labour she puts in uncomplainingly to make life easier and more comfortable for him (refer, in particular, to the nocturnal oil bath sequences), but he does nothing to help her out of her distress.
In fact, he shoos away attractive marriage offers, lest he have to face life alone, complete with difficulties that are largely of his own making. In his own way, Unni is a crafty, unfeeling exploiter. He exploits his own good, patient sexually-deprived sister in the same unfeeling way as his forebears exploited landless farmers who toiled on the family acres. It should be noted that failing to have his way with his other sisters, Unni concentrated on making the most of Rajamma’s innocent nature (played by Sarada in what is perhaps her finest performance in a long and distinguished career).
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Elippathayam’s visual and narrative qualities are heightened by Adoor’s profound sense of form and structure, as evidenced in this dense essay revolving around individual performance and collective destiny. Adoor invented several symbolic representations to establish the film’s style, and realise its largely melancholic mood. It is impossible for the intense viewer to miss out on the several “exits” in the film, employed as signs or symbols of a change-over from one set of circumstances to the next. Noticeably, the first “exit” is that of a trapped rat being drowned in the village pond and the last is of Unni himself being bodily lifted from his house one night by some unknown characters and thrown into the same pond out of which the man is seen coming out, shivering in a bent, rat-like, crouching position.
Years ago, when I once put it to Adoor that in that pose of a supplicant, his hands almost joined together, perhaps Unni was praying for forgiveness for the sins of his fathers and his criminal callousness towards his own sister, the director roundly disagreed. He said he meant nothing of the kind; that it was just a picture of hard realism; a middle-aged man shivering from the cold. However, to this day, I refuse to accept that the man was not asking for forgiveness in the only frozen way he was capable of. Bizarre or absurd or even plain stupid as it may sound, to my mind, the director may not always be the best judge of his own work, at least as far as “readings” or interpretations go.
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Adoor’s sense of music, which may perhaps be attributed to his close connections with traditional theatre since childhood, comes alive in Elippathayam with an improbable grandeur of its own, if there is anything “grand” in decay, deprivation, and degeneration associated with the feudal order of things. The deep, elongated, stretched-out plaintive strains to the accompaniment of which each of the six “exits” is enacted, acts like a signature tune in the film, deepening the pathos of the narrative. Ritwik Ghatak, Adoor’s teacher at the film institute, was given to saying that we often fail to notice that in cinema, sound has a life of its own, expressing itself in many avatars, from designed or orchestrated music to incidental noises to silence, the supreme of all sounds. Although Ghatak never counted Adoor among his favourite pupils and Adoor himself has never been effusive about Ghatak’s oeuvre while being unfailingly courteous in his occasional remarks about him, looking at Elippathayam, one may feel tempted to think that the Bengal master is unobtrusively present as Adoor punctuates his spells of silence with the use of his remarkable “signature tune” signifying the “exits”. This is just a passing thought, and it is possibe that Adoor will not agree with it.
Elippathayam is reminiscent of Ray’s Jalsaghar (The Music Room, 1958) in more ways than one. The attitudes of the two directors to the self-destructive feudal mindset are the same, although their portrayal of their respective feudal “hero” is quite dissimilar. Ray’s zamindar fallen on difficult times can be kind and considerate even to his minions. In contrast, Unni is infuriatingly self-centred. But what unites them is their wilfulness, their refusal rather than their inability to accept the fact of change; their deliberate and conscious choice not to reconcile themselves to the reality that they have been overtaken by the inexorable dynamics of social transformation. In refusing to adjust themselves to a changed order, both Bishambar Roy and Unni have condemned themselves to a tragic fate that, perhaps, could have been avoided.
Adoor once said, “If my films were indistinguishable from his work, [Satyajit] Ray would have had only scorn for me. As a master craftsman, what he saw in my work was departures, I believe.” | Photo Credit: BY SPECIAL ARRANGEMENT
However, to my mind, Elippathayam, based on an original screenplay like most if not all Adoor’s films, is a more ambitious work where the director is engaged in plumbing the artistic designs and aesthetic possibilities of the medium than being satisfied with telling a good, even remarkable story. This quest for linguistic and stylistic originality is even more evident in the two films which followed, namely, Mukhamukham (Face to face, 1984) and Anantaram (1987), completing what may perhaps be described as a triptych examining the latter-day Malayali in varied states of physical, emotional, and psychological unrest.
Following the success of Elippathayam at home and abroad, Adoor directed Mukhamukham dealing with the passions of a political revolutionary. True to his search for a constantly evolving idiom of self-expression, Adoor depicted the life, loves, and death of the revolutionary as an interplay of illusion and reality; of truth (as the man’s life really was) and memory (as the man’s followers chose to remember him).
It is easy to read the film as an exclusively political exercise when the truth, as in the case of the protagonist himself, is more elusive. The tragedy of the brave, upright political leader, in this case a communist trade unionist, being reduced to a lesser position, nay, to pathetic straits – by his own failings; by the continued exacting demands of his followers who once virtually worshipped him; and, finally, by what can only be described as the inscrutable character of human destiny—is at the core of this meticulously crafted essay which, however, can come handy to political activists willing to travel beyond the given limits of conventional thinking. If the human element, especially in political relationships, was not so easily lost sight of, perhaps human history would have had fewer leaders ending up as helpless prisoners in the hands of the led.
How galling the tyranny of the underprivileged (in this case, the subtle or open insults of party cadres) can get to be, is illustrated by a teashop sequence seared in the memory of this writer. Getting up from his seat to leave the shop, yesterday’s leader, now an alcoholic and an embarrassment to the party, is practically commanded by the teashop owner to sit down and to leave only after he had explained his (alleged) moral degeneration.
For someone like this writer who has had the bitter experience of being treated in like manner whilst trying to (unsuccessfully) organise the disorganised white-collar workers of one of the country’s largest steel and engineering consultancy firms in Calcutta in the mid-eighties to late-nineties with the Left Front in power, it has always been a wrenching experience to watch Sreedharan’s humiliation at the hands of the teashop owner who we had seen earlier in the film being trained to be a labour activist, a union man, by the one now being treated like dirt. (In cinema, arguably more than in any other art form, the so-called “identification syndrome” seems to be constantly at work, the biography of a film’s protagonist very often fusing with the autobiography of a viewer.)
Upsetting a section of Marxists
Predictably, Mukhamukham caused a furore across Kerala among doctrinaire Marxists who easily branded the film as being anti-communist. P. Govinda Pillai, remembered by this writer as an otherwise erudite man of letters and a thinker of no mean order, gave leadership to the tirade against the film. The storm soon reached other parts of the country, notably Calcutta, Delhi, Madras, and Bombay. Adoor is on record that even as Mukhamukham was being said to be an anti-communist film in India, outside the country, including the West, it was being praised as a pro-communist document by socialists, democrats, centrists, and film-lovers who harboured no particular political bias.
Perhaps, the radically different perceptions about the film would have made for a certain amusement if the issues the director was discussing, by means of a strange film language made up in large measure of prolonged sleeping sequences, were not so serious. It should not be forgotten that here was a communist leader refusing to compromise on his basic ideological commitment at a time when the ideology itself was being questioned, even pilloried, in many countries in the West and the East alike, and the term “communist” was being used freely as a synonym for cruelty and corruption.
Filmmaker Adoor Gopalakrishnan at the inauguration of Sadaram Sargam, Malayali Markazhi Mahotsavam, in Chennai, on January 5, 2024. | Photo Credit: R. Ravindran
Perhaps, the Indian viewer could profitably compare the example of Sreedharan in Mukhamukham with that of Neelkantha Bagchi (played by Ghatak) in his ultimate film, Jukti Takko Aar Goppo (Reason, debate, and a story, 1974). It is difficult not to focus on Neelkantha’s words: “For a bottle I will lie and steal, but for name or fame or position I will never lie.”
Among his listeners is a young man who immediately retorts: “You have practised that pose long enough to become an adept.” Sreedharan, a denser and certainly a quieter man than Neelkantha, stays quiet when his comrades, now in power, insult him on this or that count. He is seen stealing from his wife’s small savings to buy a bottle, but refuses to go along with his comrades when he is promised a monthly allowance to satisfy his alcoholism on the condition that he would keep indoors and thereby cease to be a public embarrassment to the party. He does not argue, only declines the offer with a brief reply as to how he can accept money from a person (the present owner of the tile factory where his career as a trade unionist began) whose father had arranged for the murder of some of his comrades in the past.
Clearly, it is this line of argument, showing the “fallen” leader’s strong attachment to his principles, which appealed to those viewers, mostly abroad, who saw in the film a validation, not a denunciation, of the socialist ideology.
A political system, one daresay, ought to be judged not on the basis of its worst offenders, but its best upholders. The refusal to compromise brought about Sreedharan’s death—at the hands of who knows who?—sending his former comrades into a fresh round of celebration in absentia. A man is easy to kill, but to kill a myth or an entire mythology built around a man is well-nigh impossible. And there will always be people to make their careers out of the sacrifice of deviant saints like Sreedharan.
For all its uniqueness of construction, its measured pace, its near-magical rhythm or its engaging characterisations, Elippathayam was easier to appreciate than Mukhamukham which is nothing if not a conundrum wrapped in layers of light and dark dealing with a controversial figure idolised one moment, damned the next, by the same group of people on grounds sometimes real, sometimes fictitious, and at other times more fictitious than real. What to make of the forces fashioning the life and legacy of such an enigma is the question.
Before concluding, perhaps it needs to be emphasised that an early nugget like Kodiyettam (1978) has yet to receive its due by way of serious notice on the part of even film lovers of high pedigree. Swayamvaram may have won the awards, but to my mind, it was Kodiyettam which should have awed the film aesthete with, principally, its purity and innocence of vision.
Shankarankutty (played with remarkable authenticity by Bharath Gopi) is an adult as far as years and physical growth is concerned, but mentally, he is yet to outgrow a personal history of playfulness. He is at home with the children of the village to whom he is a playmate par excellence. He flies kites with them, does errands for a young widow in return for hearty afternoon meals, and attends the occasional political gathering at the behest of a local politico who thinks nothing of waking him up from his sleep with a nudge of his slippered foot. This is an early indication of Adoor’s negative/pessimistic attitude towards the political class out to exploit the gullible and the vulnerable as easy fodder to satisfy their questionable ambitions.
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Eating as a metaphor for a young man’s directionless existence is utterly charming. When Shankarankutty is not playing with his pint-sized friends, attending the village fair and getting hauled up by the police without having done any wrong, or unsuccessfully trying to appreciate the chenda players at the local temple, he is to be seen eating wherever and whenever a full free meal is to be had.
In a world where most people eat to live, here is a lovable fellow who lives to eat until such time arrives when he is blessed with fatherhood and an attendant sense of responsibility. Eating in Kodiyettam serves the same symbolic purpose as sleeping does in Mukhamukham where we are witness to a once robust leader reduced by time and history to a physical wreck, falling off to sleep in full view of an audience made up of the young and the middle-aged who were once among the man’s staunchest supporters. Of such bravura and idiomatic challenges was the genius of early Adoor made.
Vidyarthy Chatterjee is a Calcutta-based veteran writer on cinema, society, politics.
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