Part II
Once, Mahatma Gandhi asked the painter Nandalal Bose, “What do you think of the Khajuraho sculptures?”
Nandalal Bose replied, “They remind me of my own parents.” Gandhi, hearing this, became quiet and lost in his own memories.
A woman lived alone with her striped female cats. At night, the male cats would circle her home, crying out. The female cats would sneak away for their secret meetings, but the woman could not bear to watch the act of mating.
One night, Keshavan knocked on her door. There was no answer. He knocked again. Finally, a voice from inside asked, “Who is it?”
“It’s Keshavan. Just open the door.”
Silence. “Why won’t you open it?” he pleaded.
“No,” she said.
He reminded her of a promise she had made that afternoon. She didn’t reply. He begged and complained. “I’ve lived to forty-seven,” she said. “I don’t need this anymore.”
An owl hooted outside, a sound her grandmother said meant a woman would become pregnant. Memories stirred. A curiosity, like a sixteen-year-old’s, grew. Why does a woman worship a man? Why does she become his slave? She didn’t want a relationship with a man, yet she felt nature had given her these weaknesses for the survival of the species. She was forty-seven. What was the purpose of her life? To start a family? She had failed.
Keshavan Nair called again. Something inside her broke. She opened the door. The impact of that restless feeling inside her was tremendous. It felt necessary. Even as her face contorted, she hated herself for the theatrics. After the deed was done, she felt an immediate need to bathe. And thus, the first night of the “eternal virgin” passed.
The next day, he knocked again. “No, no,” she said firmly. She never opened the door for a man again. She finally understood the power men possessed, the power she had been waiting for. But she felt nature in her pits. Even as she drowned unwanted kittens, she yearned for the touch of a baby. She waited ten months after that night. If only it had happened years earlier… That morning, her cats circled her, crying.
I was an assistant director for Adoor’s ‘Kathapurushan.’ My main job, it seemed, was to keep the locals of Adoor from disturbing the shoot. There were people who had practically raised Adoor, and he had asked me to gently field them away.
Adoor’s way of working was unique and intense. His eyes missed nothing. I sometimes wondered if he would save energy by just eliminating the role of assistants.
When I first wrote to him asking to work on the film, his reply was: “Whenever I bring friends on as assistants, it ends in enmity. I don’t want to lose a good friend, but the decision is yours.”
I shot back: “I have decided to become your enemy and am joining.”
The goings-on of the Film Industry and the working style of the Adoor School were poles apart. The shooting practices in Tamil Nadu resemble the caste practices in North India. I still remember the wide-eyed wonder of a Tamilian light boy who watched Adoor wash his hands and sit down to eat in the space he had vacated. I have experienced first-hand how the practices of Gandhigram have infused idealism into this man, both in real life and in cinema.
It was in Adoor’s school that I understood that a film’s visualisation is fundamentally about its lensing. Mood and music constitute photography, said Razak, sitting in Kottakkal, famous for Ayurveda and photography. Neither Razak nor I received the full script for ‘Kathapurushan’ or ‘Nizhalkkuthu’. We discovered the story as it was being shot, just like the audience would.
The locals of Adoor would invent stories each day based on what they saw. I loved overhearing their theories in tea shops.
One thing really confused them. Adoor used the same child actor to play the young protagonist, Viswanathan, and then later, Viswanathan’s son. The locals couldn’t accept this as a simple filmmaking trick. Finally, they solved the puzzle: The child must be the reincarnation of the protagonist! What cosmic justice, they thought, that Viswanathan, who walked straight as a young man, returned as the “Kathapurushan” with a stutter and a limp!
During the shooting of ‘Nizhalkkuthu,’ the lead actor, Oduvil Unnikrishnan, was made to wear a single dhoti and sit in the scorching sun. The solar flares erased the marks of his shirt and watch from his body.
For ‘Kathapurushan,’ when I suggested a practical idea–since it was difficult to find tamarind (Valanpuli) spread out on a Chikku Pai (woven mat) in the ancestral home courtyard to dry, maybe we could look for something else–the answer I got was about ‘internal layers within internal layers.’ The effort involved in the life behind the mat laid out to dry the tamarind is minimal. The only investment is the labour of climbing the tree, picking the tamarind, and spreading it on the mat. Therefore, what is being signified behind the tamarind and the mat is a cross-section of Kerala’s history. Whether all this will strike anyone watching the movie is not a Gandhian concern at all. Thus, even if only the face and the vessel of the girl boiling milk are in the frame, it is assumed to be cow’s milk in the vessel. Although cinema cannot capture the smell of the boiling milk, the heat hitting the face of the human being boiling the milk is Adoor’s Gandhian truth here. The god in the details.
Adoor Gopalakrishnan has directed documentaries about Kathakali, the dance form that is so embedded in Kerala’s culture it appears everywhere, even in tea commercials. Yet in his feature films, he never treats Kathakali as a mere spectacle.
His nuanced approach is often misunderstood. Chidananda Das Gupta from Kolkata, who attempts to place Adoor’s work within a specific cultural history is a good case in point. In his effort, he falls into a familiar trap, reducing the director’s identity to a simple cultural signpost.
The misunderstanding is revealed in a passage from his book, Seeing is Believing:
“Adoor is the name of the small town from which Gopalakrishnan came. The town is known for its Kathakali dancing troupes and it is customary for the players – and the villagers prefix their names with that of the village from which they come. Hence the name Adoor Gopalakrishnan, known to his friends, all over the country and abroad, as just Adoor.”
The “Kathakali-fication” is taken too far. The critic solemnises simple character walks into Kathakali hand gestures and camera movements into classical dance forms.
While Adoor is being so heavily ‘made up’ in Kolkata, a handsome writer in Malayalam once searched for the resemblance of ‘Swayamvaram’ in a segment of Ritwik Ghatak’s ‘Subarnarekha,’ at a film workshop held at UC College, Aluva. Although Adoor flatly opposed it then, I’m not sure what he thinks now.
My worry isn’t that films like ‘Nalu Pennungal’ were technically made for Doordarshan but are presented as superior arthouse cinema, when their feel is often that of a TV serial.
Here’s a strange reversal. A Westerner might struggle with subtitles to understand the depth of Adoor’s early film ‘Elippathayam.’ But now, a Malayali watching his latest films has to struggle to survive the Malayalam in them.
A prominent South Indian filmmaker once privately said the “Old Adoor” began to fade with the inflow of foreign funds. I argued against it then, but the thought still disturbs me.
The whole world reads subtitles. I’m told the Finnish director Aki Kaurismäki even made a film just with the subtitles. Aravind Sinha’s ‘Maya Poocha Kaya Se’ (The Soul Asks the Body) is a fantastic documentary film featuring Howrah Station in Kolkata. When it was screened in Kolkata three years ago, the audience started checking their watches and whispering after the first fifteen minutes. The local audience grew restless because the station was an everyday sight for them.
I saw the film again at a special screening hosted by the Max Mueller Bhavan for German guests, an event held in honor of the Nobel laureate Günter Grass. The audience around me reacted with soft, appreciative murmurs–whispered “wows” and “fantastics.” But I felt disconnected, frozen in my seat like a fish in an ice bucket. I was an outsider to their experience.
I slowly, almost subconsciously, covered my ears. I shut out the sound and focused solely on the subtitles. On screen, a Bihari porter, identified by a metal number plate and clad in a red shirt, was speaking: a man who earned his living purely through the labor of his body. In the film’s imagined scenario, his soul, at the moment of his death, asks his body a metaphysical question: “When will we meet again?”
The long, philosophical interview was then punctuated by the director’s sly intervention: a leaked radio advertisement for underwear. In that moment, something extraordinary happened. From this clash of the inner soul (Antaraatma) and underwear, a new, parallel cinema emerged in my mind. It was a moment of pure creative freedom.
Sir, I saw your film screening in Kolkata. We talked about your films. Had I said anything other than what I did about the soundtrack, I would have been shut down.
You filmed Thakazhi’s “Nithyakanyaka,” but you cut out the wild, messy sex of the first night. Some say this was to tailor it for Doordarshan. Let that be.
But here is the rub: In the story, the woman is technically not a virgin, yet Thakazhi calls her an “Eternal Virgin.” This gives the term a deep, painful, psychological meaning.
In your film, you censored the first night and presented the character, played by Nandita Das, as a nun-like figure. At the end, when she declares a woman can live without a man, the music swells triumphally. A Doordarshan official would surely stand and applaud.
But what happened to the “internal layers within internal layers”? The complex, raw humanity of Thakazhi’s character. Her disgust, her yearning, her failure have been reduced to a campaign slogan about women’s independence.
However, the same trope has saved Thakazhi’s story ‘Pankiyamma’ (in Randanum Oru Pennum). With what control is the final ‘hahahaha’ laughter of the original story elevated to a Basheerian level? Which is the prison? Which is the world?
However, the embellishment of the mere three-page story ‘Kanyaka’ into an Unnaman version (a colloquial narrative style) exposes the copper of the filmmaker.
(Macro close-up shot filled with VKN. Synch-shot of VKN’s answers to questions posed in Akbar Kakkattil’s voice) “You see people with a third eye, don’t you?” “That’s because I’m cross-eyed.” “How do you feel when you are called the ‘Modern Kunchan’?” “I feel like doing a ‘Thullal’ (a traditional dance form).”
In ‘Kathapurushan,’ there is a Gandhian smile and tear for a passing world. I remember that even the green tapioca plants in the background of a shot were removed because tapioca wasn’t prevalent in Kerala during the film’s period. That’s a Gandhian concern for truth–every detail matters, even the blurry green in the background.
The green dye in Vanaspati cooking oil was a way of deceiving Gandhi. And my own, perhaps dishonest, hope is that the boy in ‘Kathapurushan’ who sobbed at the news of Gandhi’s death will somehow help Adoor peel away the new layers of “Kathakali-fication” and the feel of television serials.
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Translated from Malayalam by Ebin Geevarghese and Binu Karunakaran
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