The biggest difference between the filmmaker Adoor Gopalakrishnan and Mahatma Gandhi is simple: Gandhi could never have made one of Adoor’s films.
Not because Gandhi would have refused to use new media. He likely would have embraced any tool to spread his ideas. The problem is cinema is built on illusion. The entire process involves a kind of “cheating” and would have been completely at odds with Gandhi’s life-long commitment to truth.
In Adoor’s Nizhalkuthu, the crew used pesticide spray pumps to create the effect of raindrops falling on a roof. The crew was covered in pesticide powder for days. Gandhi would not have tolerated this. He would have objected to the use of Makeup Mani’s red paste to simulate a young girl’s first period. He would have rejected the plain water in the liquor meant to be the liquor drunk by the executioner, Oduvil Unnikrishnan. In the movie, the executioner tells his Gandhian son he agrees with all of Gandhi’s ideals, except for the part about (not) drinking. One has to wonder if the director had a smirk on his face while filming that scene.
Adoor Gopalakrishnan’s film, Randanum Oru Pennum (Two Men and One Woman), was not shown at the 13th International Film Festival of Kerala (IFFK) in December 2008. After the festival, the film critic Vidhyarthi Chatterjee and I went to Beemapalli. We were tired from watching many films, but we bought DVDs of the movies we had missed. One was Adoor’s Elippathayam. It had crescents of Arabic subtitles over the Central Travancore dialect.
Gandhi comes calling again.
If I wanted to mess with a film critic, to make him question if we were in Realism or Magical Realism, all I’d need is for Gandhi to show up and knock on the door in the middle of a shot. It reminded me of the intense debate about the film Mukhamukham. Did Kaviyoor Ponnamma’s character actually open the door for Comrade Sreedharan?
Film critic, Iqbal Masood, argued that Sreedharan becomes so specific in the second half of the film that he stops being a fictional image.
Why don’t we have deep debates like this about Adoor’s films, such as Elippathayam or Mukhamukham, in Malayalam cinema today? What happened to our film society culture? Why couldn’t established Kerala critics like Kottayam Mathaichan and Thrissur Thomachan speak as plainly as Iqbal Masud? Is the Malayali audience now afraid of Adoor, one of the founders of the Chitralekha film society? Is this a kind of “Adoor-phobia,” similar to old social fears like Pulappedi or Mannappedi?
I wore a traditional mundu from my village, Kadamakkudy, to an interview at the Pune Film Institute. My English was scratchy. My appearance and language skills must have made the judges’ decision very easy. Cinema and I went our separate ways.
My new plan was to take on the Catholic Church. Along with a poet from Kadamakkudy, Josukuttan, I targeted St Augustine’s Church in Kadamakkudy. But Liberation Theology failed. The fellow comrades wrote mercy petitions to the church. The case we filed against the Bishop of Ernakulam and the local Vicar was dismissed by the High Court.
Kadamakkudy is an island. I had nowhere to go.
I applied for a job at the Films Division, Bombay in lieu of Nanappan. A policeman from Njarakkal Station went to the church first for my conduct certificate. Fortunately, the Vicar, who usually fasted, had eaten a large wedding feast that day and was asleep. The policeman ended up going to my mother for the verification. That is how I got the job in the Malayalam section of the Films Division.
There, I was haunted by my old interest: cinema. The Films Division had a government mandate, and it mostly demonstrated how films should not be made. My proposals to make films were constantly rejected. I felt like I was being told, “Go away, junior Nanappan.” I wondered, which church was I supposed to challenge now? The dark poet Josukuttan wasn’t with me, either.
During the interim government before India’s Independence, Gandhi suggested that Vanaspati (hydrogenated vegetable oil) should be banned. He called Vanaspati a “falsehood” because it was designed to mimic real ghee, sometimes even with added animal-based Vitamin A. The government was full of Gandhi’s followers.
Gandhi wrote about it constantly in Harijan. He wrote about Vanaspati with the same seriousness he gave to Cripps Mission.
The government, tired of his campaign, finally made a decision. They did not ban Vanaspati. Instead, they decided to add green dye to it, so people wouldn’t mistake it for ghee. Two months later, they abandoned even that plan.
It was from this incident that I first understood how Gandhi’s ideals would be treated in independent India.
– Prof MN Vijayan
Adoor Gopalakrishnan’s film Randanum Oru Pennum opened to bad reviews; critics called it a soap opera, and word on the street was it got an award due to Adoor-phobia. A friend from All India Radio called me, upset after seeing Adoor and the cultural minister MA Baby together at a press conference.
If Baby had said, “I don’t respect Adoor Gopalakrishnan, but I fear him,” it would have been a dramatic moment, with a John Abraham touch. But the minister said he had respect, not fear. The whole event felt like a performance. In Kadamakkudy, we call it Porattunatakam–a satirical folk drama.
The film reviews of Thrissur Thomachan and Kottayam Mathaichan are still decorating book shelves. Reading them, I always had one question: The British Film Institute recognised Elippathayam because it is a powerful film. But would the foreigner have been as touched if Adoor hadn’t explained the film’s psychoanalytic layers, its subtext, and its subconscious themes? And are we now forced to read his explanations as the film reviews of Thomachans and Mathaichans?
You can see the effect of Adoor-phobia in the writer Akbar Kakkattil’s book, Varu Adoorilekku Pokam (Let’s Go to Adoor). After spending time with Adoor, Kakkattil seems to become possessed by Adoor’s influence. He writes, “What I have to say about him, I tell him directly.” But the book echoes Adoor himself.
On page 68, Kakkattil asks a question about the characters in Elippathayam and Mukhamukham. It feels like a question that Adoor has already answered for foreign audiences many times before. The whole exchange feels like a farce.
Unhappy with writing dry commentary for Films Division movies, I began writing for Trial weekly. The magazine was edited by MP Narayana Pillai from Bombay and published from Thiruvananthapuram.
I wrote a note about Vijayakrishnan’s film Nidhiyude Katha (Santosh Sivan’s first film) using the pen name ‘Pravasi’ (Expatriate). I used my friend Mary’s handwriting. The editor, Nanappan, who is familiar with Mary’s writing, decided to print it under the name Mary Alexander. He did not like pseudonyms. I thought it was a good disguise. Mary agreed.
“Mary Alexander” began writing a regular cinema column for Trial. To make it believable, I added fictional details about Mary’s life working at the Times of India. The biggest challenge was writing from a woman’s perspective. The column became quite popular. Nanappan featured Mary’s articles on the cover. “Mary” received many passionate love letters from readers in the Gulf countries.
At that time, Adoor came to Bombay with his new film, Anantaram. I was his main assistant. We screened the film at a small theatre at Nariman Point. The only Malayalees in the audience were me, Adoor, Subhash Chandran, and PK Raveendranath, the Bombay correspondent for Mathrubhumi. The film was screened again the next morning for the major Bombay critic Iqbal Masood. So, Mary Alexander saw Anantaram twice before it was shown in Kerala. The next week, Trial’s cover story was about Anantaram.
When the love letters from the Gulf became too intense and laced with smut and Mary’s name was suggested for an award committee, we became uneasy. We decoupled and put paid to the column.
At the International Film Festival of India in Thiruvananthapuram, I was in the back seat of Adoor’s old Fiat car. The poet Vinayachandran was with me. V Sasikumar from the P&T department was in the front passenger seat, holding a new copy of Trial. I tried to act normal. Sasikumar, who knew I was friends with Mary, flipped through the magazine and said, “Oh, Mary!”
My heart raced. I was afraid I would be exposed and thrown out of the car. At least that would have lowered my blood pressure.
“Has that woman written in this issue too?” Adoor asked.
I only recall Sasikumar showing him the article. Rest is lost in the mist.
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Translated from Malayalam by Ebin Geevarghese and Binu Karunakaran
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