The Pot that Broke Below a Hundred Other Pots
If
you have the option of picking from among half a dozen cinematic
traditions, why would anyone choose to look for romance in Malayalam
cinema – the most determinedly unromantic of them all?
By Nisha Susan | Grist Media – Mon 2 Dec, 2013
Towards the middle of
Aaraam Thampuran, a 1997 movie with Malayali actor
Mohanlal
in the lead, the hostile villagers are steadily awakened to the true
‘noble’ roots of the bad man who has bought the big house. The villagers
– and the audience – are given broad hints that he isn’t just the
goonda from Bombay they thought he was. It is in the nature of the
movies the Malayalam industry was making in the late 1990s that Jagan
(Mohanlal) was revealed to be not just a secret aristocrat; he was a
secret aristocrat from the village who has now returned to his rightful
place. The ‘Lost Heir’ is not a new trope, but hoary as it is, it can
still be satisfying.
Unfortunately, what was memorable for me
about the Lost Heir in this movie was something that happens in the
middle of the film. Someone from the city comes to meet Jagan for
prosaic business. The moment he sees Jagan the man is wreathed in
confused smiles. “Aren’t you the Jagan who ran an art journal in Delhi?”
Mohanlal the actor tries to look modest and yet cosmopolitan but looks
like he is suppressing giggles instead. The establishing of Jagan the
violent thug as a Delhi gallery owner, a classical musician in Gwalior, a
jet-setting aesthete, is done with this swift exchange, followed by the
arrival of his long-term city girlfriend who offers to cheer him up by
taking him to any of his favourite places. “London? Paris? Vienna?” she
trills alongside being ‘chulbuli’ – the pan-India cinematic mutation of
female vivaciousness, which is usually represented as chihuahua on
speed.
As an 18-year-old,
Aaraam Thampuran made me wince for days. “
Ningal Alle Delhi yile aaa art journal…?
(Aren’t you…? The one who ran the art journal in Delhi?)” over the
years became my shorthand for unconvincing, name-dropping arty
characters in movies. It embarrassed me deeply. (Perversely,
Suresh Gopi, hero of
Lelam
– also from 1997 – resorting to Yiddish in the middle of a trademark
tirade against the villains, ‘You schmuck’, only made me fall about
laughing.)
Over the years, I’ve also become a little grudging of
the long explanation (such as the one in the above paragraph) I must
make for this reference when I’m around someone who does not watch
Malayalam cinema.
You’d
think I’d have options other than Malayalam cinema for bonding in this
movie-mad nation. My family was addicted to movie-watching in five
different languages and thought it perfectly unremarkable. What was a
bit unusual was that my paternal grandparents owned a movie theatre in
the village for a while. We were packed off, all of us cousins, resident
and visiting, to watch whatever raunchy 1980s Malayalam movie was
running in the afternoon, to keep us off the streets and out of the pond
or the local timber mill where the elephants were diligently working.
For
a while, after the afternoon show, I’d race out to the back of the
theatre hoping to catch the actors, since I’d somehow imagined that they
were just behind the screen. No one worried about what we were
watching. Movie-watching was completely respectable in that household.
My paternal grandparents even offered to take my mother to the movies to
distract her from labour pains when she was about to give birth to me. I
suspect if the gimlet eye of her own mother (who was convinced that all
in-laws are villains unless proven otherwise) hadn’t been on her, my
mother would have gone gamely to the matinée. To see something by
Sukumaran, probably, or
MG Soman.
Soman once turned up in the village to promote his movie and all of us
grandchildren were gobsmacked seeing our house surrounded by hundreds
and hundreds of fans. We got nowhere near the star, of course. But the
stars seemed very close, so close that I’ve a false memory of staring
into the sky after being told the breaking news that the action star
Jayan
had fallen off a helicopter during a stunt and died. An utterly false
memory, because when Jayan with the Errol Flynn moustache died, I was
just a year old.
After my parents left
Kerala,
first for Nigeria and then to Oman, their movie addiction continued.
They watched British and American cinema (though I don’t think they
discovered
Nigeria’s own.)
There is also some family legend that when we were robbed to the last
spoon in Nigeria, my parents were left only with a trunk full of movies
which they sold to finance my father’s visa to Oman.
Later,
through their decades in Oman, my parents were always members of the
local video library in whatever tiny town on the Batinah coast they were
stuck in, and watched three or four movies every week. They watched
Malayalam, Tamizh, Hindi,
Telugu movies
and of course, Hollywood. In the summers when my brother and I visited
them from India, my mother stocked up the fridge with treats and piled
up the videos that she had enjoyed all year.
I was more than
happy to plunge into the crazy comedies that she usually picked,
particularly because in Bangalore, where I went to school, my movie
viewing was rather virtuous. The Kannada movie every Saturday evening (
Rajkumar
as Krishna, Rajkumar as James Bond) and something horribly cheerful in
Hindi on Sunday evenings. The only Malayalam movies I caught on
television were worthy national award winners like
Adoor Gopalakrishnan and
G. Aravindan works which, to my pre-teen self, were parodies of long silences and bewildering ambiguities.
Superficially, I went through the same rites of passage as everyone else of my generation in Indian cities, graduating from
Amitabh Bachchan to
Shah Rukh Khan,
or from Kamal Hasan to Madhavan. But I had no clue what my friend
Vinaya was talking about when she says she first understood sexual
desire after seeing Amitabh Bachchan in
Deewar, or my friend Paro, to whom Shah Rukh means pure love. I found romance in the crevices of
Malayalam cinema.
Hollywood
was where people tongue-kissed, the same fictional universe as Mills
& Boons, where people had no parents and could do anything.
Hindi movies
had even more baffling people: those who knotted jaunty handkerchiefs
around their necks and played pianos. Telugu movies had people doing
aerobic routines en masse on shiny disco floors under shiny disco balls.
Malayalam movies
had Malayalis, who, like me, couldn’t dance, were uncool but snippy. At
best, they could look over mountain vistas while clad in knotted
sweaters. Mostly, they couldn’t do that either without making fun of
themselves.
The climax of one of my favourite movies
Mithunam
(plot: Sethumadhavan wants to start a biscuit factory but everyone
wants a bribe) works around a disastrous romantic getaway to the hills
and the hero’s tirade against his long-term girlfriend’s cinematic
expectations of love. I don’t know why Sethumadhavan bothered. The
entire movie was puncturing romance in cinema. Here is Sethumadhavan and
buddy outside his girlfriend’s house planning the quick elopement.
Buddy peeps over the bushes and spies a teenaged girl sweeping the
courtyard. Buddy: Is this thirteen-year-old the one you said you have
been in love with for the last sixteen years? Later, as they are
carrying away the girlfriend rolled up in a mat, Sethumadhavan spots his
girlfriend’s older brother. Sethu: Oh my god, it’s her brother! Buddy:
Is that the elder brother of the burden we are currently bearing?
Why would something so fundamentally anti-romance fizz in my veins?
I don’t want you to think these movies were charmless or nihilistic. They did have
the lover who quotes a passage from the Song of Songs
(“let us go out early to the vineyards and see whether the vines have
budded, whether the grape blossoms have opened and the pomegranates are
in bloom. There I will give you my love.”);
the woman who scams her neighbour and convinces him that her ‘foreign’ dark glasses give her x-ray vision to see through his clothes;
the woman who goes from Bangalore to the funeral of her mercurial lover and finds the identical twin he’d kept in
Kerala as a prank;
the young wife of the old brahmin who is smeared with the face-paint of her Kathakali dancer lover.
It wasn’t that Malayalam cinema was staid either. I didn’t need to see Silk Smitha to be shocked. Why bother when there was
Mammooty
in an eye-poppingly tight swimsuit, or heroines in gratuitous
towel-wearing-and-playfully-fighting-in-bed scenes? Why bother with item
numbers when the worldliness of the script could titillate so much
more? Take this scene: aunt of heroine tells her that she’d better marry
suitable boy aunt has picked out or else. Heroine refuses. The very
next scene: post-coital aunt in bed with suitable boy telling him to not
to worry, the heroine will come around or she will be made to.
Or
take the mildly arty film I caught one afternoon in which the orphan
from the city who is trying hard not to scandalise the village
inadvertently (when she is sitting at the stoop of the house she
remembers to keep her legs covered entirely under long skirts) and is
instead surprised by her first kiss – in broad daylight with a
casualness and lack of soothing soundtrack.
It took me years to
understand that the romance Malayalam movies offered me lay elsewhere.
Somehow it had leaked out of everything from the
Keystone Kop comedy of
Nadodikkattu to Mithunam, to the political satire of
Sandhesam
into the real world. Romance lay in the particular comic timing of
Malayalis: the deadpan delivery, the unexpected terms of reference, the
particular rhythms of speech. Though I speak, read and write Malayalam,
I’ve lived very little in Kerala and have no formal understanding of its
literature. I don’t know enough to decide whether the Malayali men of
my generation speak like the movies or the movies speak like them.
All
I know is that a certain rhythm of speech will get me every time
because it reminds me of a long history of movies: one collapsing on
another with a clang and a crash like the school cycle stand when my
friend Nishad came downhill and lost control of his new Hero Ranger. No,
to be accurate they fall like the one pot that broke in the beginning
of the 1994 movie
Thenmavin Kombath
(elderly lady to Manikyan: Are you saying the police came because you
broke one pot at the market? Manikyan: Well, no, that was probably
because the pot I broke had a few hundred pots above it.)
Sometimes
it’s a just a silly memory. In my family, we just need to hold up a
chilli with a solemn face to crack each other up. It evokes the
matriarch of
Melaparambil Aanveedu
handing her three unmarried sons and her unmarried brother-in-law
chillies like swords to take into battle, because gruel and chillies
were the only items on the menu henceforth, because she had no plans to
cook ever again.
Mostly, though, it’s not just deplorable
nostalgia. My favourite exchanges were always the ones that went from
grouchy to absurd in three sentences, usually written by the
diamond-sharp (writer, actor, director)
Sreenivasan. Observe my most beloved sequence ever in
Sandhesam,
a movie about two brothers who are lowly but rabid members of rival
political parties. It’s lunchtime and each brother tries to turn their
newly retired father (freshly arrived in Kerala from a lifetime posting
in Tamil Nadu and hence, the movie implies, an innocent abroad) towards
their side. Impassioned one-upmanship careens from the IMF to the gold
standard to the devaluation of the rupee to the puppet government in
Nicaragua, the collapse of Hungary, and ends with the Communist brother
(Sreenivasan) sternly warning the Congress brother: “
Polandine patti oraksharam nee parayaruthu (Don’t you dare say a word about Poland).”
I have my share of affection for Dharmendra and Amitabh Bachchan in
Chupke Chupke and I smile politely at people who rave about
Jaane Bhi Do Yaaron. So polite that I don’t even think to myself: brother, what would you do if you watched
Narendran Makan Jayakanthan Vaka,
a surreal, serene comedy that spans the 24 hours of a man (non-resident
Malayali freshly arrived in Kerala from Tamil Nadu and hence again, the
movie implies, an innocent abroad) trying to get compensation for the
property that his father lost to the Kannur Airport? What would happen
is that your brains would leak out of your ears.
But I don’t say that. My pleasures remain private.
When
I was 24, I was stuck on a project for weeks at a stretch with a
pothead designer. He had nothing to recommend him except his general
sweetness and the facsimile of Malayalam movie comic timing that I now
realise I’m fatally attracted to. The rest of the package – the distrust
of emotion, the moping, the languor – I could do without. I did do
without.
Years later we bumped into each other on the street. I
was hanging out with N, a Malayali friend who speaks less Malayalam than
I do and for whom, therefore, Malayalam humor is only accessible as a
bittersweet groupie. Obviously, in his presence I like to perform quick
acts of Malayaliness. Like teasing a true-blue Malayali in Malayalam.
Acquired as my register is from movies which give female characters next
to nothing to do or say, my ‘material’ (as the stand-ups say) is
necessarily laddish. I’m inclined to say
shavam for effect. (What? It means corpse and don’t ask me why it’s a swearword). I’m inclined to say
shavam, kundam, myru (corpse, spear, pubic hair) not ‘sheeee’ or ‘cheee’ as ladies ought to.
So
there I was doing my number and my lost-lost crush put up with it for a
while. He was silent as the tomb as he had always been. When I teased
him about something obscure he waited two beats and then said, “oho.”
Then another beat. N and I stared. “Vitt-uh.” he completed deadpan. I
was slain. Living across the border from Kerala, N and I have to wait
for years before there is any context for anyone unleashing that
familiar, contemptuous Malayalization of the English word ‘wit’. For N
and me, it was better than sex.
* * *
The Malayalam folk rock band
Avial
has made some inroads into the world of my Malayali and non-Malayali
friends in the last few years. Though I like some of their tracks I have
an irrational suspicion, a Scrooge-ish resistance to their trendiness
among some people I knew.
As Malayalam cinema becomes more
globalised, has more globalised faces, bodies and features,
embarrassments such as whirling dervishes on Kozhikode beach (oh
Ustad Hotel,
how I loved you for the first twenty minutes with your screen-full of
cute hijabi girls before you pulled your faux-Sufi nonsense on me) I’m
rendered more and more cranky.
I saw
Neelakasham Pachakadal Chuvanna Bhoomi and
pulled my hair out in clumps. The cute-boy protagonists are riding
through the country on fancy motorcycles, okay. They are being serenaded
through said south Indian countryside by piggybacking rollerskaters,
er…okay. But the voice-over in half-Malayalam and half-English made me
cry: “They say the road has answers for everything.
Enalum enyike chothiyangal ilayaranu. I was confused on (sic) identity, politics, happiness, freedom. The only thing I was always sure about
ente vidhi ente thirumanangalanu and I chose to be with her.” This movie may well be somebody’s
Dil Chahta Hai but boy, does it look like one giant
Delhiyile art journal.
It
isn’t nostalgia that makes me resistant to the smart, new movies of
Malayalam cinema. It is the knowledge that I may have to wait a long
cinematic lifetime before smart patter comes back, absurdity comes back,
uncool comes back. For a brief while, my neurotic, shifty sense of
humor and desire for self-deprecating romance was in sync with what was
on screen. For a brief while, I possessed cinema aglow with men who were
not dudes, who were utter failures at being dudes, who broke your heart
permanently with their undude-ishness. Their toes were almost always
making circles in the sand while the heroines stared bemused at them.
When the scripts required them to be jet-setters they looked giggly.
The beginning of the end came with a swathe of macho movies with two-word English titles:
The King,
The Commissioner
(and to our recent horror, a sequel called The King & The
Commissioner). The soft, dysfunctional heroes I loved were suddenly
bursting out of tight uniforms or uniform-like office gear. Their mouths
were filled with tooth-cracking, breathless rants about the evils of
the nation and the worse evils of forward women in trousers who have
careers.
For a long while I stopped watching Malayalam movies. I
switched to Tamizh where luckily the age of the sexy, dysfunctional
hero was just around the corner.
My baby cousin Prem (well fine,
he is a giant six-foot person now) is my current source for the best
things from Kerala. I trust, for instance, that he will not peddle two
random boys on bikes surrounded by roller-skaters with a portentous
voice-over to me. After all, when I started researching Malayali nurses
he blew my mind by making me watch
22 Female Kottayam,
the adventures of the bobbitising nurse Teresa Abraham. So when he
sends me a link saying watch this, I watch it. Even if it is a video of
Avial’s song from the soundtrack of the Malayalam movie
Salt N’ Pepper.
I’d mildly enjoyed the movie for its slightly stoned and runaway plot
about two not-so-young people finding love through cooking.
Revisiting
the music video didn’t seem like too much fun. Here were the dudes
jumping around doing their dude thing singing in a flood-lit set (with
motorcycles and extraneous sofas) about
Ayyapan the elephant thief, Ayyapan the yam thief. Why should I care, I thought in my familiar Scrooge-ish way.
And then I saw it. On the dudes’ t-shirts was the almost-impossible-to-read line: “
Polandinepattioraksharam nee parayaruthu.”
I won’t say a word about Poland if you won’t.
Nisha Susan is an editor for Yahoo! Originals and the women’s zine The Ladies Finger.
Her fiction has been published by n+1 magazine, Caravan, Out of Print,
Pratilipi, Penguin and Zubaan, and she is currently working on her first
book.
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