Things fall apart: The cinematic rendition of the agrarian landscape in Kerala
Dilip M.Menon
In this freewheeling essay the author looks at the agrarian landscape in Kerala since the fifties and how issues find representation in literature and cinema, largely in the work of MT Vasudevan Nair, writer and filmmaker and one of Kerala's most important cultural figures today.
1 |
From the inside there is no answer to be given; it was simply the way things were |
(The transfiguration of the commonplace, Arthur C. Danto, 1981) |
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Scene 49
A village post office. The postmaster stands behind the half-shut door with the letters, looking at them with silver frame spectacles and reads out names. He holds in his hand a copy of the newspaper, The Hindu.
A crowd of expectant people.
Kunnathuthodi Velayudhan.
The man is not there. Puts it aside and calls the next name.
Mundamvalappil Saithali, son of Mundamvalappil Anthru.
A man reaches out and takes the letter.
Melevalappil Chathu.
The man is not there.
M.T.Sahadevan.
A youth takes the letter.
P.K. Kausalya- west Kattur.
No one claims it.
K.N.Brahmadattan Nambudiri, Melekkavu temple.
The postmaster looks at him and the redirected address and gives him a copy of The Hindu.
Unni Nambudiri takes it and steps out.
In the background, the reading of addresses continues.
Ponnumkuzhil Kuttan. Thekkepat Vasu.
[Nirmalyam (The offering of flowers), 1973]
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The village post office: the global in the local. A place where different times, geographies and entities intersect. In the roster of names is a Muslim, Saithali; a Brahmin - the Nambudiri; some lower castes - characterised by the initials and lack of surnames; and a woman of indefinite caste
- Kausalya. Some of them are present to collect their letters: the Nambudiri Brahmin at the temple and the Muslim: an embodiment of patrilineal continuity. Chathu, Kuttan and Velayudhan are absent. Have they not been able to turn up or have they left, emigrating as part of the large labour diaspora from Kerala to West Asia and south East Asia? Who wrote these letters to them: someone from an earlier generation of migrants? Is the Muslim Saithali able to ensure his continued presence within this landscape on remittances that come from across the ocean? Or has he returned wealthy, after gruelling years of labour abroad and now with the memory of want effaced, become the hub around whom others congregate in search of riches? We are half way through the film, Nirmalyam. By now the viewer knows that the Nambudiri (the only one among the people assembled at the post office who is a character in the unfolding story) is about to leave this landscape as well. The Hindu, in his hands, holds the promise of jobs in a place elsewhere, even if in the dark recesses of some government office, and he is driven by both guilt and a sense of responsibility. The viewer also knows something else about the last name to be called- Thekkepat Vasu- to which no one answers. This is the nickname of Madathu Thekkepat Vasudevan Nair (1934-), the screenplay writer and director of the film.This spectral, Hitchcockian presence is a signifier of absence. With Nirmalyam, MT (as he is popularly known) has finally left the landscape that he had been cataloguing
with care in his short stories and novels from the early 50's. From Sacred Sword and Anklets (1954), the story from which Nirmalyam was scripted through to his first novel, Nalukettu (The Ancestral Home) of 1958 and his first screenplay Murapennu (The Betrothed)(1965), MT had been writing stories of the disintegration of a traditional society and order, that in his eyes had been held together by the matrilineal households of the Nairs. The stories were dark, brooding and shot through with metaphors of madness, unrealised loves, and the break-up of families through an excess of greed for property. However, these were the intimate renditions of someone who was implicated in the stories that he was telling. There was sadness, but it was a wry, knowing sadness. Nalukettu told the story of the young fatherless boy Appunni, who is rejected by his mother's distinguished and decaying family, and struggles for love and recognition. A Muslim trader, who is believed to have poisoned Appunni's father, and whom he initially sees as his enemy, helps him to get employment. At the end of the novel he buys the Ancestral Home and restores his mother to her rightful estate. Asuravithu (1962) (The misbegotten one) was both more radical as well as despairing. Govindankutty, regarded as a ne'er do well by his Nair matrilineal family, and tricked into a marriage with a woman already pregnant, decides to convert to Islam and finds himself suspended in a space where neither Hindu nor Muslim wants to own him. An epidemic breaks out in the village and Govindankutty redeems himself but casts himself as the ultimate outsider by burying the dead; "the dead needed him." The novel ends with the words, "My dear ones, it is to return again that I begin my journey." (1) In Kaalam (Time) (1969), Sethu, leaves the village and his matrilineal household and enters the vortex of the city and the larger world: unemployment, a job and the shady world of commerce, illicit love with his employer's wife and a final broken return to the village, unable to be present at his mother's bedside as she dies. He crosses the river in an uncertain return to the city; the river itself, "dreaming of floods even as it grew dry." (2) In the film Nirmalyam, the river has run dry, and the mood is one of cynicism and loss. In one of the most searing endings in Indian cinema, the central character, a temple oracle, repeatedly cuts his forehead with the temple sword in a state of possession and dies in the sanctorum, spitting blood in anger on the face of the deity who has betrayed his devotion to her. It is the character of the young Namboodiri who leaves the temple for the city forever who is the other pivot of the film. So what happened between 1953 and 1973; why had Thekkepat Vasu left the countryside that he had so painfully recorded? Had each of the earlier renditions been in fact, a chronicle of a departure foretold?Was this a peculiar trajectory? Let us take another contemporary filmmaker, but from the avant garde end of the spectrum: G. Aravindan (1935-91), cartoonist, stage director, musician and employee of the Kerala Rubber Board. His life in some senses encapsulates the trajectory of many intellectuals and artists in Kerala, chained to the security of a numbing government job yet living lives of the mind that roamed free. Aravindan worked as a cartoonist for the weekly Mathrubhumi (of which M.T. was the editor between 1968 and 1981) drawing the series, Cheriya manushyan valiya lokam (Small humans in the big world) between 1961 and 1979. The lower middle class hero Ramu, with his trademark hair combed back in a puff, is a witness to a changing world of increasing unemployment, faithless politicians, passionate intellectuals, idealistic schoolmasters and occasional loves. (3) The frames are full of incidents, characters and an affectionate, intimate, irony about the state of the world. In one of the early cartoons Ramu's retired father tells him that the postman was enquiring after him. Dreaming of a job interview, Ramu goes through his daily meanderings at the library, the Muslim teashop and the secretarial college (where the then object of his affection sheds tears at his imminent departure). Finally, the postman gives him back the letter that he had posted; returned on account of insufficient postage. By 1978, the mood has changed. If in the case of MT's film, he has left the landscape, Aravindan's later cartoons are evacuated of characters and depth and are tinged with a melancholy sarcasm. Emptiness characterises the space within the frame and the characters are pushed out to the edges. Ramu, himself has lost his cockiness, his iconic puff has lost its buoyancy and the radical intellectual has reinvented himself as an Indo-Anglian writer. The language itself has been corrupted; Ramu and his erstwhile friend speak to each other in a peculiar argot of Malayalam and English. When the writer tells Ramu that he has been residing in the five star hotels of Delhi and writing the authentic Indian novel, the latter asks him whether the real India is visible in such spaces. The intellectual replies, "India at all times has been one, brother, with its poverty, prostitution, superstition, filth, flies." (4) (the italicised words are in English in the original text). In Aravindan's first feature film, Uttarayanam (Tropic of Capricorn) (1974), the hero Ravi, disillusioned with the city, numberless lost job opportunities and surrounded by too corruptible friends, abandons everything to find meaning in religion and a godman. There is a dark cynicism as in the case of Nirmalyam -and departure - but a different resolution.
II |
.and everywhere |
The ceremony of innocence is drowned |
(The second coming, W.B.Yeats) |
So what indeed had happened between 1950 and 1973? In 1957, the people of Kerala elected the first communist government to be voted to power anywhere in the world and E.M.S. Nambudiripad became the state's chief minister. This had been preceded by two decades of mobilization that challenged rural inequalities as well as caste hierarchies. (5) However, communism in Kerala was far more than just a political movement organising the proletariat and the peasantry into militant entities pressing for exigent economic concessions. Euphoric visions of a new order and a rampant rejection of past hierarchies found expression in popular songs, literature and films. The iconic play of the 1950s, Ningal enne kammyunist aakki (You made me a communist) (1952) written by Thoppil Bhasi (1924-1992) and performed by the Kerala People's Arts Club, had as its hero a young Nair peasant revolutionary who converts his uncle, a rich peasant, to Communism. However, there were strains evident even then. The move towards an electoral communism in 1952 had been criticised by a radical left as a degeneration into "parliamentary cretinism." (6) With the formation of the state of Kerala in 1956, it became necessary to discipline the cadres at the same time as mobilise them. It also became increasingly obvious that fundamental issues of caste inequality were being brushed under the carpet as a largely upper caste leadership assumed power and defined regional culture in its own terms. (7)
There is another important factor to be considered here. Kerala is different from most other states in India in having a significant and powerful minority of indigenous Muslims and Christians, as also a heterogeneous group of Jews, Gujarati Muslims, and Konkani merchants along the coast. The assumption of power by the East India Company of this region in 1792 had been premised on the decline of maritime commerce in the region and the turn inwards by the Company state towards strengthening the hands of landed elites and realising revenue from land alone. While a number of the Mappila Muslims continued with their engagement with coastal trade in an age of diminished maritime activity, and the Christians retreated by the late 19th century into the niche economy of rubber and coffee plantations, the Hindu landed groups were granted a new hegemony. Colonial discourse rewrote the history of Kerala as a history of land settlement, writing out, in effect, the histories of commerce as much as the groups that had once made Kerala part of the larger world of the Indian Ocean. (8) Social and political activity had depended to a considerable degree on the disintegration of the upper caste Nair matrilineal landed households (tharavadu) and the entry of a younger generation of Nairs into the making of a new world. In 1867, the Madras High Court had decreed that the tharavadu was an impartible, co-residential unit headed by the eldest male. Demographic pressures generated a discourse of the tyranny of the Karanavan, or the eldest male, who was vested with almost absolute legal powers of sale and acquisition of property, as younger men attempted to strike out on their producing tremendous strains within the tharavadu. In 1933, the Matriliny Act was passed which stated that the matrilineal system was ended and the "social stream [was] flowing along more natural channels." (9) However, matriliny as a system and matrilineal values both were a long time dying. The tharavadus with dominant elder males, dependent younger men and women and a system of bilateral inheritance continued till 1973 when matrilineal inheritance was finally abolished. The agitations for the abolition of matriliny also generated a sense of identity among Nairs, and it was not uncommon to come across statements such as the one made by a Nair meeting in 1932 that the Nairs should lead the other communities in the "creation of the new age." (10) This Nair universalism, if we may call it that, also allowed for the Oxford educated Nair historian, K.M.Panikkar to say, that the central fact of the history of Kerala in the last 400 years was the decline of the power of the Nairs. (11) One finds echoes of this again in Thoppil Bhasi's radical plays. The world of the Nairs is what Bhasi is most comfortable with and there are brilliant portrayals of crumbling households, litigious families, shady land deals and a critique of Nair nostalgia. The Nairs as anchors of the plays undergo transformation towards a universal consciousness while the other castes remain trapped within their stereotypical renditions. (12) MT"s novels share the same paradigm. However, there is a radical difference. While there is an implicit universalisation of the Nair condition as metaphor for conditions in Kerala, in MT's work the hope of radical transformation that Bhasi espoused has evanesced.
The Communist ministry introduced the Land Relations Bill in 1959, proposing the abolition of landlordism and transferring the land to the tiller; a measure that threatened the hegemony of the Hindu landed households in particular. Christian interests were ostensibly protected under a dispensation that declared the plantations and land reclaimed from the backwaters out of the purview of this legislation. (13) However, the ministry's attempt to regulate private education intruded into a realm in which the Christian church as well as Hindu reform organisations had been historically active. This and other radical measures like preventing the police from intervening on the side of industry in the case of strikes, led to a social movement bringing together conservatives among the Hindus and Christians against the ministry. (14) For the first time since Independence in 1947, the central government in Delhi interfered in 1959 and removed the ministry on grounds of the breakdown of the machinery of law and order. The communist party was to return to power again but with its radical sheen somewhat dimmed (fig. 3). A series of coalition ministries of uncertain ideology followed. In 1967, out of power for eight years, the communist party was elected in an alliance with the Muslim League, a few socialist parties and an agrarian party led by a Christian priest. The price of alliance with the Muslim League was the carving out of a Muslim majority district in Malappuram, accompanied by a political uproar about opportunist politics. (15) At the national level the late 1960s saw rising unemployment, industrial recession, the perception of a large-scale intrusion of foreign capital, and a slowing down of the rate of agrarian reform. Meanwhile, the national Congress party flirted with socialism, adopting a swathe of populist measures calling for the immediate extermination of poverty, abolishing the privy purses of the erstwhile princes and nationalising banks. (16) In this atmosphere of disillusionment, away in north-east India a peasant uprising in Naxalbari, under the leadership of Charu Mazumdar, fanned the spark of hope for those disillusioned with what came to be called the "neo-revisionist leading clique" which included now the name of E.M.S. Nambudiripad. In 1969, the Communist Party of India (Marxist-Leninist) came into existence, committed to Maoist strategies of peasant revolution. In Kerala, there was one major incident on 24 November 1968, when Kunikkal Narayanan and a group of armed men attacked a police station in Wynaad district. This turned out be more of a symbolic gesture and the echoes of the Naxalite movement were to be felt in the intellectual realm more than in any fundamental social upheaval. (17)
The 1970s began in a mood of despair with the prospect of social transformation deferred yet again. The oracle spits on the face of god. Ramu regresses into cynicism. From the mid 1970s another option had opened up. It was no longer about staying but leaving. The boom in oil prices in the Gulf region had sparked off a massive need for both labour and technical expertise. Kerala which for a millennium had been incorporated in the rhythms of the Indian Ocean, responded with a massive outflow of labour, a majority of them Mappila Muslims. And a generation later it is possible to argue that Kerala survives as a viable entity purely on the strength of remittances from across the ocean, given its lack of industrialisation, high rates of unemployment, and extremely volatile coalitional politics. (18) However, the ocean is not part of MT's world, living as he does beside it. The only novel that he wrote about the sea was Arabiponnu (Arab gold) in 1962, co-authored with N.P.Mohammad. The ocean was a threatening presence, bringing in money, gold and illicit wealth that undermined rural values and displaced the natural order of the village. Koya the central character, having blown up his patrimony in gambling, remakes himself through getting involved in the smuggling of gold. Alcohol, greed, prostitution and corruption are the persistent themes in this novel that shows an aristocratic disdain for commerce and money, and the Mappila Muslim associated with this.
However, in his other novels, MT had worked at a portrayal of the relationship between Hindu and Muslim (and we shall return to this theme later) that ranged from seeing the Muslim as a moral centre (Saithali as the guardian of Appunni in Nalukettu) to envisaging dissolution of identities (Govindankutty converting to Islam in Asuravithu). In Nirmalyam, the experience of the Gulf boom, the formation of the Muslim majority district of Malappuram, and the visible impact of the Mappila nouveau riches is reflected but in a chilling image. The oracle returns home at dusk to collect the temple sword and the sacred anklets to prepare himself for a possession in the face of the epidemic that threatens the village. He knocks on the inner door and the Muslim moneylender, Maymunni, sidles out followed by the oracle's wife. Driven by want and the fact that temple ceremonies no longer provide sustenance for the family, she has slept with the moneylender to pay off debts incurred for daily food. It is the last straw. The oracle then goes on to a final, glorious, possessed performance and his death. MT too moved on, but into a Hindu world, after the seemingly radical rejection of religion in Nirmalyam. His most recent novel titled Varanasi is set in the Hindu holy city of Benares, towards which the protagonist slouches after a life of irresolution and personal betrayal. However, can regional or even national history be the template for a discussion of an artwork like film? Is the parallelism that I have sketched between "events" and "representation" too easy a resolution? How are we to negotiate the question of "time" in its plurality: of historical and cinematic "times"?
III |
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Time held me green and dying |
Though I sang in my chains like the sea |
(Fern Hill, Dylan Thomas) |
MT has had an enviable record both as a screenplay writer and director. Murapennu [The betrothed] (1965 Director: A.Vincent) his first screenplay based on the falling apart of a tharavadu and the travails of the protagonist ground down by responsibilities, to the extent of sacrificing the love of his betrothed was a resounding commercial success. Iruttinte Atmavu [The soul of darkness](1967 Director: P.Bhaskaran), based on his own short story of a decade earlier went on to win the President's National award for best film and also recognition for Prem Nazir who played the simple-minded hero driven to an acceptance of his insanity. Olavum Theeravum [Waves and the shore] (1969 Director: P.N.Menon), again based on a short story of 1954, about a Muslim boatman and the community of Muslims living off trade and transport on the river, and written in the Muslim Malayalam dialect, won the Government of Kerala's award for best film, director and screenplay. Nirmalyam [Offering of flowers] (1973), his first directorial venture and scripted from a short story of 1954 went on to win not only the President of India's Gold Medal, but also six state government awards and the best film award at the Asian Film festival at Djakarta. MT went on to direct five more films, the most recent being Oru Cheru Punchiri [A slender smile, 2000] and script sixty more screenplays, all of which have enjoyed resounding success. (19) A new film scripted by MT is an event in Kerala and an assured box office success. In 1996, he received the Jnanpith, India's highest literary award for lifetime achievement in literature.
The Encyclopaedia of Indian Cinema, characterises MT's early films as "the melodrama of feudal nostalgia." (20) This definition though it has the obvious benefits of economy, does not help us move towards an understanding of MT's films beyond a formulaic reduction into a type. At the same time it reduces the space of the films to one genre, one historical time and one affect. In a limited sense, the plots structured as they are around familial relationships, star-crossed lovers, forced marriages, heroes doomed to tragic failure, villains displaying their power through sexual aggression, heroines committing suicide, are amenable to being interpreted as melodrama. There are two kinds of problems with such a reading. Any definition of genre invariably tends towards a circular logic. Certain characteristics are isolated and then the presence of some or all of these characteristics becomes the means of identifying other films as belonging to that particular genre. (21) This poses a problem both of arbitrary definition as well as the fact that the power of most popular films derives from the fact that they borrow from different "genres". In the case of Hindi films, in particular, it has been convincingly argued that they belong to a category of "super genre" which cannibalises other genres as they emerge. (22) So a film like the classic Sholay (1976) could be seen as a melodramatic musical in the style of a western incorporating themes of caste, region, nation, homosociality and family, with moments of both high comedy and tragedy. Of course, to state this is to get back to the details of the film itself and not allow oneself the lethargy regarding details that Grand Theory induces. The easy resort to genre theory flattens nuance and certainly a case can be made for "piecemeal theorising", a la Noel Carroll, that allows a dwelling on the details of particular films, instead of receding into a taxonomic exactitude. (23)
The second problem comes from a notion of a transcendent time that determines the reading of the film in terms of the "empty, homogeneous time" of the Nation, of Modernity or indeed of Incomplete Modernity. The "genre" of melodrama can then be read as located within "transitional" moments that exemplify, "the struggle of a morally and emotionally emancipated bourgeois consciousness against the remnants of feudalism" or in a more extreme reading, as "the drama of capitalist modernisation, framed in such a way as to exclude the very possibility of change in a socialist direction" (24). However, such analyses of melodrama seem to be theorising the time in which the film is made and conflating it with the different times within the space of the film itself. There is not only one presiding time, or notion of time in a film, apart from the obvious empirical linear time that carries the plot from a beginning to an end. We have Metz's seemingly commonsensical observation that, "a narrative has a beginning and an ending, a fact that simultaneously distinguishes it from the rest of the world." (25)To which we can counter pose Godard's riposte that a film has a beginning, middle and an end though necessarily not in that order. Or indeed, MT's own observation that a story "may have a beginning, middle and an end." (26)
The notion of one regnant time under the shadow of which creation takes place finds its best expression in Frederic Jameson's expansive, apodictic formulation, "all third world texts are necessarily .allegorical, and in a very specific way: they are to be read as what I will call national allegories." (27) In such a reading, nationalism comes to be seen as the only authentic cultural attribute of the non-western parts of the world. Moreover, the distinction that Jameson creates between third world and first world literature replicates and carries on the central concern of western Marxism: its nostalgia for totality. The Lukacsian positing of the totality of imagination in the epic as against the fragmented present delineated in the novel is reprised by Jameson but in a curious dehistoricizing conflation. The third world text is equated with the epic: the telling of individual stories in the third world novel "cannot but ultimately involve the laborious telling of the experience of the collectivity itself." (28) The influence of this view is obvious in studies of Hindi cinema that reduce fifty odd years of filmmaking to the one theme of the nation. (29) I would rather argue that in any film there is an articulation of several times; the time at which the film is made being only one of the times that is reflected in the film itself.
There are the times in the film and the times of the film, and these are two related, but different, matters to be elaborated in conjunction for a historical reading that also allows for the relative autonomy of the Art-efact. Time in the film is embodied in different characters, in objects, in the music (both as background as well as in songs), in the pace of editing, in literary or cinematic references, and in artifices such as the flashback and voice-overs. Deleuze, in his reading of Dreyer's Passion of Joan of Arc, argues that there is "a whole historical state of things, social roles and individual or collective characters, real connections between them." At the same time, there is something else, which is "internal" to the film, though not exactly in an eternal or unconnected sense. "It is like two presents which ceaselessly intersect, one of which is endlessly arriving and the other is already established." While the film may be speaking of events and characters in a historical time (present or past), "one part of it [the events] is profoundly realised in a state of things, whilst the other is all the more irreducible to all realisation." (30) And MT emphasises one of the senses of an internal time when he writes that it is when "characters throw open the windows of their minds by unspoken words and display half-suppressed emotions, [that] they tend to shine with glowing reality before audiences (emphases added)"(31)The use of silence and gesture invites the viewer to read into the discontinuities that they generate in terms of plot, character and cinematic time. Making sense of the discontinuous is rendered possible because the narration is "fraught with background" to refer to Auerbach's reading of Biblical narrative.(32)
The viewer fills in the details of an already-known history (the time of a society in turmoil and change) in the immediate space of the viewing, through both personal autobiography as well as the revealed life of the character on-screen. The relation between these three times is what renders transparent the "obscurity" engendered by the unspoken and the half- suppressed that is the staple of MT's films. Let us take the sequence of scenes before the Intermission in the film Iruttinte Atmavu (Soul of darkness). The lead female character, Ammukutty knocks on the protagonist Velayudhan's door. He is a simple-minded man (seen as mad by his family) and has just been beaten for threatening with a knife the family retainer delegated to look after him. Ammukutty is his cousin and according to matrilineal custom, his betrothed. She gives him a plastic toy watch as a gift from the village fair; he gives her bangles that he has bought from the fair as well, having managed to elude his retainer. Their cousin Rajan who is visiting from Singapore, comes up to the doorway, smoking a cigarette and breaks the bangles (a signal of rivalry since he too stands in the position of betrothed to Ammukutty, since she is his mother's brother's daughter). In the next scene, Rajan and his sister Prema, are shown in a bedroom. A gramophone record plays music for dancing the "twist". Rajan, dressed in a pant and shirt is smoking a cigarette and Prema is occasionally dancing and chatting with her female friend. Prema is dressed in a frock with her hair fashionably cut short. Their return from Singapore to stay on in the family home in Kerala is much against their will but compelled by their mother's nostalgia for her native land. Ammukutty enters, dressed traditionally and carrying a tray of coffee cups. Prema turns to her friend (who has taken a shine for Rajan) and asks mischievously, doesn't he have the cut of, i.e. a resemblance to, Rock Hudson. [That is in the screenplay. When the film was made, the director changed the reference to the then Hindi film matinee idol Dilip Kumar] (scene 49)
In the next scene, Ammukutty carries snacks into a room where her uncle from Singapore sits with his friends drinking alcohol and there are the sounds of loud, unrestrained laughter (scene 50/51a). On her way out, she is accosted by Rajan on the staircase, and he flirts with her (scene 51b). Meanwhile, Prema lies on her bed reading The Actor by Niven Busch (screenplay writer of Duel in the Sun, Postman always rings twice and Pursued). MT's screenplay had suggested "some cheap romance" by Denise Robbins or Hermina Black. Lying on the bed, Prema speaks about a girl in love with three men and marrying a fourth, and sensuously leans back, reclining languidly. She asks Ammukutty whether she would like to get married (scene 52). The camera moves to the darkness outside and then tracks back to Ammukutty in her room putting out the lamp. She begins to sing; a song of moonlight, her dreams and the moon unthinkingly shining down on human pain.
INTERVAL
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This sequence is revealing in the cross hatching of times in the film, through the formal, cultural and cinematic references that abound in a relatively short span of viewing time. In an analysis of this sequence, I shall inaugurate a framework of analysis that I shall be developing in the course of the paper and anticipate some of the themes that shall be explored later in detail. Ammukutty presents a toy watch to Velayudhan as he stands under the door lintel (a liminal space), and he gives her bangles, the cultural symbol of prospective matrimony. These are both arrested gestures referring to two stopped times. Velayudhan, significantly the potential successor to family headship but disabled by his simple-mindedness, comes to accept that he is a lunatic and accedes to being incarcerated in his matrilineal home at the end of the film. He represents the dark, brooding, involution of matrilineal families in a time of change, representing like the madwoman in Jane Eyre, a space and time out of joint. The time of matriliny is over; hence the stopped watch. Matriliny is also gestured towards in the reference to a woman having to choose between lovers, polyandry having been one of the threatening features of matriliny that was summoned up by male reformers." (33) The breaking of the bangles is also a disruption of the matrilineal line of affect by the cousin who has come from Singapore, the space of modernity, of money and of a linear time oriented towards the future. He wears pants and a shirt, in contrast to the waistcloth and bare body of Velayudhan; the very objects on him (wristwatch and cigarette) speak of the time of the modern. The cigarette as much as the bottles of alcohol in the following scene are markers of another, more degraded time (and we shall return to the discourse of objects later).
We move from this juxtaposition to another one: of cinematic times. The reference to Dilip Kumar/Rock Hudson and Niven Busch's book on which the camera focuses is a playful intertextual reference to other cinema industries; a reference to the global within the local. (34) However, these references, riffs are indicative of an intersection of times rather than an example of cinema in the Time of Hollywood. The reference in the screenplay to the cheap popular romances shows how cinema exists within a larger universe of signification where the film viewer is always already in a world of circulating images: literary, the cinematic-literary (screenplay) and the movie-image. (35) And finally, the music that serves both as setting the period ("twist" music of the 1960s) as also serving as an example of simultaneous times. When Ammukutty sings, she locates herself in another time - that of the high literary and classical poetry- with its references to the moon as presiding over the longing experienced by lovers. The song itself is not diegetic i.e. it does not carry the story forward, it is hammock of time in which the heroine luxuriates and the lyricist revels in imagery and language quite out of keeping with the demotic. The first line images the white moonlight spread over the landscape as akin to a woman who has emerged from her bath in clothes drenched with water and circumambulating a temple in prayer. This concatenation of times is not random. We can also see the spaces of a dying matriliny (the stopped watch gifted to Velayudhan); of a resurgent, decadent modern (Rajan and Prema) and the timeless arena of classicism occupied by all of MT's heroines, representing as they do the ineffable worth of Tradition. And finally, the Intermission/Interval, which bisects every Indian film, creating dramatic suspense as much as allowing the viewer to engage with bodily functions as with the "consumer economy" in the foyer. This reinsertion into real time is also a form of "cinematic punctuation" that is a closing strategy for the first half and points towards a narrative that will unfold in the second half. The perceptive viewer seeing Ammukutty singing blithely of romance prior to the interval feels an anticipatory chill, or thrill, at the thought of impending tragedy. As Lalitha Gopalan puts it, "the interval lies at the bedrock of our comprehension of the structuring of narrative expectation, development and closure in Indian cinema." (36)
The space of the songs is also the space of the time of a traditional femininity. Songs serve no plot function, as in musicals, but serve to transport the heroine as well as the audience to another time. Male protagonists appear to have no respite from the struggle with the multiple times that they inhabit. Within the space of the song, the women occupy a space that is both timeless as well as uncorrupted. Studies of Indian cinema are shamefaced about the music and songs in the films, since they seem to serve no obvious diegetic function, and are there almost as independent accretions. However, one of the most significant features of the song is that they are rarely, if ever, in the demotic register of the dialogues. With the opening strains of a hundred violins, the viewer is immediately transported to a time of classicism, of metaphor, and of words laden with meaning and affect. If MT's films as noted earlier are fraught with background and rely on silences and gestures to convey meaning, the songs are explicit in their evocation of a lost time. It is to be remembered that established poets who adhered to the exacting rhythm and metre of classical poetry nearly always wrote the lyrics.
And here there is another history awaiting excavation. In the decade of the 1950s, Vayalar Rama Varma, P.Bhaskaran and other poets had worked with radical theatre and invented a whole genre of "folk music" set to tunes supposedly corresponding to agricultural work rhythms. (37) This variety of socialist agrarian realism-the depiction of the peasant singing in the fields-was also a feminised one, in that it was the women who were generally shown as singing at work. Women were also the repositories of tradition, uncorrupted by the modern, and representing a pure spontaneous adherence to revolution. These very same poets moved to the film industry and while the narratives may have been less than revolutionary in their import, the women continued to sing songs studded with religious and rural images. In Murapennu, Bhagi is shown singing two songs: a romantic lullaby (in which the arrival of the boat bringing her lover brings the flush of a rainbow on her cheeks); a deliberately "traditional" bucolic song about a thousand virgins celebrating the festival of the asterism of thiruvathira. This is before the Intermission. She is then forcibly married to the city educated Aniyan and leaves the village for the space of the estate and the modern accoutrements of house, car and furniture. Bhagi never sings again in the "decorated prison" that her husband has transplanted her in; song was possible only within that agrarian wholeness in which women could properly be women incorporated within the time of ritual and lore.
There is a changing relation too, to the time of the religious. In Nalukettu, his first novel, MT describes a scene in which Appunni, the young protagonist witnesses a family ceremony to propitiate the local snake deities. At the heart of the rite are the pubescent girls of the family who are seen as the conduits to the erotic, powerful charge of the serpents. In pages saturated with longing and desire, Appunni sees from behind a pillar, his cousin Ammini, seated bare breasted with her hair cascading like a serpent over her shoulder (fig 4.). The lamplight flickers and wriggles on her body and Appunni enters a reverie of an insurgent masculinity. As in the space of the song, femininity is complete because it belongs both to a cosmic time as well as a not yet disrupted matriliny. (38) In the films, religion is the space of the incomplete. Witness the incomplete ritual of the oracle at the end of Nirmalyam, in which what was meant for the greater glory of the deity has been rendered as the despair of the devotee. Rituals are constantly being disrupted. In Murapennu, an indigent uncle comes in and pulls down the decorations disrupting a similar serpent propitiation ritual. The incomplete ritual conveys the impossibility of a sacred time. Towards the end of the film, in an echo of the uncle's act, the protagonist Balan pulls down the garlands and streamers in the structure built for his sister's marriage. His sister then commits suicide, fulfilment denied. Iruttinte Atmavu shows the inevitability of incompleteness as also the degrading of religion in a time out of joint. A fierce exorcist beats Velayudhan in an attempt to cure his "madness"; again, Velayudhan turning on his tormentor interrupts the ritual.
The figure of the lamp brings together brilliantly the discourse on the time of religion, gender and objects. The lamp, borne by women, is one of the objects redolent of a time of religion that is also a time of uncorrupted femininity (fig. 5). In the films women are shown lighting lamps at the time of dusk, praying in front of lamps at temples, seated next to lamps in the family prayer room. (39) However, the aura of the lamp frames the dying space of the matrilineal. Either they are trapped in the space of the lamp (an extreme instance being in Nirmalyam where Ammini is seduced by the young Nambudiri by the light of the temple lamp in a double violation). Or they leave the lamps behind and move into the harsher, modern space of the electric light as in the case of Bhagi in Murapennu, condemned to a loveless marriage in the estate. In Iruttinte Atmavu, the "modern" woman, Prema, who has returned from Singapore is always seen in rooms lit by electric bulbs as opposed to Ammukutty who is positioned in relation to the lamp. Nirmalyam has a darker rendering of the time of tradition and the space of religion and women. In earlier scenes in the film, the oracle's younger daughters are shown studying by the light of the lamp and the lessons they learn are ironic both in terms of the materiality as well as social conditions that they describe. For instance, in scene 16, the girls are reading out, "Mother gives us milk and she will be sad if we do not drink it. I should grow up to be as big as my father. This is what mother desires." By scene 66, the tempo towards the climax has set in: the temple priest has seduced Ammini and the oracle has driven his son from the house. The girls are shown around the lamp at home reciting their prayers and we never see them at their books again. They have reverted to the time of religion from that of the pedagogic modern.
Another notion of time, less contingent and more transcendental, lies in the background of MT's creations. It is the time of the river: both landscape and metaphor; witness as well as participant, that frames the actions of the characters on-screen. The flowing river is the horizon of all the lives depicted in the films, contrasted with the relative fixity of the land, individual roots and households. (40) The ocean is written out, except in the formulaic references to Singapore and Colombo (or Singaporecolombo as the old grandmother puts it in the film Murapennu), which come to stand in for the "foreign" across the sea, through their very repetition. As we saw earlier, in his novel of 1962, Arabiponnu, MT had dealt with the threatening aspect of the ocean as that which corroded an existing hierarchy through the possibility of the wrong kind of people making money. In MT's conservative vision, it is significant that characters associated with the oceanic space are generally presented as intruders and disrupters of the moral economy of the rural landscape. In Iruttinte Atmavu, the arrival of Madhavan Nair with his wife and two children from Singapore (prefigured by a shot in which the camera zooms in on an envelope that has arrived in the household in Kerala with a postage stamp from Singapore), starts the downward spiral of the film. The matrilineal family is partitioned; Rajan, the Singapore returned cousin attempts to rape Ammukutty the heroine, who then is forced into marriage with a widower; and Velayudhan, the protagonist is exorcised, chained, and finally comes to accept his madness driven by Madhavan Nair's intolerance. In Nirmalyam, a Brahmin driven by the slim pickings as temple priest, starts a teashop and dreams of going to Singapore to make money. The arrival of Kunhali, who has made money on the other coast in the city of Salem, is the hinge on which Olavum Theeravum turns, bringing tragedy into the lives of the protagonists.
The turbulent time of the ocean is replaced by the local, familiar rhythms of the river. In one of the most evocative sequences in Iruttinte Atmavu, Velayudhan sits by the well in the compound of his house, next to a large vessel containing water for his bath. As he waits for the retainer to come bathe him, he idly pours the water out on the ground with a scoop. The water flows along a channel and the camera then pans to the river to a dream sequence in which Velayudhan stands on a boat in full sail and his face, otherwise tormented and diffident, is carefree and radiant. Yet another scene has him climb the flexible trunk of an areca nut tree and as he swings from one treetop to the other, the vision of the river transports him. His simplicity is aligned with the time of the river, at odds with the discontinuous and jarring modern. In Murapennu, the song Karayunno puzha, cirikunno (Does the river weep or does it laugh) frames the tragedy of the central character Balan, as he struggles with the demands of familial duty over his individual needs. The film begins with Balan, his younger brother Aniyan and their male cousin returning from college to their village by boat. Balan never crosses the river again, sacrificing a college education and becoming a farmer so that his brother can have a career. Aniyan journeys across the river, gains a degree and a well-paid job, but by going to the other side, he crosses a moral line as well, treating his family and his duties with contempt. Olavum Theeravum, is structured by the rhythms of the river; the boatman Baputty likens himself to a log on the river. After losing the woman he loves and the dreams of a land based domesticity, he returns to the embrace of the river where he can be untrammelled and away from the casual corruption of humanity.
In Nirmalyam, MT's bleak film of 1974, the river has run dry. We first see the young Nambudiri, who comes to the village temple to bide his time as a priest while dreaming of a job in the city, as he crosses the desiccated riverbed and approaches the bank. With his entry, from across the river, a chain of events is set into motion including his casual seduction of the oracle's daughter. So far, the imagery is in keeping with the river as a moral boundary. However, we have also the powerful metaphor of the oracle's perpetual thirst. He asks for water at the very beginning of the film soon after finishing his ritual performance. As he wanders around in the course of the film, throat always parched, trying to raise money for temple rituals he is shown drinking water from a spout, poured by a kindly woman. Later on he is refused water at the teashop, the parsimonious owner saying firmly that he would have to have tea or coffee. And finally, as we move towards the climactic end, the oracle returns home at dusk, calls for his wife to bring him water, knocks on the door and the Muslim moneylender steps out of the interior. His thirst unquenched, he goes to the temple pond, dips into it, and emerges revived, pulsing and possessed to go to his ritual death. From ocean, to river to pond. From fluidity to the stagnant. The longer, persistent time of the river has run out and the rural landscape is without a moral horizon.
IV |
|---|
The wilderness rose up to it, |
And sprawled around, no longer wild. |
(Anecdote of the Jar, Wallace Stevens) |
Time sticks to people, it inheres in objects. In Iruttinte Atmavu, we are introduced to Velayudhan amidst the jumbled disorder of objects and artefacts that surround him. In the opening shot of the film the camera moves across the walls of his room, covered over with childish drawings and then moves in on particulars: wood shavings on the floor, a knife, and a bowl of water. It tracks to Velayudhan, carving a statue. We see him get up and search in his rusty trunk filled with seeds, gilt paper, the burner of a lantern, round stones, pieces of cloth, and old coins. These remains represent not only the lack of wholeness in his life but also stand as a metaphor of his matrilineal inheritance. They are the fragments that he has shored against his ruin. There is a discourse of objects in MT's films where "things" are no longer ciphers. They circulate within the film adding another layer of meaning. Objects are an integral part of the "visual economy" of the film. The viewer constructs meaning through what they see as much as much as how what they see is put together through the use of the vocabulary of lighting, editing and other joining effects. Madhavan Nair, the nouveau riche returnee from Singapore is shown always clutching a tin of 555 State Express cigarettes, expresses not only wealth, but a lack of breeding that makes him smoke in the inner spaces of the house and without a sense of decorum and respect towards elders. The impending confrontation between the family head and Madhavan Nair is signalled in a scene where he chastises the Karanavan, the head of the family (his brother-in-law and uncle of his children) questioning his right to reprimand his niece. In a reprise of the classic conflict within matrilineal households between older uncles and younger nephews/sons-in-law, Madhavan Nair venomously says, "Uncles to advice and scold, indeed! Have uncles been of any use to my children?" He throws his lighted cigarette down mutters, "Uncles", and spits on the ground. The Karanavan stubs the cigarette out with his foot. (Scene 72) The extinguishing of the cigarette is also the vanquishing of the upstart. Later the Karanavan will remind Madhavan Nair that he has known him from the time that he was indigent and used to smoke beedis (the local hand-rolled tobacco leaf). From this moment on Madhavan Nair moves towards recognition of how money has blinded him. One episode towards the end of the film that brings him back to his senses is when he wanders into his son's room and finds him smoking a cigarette and looking at photographs of unclad women. Needless to say Madhavan Nair never smokes again.
MT writes about the challenge that the screenplay writer has to face when he has to express something on screen where neither word nor action will suffice. He refers to Dudley Nichol's script for John Ford's The Informer (1935), in which the mental anguish of Gypo Nolan after informing on his friend is shown through the movement of a poster announcing a reward for Frankie's arrest. The wind blows the poster towards Gypo and entwines the poster around his knees and ankles. He kicks it aside and later as he sits down at a fire with Frankie and Dan, the poster falls into the fire and burns as a horror-stricken Gypo looks on. (41) By their objects shall ye know them. The externality of the characters and their inner domain are knitted together through their relation to objects. Back to the cigarette. The cigarette is the marker of the modern and the corrupt as also of a villainy born of a location outside the moral community of the rural landscape. In Olavum Theeravum, only the villainous Kunhali smokes cigarettes, while the hero Baputty and the other rustic characters are shown with beedis. When Madhavan Nair in Iruttinte Atmavu and Kunhali in Olavum Theeravum offer cigarettes, only the comic characters accept; their traffic and friendship can only be with the fool and the marginal. In Murapennu, there is a slightly more complicated semiotic in operation. Keshavankutty returns from college and his betrothed, Kochammini ribs him about having given up beedis for cigarettes. This should be enough to ring alarm bells in the alert viewer's mind; we know that he has changed in a fundamental sense. As the film progresses, Keshavankutty moves away from his childhood love, after attempting unsuccessfully to seduce her, and consents to marrying a girl from a rich family, where he can enjoy the comfortable status of the son-in-law. The only other person who smokes in the film is Aniyan, the brother who leaves family responsibility behind to make money. In Nirmalyam, fairly early on the local madman asks the oracle for a beedi; a profane request which establishes the character's madness. The very first time we meet the oracle's ne'er-do-well son, Appu, he enters the compound smoking a beedi, which he throws away only as he is about to step in to his house.
Mirrors play an important role in the economy of the films. They serve as obvious mediators of self-recognition as in Iruttinte Atmavu, when Velayudhan walks into his visiting cousins' room and looks at his face in a mirror for the first time. He is displeased by what he sees. Till this moment he has been within the space of his family where there is a recognition of his simple mindedness but softened by love and acceptance. In the very next scene, we see Prema enter the room, see Velayudhan in her bed and she shrieks. Madhavan Nair enters the room and says that madmen ought to be locked up and not allowed to wander around the house. This is the first time that Velayudhan is characterised as "mad", and the film allows another register for our understanding of him. Ammukutty, the heroine of Iruttinte Atmavu, is in her room changing after her bath; when we see in a mirror, her cousin Rajan, enter after stubbing out his cigarette on the doorframe. Later in the film, he will attempt to rape her, asserting his right over the woman betrothed to him by tradition. In Murapennu, Bhagi, who is in love with the hero Balan, is in her room, looking at the gift that he has brought for her. As she stands lost in thought we see the image of Aniyan, Balan's younger brother, who will eventually coerce her into a loveless marriage, in the mirror. She looks up and the first time she sees him is in the reflected image. In Olavum Theeravum, Nabeesa goes to the village market and squats as she buys bangles; a sign of love having entered her life and a sense of commitment to Baputty. The villain Kunhali's image appears in the mirror placed on the ground; this is the first time they see one another. She rushes away from the market. The next time they occupy the same frame is in her hut when she sees him in the mirror again as he enters to rape her. Significantly, at the very moment of their happiness the women see in the mirror the men - from outside the rural moral economy, and engaged with the modern - who will bring sorrow into their lives. Their own access to the modern and the outside cannot be direct, it is mediated both through objects and the aggressive masculinity that lays claim to them. It is as if any attempt on the womens' part to reach happiness, is hopeless; their hopes rebound off the glass.
There is of course, the obvious engagement with the objects that characterise modernity. In Iruttinte Atmavu, when Madhavan Nair and his family arrive from Singapore, their attire and accoutrements mark their very bodies. Madhavan Nair has on gold framed spectacles, rings on fingers, gold bracelet, gold watch, and he wears a silk shirt. His son, Rajan, is wearing a pant and shirt and the daughter, Prema, is in a dress with her hair cut short. The good, noble rural characters are always clad in traditional attire and very often the men are dressed in waistcloths with the dirt of hard work in the fields marking their bodies. Again, in the portrayal of spaces, those occupied by the women and older men in the household are characterised by darkness and very often shots are taken through window bars or shadowed by wooden staircases. However, within the same house, the new entrants have airy rooms that are almost effulgent with light. Dark and light are ironically represented and do not necessarily correspond to bad and good. Two scenes take us to the rooms of Rajan and Prema in quick succession, as seen through Velayudhan's eyes. Rajan's room: shirts on bed, transistor on table, some shoes on the floor. Timepiece. An album lies on the central table with a photograph of Rajan in a suit. It has other photographs of women in swimming costumes. An owl clock on the wall strikes the hour. Velayudhan watches. (Scene 37A) Prema's room: film stars on one side of door frame, on the other traditional paintings of women by the 19th century Malayali painter Ravi Varma; blouses on hanger, a bed with a mosquito net, photograph of girl with a fan looking at mirror; on one side a big mirror with make-up items. (Scene 37B) Seeing as we do this profusion of objects through the eyes of the hero Velayudhan, we are cynical of such luxury and are invited to contrast it with Velayudhan's own clutter with which the film began. Simplicity is opposed to a shallow display.
At the turn of the 20th century most of the novels written by upper castes spoke of the modern inner spaces of homes with desire. The late nineteenth century had inaugurated the move away from matriliny and polyandry to the nuclear monogamous unit of husband and wife. In Chathu Nair's novel, Meenakshi [1890], the interior of the home is done up in the style of the Victorian bourgeois domestic spaces with painted mirrors, expensive carpets, sofas, chairs, glass lamps, and there is a library with two cupboards holding, appropriately, Sanskrit and English books. Again, in Lakshmikeshavam (1892), by Padoo Menon, Devaraja Naidu's house has carpets, marble-topped tables; glass panelled cupboards, and oil paintings. Moreover, the home was ruled by a new notion of time, with every passing minute accounted for: "The sound from the clocks hung in a row on the wall was so loud that one had to talk loudly in order to be audible." (42) The owl clock that farcically strikes in Rajan's room as if only to please and amuse Velayudhan has replaced this obsessive engagement with the time of modernity. This innocent engagement with the baubles of modernity and the celebration of the domestic space of the nuclear family has given way to a cynicism regarding "modern" spaces filled with obscure objects of desire. By MT's time, we are in the time of the fragmentation of the matrilineal and the shine has begun to wear off the great patrilineal hope.
Another object that figures prominently in MT"s novels and film are dice. Gambling and dice bring together notions of time, fortune and control. It is about being able to attain the desired number in as few throws as possible; winning is also about being able to control time. And there was a time when time itself was amenable to being held in a fist and rolled. In his first novel, Nalukettu (1958), Appunni hero-worships his father, Konthunni, whom he has never seen but who is a village legend: strong, irascible, popular and good at dice. The novel recounts a legendary match in which Konthunni, required to throw 32 to save the honour of the village, throws the dice three times, each time the maximum 12. His defeated opponent swears never to touch dice again. However, in the films, time is out of joint and that wholeness in which men were master of fortune is over (Konthunni asks why he should invoke the bitch-goddess luck before he throws for a win). The novel Arabiponnu (1962) begins with the character Koya entering the Café de Paradise where frenetic gambling is in progress and we realise as the story unfolds that Koya was once rich on a patrilineal inheritance that he squandered away through gambling. However, this novel, his only one set beside the ocean, is about the corrupting influence of the ocean and the immoral quality of the money made through illegal commerce. In the films, only the losers, so to speak, play dice. We first meet Baputty in Olavum Theeravum, crouched by the riverbank playing dice, and losing. He may have been cheated, but he has no control over the game. Aniyan, in Iruttinte Atmavu, squanders the money that he earns at the estate on gambling; never having any for the urgent needs of his family back home in the village. In the case of Appu, the oracle's son in Nirmalyam, there is an important twist. He is shown winning at dice, in a sequence where the oracle walks towards cries of "six, six", sees Appu playing, and the camera focuses on the dice showing six and six respectively. However, lucky at dice. Appu, driven by poverty and anger, attempts to sell the goddess's sword, and is driven out of the house by the oracle. The dice raise the question of a degraded time that we have been exploring. However, we wonder too, whether it is a question of degraded masculinity. In Konthunni's time men were men, what now in the twilight of matriliny?
V |
|---|
Remember us -- if at all -- not as lost |
Violent souls, but only |
As the hollow men |
The stuffed men. |
(The Hollow Men, T.S.Eliot |
Let us go back to MT's debut novel, Nalukettu of 1958. The novel begins with the words, "He would grow up. Yes he would, and become big and strong. His arms would be muscular. Then he need not fear anybody. He would hold his head high and be respected. If anyone asked him, "Who are you?" he would reply (in a ringing assertion of patrilineal descent) head held high, "It is I, Appunni, son of Konthunni Nair." (43) The story tells of a fatherless child, who goes back to his matrilineal household, subjects himself to the indignities and insults heaped on him by the head of the family, his mother's uncle, and finally, through hard work buys the family house, the eponymous nalukettu. He installs himself as the head and brings his mother back into the house from which she had been cast out for loving unwisely. The tussle between the older order of agrarian masculinity represented by the Karanavan, and the newer order of the educated young male has been resolved in favour of the latter. The novel ends with Appunni reminding himself that he was not alone in the world despite the sacrifices that he had to make. "Chains of obligations" bound him to members of other communities and other generations; he has become the universal representative. (44) This confident assertion of a new masculinity is absent in the films; uncertainty and irresolution has taken its place. All of the films end in the heroes' failure or capitulation to forces beyond their control. At the same time, they stand disencumbered on the edge of a new and as yet unresolved identity.
In all of the films, in keeping with the matrilineal mode, the hero's father is absent. It is the uncle that has to be contended with, presenting a model of authoritarian masculinity under which the hero buckles. The older males, who stand in the relation of father in the films are generally invalid or lost in the glories of another age. In Iruttinte Atmavu, the grandfather of Velayudhan lies in his bed under the staircase, framed in shadows, a silent witness to the squabbling and disputes in the family. He is full of stories of powerful karanavar of another time, men feared when they were alive, but poisoned in their prime or driven to madness. Similarly, in Nirmalyam, the oracle's father is paralysed, and lies in a corner of the house, the camera focuses persistently on his moving eyelids to emphasise his bodily incapacity. We know that both he and his father were oracles to reckon with, capable of negotiating with the goddess of smallpox and stay her hand. A dominant masculinity carries the seeds of its own destruction. The dominant karanavar of Murapennu, is able to bend the wills of those around him but drives them to tragedy. The heroes cannot and do not aspire to the overriding, arrogant and infructuous maleness of the Karanavan. It is the villains, so to speak, who also occupy the space of the modern, who possess the will to power but it is expressed only in relation to the women. Rajan attempts to rape his betrothed, Ammukutty in Iruttinte Atmavu, just as Aniyan in Murapennu slaps his wife in his desire for control. The possession of education is an ambivalent virtue. In Iruttinte Atmavu, the teacher appointed to instruct Prema in English, attempts to woo her through romantic tropes in the poetry that he teaches and even uses Einsteins Theory of Relativity to impress upon her how his longing makes him experience time differently.
The hero stands in between this decaying older trope of masculinity and the resurgent, immoral new one. To be in-between is to inhabit a tragic space: the road to madness as in the case of Velayudhan or to lose everything as with Balan. Olavum Theeravum, though it is set in a Muslim community, has the hero Baputty embark on the river once again after having lost the woman he loves. He chooses loneliness. In Nirmalyam, the oracle's principled life can culminate only in his death. The options open to him are to leave the rural landscape (as the young Nambudiri priest does) or turn to the profane world of commerce (like the older Nambudiri priest who sets up a tea shop). Loves are structured by the yearnings of matriliny; heroes love their female cousins, the daughters of their uncles. In a time out of joint, these loves remain unfulfilled. The younger women have little option; they enter into unhappy marriages or commit suicide. But this is also a rendering of matriliny that is too conditioned by the history of the crusade against it. Women had once headed households, but that is a narrative that MT suppresses. Even the older women are dependent, shadows in the presence of the dominant older males. Women can be only the objects of love and lust, or pity. And we realise that is not against other males that masculinity is created, it is in relation to the female. It is the image of Appunni leading his mother back to the ancestral home that structures the trajectory of malehood.
What is being forged here is the man in the new mode of patriliny. And this cannot be done within the space and time of the agrarian landscape. In Murapennu, Balan decides to sacrifice his college career so that his younger brother can have a career in a place elsewhere. Shortly afterwards, he is initiated into rural life through a thrilling sequence in which he takes part in a bullock race and emerges triumphant even after falling in the slush of the rice fields. Covered with mud, triumphant, he seems to have been vindicated in his option. However, by the end of the film, every venture of his, including his heroic effort to get his younger sister married has come to naught. The male characters have to leave; every film stands poised on the edge of a future wholeness. And where does that lie? Madhava Prasad has interpreted brilliantly the recurrent theme of how time after time the police always arrive late in films made in almost every Indian language. The state apparatus -the time of the modern- is kept at bay, and it is community justice that is triumphantly meted out through the agency of the hero. In MT's films, the state is significant by its absence and the community is present only in its imminent dissolution. The burden of transformation is on the new man arising from the ruins of matriliny and the structuring of the public domain around a resurgent masculinity. (45) The new man is also the reconstructed agrarian Hindu. Living by the sea, MT has also effaced the maritime and its rhythms, silencing of the space of commerce, and therefore the Muslim and the Christian. It is worth remembering that in MT's short story "Sacred Sword and Anklets (1954)" there is no Muslim character at all. In Nirmalyam, the film on this story and made two decades later, we are given the chilling image of the Muslim moneylender who has entered the home of the oracle. It is an icon that summons up the fears of the new politics of Hinduism. From within the heart of a regional progressive poetics and the lapsing dream of a new society, MT has forged a vision that prefigures an emergent national paradigm.
Notes
|
| 1. | M.T.Vasudevan Nair, Asuravithu (Kottayam : D.C.Books, 8th edition, 2003), p.248. (Back to Main Story) |
| 2. | M.T.Vasudevan Nair, Kaalam trans. Gita Krishnankutty (Hyderabad : Disha Books, 1995), p. 235 (Back to Main Story) |
| 3. | It would be a fundamental mistake to see these as "local" cartoons teeming with the business of everyday life in Kerala alone. As M.T. points out in his introduction to the 1996 edition of Aravindan's cartoons, the justification provided for retailing the adventures of a lower middle class hero came as much from Kingsley Amis's Lucky Jim (1954) which was part of their literary imagination. It is also worth remembering that in one of the cartoons a friend tells Ramu, on the basis of his having taught in a local college, that he was a retired Professor of sorts. The schoolteacher retorts that (Federico Garcia) Lorca once remarked that a chameleon is a crocodile of sorts. (Back to Main Story) |
| 4. | G. Aravindan, Cheriya lokam valiya manushyan (Kottayam: D.C.Books, 1996 1st edition 1978). (Back to Main Story) |
| 5. | Dilip M.Menon, Caste, nationalism and communism in south India: Malabar, 1900-1948 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994). (Back to Main Story) |
| 6. | K.Damodaran, "The tragedy of Indian communism", in Tariq Ali ed. The Stalinist legacy (Harmondsworth, 1984). See also Ross Mallick, Indian communism, collaboration and institutionalisation (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1994). (Back to Main Story) |
| 7. | For a discussion of these issues see Dilip Menon, "Being a Brahmin the Marxist way: EMS Nambudiripad and the pasts of Kerala", in Daud Ali ed. Invoking the Past: the uses of history in south Asia (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1998). (Back to Main Story) |
| 8. | The first chapter of my book looks at this discursive process. An initial exploration was my "Houses by the Sea: State Experimentation on the South West Coast of India, 1760-1800", in N.Chandhoke ed.Mapping Histories: Essays presented to Ravinder Kumar (New Delhi: Tulika, 2000)(Back to Main Story) |
| 9. | For the most incisive historical work on matriliny in Kerala see G.Arunima, "There comes papa": Colonialism and the Transformation of Matriliny in Malabar, 1850-1940 (Hyderabad: Orient Longman, 2003). (Back to Main Story) |
| 10. | Mathrubhumi, 11 May 1932. (Back to Main Story) |
| 11. | K.M.Panikkar, Malabar and the Dutch (being the history of the fall of Nayar power in Malabar) (Bombay: D.Taraporevala Sons & Co., 1931). (Back to Main Story) |
| 12. | See Dilip Menon, "Lost Visions: The Imagining of a National Culture in the 1950s", in Alice Thorner ed. Land Labour and Rights: 10 Daniel Thorner Memorial Lectures (London: Anthem Press, 2002) (Back to Main Story) |
| 13. | See Ronald J.Herring, Land to the Tiller and Paul Baak (Back to Main Story) |
| 14. | There is as yet no comprehensive study of this important period in the history of Kerala in which an alliance of forces came together to bring down the communist ministry in alliance with the central government. That this agitation called itself the vimocana samaram, or the freedom struggle, is rich in implication for a history of post-colonial India. (Back to Main Story) |
| 15. | See Victor M.Fic, Kerala:Yenan of India, rise of commuist power, 1937-1969 (Bombay: Nachiketa Publications, 1970) and T.J.Nossiter, Communism in Kerala: a study in political adaptation (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982) (Back to Main Story) |
| 16. | See Francine Frankel, India's political economy, 1947-1977: the gradual revolution (New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1978) and Lloyd I.Rudolph and Susanne Hoeber Rudolph, In pursuit of Lakshmi: the political economy of the Indian state (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1987) for excellent analytical overviews. (Back to Main Story) |
| 17. | Sumanta Bannerjee, India's simmering revolution: the Naxalite uprisingi (London: Zed Books, 1984). A cultural history of the Naxalite movement in India is yet to be written. This is a curious fact given that in almost all the regional languages of India, the engagement with Sartre and French existentialism dates to the Naxalite debacle and the retreat of the young intellectuals into the world of the ephemeral radical literary journals that mushroomed in the decades of the 1970s and 1980s. (Back to Main Story) |
| 18. | See the essays in Govindan Parayil ed., Kerala: the development experience : reflections on sustainability and replicability (London: Zed Books, 2000.) (Back to Main Story) |
| 19. | See www.mtvasudevannair.com for a list of awards. (Back to Main Story) |
| 20. | Ashish Rajadhyaksha and Paul Willemen ed., The Encyclopaedia of Indian Cinema (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1999) (Back to Main Story) |
| 21. | Andrew Tudor poses this problem well when he observes of the genre of "westerns" that, "To take a genre such as a western, analyse it, and list its principal characteristics is to beg the question that we must first isolate the body of films that are westerns. But they can only be isolated on the basis of "principal characteristics", which can only be discovered from the films themselves after they have been isolated. See Andrew Tudor, "Genre", in Barry Keith Grant ed. Film genre Reader III (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2003), p. 5. (Back to Main Story) |
| 22. | Madhava Prasad theorises the "super genre" of the Hindi film in his book, Ideology of the Hindi film: a Historical Construction (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1998), chapter 3, passim. Of course, the idea of super genre is an example of having one's cake and eating it too: both genre and not-genre. For a similar idea of always "hybrid" genres see Sarah Berry-Flint, "Genre" in Toby Miller and Robert Stam ed. A Companion to Film Theory (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2004). See for a reading of Hindi film as blurring genres, Lalitha Gopalan, Cinema of Interruptions Action Genres in Contemporary Indian Cinema (London: British Film Institute, 2002). (Back to Main Story) |
| 23. | I have benefited much from Noel Carroll's acerbic readings of the ambitions of certain kinds of film theory in Mystifying Movies: Fads and fallacies in contemporary Film Theory (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988). His philosophical engagement with the movies is akin to the idea that god is in the details, a principle dear to the historian's heart. (Back to Main Story) |
| 24. | See essays by Thomas Elsaesser, "Tales of sound and fury: observations on the family melodrama", in Monogram, 4 (1973), pp.2-15 and Paul Willemen, "Negotiating the transition to capitalism: the case of Andaz," in Wimal Dissanayake ed., Melodrama and Asian Cinema (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993) for two characteristic readings in two different contexts. (Back to Main Story) |
| 25. | Christian Metz, Film Language: A Semiotics of the Cinema (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978), p.17. (Back to Main Story) |
| 26. | M.T.Vasudevan Nair, "Visual literature"(1978) trans. V.Abdulla, in idem., The Demon Seed and Other Writings (Delhi: Penguin Books, 1998), p. 453 (Back to Main Story) |
| 27. | Frederic Jameson, "Third world literature in the era of multinational capitalism", Social Text, Fall 1986, p.69. (Back to Main Story) |
| 28. | Ibid., pp.85-6. (Back to Main Story) |
| 29. | See for instance the punning on imperso(nation) in Sumita Chakravarty, National identity in Indian popular cinema, 1947-1987 (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1993) and Jyotika Virdi, The Cinematic ImagiNation:Indian popular films as social history (Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2003). (Back to Main Story) |
| 30. | Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 1: The Movement-Image (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986), p.106. Deleuze's text as ever is dense and provocative and elliptical, and my use of his ideas is as yet, a very tentative one. (Back to Main Story) |
| 31. | Erich Auerbach, Mimesis:The representation of Reality in Western Literature (New Jersey, Princeton University Press, 1968), pp.11-12. "the externalisation of only so much of the phenomena as is necessary for the purpose of the narrative, all else is left in obscurity; the decisive points of the narrative alone are emphasised, what lies between is nonexistent; time and place are undefined and call for interpretation; thoughts and feelings remain unexpressed, are only suggested by the silence and fragmentary speeches.." (Back to Main Story) |
| 32. | Erich Auerbach, Mimesis:The representation of Reality in Western Literature (New Jersey, Princeton University Press, 1968), pp.11-12. "the externalisation of only so much of the phenomena as is necessary for the purpose of the narrative, all else is left in obscurity; the decisive points of the narrative alone are emphasised, what lies between is nonexistent; time and place are undefined and call for interpretation; thoughts and feelings remain unexpressed, are only suggested by the silence and fragmentary speeches.." (Back to Main Story) |
| 33. | As of now, the jury is out on the question of polyandry under matriliny. While there was no formal institution of marriage prior to the Marriage Act of the late 19th century, and the Malayalam word sambandham, was variously read as relationship and liaison, serial monogamy rather than polyandry may have been the norm. See Arunima, There comes Papa, passim. (Back to Main Story) |
| 34. | The cinephile could argue here that the reference to Rock Hudson is itself a gesture towards Hollywood melodrama of Douglas Sirk who juxtaposed Hudson's wholesome masculine persona against themes of failure, impotency and blindness. In fact, there may be a parallel also in the fact that Sirk's films have been interpreted as "the history of the congealed disintegration of scciety." See Jon Halliday, "All That Heaven Allows," in Jon Halliday and Laura Mulvey eds., Douglas Sirk (London: British Film Institute, 1972). Also Barbara Klinger, Melodrama and Maning: History, culture and the films of Douglas Sirk (Bloomington: Indiana University press, 1994). (Back to Main Story) |
| 35. | MT observes in his essay on cinema that it is through references to what lie outside the film, but are within the realm of the viewer'simagination, that the writer contributes "a literary dimension and depth." For instance he refers to Wajda's film Kanal (1957), set in the last days of the Warsaw uprising: "The cranky character who spouts lines from Dante in Kanal, provides this literary dimension: it is Dante's Inferno that reminds is of the hell in which unfortunates are consigned to live." in "Visual Literature", p.459. (Back to Main Story) |
| 36. | Gopalan, Cinema of Interruptions, p.71. Gopalan's book is the first to work with the structure of Hindi films and the conditions of their viewing rather than subject them to the theoretical conditions of viewing framed in much film theory. She proposes a cinema of interruptions in opposition to the idea of continuous viewing and consequent subject-formation; beloved in particular of what Carroll terms the "Althusserian-Lacanian paradigm". (Back to Main Story) |
| 37. | P.Bhaskaran (1924- ) was associated with the radical cultural movement of the 40s and the 50s and composed more than 3000 lyrics in the invented tradition of romantic agrarianism. M.S.Baburaj (1921- ), the composer of the music for Olavum Theeravum, also came from the theatre movement, and was one of the first to introduce north Indian classical music into Malayalam film, incorporating a slower beat, minimal orchestration and a music that was more melody rather than rhythm based. (Back to Main Story) |
| 38. | See fig. 4 for the illustration by Namboodiri in Nalukettu. (Back to Main Story) |
| 39. | See fig. 5 for a "prototypical" representation of the woman with the lamp. V.Sanil argues that Namboodiri who has done the illustrations for most of MT's novels, revels in "prototypes" as opposed to "stereotypes"; the former being more future oriented and open in their nature than the latter which are congealed forms of social perception. "Kandukondain Kandukondain": Namboodiriyude chitramezhuthine kurichu" ["Transfixed by the look: on Namboodiri's drawings"], Paccakuthira, July-September 2002, pp.70-81. (Back to Main Story) |
| 40. | See the dense, suggestive section in Deleuze titled "Towards another state of perception: Liquid perception", in Cinema 1, pp.76-80 in which he discusses the significance of running water in the films of Renoir and the French school. (Back to Main Story) |
| 41. | Vasudevan Nair, "Visual Literature," p. 457. (Back to Main Story) |
| 42. | See Dilip Menon, "A Place Elsewhere: Lower Caste Malayalam novels of the 19th century", in Vasudha Dalmia and Stuart Blackburn ed. India's Literary History: Essays on the 19th Century (Delhi: Permanent Black, 2004) and Udaya Kumar, Styles of the Self: The Subject and the Act of Self-Articulation in Modern Malayalam Society (Shimla: Institute of Advanced Society, forthcoming). (Back to Main Story) |
| 43. | M.T.Vasudevan Nair, Nalukettu (Trichur: Current Books, 15th impression, 1999), p.1. (Back to Main Story) |
| 44. | ibid., p.189. (Back to Main Story) |
| 45. | Exploring this paradox of a state where the physical well-being of women is far superior compared to other states in India while at the same time men dominate the public sphere in a strongly patriarchal mode of functioning is just beginning to be explored in recent studies. For the classic study of Kerala as a model for the equality of women, see Robin Jeffrey, Politics, Women and Well-Being: how Kerala became a 'model' (Basingstoke, Hampshire : Macmillan Press, 1992). For the emerging new paradigm see J. Devika, "Engendering individuals: a study of gender an individualisation in reform language in modern Kerala, 1880-1950". Unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, School of Social Sciences, M.G.University, Kottayam, 1999. Also the ongoing doctoral work by R.Ratheesh, "Masculinities and the restructuring of the "public domain" in contemporary Kerala" at the Centre for the Study of Culture and Society, Bangalore. (Back to Main Story) |
Bibliography |
| Aravindan, G., Cheriya lokam valiya manushyan (Kottayam: D.C.Books, 1996 1st edition 1978). |
| Arunima, G., "There comes papa": Colonialism and the Transformation of Matriliny in Malabar, 1850-1940 (Hyderabad: Orient Longman, 2003). |
| Auerbach, Erich, Mimesis:The representation of Reality in Western Literature (New Jersey, Princeton University Press, 1968) |
| Bannerjee, Sumanta, India's simmering revolution: the Naxalite uprising (London: Zed Books, 1984) |
| Berry-Flint, Sarah, "Genre" in Toby Miller and Robert Stam ed. A Companion to Film Theory (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2004) |
| Carroll, Noel, Mystifying Movies: Fads and fallacies in contemporary Film Theory (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988 |
| Chakravarty, Sumita, National identity in Indian popular cinema, 1947-1987 (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1993) |
| Damodaran, K., "The tragedy of Indian communism", in Tariq Ali ed. The Stalinist legacy (Harmondsworth, 1984) |
| Deleuze, Gilles, Cinema 1: The Movement-Image (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986) |
| Devika, J., "Engendering individuals: a study of gender an individualisation in reform language in modern Kerala, 1880-1950". Unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, School of Social Sciences, M.G.University, Kottayam, 1999 |
| Elsaesser, Thomas, "Tales of sound and fury: observations on the family melodrama", in Monogram, 4 (1973), pp.2-15 |
| Fic, Victor M., Kerala:Yenan of India, rise of commuist power, 1937-1969 (Bombay: Nachiketa Publications, 1970) |
| Gopalan, Lalitha, Cinema of Interruptions Action Genres in Contemporary Indian Cinema (London: British Film Institute, 2002). |
| Halliday, Jon, "All That Heaven Allows," in Jon Halliday and Laura Mulvey eds., Douglas Sirk (London: British Film Institute, 1972) |
| Jameson, Frederic, "Third world literature in the era of multinational capitalism", Social Text, Fall 1986, p.69. |
| Jeffrey,Robin, Politics, Women and Well-Being: how Kerala became a 'model' (Basingstoke, Hampshire : Macmillan Press, 1992). |
| Klinger, Barbara, Melodrama and Maning: History, culture and the films of Douglas Sirk (Bloomington: Indiana University press, 1994). |
| Mallick, Ross, Indian communism, collaboration and institutionalisation (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1994). |
| Menon, Dilip M., "A Place Elsewhere: Lower Caste Malayalam novels of the 19th century", in Vasudha Dalmia and Stuart Blackburn ed. India's Literary History: Essays on the 19th Century (Delhi: Permanent Black, 2004) |
| "Being a Brahmin the Marxist way: EMS Nambudiripad and the pasts of Kerala", in Daud Ali ed. Invoking the Past: the uses of history in south Asia (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1998). |
| "Houses by the Sea: State Experimentation on the South West Coast of India, 1760-1800", in N.Chandhoke ed. Mapping Histories: Essays presented to Ravinder Kumar (New Delhi: Tulika, 2000) |
| "Lost Visions: The Imagining of a National Culture in the 1950s", in Alice Thorner ed. Land Labour and Rights: 10 Daniel Thorner Memorial Lectures (London: Anthem Press, 2002) |
| Caste, nationalism and communism in south India: Malabar, 1900-1948 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994). |
| Metz, Christian, Film Language: A Semiotics of the Cinema (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978) |
| Nossiter, T.J., Communism in Kerala: a study in political adaptation (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982) |
| Panikkar, K.M., Malabar and the Dutch (being the history of the fall of Nayar power in Malabar) (Bombay: D.Taraporevala Sons & Co., 1931). |
| Parayil, Govindan ed., Kerala: the development experience : reflections on sustainability and replicability (London: Zed Books, 2000.) |
| Prasad, Madhava, Ideology of the Hindi film: a Historical Construction (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1998) |
| Rajadhyaksha, Ashish and Paul Willemen ed., The Encyclopaedia of Indian Cinema (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1999) |
| Ratheesh, R. "Masculinities and the restructuring of the "public domain" in contemporary Kerala." MS, Centre for the Study of Culture and Society, Bangalore, 2004. |
| Rudolph, Lloyd I. and Susanne Hoeber Rudolph, In pursuit of Lakshmi: the political economy of the Indian state (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1987) |
| Sanil, V., "Kandukondain Kandukondain": Namboodiriyude chitramezhuthine kurichu" ["Transfixed by the look: on Namboodiri's drawings"], Paccakuthira, July-September 2002, pp.70-81. |
| Tudor, Andrew, "Genre", in Barry Keith Grant ed. Film genre Reader III (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2003) |
| Udaya Kumar, Styles of the Self: The Subject and the Act of Self-Articulation in Modern Malayalam Society (Shimla: Institute of Advanced Society, forthcoming). |
| Vasudevan Nair, M.T., Asuravithu (Kottayam : D.C.Books, 8th edition, 2003) |
| Kaalam trans. Gita Krishnankutty (Hyderabad : Disha Books, 1995) |
| "Visual literature" (1978) trans. V.Abdulla, in idem. The Demon Seed and Other Writings (Delhi: Penguin Books, 1998), p. 453. |
| Virdi, Jyotika, The Cinematic ImagiNation: Indian popular films as social history (Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2003). |
| Willemen, Paul, "Negotiating the transition to capitalism: the case of Andaz," in Wimal Dissanayake ed., Melodrama and Asian Cinema (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993) |
Dilip Menon teaches at the Department of History, Faculty of Social Sciences, University of Delhi. Among other books, he has authored The Blindness of Insight: Essays on Caste in Modern India (Chennai: Navayana Publications, 2006).
Courtesy: indianetzone.com
Courtesy: hindu.com