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A life less ordinary The film fills in the gaps

The world measures achievement by the number of awards, medals, citations, shawls and sandalwood garlands an individual can garner. In a similarly blinkered fashion, the media refers to Pattabhi only as the director of “Samskara” because (a) it was the first Kannada film to be banned and (b) it later won the President’s Gold Medal. Yes, the radical film on Brahmin hegemony, made in ’69 and based on U.R. Ananthamurthy’s novel, did start a new wave of Kannada cinema. But it did not wholly define the man Pattabhi whose life and work spanned nearly a century (19 February 1919 to 6 May 2006). Chandrashekar’s film fills out the portrait.

We come to know the boy Pattabhi, a product of feudal times, living in a mansion in Nellore, fearful of his stern father who used to beat him to make him study. We meet the young man, barely out of his teens, who vowed to “break the back” of traditional Telugu poetry with the “stout stick” of his blank verse. His slim anthology “Fidelu Raagagalu Dozen” (a dozen fiddle ragas) was far ahead of its time, not only scorning rhyme and metre but also the traditional themes of love poetry. He likened the moon to a light bulb. He spoke of prostitutes and policemen and bleak city streets and coffee houses in the rain. His sensual descriptions of a woman’s body must have sent the ruling poets of the time into a tizzy.

The life Pattabhic was a colourful tapestry of experiences enriched by his helpmeet, the unforgettable Snehalata. When he first met the generous and impulsive Joyce Powell in Madras, did he know he had found his soulmate? They honeymooned in Spain because Sneha wanted to learn flamenco dancing. Their daughter Nandana was conceived there; they named her Ishbilya which in Spanish means “born out of love”. (It is perhaps no coincidence that their son Konarak delved into flamenco music years later when he had turned into a guitarist of no mean stature.) Sneha founded The Madras Players, a theatre company that has maintained high professional standards to this day.

Of course the world remembers Snehalata Reddy largely as a victim of the Emergency: She was imprisoned, and died not long after she was released. But Sneha was as much a source of inspiration as Pattabhi was. Filmmaker Deepa Dhanraj recalls that, as a young woman from a conservative background, her exposure to the unconventional life that Sneha led introduced her to feminism in a way that textbooks couldn’t. Ananthamurthy talks of how Sneha and Pattabhi’s house was open to all, night and day, and how it became a crucible of new ideas in art, literature, cinema and politics. There were heated discussions there, people slept over, people quarrelled and went away only to return the next day to an equally warm welcome.

Chandrashekar was one of the many who were caught in this magical web of relationships. “I’ve known Pattabhi since ’73 when he made Chanda Maruta,” he says. “I was 19 then. I played the thief in the movie and Ashok Mandanna was the Naxal.” He says that once he met Pattabhi and saw the kind of films that were possible, he found it impossible to do cinema as a purely commercial activity. Pattabhi egged him on to make his first feature film “Huli Bantu Huli” set among the Jenu Kurubas of Kakanakote, which was screened in the Indian Panorama section of the International Film Festival of India in ’78. Chandrashekar went on to make documentaries on Hindustani vocalist Mallikarjun Mansoor and writer Kuvempu, and directed a 52-episode serial of Kuvempu’s novel Malakalalli Madumagalu for Doordarshan in ’96.

He recalls how he went location hunting for Savithri with Pattabhi and Tom Kowen, the Australian cinematographer who shot Samskara. Kowen visualised it as a big-budget film but they failed to find funds, so Pattabhi rewrote the script as a play which was staged by daughter-in-law Kirtana Kumar and Konarak. With Savithri he was going back full circle to Aurobindo – he had visited the ashram as a boy and met the Mother. But this life is only half the journey, as his granddaughter Zui says in her poem that she recites at the end of the film. Death is the other half and he is still travelling. She tells her Pa-bi: “Drive safe.”

(“Pattabhi” will be screened on February 15 at 6 p.m. at ECA Auditorium, next to New Horizon School, 100 Ft. Road, Indiranagar.)

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