Kerala begins as a swathe of black, grey and white, along with a faltering pennant on a big top. Not the unrelenting duet of lush foliage and warm laterite, nor the lacerating blue of its skies and seas that hallmarked it as God’s Own Country for decades. The Kerala of my memory, that is. Memory – an odd beast at the best of times, faithful to nothing but its own constructed, sometimes malleable reality – was itself an inchoate being then, for I was four or five years old. And Kerala first took shape through celluloid – through the films of G. Aravindan, John Abraham, Rajivnath, Adoor Gopalakrishnan and others, viewed in tiny cinema halls of cultural centres in the Delhi of the late 1970s– long before its latitudes and longitudes, its rivers or homesteads did.
This early acquaintance with Malayalam art-house cinema was entirely serendipitous: my father commanded a Signals’ unit in Delhi during that time, and these filmmakers were often in the capital, either for screenings or fundraising meetings or festivals. Since Rajivnath was a relative, he would drop in for home-cooked meals, and some of the others took to tagging along, having quickly tired of the daal-chawal or tandoori routine. Consequently, my folks were invited to press previews, trial screenings and festival shows, and for reasons too complicated to explain, they took me along for each one.
I would love to vaunt how appreciative I was, immediately, of Kerala’s parallel cinema movement, but the facts are less flattering. The kindergartener-me didn’t grasp many of the films, and I flush remembering how my poor mother, crimson with shame, had to drag me out during the preview of a G. Aravindan film, because I had exclaimed loudly, “When is this going to end? It’s been going on and on!” It was Kanchana Sita, I think. Yet, despite my brattish disdain and inability to understand much of the proceedings, the film left a mark: there are shots still imprinted in the retina, especially of an anguished Rama, hardly an unbeatable divinity but identifiable in his intense grief, even to a child.
BANGALORE, KARNATAKA, 05/02/2014: Writer, Karthika Nair during an interview in Bangalore on February 06, 2014. Photo: K. Bhagya Prakash
Aravindan’s Thampu, meanwhile, seared early consciousness. It was a first encounter with deprivation, and desperation, and a lesson in how unforgiving the privileged are of their lesser counterparts. I couldn’t fathom till much later why John Abraham’s Agraharathile Kazhutha moved me to uncomprehending tears and nightmares after I saw it: death and exclusion were so real, so fearsome that they crossed the safely unreachable divide of the screen and transfixed the imagination. And Kummatty was pure magic: every minute of the film sang to me with its colours, its songs and the immense empathy it had for all the protagonists, old and young, human and animal.
Two decades later, as press officer of the Alliance Française in Thiruvananthapuram, I was to discover another Kerala: the land of the cinephile, where hundreds would defy torrential rain and sit, drenched, through an open-air screening of Les 400 Coups or Au Hasard Balthazar in Nishagandhi Auditorium in Thiruvananthapuram, and where the paper-vendor and tea-stall-keeper were as fervent aficionados of the French New Wave as any film critic. Liberty, Equality and Fraternity might have become chimeras – both in Kerala and France – but these are the islands from whence they shine brightest, in memory.
