One badge of reputation that has got tagged to the above-average Keralite has earned him/her goodwill as well as ridicule. It’s all about an extra penchant for following developments abroad. While the eagerness to learn about, say, the nearly half-century Soviet Communist dominance in Poland can be a laudatory hint at one’s broad view of the world, such traits also invite caricature: “You’ve nothing to worry about yourself?” Mainstream Malayalam cinema has itself poked fun at this mindset — a decent entertainer Sandesham, for instance, famously features an animated argument between two young jobless brothers over the socio-economic profile of some East European country between 1945 and 1989, ahead of the balkanisation of the USSR.
Such stray comments apart, Malayalam cinema has seldom ventured into portraying international themes in a major way. Filmmakers from Kerala have only very rarely chosen themes based on a historic event involving more than one nation. One of them came out 20 years ago in 1991, the same year during which, incidentally, Sandesham was released. Vasthuhara though, treated its plot in an out-and-out serious way. The story stemmed from a slice of the past that is very poignant: the massive migration of people from nascent Bangladesh to India after the partition of Pakistan following its defeat in the 1971 liberation war.
But is there a Kerala link to it? Yes, at a minuscule level — and maybe, more in the realm of fiction, thanks to a touching work in Malayalam literature. It is a story by the same name penned by the late C V Sreeraman that director G Aravindan, well-built and extremely reticent, chose to bank on while essaying it on celluloid. And that turned out to be his last movie; Aravindan died the same year. Crucially, writer Sreeraman (1931-2007), who was partly raised in northern Sri Lankan estates before graduating from Madras Law College, had worked for seven years in the Rehabilitation Department of Andaman and Nicobar — the islands that became a haven for many Bangladeshi refugees in the 1970s.
A glimpse at the bank of the work of Aravindan (1935-91) — also a cartoonist and singer — would draw one to quite a few interesting inferences. Most of which, as mentioned at the outset, have much to do with the typical Malayali psyche of an earlier generation. One, of course, is the fascination for Leftist ideology. This aspect shows up, though not in a big way, in the 103-minute Vasthuhara (The Dispossessed), through the appearance of a Bengali youth — a communist revolutionary who is hiding from the police. It’s his sister (Damayanti played by Neena Gupta) who takes the protagonist (Venu played by Mohanlal, a Malayali rehabilitation official in Calcutta) to her brother’s underground hideout. This, after they learn about a common ancestry: they are cousins, courtesy a marriage between Venu’s uncle Kunhunni Panicker and Arati, a woman he met in undivided India as an activist of Subhas Chandra Bose’s INA. (Decades later, a chance encounter between Kunhunni’s nephew Venu and Arati Panicker, as an aged Bangladeshi refugee, lends the story its seminal thread.) Then there is the element of a socio-geographical attraction that quite a few Malayalis have for Bengal. Partly for its serene countryside, but equally strongly, for bustling Calcutta. And most especially for the old pockets of the city — the narrow roads lined by ramshackle buildings (in one of which Arati lives). These must have been very tempting for somebody like Aravindan to capture such moving images. In Kerala, the green and rugged central part of the state that has a feudal-era hangover in some of its interior belts, is another thing that has caught the fancy of many Malayalis. In Vasthuhara, it comes to life in the form of a Palakkad village from where Venu hails.
In fact, a similar locale comes into deeper focus in one of Aravindan’s earlier films: Oridatthu — in 1986. That was around the time Malayalam cinema was sensing the dynamics of an Aravindan movie laced with good acting. Apparently, the filmmaker had little trust in the histrionic prowess of the reigning stars of that period. Though a year earlier in 1985 Aravindan had successfully teamed up with a small crew of well-known actors including ‘Bharat’ Gopi, Nedumudi Venu and Srinivasan besides the late Smita Patil for Chidambaram (again, based on a Sreeraman short story). The presence of a talent-rich cast began to ensure that nuanced movements in the scenes of Aravindan films stopped looking like attempted bids at high-brow artistry and celebrated silences never lurked around uneasily in the garb of intellectualism.
That is one reason why Aravindan’s brilliance came to the fore in the cast of Vasthuhara: Venu’s aunt is actress Padmini, whose real-life niece Shobana dons the character’s youthful days in flashback scenes. Arati Panicker’s Bangla-accented Malayalam sounds perfect, though effort could have been made to eliminate the unnaturalness of certain bluntly translated dialogues she mouths without altering a word in the literary work. Had Aravindan lived to make a movie after Vasthuhara, that could’ve possibly been his best.
sreevalsan@expressbuzz.com
