Auteur Audacious

Auteur Audacious The Malayalam film Njan (Myself) by Ranjith is one of this year’s most original films. Here, the novelist on whose work the film is based pays his tribute to the genius of his friend and collaborator Ranjith

When Malayalam's most socially provocative and artistically audacious filmmaker Ranjith approached me with the proposal of making a movie based on my novel KTN Kottoor: Ezhuthum Jeevithavum (KTN Kottoor: His Life and Works), I didn’t have to think twice about giving him my consent, though there were warnings against its feasibility from expected quarters. Their main concern was: To what extent can a director, however talented, be ‘faithful’ to a novel, the milieu of which is the national freedom movement and its ideological fermentation, and the characters of which are mainly uninteresting political activists and drab villagers, all incapable of providing entertainment? The knowledgeable among them, either directly or through social media, even quoted the likes of Susan Sontag and Buddhadeb Dasgupta to substantiate their fears.

Sontag, some wrote, in her 1983 essay ‘Novel into Film: Fassbinder’s Berlin Alexanderplatz’ had said: Directors of the 1930s and 1940s like Wyler, Stevens, Lean and Autant-Lara were particularly drawn to good- novel-into-movie projects, as have been, more recently, Visconti, Losey, and Schlöndorff. But the failure rate has been so spectacular that by the 1960s the venture was considered suspect in certain quarters. Godard, Resnais, and Truffaut declared their preference for sub-literary genres—crime and adventure novels, science fiction.

And Buddhadeb writes in Literature, Cinema and the Language of the Scenario: A non imaginative director on the contrary, might not succeed in making an unusual movie in spite of having a bright theme or story. It may end in ignominious results and turn out to be a fiasco because of the incompetent handling. So, our— Ranjith’s as the director and mine as the original story-writer—challenge became two-fold: to make a film that disproves the worrywarts’ warnings against ‘novel-into-movie projects’ and to uphold the reliability of the original text. However, the naysayers couldn’t deter us from proceeding with the project. There were many reasons behind it. Primarily, Malayalam cinema has a long history of meaningful coexistence of writers and filmmakers that dates back to the 1940s— the formative years of the state’s film industry. Ever since, many important works of fiction in the language have got screen adaptations, many talented writers have become scenarists and poets have turned into lyricists too.

In those days, making a commercially viable movie based on a socially relevant theme was not an unlikely proposition. Thakazhi Sivasankara Pillai’s Chemmeen, MT Vasudevan Nair’s Nirmalyam, Uroob’s Neelakkuyil, Parappurath’s Aranazhikaneram, Kesavadev’s Odayil Ninnu, and Vaikom Muhammed Basheer’s Bhargavi Nilayam and Mathilukal are some of the outstanding literary works which were made into movies, successful both commercially and artistically. These movies and the literary works they were sourced from haven’t lost their charm in influencing viewers and readers, even though decades have passed.

It’s this practice of cultural and generic reciprocation that became a memory of the past with the emergence of a new generation of filmmakers in the 1980s for whom cinema is a medium for whimsical expressions. And once they began to concoct stories that verged on the farcical to suit their particular need, the divorce between cinema and literature became absolute.

Also, technical excellence and thematic relevance, it seems, are in inverse proportion in popular Malayalam cinema of recent times. A film, though conceived and made with exceptional technical perfection—say, a flawless screenplay, excellent cinematography, brilliant performances by the actors, superb background score and the executions of all these faculties with directorial mastery—need not always appeal to a refined viewer for its shallow approach to human life and society, or for its flimsy treatment of the medium. If one approaches them as artistic works of the period, most of the hyped contemporary movies, despite their box-office success, are disappointing.

Ranjith is an exception. He has already proved himself a successful and socially and politically aware scenarist, director and producer. His career graph is full of unpredictable twists and turns. A graduate who specialised in acting at Calicut University’s School of Drama, he first took up films as a scriptwriter for parallel cinema. He later became a writer and director of blockbusters. But, before long, he forsook and denounced the glamour and money the world of commercial movies provided someone like him, saying, “My aim is meaningful cinema.” His later movies, such as Thirakkadha (Screenplay), Indian Rupee, Pranchiyettan and the Saint and Spirit, proved exactly what he had meant.

One can find the critical eye of an avid social observer in these movies which address some of the crucial issues of today’s Malayalee middle class: craze for fame (Pranchiyettan and the Saint), craving for money (Indian Rupee), addiction to alcohol (Spirit) and ruthless personal betrayals in human relations (Thirakkadha). Also, my association with Ranjith began with his 2002 movie Paleri Manickyam: Oru Pathirakolapathakathinte Katha, which was based on the Malayalam translation of my novel Undying Echoes of Silence. This novel is about ‘the onerous journey into the past undertaken by a crime investigator to uncover the mysteries shrouding the death of an innocent, young woman in a nondescript village in the 1950s. Set in the period of the first Communist government in the state, it is also an attempt at unravelling nefarious nexus between the police, the criminal elements and the political establishment.’ Hence, a director of his calibre finding it worth adapting to a movie in the present-day Indian context of escalating violence against women would have been natural.

But, Ktn Kottoor: Ezhuthum Jeevithavum, I thought, has few or none of the ingredients that may interest a director or a producer of our time. Mixing history and fiction indistinguishably, the novel aims at chronicling the trials and tribulations in the life of a writer who lived in the Malabar region of Kerala in the first half of the twentieth century. Apart from being a writer, he was also a social and political activist who championed the cause of freedom and egalitarianism. A crusader against untouchability and discrimination on the grounds of caste, religion and sex. KTN Kottoor, the protagonist of the novel, is a libertarian who freely and fearlessly ventures in the realms of history, culture and politics without being partisan or prejudicial. Kottoor, his provenance, is a fortified Malabar village in a valley of the Western Ghats, with hills on four sides. This highland vista not only veils the life of the people but keeps them closeted from anything new. It is in this antiquated feudal hamlet that KTN Kottoor aka Koiloth Thazhe Narayanan was born in the latter half of the 1920s. Singleness and solitude put the young KTN in the domain of creative thinking and reasoning, which imperceptibly propels him to the position of an uncompromising writer of the period. The stature he has attained is that of a futuristic and unconventional poet of avant-garde eminence. His writings have promethean innovations of high gravity that rocks conventionalism.

Parallel to his writerly life, KTN leads an agrarian uprising influenced by socialist ideology in tandem with the struggle for independence. Here, the man who dreams up positive creative visions comes up against the realistic restraints of the social scenario; the political confronts the personal. But he doesn’t compromise with any anarchist resolutions on bodily desires, including subversive carnal appetites.

The novel begins with KTN Kottoor, then a boy of nine or 10, accompanying his father, Koiloth Thazhe Kunjappa Nair, when the latter led the villagers in a procession to a nearby hill-top to hoist the tricolour flag and take an oath of independence on 26 January 1930, following the decision taken at the Lahore session of the Indian National Congress. KTN Kottoor on that day is witness not only to an awakening of people to their right to freedom, but his father’s last moments as Kunjappa Nair collapses and dies immediately after hoisting the flag. And the novel ends with KTN Kottoor, looking thin and worn and mentally deranged, in rags, standing a silent spectator to the people’s patriotic frenzy when India’s first Independence Day is celebrated on Marina Beach of Madras city on 15 August 1947. As part of juxtaposing the historical with the fictional, many historical personalities such as EMS Namboodiripad, K Kelappan, AK Gopalan, P Krishna Pillai and KA Keraleeyan make their appearances time and again in the novel.

Perhaps the major obstacle to adapting a novel to film is its length. Hence, to do justice to a work of fiction, a director either has to abandon the existing length conventions of a film or leave out organic parts of the literary text. Or he requires eclectic taste to creatively mediate between these two extremities and come up with an authentic and engaging filmic interpretation of the literary text. Filmmaking, in this context, becomes an act of deconstruction that demands extraordinary freedom as an artist. I think this is what Ranjith, extensively borrowing from theatre and social media, and inventing new characters to emphasise his reading of the text, has done in Njan (Myself).

About The Author

Thachom Poyil Rajeevan