If the phenomenal success of Ponniyin Selvan, that Mani Ratnam adapted from Kalki Krishnamurthy’s novel, is anything to go by, the time is ripe for Tamil cinema to adapt for screen stories from its rich Tamil literature, of the past and the present. And one contemporary name stands out. He who caught national and global attention after he declared on Facebook in 2015 that he ‘the writer’ is dead, after he was harassed and attacked for his writings (Madhorubagan/ One Part Woman). But it were also his writings (around 200 poems) that resurrected the author and took him (his Pyre) to the Longlist of the International Booker Prize 2023. That writer is the inimitable Perumal Murugan. Murugan’s short story Kodithuni comes to life in Vipin Radhakrishnan’s sophomore, Angammal, which premiered at the MAMI Mumbai Film Festival, and will hit the theatres early next year.
In it, the camera opens into vast fields of dried grasses swinging in the wind, reminiscent of the kaash flower (kans grass) fields of Satyajit Ray’s debut Pather Panchali (1955). Western Ghat mountains visible in the distance. The train in Ray’s film is replaced here by a woman riding a motorbike with her granddaughter, narrating a folk story as grandmothers do. Angammal is the tale of the grandmother, a widowed matriarch, who fights with her daughter-in-law, rides a bike, listen to a walkman with headphones, carries food to the ailing, cares for her community people, makes her doctor-son tend to the sick for free when he comes visiting, she delivers milk to homes at dawn, she smokes a cigar-like beedi, eyes a fellow widower, flaunts a tattoo on her arm and refuses to wear a blouse.
The matriarch is essayed by the superlative theatre actor Geetha Kailasam, who is known for Sarpatta Parambarai, Maamannan, Navarasa, Neela Nira Sooriyan (Blue Sunshine), Raayan, Lubber Pandhu. The film also features Mullaiyarasii (Kottukkaali, Kannur Squad), Thendral Raghunathan (Viduthalai Chapter 1) and Bharani (Nadodigal) in pivotal roles. And Saran Shakthi, seen in KGF 2, Vada Chennai, Meiyazhagan and Salaar, plays her city-educated doctor son Paavalam, who wants to marry a rich Christian communist girl from the city and awkwardly coaxes his mother, back in their village home, to wear a blouse, when his future in-laws come visiting.
Radhakrishnan’s film in Tamil, shot in Padmaneri, near Tirunelveli, in south Tamil Nadu, takes Murugan’s short and gives it a slightly commercial twist. His first film the Malayalam-language Ave Maria (streaming on Prime Video) had premiered at International Film Festival of Kerala (IFFK) in 2018.
While the landscape readily gives itself to be visually consumed, the film has been shot exquisitely by Anjoy Samuel, who along with Feroz Rahim have produced this film under the banner of Njoy Films. Sound mixing is by National Award-winning sound designer T Krishnanunni (who did the sound on the 1989 Cannes’ Golden Camera Special Mention awarded Shaji N Karun’s Piravi) and Malayalam playback singer and lyricist Mohammed Maqbool Mansoor (Bangalore Days, Trance) has composed the dulcet music for Angammal.
In Angammal, Radhakrishnan sticks to the core story of Kodithuni, seeks Murugan’s permission, and expands and adds bits to make into a full-length feature. He develops Murugan’s story’s core idea, plotline and politics into a different screenplay. He’s changed the characterisation of the mother. The short story’s ending wouldn’t have worked for a film, so the director leaves the film open-ended. The liberties he has taken, by his own admission, have been approved by Murugan.
The aspect about Murugan’s stories that has, perhaps, struck a chord with the filmmaker is the honesty of the author’s tales and he has tried his best to stay faithful to that authenticity of the original short Kodithuni in Angammal. Murugan’s stories founts from his life. Especially his earlier stories that have autobiographical or rather elements from his own life, that he may have seen, heard or experienced. The story is based in the late 1990s, on a real-life experience of Murugan. The mother character is based on a woman he knew from his village and this incident had happened to her. The story also has a humour element to it and makes you smile before you engage with its politics.
On the surface level, Angammal (and Kodithuni) is a story about mothers and sons. Paavalam also has an older brother, who doesn’t share his fortune. The elder brother, a man of little words, stays aloof, plays the nadaswaram alone at night, he might have been an angry man running into skirmishes with villagers, but now stays to himself and his wind-instrument. His wife, who wears a blouse, is a homemaker, who keeps reminding him how his mother has been partial to one son. The older toiled in the fields with her while the younger got a city education. But she cares for her brother-in-law and promises to him that she will persuade his mother to wear the blouse.
Murugan’s stories are deceptively simple. Simple context with profound subtext. Dig deeper, the layers reveal themselves. The ’90s politics of the story — fashion politics and the right to wear what one wants to, the right to one’s own identity — is still relevant today. The middle cinema in Tamil industry consistently taps into the region’s complex social reality. Angammal, in which the complex rural reality is at odds with urban cultural shifts kicked in by ’90s globalisation, joins that league.
The film explores themes of social propriety, bodily autonomy and a traditional woman defying set norms and her son’s discomfort springing from modern notions of respectability. In refusing to wear the blouse, which she sees as a mere piece of ornamentation that is stifling and uncomfortable to wear, the matriarch chooses to breathe free instead, demonstrating social assertion and a feminist ethic theoretically alien to women from these parts back then. These notions, or rather Victorian prudishness, were set in by the British in the 19th century. Prior to that, Indian men and women (especially among Hindus) wore unstitched clothes, without an upper-body garment, across villages and castes (not just Dalits; that caste oppression came eventually, instituted by British, perpetuated by Brahmins). Indians chose to go bare-torsoed because it was a way of life known to them. A glimpse of that can be seen in Pa Ranjith’s recent film Thangalaan. So, the mother in Angammal sticks to her guns, stays rooted in her traditions, her way of life, her right to appear the way she chooses to, and even when as a mother she listens to her son and wears the garment, deep down she’s unhappy.
The motivation to show the rural life in Murugan’s stories, in Kodithuni, and in effect Radhakrishnan’s Angammal, is Gandhian (India lives in its villages) as does the matriarch’s self-sufficiency and ways of protest — silence and distancing — which is what Murugan also deployed in disengaging with critiques of his Madhorubhagan. The mother character, however, is moulded on social reformer EV Ramasamy (EVR) aka Periyar’s principles of women’s liberation, self-assertion and self-respect. Periyar founded the Self-Respect Movement in Tamil Nadu in 1925-26 based on transforming society at a key site of its production: the family and its domestic spaces. Only on women’s liberty can an egalitarian society stand, he espoused. And, so, the blouse becomes a metaphor for prude imposition — patriarchal (by adult-son Paavalam) and colonial (by his English educated indoctrination of Christian morality) — on women’s bodies. Periyar’s approach to the women’s question stemmed from not just a rights-based discourse but also a freedom-based discourse; freedom not just from patriarchy but also sexual freedom. Though here, this isn’t a misunderstood bra-burning feminism at play but rather something (the alien blouse) that stifles and constrains you, literally.
Kodithuni is among Murugan’s stories that reflects a marked shift in his own earlier politics from a Marxist-Leninist lens to a Periyarite one. The film Angammal doesn’t give easy answers, leaving the audience with questions and aptly casts Geetha Kailasam, who carries the story/film on her broad shoulders and majestic body language, so much so that even the commercial bits don’t take away from the essence of Murugan’s story.
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