Chemmeen

by T. S. Translated by Nair, Anita Pillai

  ‘That father of mine talks of buying a boat and nets.’

  ‘What a lucky girl you are, Karuthamma!’

  Chemmeen began thus. Having forsaken Pareekutty and their love, Karuthamma marries Palani. And then when a completely devastated Pareekutty’s cry of anguish echoes on the shore, Palani’s wife, Karuthamma, goes seeking Pareekutty. The dead bodies of Pareekutty and Karuthamma locked in an embrace are found on the shore. The transgression of a fisherwoman invoked the wrath of the sea mother. The husband who went out into the sea to fish was taken away by the sea mother.

  From a lodge organized by D.C. Kizhakkemuri in Kottayam, Thakazhi finished writing the novel in seven days, and in two weeks the first print run had been sold out. When it received the Central Sahitya Akademi award in 1958, Chemmeen became known nationally. It was thereafter translated into several languages including English, Spanish, Italian, French, German, Czech, Slav, Dutch, Polish, Hungarian, Russian, Arabic, Vietnamese, Japanese, Sinhala…

  When Chemmeen was made into a film, it took Thakazhi and Malayalam into world limelight. Kanmani Babu optioned and acquired the film rights for Chemmeen through a Bombay production house. ‘I don’t remember precisely how much I was paid. Rs.25,000/- I think! It’s with that money I bought ten acres of coconut grove in Thakazhi. Later I sold that,’ Thakazi said.

  In time, the financial benefits of Chemmeen dwindled. But the antagonism towards the premise of the novel continued. From his student days till the time he worked as a lawyer in Ambalapuzha, Thakazhi had come to understand the life on the Alapuzha shore stretching from Purakkad to Thykall. His love for that life and its tradition manifested as Chemmeen, but along with the novel came several protests. Some leaders of the fishermen community accused him of presenting their life and language in an ungainly fashion. And some progressives attacked what they claimed was a blatant build-up of superstition, namely the myth that the sea goddess would take away the husband of any fisherwoman who transgressed. The accusation and Thakazhi’s routine explanations continued much after the novel was written and published.

  Three years ago, Babykuttan adapted Chemmeen into a play for Kollam Thulika. Thakazhi had blessed this endeavour. When the play reached the stage, the protesters woke up once again. Thakazhi, incapacitated by old age, was threatened and tormented by them on the phone.

  One other thing that caused him much grief was the idea of a sequel to the film Chemmeen. When the subject was broached, Kanmani Babu protested that there shouldn’t be a sequel. Caught amidst this tussle, Thakazhi watched helplessly. Apart from a dakshina offered by the actor Suresh Gopi, he received nothing more, Thakazhi later said.

  The film that later came out as Thirakalkkappuram was not even a patch on Chemmeen. In fact, the pointlessness of making a sequel to Chemmeen was pointed out by the screenplay writer of Chemmeen, S.L. Puram Sadanandan.

  More recently when Ismail Merchant of the famous Merchant Ivory film-making duo was in Kochi, he expressed a desire to turn Chemmeen into a film. This was the final heartache that Chemmeen bestowed upon Thakazhi. Thakazhi, who read about Ismail Merchant’s desire in the newspapers, waited eagerly for Merchant’s arrival at Sankaramangalam.

  It was an abject desire of that elderly mind to see his story that in his own words ‘encompassed sorrow, pleasure, anxiety, love, anger, all in its purest form’ make its presence on the international film arena. So he waited with much delight and expectation.

  But when Kanmani Babu staked a claim that the right to make the film in any language was his alone, Thakazhi’s hopes were once again dashed.

  ‘From the day I wrote that first line, “That father of mine talks of buying a boat and nets,” I have had to endure much incrimination. Nothing has changed even now. When it comes to condemnation it’s all reserved for me; as for the cash, that’s all for someone else.’ A quivering voice, moist eyes encapsulated this tedious and demoralizing situation.

  Then he spoke of Karuthamma. ‘If I go to the seashore of Neerkunnath, Purakkad and Ambalapuzha and call for my Karuthamma, she will heed my call. They will all emerge radiating love and devotion. Pareekutty, Palani, Chembankunju, Chakki, Panchami – all of them.’

  It seemed that if the thought of all that Chemmeen brought his way lit up that wrinkled visage, it also cast its shadows by the grief it thrust on him.

  11 April 1999

  On Adapting Chemmeen: Myth as Melodrama

  Meena Pillai

  Chemmeen the novel anticipates a film as no other novel in Malayalam has ever done. The novel taps into cultural dimensions that are precisely the foundations of cinema as a mode of mass entertainment. Human drama as populist spectacle underlies the spirit of the novel as the film. The miseen-scène of the film bears very close resemblances to the imaginary frames of the novel and this proves interesting in view of the fact that in nearly half a century of its history many Malayalis might have seen the movie first and then read the novel, raising interesting conjectures about the possibilities of the superimposition of subsequently accumulated star value of actors such as Sathyan, Sheela, Madhu and Kottarakkara on to the characters of the novel they portray and the ways in which it could affect both the interpretation and aura of the original.

  Before the prolific appearance of new media or visual modes of mass diffusion, Chemmeen was a narrative pregnant with the cinematic, dexterously negotiating the Malayali’s iconophobia and logophilia or the deep cultural prejudice against and stigmatization of the visual arts and media, probably also stemming from an over-valorization of the written word. What is often called the ‘essentially pornographic’ filmic image offers itself in the novel, demanding our scopic gaze both literally and figuratively. In the novel, for example, Karuthamma chastises Kochumuthali, begging him not to ‘look’ at her in ‘that’ manner. The ‘look’ and the ensuing ‘bashful realization’ of her breasts and single piece loincloth embody her in a fleshly materiality that is characteristic of the visceral pleasures of cinema. Conversely, one can find in the film the thematic and narrative persistence of the novel with an added novelty offered by the material variations due to the cinematic apparatus. The very first shot of Karuthamma in the film marks the meaning she bears – her body is constructed as the object of the male gaze. Thus the cinematic apparatus, always already compromised in the ideology of vision and sexual difference cannot but construct Karuthamma as image, spectacle, and the object of gaze. The taut body of Sheela’s Karuthamma marks the transformation of the central female subject of a coastal community drama into an objectified erotic figure created on demand to the visual and erotic desires of Malayali audiences. Even the big dark mole on the breast in the movie serves to accentuate active scopophilia. That both the novel and the film are fetishistic is beyond doubt. Nevertheless, the success of the film, its huge popular appeal is probably owing to the fact that it is able to tap much more into this fetishistic gratification using the image of ‘chemmeen’, or the catch from the sea, as a fetish for the woman, the ‘catch’ from the land. The film creates a narrative enigma which is not as prominent or pronounced in the novel. The question of whether Karuthamma loves Palani or Pareekutty, whether she does not forget or forgets Pareekutty creates a strategy of exchange and equivalence in the film. Often the fish or the ‘catch’, creating an ‘insistent impression of display in the mise en scene, marks out a process of fetishistic substitution’ (Cowie 276). It is Karuthamma who becomes fetishized in this process of substitution. Throughout the film, Karuthamma and the fish catch are in a ‘circulation of substitution and exchange’ where one can decipher ‘the palpable over-investment in or excessive value on the visual within the image’ (Cowie 268). Marcus Bartley’s camera captures the fishing boats coming in again and again to create multiple connotations of objects circulated and exchanged.

  For Thakazhi the writing of the novel was impelled by an acute monetary need – to make money for building a house for his wife and children. This act of consumption, so embedded in notions of the popular, gets tr
anslated into the lives of his characters like Chembankunju and Palani. The adaptation too can be seen as another massive investment, fiscal, emotional and psychic, accommodating and replicating this act of consumption within the representational form of cinema. Chemmeen, the catch from the sea, as the title suggests can also be thus seen as a palimpsest for the numerous acts of consumption that mark the trajectory of the novel from its writing to its popularity, its numerous translations into different languages; as also its immensely successful screen adaptation and the awards, accolades and the popular cult status of both novel and film.

  The novel’s realism is a visually pliable one that happily yields to the film’s complex conventions of portrayal and also to the cultural expectations of Malayali and pan-Indian audiences alike. Thus, the film’s opening pan and long-shots fix the locale and present the life of its fisher folk characters in the most innocently ‘realistic’ manner. Yet the novel is Thakazhi’s attempt to shrug off the ideological burdens of the realist tradition of the Progressive Writers’ Movement. The novel’s rather superfluous realism, which is in contrast to Thakazhi’s earlier social realist mode of writing, offers itself to the regiming of representational realism that the film seeks to achieve. It is the brilliance of Ramu Kariat’s direction and the lucidity of S.L. Puram Sadanandan’s screenplay that create the aura of social realism and humanism in the film. Thus it has to be emphasized that what is fabricated by the narratives of both film and fiction as the real, authentic life of the Araya community is actually a logbook of the ideologies and ideological contradictions of the Kerala society coming to terms with the idea of the conjugal family and attempting to contain the subversive potential of that social unit. Both Chembankunju and Palani, at the heart of the bourgeois family, face social and emotional isolation signifying the crisis of masculinity trapped in a domestic interiority and struggling with new cultural codes appropriate to the male providers of the new family ideal. It is noteworthy that the split between the public space of production and the private, domestic, emotional space of reproduction is much more cutting in the film. The iconography of the film, its editing, and its visual vocabulary emphasize this divide very powerfully with the waves which act as a metaphor for the dichotomization of the interior and exterior, private and public, sea and shore. Yet the film latches on to only those conventions which register as ‘realistic’ with the Malayali viewing subject. Therefore Sheela as Karuthamma, though most unlike in physical features to real fisherwomen (generating innumerable ‘academic’ critiques on Sheela as ‘Veluthamma’ referring to her fair skin), caters to popular audience expectations on how the heroine of a melodrama can plausibly be constructed on celluloid according the aesthetic conventions of cinema, in the process becoming popularly accepted as realistic. As Colin Crisp points out: ‘Emphasis on plausibility and credibility can lead even the most extreme fantasy texts being deemed realistic if they conform to existing social conventions of representation and/or to the operative generic conventions of representation’ (242). It is the film’s conformity to the conventions of representation and its reproduction of dominant ideological perceptions of the audience that makes it realistic in effect, for these again erase the materiality of the processes of its representation.

  The film’s construction of the private space of marriage and its attempts to map conjugal happiness on to this space is at slight variance from the novel. Karuthamma in the film is more preoccupied with the ‘idea’ of a home and fashions herself in the aesthetics of this imagination. However, it is interesting that the novel apparently tries to critique the politics of this self-fashioning, given the gendered compromise of modernity it affects in the climatic episodes of the story.

  A significant point is that in the 1950s when the public sphere in Kerala was registering a more popular and wider support for liberal, socialist, egalitarian values as a result of the social reforms and the communist movements, helping more women to step out into the paid labour force, the novel seeks to entice women back home through the domestic ideal. One has to remember the Araya socio-political activist Velukutty Arayan’s polemic pamphlet critiquing Thakazhi’s myth of Kadalamma as investing dangerous ideological dimensions, especially compromising the liberty of Araya women, on what he calls mere poetic speech and figurative language of the community. It is indeed important to analyse how both fiction and film set the practice of imagining the modern family sans attempts to modernize gender relations. Thus the casting of chastity as the defining virtue of women and materially grounding this in the women of the Araya community, where large numbers of women work in the public sphere, selling, curing or processing fish, illustrates the gender blindness of modernity in Kerala. ‘An informed reading of the history of social reforms in the state from a feminist perspective suggests that while all social reformers have emphasized the importance of literacy, the proposed “emancipation” of women has invariably been looked upon as an instrument that is to be used for the benefits of the family and society, not for the benefit of the woman as an individual in her own right. Literacy may even have been an instrument facilitating the process of internalization of that message. The message has clearly gone very deep in Kerala society, for in terms of gender-related issues in public life, Malayalee society continues to be very conservative’ (Mukhopadhyay 15). The novel even goes to the extent of portraying Karuthamma’s feeling of ‘conjugal bliss’ when forbidden by Palani to venture out of her home to sell fish. Moreover, it validates Palani’s reiterated demand for Karuthamma’s chastity in return for the economic and social security he provides her with as a husband, with Karuthamma herself calling this demand if not a woman’s ‘need’, her ‘right as a wife’ and a tangible proof of the husband’s love. It is the marked absence of the discourse of social reform which so clearly marks the social history of Kerala in the mid twentieth century that makes Chemmeen so much more of a moral fable or myth. If the novel attempts at creating a mystique around the conjugal imaginary that would nevertheless provide obstacles in the path of real Malayali women to access education and employment, the film is much more curt and ends the issue with a cryptic, matter-of-fact order from Palani forbidding Karuthamma’s work forays into the public sphere which seems most natural in the circumstances. Yet one can read into the text and recognize the beginning of the process of shaping the hegemonic masculine that would become the hallmark of popular Malayalam cinema at a later period in history.

  Cinematography by the Anglo-Indian Marcus Bartley, music by the Bengali Salil Choudhary, another Bengali Hrishikesh Mukherjee’s editing and Manna Dey singing the famous ‘Manasa maine varu’ – one sees how a pan-Indian imagination strengthens the sign of the ‘modern’ in the film. Thus the film’s crew renarrativizes the regional from a renewed sense of the national where parochial/caste identities have to be refashioned in the new moulds of a national ‘secular’ self. The transition from the traditional to the modern is best effected through the imagining of the modern family and reallocation of new roles and models especially for women to emulate within the confines of this ideal. It is significant in this context to note how both the novel and the film valorize women’s social/national importance as keepers of eternal transcendental values. Both the novel and the film, as discourses of modernity, capitulate to the project of constantly pondering over the woman question and in the process regulating female sexuality.

  It is also significant that the film is more discreet over the issue of caste, conveniently doing away with Karuthamma’s more protracted agonizing over Pareekutty’s Muslim identity in the novel, the film apparently offering a safer habitus of secular modernity untainted in any significant or alarming manner by caste. In tune to the popular paradigm the film displays a delicately poised ambivalence in affirming either traditional or modern assumptions of caste, erasing the unease and embarrassment of caste by what Vivek Dhareshwar calls ‘freezing’ it as a social institution, by ‘disavowing it publicly and politically’ (116).

  The novel as a popu
lar bestseller and the film as a popular classic, fall in the representational genre of melodrama, typical of mass and popular cultural entertainment, focusing on intensely emotional moments in a family drama and seeking to evoke similar powerful emotions in the audience. The movie adds on to the novel’s melodramatic narrative by using melodramatic techniques like lighting, colour and music (one of the first colour movies in Malayalam) which gave a startling effect to the cinematic miseen-scène and contributed to its box-office success. The intense emotionality as well as the interpellation of the audience as subjects of popular sentimental and moral codes – replicating the hegemonic and thus involving the viewer in the material and moral dilemmas of the protagonists in a highly dramatic fashion – imbue the film with its hugely successful melodramatic sensibility. From the earlier social realist mode Chemmeen marks a shift in Malayalam cinema to the melodramatic, consolidating its characteristic features as a focus on the family as a microcosmic site reflecting larger social crises, anxieties over the ideal of femininity and the endless deferral of modernity especially with regard to gender. As Karen Gabriel points out, ‘It cannot be stressed enough that a melodramatic displacement of narratives of the social is not merely onto the familial and the domestic, but more crucially into the more nebulous realms of gender and sexuality’ (70). However, it is to be credited that one significant difference between Chemmeen and the classic Indian melodrama is that it radically topples the trope of the ‘sacrificing mother’, offering a moment of subversion when Karuthamma’s sexuality and desire triumphs over her motherhood. Yet in the last run this theme is made complicit with the dominant ideology, marking her desire as transgressive and traumatic.

  That the melodramatic sensibility of Malayali audiences and readers had to be imbued in an ‘air’ of social realism provides interesting insights into the socio-cultural contexts of reception in Kerala. Thus Thakzahi’s Chemmeen while laying claims to the social realist oeuvre of the writer undermines it in favour of the metaphysical dimensions of the ethical, moral and sexual anxieties of the protagonists as well as the heightened emotional ‘effect’ that could be drawn out of this conflict, while the film melds all these into a spectacle. The film more than the novel, borrows the melodramatic genre’s characteristic ambiguity towards marriage, simultaneously representing it as liberatory and repressive.