The movie owes a large part of its popularity to its songs which formed its best advertising and marketing material too. The song and dance in popular cinemas in India, unlike that in Hollywood musicals where it cleared a representational space in which both characters and audience could indulge in flights of fancy, were and are used as ‘natural and logical articulations of situations and feelings emanating from the dynamics of day to day life’ (Dissanayake 209). In Chemmeen the spectacle of the songs appear as obvious and natural, punctuating the emotional statements in the story and inhabiting almost the same continuous narrative space. Thus the song interludes signify neither fantasies nor memories, neither pretending to access an inner psyche nor creating temporal or spatial ellipsis. What they do most powerfully, both visually and verbally, is to eroticize the sea and the quests/journeys on the sea in a manner as never before or after in popular Indian narrative language. The ambiguity of the quest, the metaphorical implications that a journey on the sea has, would be best epitomized in the ‘Gulf Boom’ of the 1970s in Kerala, a moment that the narrative of the song ‘Kadalinakkare ponore kana ponninu ponore, poyi varumbol enthu konduvarum’ (O you who travel across the seas, what will you bring on your journey back?) presupposes. The sea ‘imagined’ in the songs becomes an archetype of the innumerable journeys that would mark the social, cultural and economic history of Kerala in the years to follow. Thus the journey into the outer sea captured in frame after frame in the songs signify a foundational aspect of the Malayali imaginary and functions as a popular trope that would equip the Malayali to reckon with the experience of migration, within and outside the state as also beyond the nation, in both its personal and collective significance. It is the sea that maps the Malayali self and becomes a central metaphor in all modern attempts at cartographing this self on to national as well as global narratives. The huge popularity of the songs even in the subsequent decades after the release of the movie is partly due to this rather popular hermeneutics of the sea as a metaphor for Malayali migrations.
One must also take into consideration the interrelated tropes of kanaponnu (hidden gold), ponvala (golden nets) and chakara that offer paradigms of the rarest of rare catches and treasures the migrant would bring back home, interpellating both actual and aspiring non-resident Malayalis as subjects in discourses of desire and home. Thus the narrative of the songs while simultaneously drawing on pre-modern atavistic associations and spiritual connections with the sea also attempt to construct it as a modern epic imaginary of contemporary struggles for labour, survival and subsistence. These songs have also played a crucial role as ‘migration narratives’ of Malayalis, buttressing claims for female chastity as men sail away to far-off shores to amass economic resources for the family. Three of the choric songs track back and forth to the constant setting out and movement of boats into the outer sea, symbolically linking Kerala to the commodity chains of a global trade in human resources that would become the hallmark of its economy.
All the songs in the film are diegetic, directly invoking the sea which adds to the power of its mythopoeia. It is interesting that the novel keeps on referring to the songs, both Parekutty’s mellifluous rendering of his love as well as the folk songs sung on the shores of Neerkunnam, which we actually get to hear only in the movie. The novel’s understanding of the inseparableness of music from Malayali narrative traditions and the way it grounds itself on a clear notion of the semiotic function of music in this tradition contribute significantly to the film’s use of music as an integral narrative agent, contributing to the creation of not only its mood or emotion but to its very mythopoesis. That the novel can foresee and invest in the mythical unconscious of the filmic audience speaks volumes about the folk base of the popular in India and the vast repertoire of oral traditions from which both novel and film draw their sustenance. Music thus having the ‘expressive equivalence to speech’ (Vasudevan 9), Indian audiences do not feel the ‘artificial break’ which might be felt by audiences in the West when an actor bursts into song (Beeman 83). Borrowing from the folk tradition it is interesting to note how singing is constructed as part of the daily life of the fishing community where instead of the protagonists, it is the ordinary, apparently sidelined characters who are fore-grounded and singing, where the ‘sing along’ nature of the songs constitutes a community and instills the film with its folk motif. The mesmerizing allure of the lyrics of Vayalar Ramavarma, by far the most popular lyricist poet in Malayalam, rests on the imagination of a mythic land of moonlight where nisagandhi blooms and mermaids frolic on the waves of the ocean of milk (palazhi), a land where beautiful women with shapely eyes like the pearlspot fish (karimeen kannal) take vows of chastity to ensure the safe passage back of their men from the turbulent seas. The folk idiom is set to pan-Indian folk tunes by the magic of Salil Choudhary, thus literally making the songs acceptable to mass audiences as folk songs in tone, theme and tenor. The only song that stands out at a more individual level in contrast to the songs of the community is ‘Manasa maine varu’, but even there one can see the pervasive aura of the mythic seascape where the incessant waves become tropes of the untrammeled desires of the human heart.
But the evergreen popularity and appeal of Chemmeen, the film as also the novel, is in construction of a ‘Keralan’ mythology, using indigenous symbols from this coastal strip of a state to imagine a ‘Malayaliness’ that finds an echo in the hearts of Malayali readers/ audiences. The golden beaches, the swaying green palms, and in the background the rich and poignant beauty of the enigmatic ocean offering a symbolically lush landscape to the agonies and ecstasies of the romantic hearts on shore. In a land which according to popular myth arose from the sea, the sea is also mythologized as ‘Kadalamma’. Kadalamma is not only a benevolent goddess but also the terrifying mother who threatens symbolically to devour the fishermen if female chastity is not ensured at home, posing the threat of physical and psychic annihilation. Karuthamma like Kadalamma is linked to the primal fear of obliteration and loss of identity, of being swallowed up by the feminine. One of the shots in the film that cannot be found in the novel is the morning after the wedding night when a fisherman asks whether Karuthamma has swallowed Palani – a prophetic statement of what is to follow. Palani is devoured by Kadalamma in death as he is devoured by Karuthamma in life. Once again one can see here the anxieties of a society shifting from matrilineal to a patrifocal residency, the exigencies of strengthening the notion of the conjugal family and the fine tuning of the nature of relationship between the husband and wife hinging on notions of ‘security’ from man and ‘chastity’ from the woman. In the context of this shift it was considered a humiliating practice for a man to stay on in his wife’s natal home which is why Palani’s refusal to stay in Karuthamma’s house is considered natural in the circumstances. The logic of the patrifocal nucleated family can be found in the motives for writing the novel. Thakazhi in a prefatory note titled ‘The Story of My Chemmeen’ in the twentieth edition of the novel states that he wrote the novel at a time when he was living in a thatched makeshift house with Katha and his children. Day and night Katha and he dreamt of transforming the house into a ‘strong’, ‘solid’ one. Though he had written quite a few novels and stories by then, he had been unable to build a house. Therefore, the writing of Chemmeen had two causative factors ‘a reply to the drumbeats of criticism raging around him; as also an airy, bright-lit house built with wooden rafters and tiled roof’. Towards the end of the note he says he wrote the novel in eight days and with its publication he had no difficulty in building the house ‘Sankaramangalam’. ‘Chemmeen was in high demand. Rafters were made with wood. The home had a tiled roof and three or four additional rooms were also attached.’ In imagining and consolidating this relatively new social unit of the modern family, tradition and myth had to be necessarily invoked especially for mapping the dynamics of gender and representing/containing sexualities.
However, Karuthamma is not entirely without agency and in the novel is bold enoug
h to contemplate even conversion to Islam (the discourse on dress in this context is highly significant), silently critiquing the chastity myth and seeking to validate female desire as normal and ubiquitous, both temporally and spatially. She pesters Chakki to steal from Chembankunju, and mother and daughter try to pay back Pareekutty’s debt partly and covertly. These female-action oriented scenes are entirely absent in the movie which represents her as more detached, her self-conscious ambivalence towards patriarchal mores poignantly brought out by Sheela in a supreme performance. The complete disdain towards the system is brought out in the utter contempt with which she finally acknowledges her love for Pareekutty to Palani. This is so contrary to her reactions and body language in the rest of the movie that a feminist interpreter would not be able to resist attributing an extra-auteristic impulse (given the commodified representations of the feminine in Kariat’s oeuvre), the manodharma of the actor as per Indian performance traditions, a free play of imagination which helps her to triumph as ‘woman’ over the aesthetic and ideological perspective of the director. However, her answer (that she loves Pareekutty) in the present tense as opposed to the past tense in the novel, inscribing the bold continuity of her love, asserts an apotheosis of the more gendered and revisionist readings of the novel in the nine years following its publication and before its adaptation.
Thus while both the novel and the film exhibit a ‘nonsynchronism’ characterized by disjunctures in the temporal and psychic, where the mythic might cohabit with the rational and the pre-modern with the modern, it is much more pronounced in the ending of the film where Karuthamma suddenly awakens from her mythic maidenhood to a ‘modern’, ‘individualistic’, ‘feminist’ sensibility. Palani’s raised hands to strike his wife is lowered as his gaze shifts to his child but the question is reiterated in another form as ‘Is this child his?’ This anxiety over paternity is a modern anxiety in contrast to Palani’s own uncertainty of legitimate lineage. This question has to be contextualized in the relative flexibility of conjugality in Kerala in an earlier matrilineal tradition which was in a sense compromised for the fixity of the patriarchal institution of the modern family in the twentieth century. Thus the rights of the father started being privileged over that of the mother with a patrilineal shift in ownership of property, presupposing an over investment in conjugal fidelity and chastity and leading to a new centering of the father with the marginalizing and sentimentalizing of the mothers and daughters.
This question of anxiety over paternity is significantly absent in the novel and pushes the argument of the non-synchronic nature of the film farther as we see in it the fuelling of ‘older’ anxieties by the more ‘modern’ impulses of women’s emancipation and sexual liberation, which have to be contained in the interests of the modern conjugal family and the transfer of paternal property to ‘legitimate’ children. It has been fairly proven that leftist development initiatives and social reforms have in effect augmented female seclusion in the state. Gender difference was at the very heart of modern caste identities in Kerala, a legacy of the early-twentieth-century social reform movements which projected patrifocal marriage as the natural and pre-eminent site of material relations in the private realm (Eapen and Kodoth, 2003). Conjugality as the predominant marker of a woman’s identity is fraught with change from Chakki to Karuthamma as also from novel to film, as a further and further shrinking of the private space of women. This shift from the 1950s to the 1960s in Kerala’s social fabric could probably be accounted for by the further transitions in the structure of the family from a broad-based production unit to an intensely private domestic unit primarily of consumption and reproduction (Kodoth 2005).
The novel can also be read as a Nehruvian national allegory where State ‘Planning’ and economy had to ideally take stock of and preserve spiritual traditions embedded in the more private spheres of social life. It also embodies the rise of new economic individualism and private enterprise in a post-independence India which are at odds with the older ideals of democratic socialism with its ‘central’ planning, solidarity economy and social cohesion. Thus the private libidinal dynamics of Pareekutty, Karuthamma, Chembankunju and Palani might ‘necessarily project a political dimension in the form of national allegory’ where ‘the story of the private individual destiny is always an allegory of the embattled situation of the public third world culture and society’ (Jameson 69). Such a reading would also pose numerous questions as far as the translations of Chemmeen are concerned, critiquing the notion of an unproblematic accessing of the ‘national’, always already complicated by caste, gender and class as also their regional ramifications. Thus one cannot read either novel or its adaptation without taking into consideration the national and historic contexts, the linguistic constitution of the regional and the necessities of imagining that sub-national identity, the anxieties over what was the nascent state of Kerala, the crisis of agrarian and indigenous modes of livelihood facing the modernization project of the nation, the persistence of feudal and neo-colonial forces in a postcolonial history, as also the dichotomization of the private and public and the processes of gendering the nation, all begging for more nuanced political readings instead of overly psychological ones.
It is popular history parading as populist myth that one encounters in both novel and film. Yet from all the other elements in the novel it is the myth and the mystification of women through this mythogenesis that is at the core of the filmic adaptation, offering a heady cocktail of visual and narrative pleasure combining the popular, the mythical and the musical in a mise-en-scène that is heavily coded and throbbing with severely repressed passions, and in the last run hybridizing these with the market and mass culture. That the first Sahitya Akademy Award for Malayalam novel and the first National Award for Malayalam cinema came at the cost of re-presenting many Karuthammas of Kerala as compromised signs in the gendered commodified systems of exchange that popular ‘canonical’ literature and popular cinema often become, gives us important clues to reading the popular.
Works Cited
Arayan, Velukutty V.V., Thakazhiyude Chemmeen: Oru Nirupanam. Thiruvananthapuram: Kalakeralam Publications, 1956.
Beeman, William O., ‘The Use of Music in Popular Film: East and West’, In India International Centre Quarterly, Special Issue ‘Indian Popular Cinema: Myth, Meaning and Metaphor’, Pradip Krishan (ed.) 8 (1), 1981.
Cowie, Elizabeth, Representing the Woman: Cinema and Psychoanalysis, London: Macmillian, 1997.
Crisp, Colin, The Classic French Cinema, 1930–1960, Bloomington: Indiana U.P., 1997.
Dhareshwar, Vivek, ‘Caste and the Secular Self’, Journal of Arts and Ideas 25/26 (1993): pp. 115-126.
Dissanayake, Wimal, ‘Rethinking Indian Popular Cinema: Towards New Frames of Understanding’, in Anthony Guneratne and Wimal Dissanayake (eds), Rethinking Third Cinema, New York: Routledge, 2003, pp. 202-225.
Eapen, Mridul and Praveena Kodoth, ‘Family Structure, Women’s Education and Work: Re-examining the High Status of Women in Kerala’, in Swapna Mukhopadhyay and Ratna Sudarshan (eds), Tracking Gender Equity under Economic Reforms, New Delhi: Kali for Women, 2003.
Gabriel, Karen, Melodrama and the Nation: Sexual Economies of Bombay Cinema, 1970–2000, New Delhi: Women Unlimited, 2010.
Jameson, Feredric, ‘Third World Literature in an Era of Multinational Capitalism’, in Social Text No.15 (Autumn 1986), pp. 65-88.
Kodoth, Praveena, ‘Property Legislation in Kerala: Gender Aspects and Policy Challenges’, eSocialSciences 31 August 2005, 20 July 2011,
Mukhopadhyay, Swapna, ‘Understanding the Enigma of Women’s Status in Kerala: Does High Literacy Necessarily Translate into High Status’, in Swapna Mukhopadhyay (ed.), The Enigma of the Kerala Women: A Failed Promise of Literacy, New Delhi: Social Sciences Press, 2007.
Vasudevan, Ravi, Making Meaning in Indian Cinema, Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2000.
List of Works:
T.S. Pillai
Novels
Thyagathinu Prathiphalam 1934
Pathitha Pankajam 1935
Susheelan 1938
Vilpanakari 1941
Paramardhangal 1945
Thalayodu 1947
Tottiyude Makan 1947
Randidangazhi 1949
Thendi Vargam 1950
Avante Smaranakal 1955
Chemmeen 1956
Verilla Katha 1956
Ousephinte Makkal 1959
Anchu Pennungal 1961
Jeevitham Sundaramanu Pakshe 1961
Enippadikal 1964
Dharmaneethiyo? Alla: Jeevitham 1965
Pappyammayum Makkalum 1965
Mamsathinte Villi 1966
Akasham 1967
Anubhavangal Palichakal 1967
Chukku 1967
Nellum Thengayum 1969
Pennu 1969
Vyakulamathavu 1969
Nurayum Pathayum 1970
Pennayi Piranal 1970
Kodepoya Mughangal 1972
Kure Manushyarude Katha 1973
Akathalam 1974
Punnapra Vayalarinnu Shesham 1975
Adhikalanovelukal 1977
Azhiyakurukku 1977
Kayar 1978
Thakazhi Laghunovelukal 1978
Baloonukal 1982
Chemmeen Page 23
