Ponnamma’s love for classical music began at the age of five in a town called Ponkunnam when on a Sunday her father took her out and she heard the sound of harmonium for the first time in her life. She wanted one, she told her father, a man full of love for the arts. A week later she began Carnatic music lessons with a neighbourhood guru. At eight, she went to a kutcheri at the Thirunakkara temple and listened to MS Subbulakshmi, one of the most reputed Carnatic singers in the country, in all her splendour. Little Ponnamma nursed a dream to one day sing on a stage like Subbulakshmi. In a few years, she did get on a stage, but to act, and went on acting for the next six decades, in hundreds of films after the early days of theatre until she turned 80 and breathed her last on September 20.
Kaviyoor Ponnamma – named after her birth town – was stereotyped, and from her many accounts, happily so, as the warm and cuddly mother in a majority of her 700 odd films. To name only a few from her huge repertoire, Ponnamma left deep impressions with her roles in Aabhijathyam, Pravaham, Nirmalyam, Cheriyachante Kroorakrithyangal, Namukku Parkkan Munthirithoppukal, Thaniyavarthanam, Thinkalazhcha Nalla Divasam, Adhipan, Kireedam, In Harihar Nagar, His Highness Abdullah, Thenmavin Kombathu, Sandesham, Nandanam, and Aanum Pennum.
From not knowing anything about acting to becoming the seasoned ‘mother’ of Mollywood, Ponnamma had to thank her love for music, apart from the many people who held her hand through the tough stages. She was first chosen by the Kerala People’s Arts Club (KPAC) – the most famous theatre troupe in the state – to sing. But when they could not get a female lead for the play, they asked her, and that’s how 14-year-old Ponnamma made her acting debut in the play Mooladhanam, written by Thoppil Bhasi, celebrated playwright and screenwriter.
She was still a teenager when she debuted in films, playing Mandodari in Sreerama Pattabhishekam and then a mother of two in Kudumbini. She was 21 when she put grey grease on her hair and played mother to Sathyan and Madhu, men many years her senior, in Thommante Makkal. In her interviews, she’d say she saw it as a credit that she could play mother to men twice her age when she entered the world of cinema as a novice, knowing so little. “I had not watched a single play until I joined theatre and not a single film until I began acting in them,” she said, with that trademark, much-loved, open smile of hers. Ponnamma’s smile was so famous that writer-journalist Vaikom Chandrasekharan Nair wrote a poem about it.
Ponnamma would later candidly reveal that she knew nothing about acting in those days and that she was not good at it back then. It took her a few plays to get the hang of it, and it was after coming to films that she began to ‘shine’. She had no qualms about playing older roles, she did not mind that at all, she said. Only once she had asked director Sasikumar, who’d cast her in many films, if she could not, like her contemporary Meena, try a negative shade. He’d laughed and said her face would not suit such a role, she looked too much of a ‘paavam’.
She still managed to grab a few roles that went against the tide of the all-bearing mother characters. In Thriveni, she played a fisherwoman who doesn’t care much for anything and when Sathyan, playing a 71-year-old, comes seeking the hand of her 17-year-old daughter, she misunderstands it is for her, leading to an embarrassing encounter. In Oppol, she was the opposite of the affectionate mother we are used to, with not a single nice word for her daughter (Menaka), who becomes an unwed mother, or for her grandchild. She was also indifferent to Mammootty’s character in Sukrutham, in which she played his aunt.
Ponnamma’s role in MT Vasudevan Nair’s debut directorial, Nirmalyam, is also cited among her atypical characters. She plays the wife of an oracle who asks difficult questions of her husband when the children starve and she has to resort to despicable means to earn money. In Harihar Nagar has her playing a soft and pitiable mother waiting for a son who’d never come home, but she plays a major part in the thrilling climax that puts an end to the villain.
Viewers would shoot off angry letters to her every time she played a slightly negative character, she said. It reached a point where she too stopped trying different roles.
People’s preferences also appeared to limit her already limited mother characters. Calls would come to her asking her to stick to playing Mohanlal’s mother, she revealed. Even as she had played mother to most of the actors through the 80s and 90s, her combination with Mohanlal as mother and son was so celebrated that it became another stereotype. But when Kaviyoor Ponnamma played mother, she did not fade into the background as an insignificant prop. Her presence stood out in the way she spoke, moved, and emoted. Her most recalled roles with Mohanlal in films such as Kireedam, as well as short appearances in films like Vandanam made the same kind of impact. It was endearing even when she toughened up at times – turning morose when Mohanlal makes a drunken call in Adhipan, or playing a serious, no-nonsense character who disapproves of and later changes her mind about her son’s relationship with the troubled young woman next door in Namukku Parkkan Munthiri Thoppukal.
Though she’d publicly admitted several times that her favourite ‘son’ on and off screen was Mohanlal, she’d immediately add, but it was ‘Mammoos’ (actor Mammootty) that she first played mother to. Their pairing in Thaniyavarthanam becomes too touching when the mother feeds herself and her unfortunate son, driven to madness, rice laden with poison. Mammootty also played son to Ponnamma’s main character in Thinkalazhcha Nalla Divasam, where she played a woman who missed her faraway children so much she’d named plants after them. In an interview, Ponnamma said that she was like that in real life, when as a girl she did not have many friends but roamed around in fields watching plants and animals and loving the way nature worked.
She did not get much of a formal education but she was deeply philosophical and had many questions about the world even as a child, she said. She harboured a deep love for her family that prevented her from proceeding with an interreligious relationship. She’d loved, she admitted many years later, filmmaker Jeassy as a young woman but it was just not meant to be. Ponnamma married film producer Maniswami in ‘69 and gave birth to a daughter. She continued acting and would say that if she had been a ‘heroine’ maybe she’d have been in the limelight only for a short while. But the mother roles let her have a long life in cinema. She knew the limited life and space that women had in cinema, and would admit that that was also the reason she was more known for playing mother to heroes than heroines.
She had in fact played heroine to Nazir, Sathyan, and Madhu, even in the years she played their mother. Her first hero was Kottarakkara Sankaran Nair and interestingly, she was once paired opposite his son Saikumar (in Meghatheertham).
Her consistent mother roles meant that she was also limited to a certain kind of clothing and hairdo. Ponnamma would joke that people would tease her as coming to the sets, wearing a mundum neriyathum (the traditional Kerala attire that she wore in a number of films) and a wig, and finishing her job with it. In life, Ponnamma dressed in colourful silk saris and humongous bindis. That was the attire she’d dreamed to don, the way she saw her idol MS Subbulakshmi as a child. Her only regret, she’d say, was losing her music. She sang in a few films – a prayer in Theerthayathra, a group song in Dharmayudham. In Nandanam, she played a grandmother (to Prithviraj) who was a fan of singer KJ Yesudas.
In one of her last memorable performances she was paired up with Nedumudi Venu for a segment in the anthology Aanum Pennum, both actors uncharacteristically playing a wicked couple, having a laugh and making some money too by tricking a younger couple. Ponnamma had always been flexible like that, figuring in offbeat works of filmmakers like Adoor Gopalakrishnan (Kodiyettam, Mukamukam, Anantaram) and John Abraham (Cheriyachante Kroorakrithyangal).
Aanum Pennum was part of another new wave and she had adapted effortlessly. If only more directors had entrusted her with greyer roles that she had once longed for. But it didn’t matter, she said, for Malayalis across the world had loved her for what she gave them and that was quite rewarding.
She was loved within the industry too, she said, people of all generations, young enough to be her children, calling her Ponnu fondly. She too had a mother equivalent in cinema, another Ponnamma – Aaranmula Ponnamma – who used to call her Ammini, the name of her deceased daughter.
Kaviyoor Ponnamma also had her personal tragedies. She lost her younger sister Renuka, who too had acted in films for a brief time. But otherwise, even with the many tough experiences she’d been through, she liked to keep a happy front, she’d say, before flashing another of her famous smiles.