In this revisit, we look at a film that wouldn’t easily be pegged as a Priyadarshan film. Way out in the woods, away from his comedy capers, Priyadarshan seems to have spun this bizarre drama full of patriarchal cobwebs. From the characters and songs to the gaping plot holes, here’s trying to make sense of Raakuyilin Ragasadasil.
For Priyadarshan, perhaps it was a deliberate bid to step out of a comfort zone, a divergence from the marathon comic entertainers that came in the mid-80s. Or maybe the fundamental glitches were always there in his slapstick comedies, and we were just too busy laughing our heads off to dig deeper into the problematic subtext in those narratives. The 1986 Mammootty-Suhasini film Raakuyilin Ragasadasil, written and directed by Priyadarshan, is a family drama. It’s one of those films, where even his sense of comedy flounders, along with a lot of other things.
The film begins with a saffron-robed Viswanathan (Mammootty who is stiff and loud) travelling in a bus with his son. We are soon introduced to his past. Viswanathan and Janani (Suhasini’s casting goes awry as she is a bad dancer and seems to be struggling to emote) who study at the music college run by a sour-faced Ragan Vaidyanathan (Adoor Bhasi). The father sees a great future in dance for his daughter, Janani.
Predictably Vishwam and Janani falls in love. More on that later, first let’s go back to our hero—Viswanathan. He is a precedent to what later came to be called as the Ranjith upper caste alpha male hero. Egoistic, misogynistic and entitled, though he claims to carry a silent love for Janani, his body language and actions suggests otherwise. When he proposes to her and she rejects him, he isn’t heartbroken, rather he is more concerned about admitting defeat to a woman. Why, even the proposal is a milder version of what Mohanlal’s Induchoodan tried on his girlfriend in Narasimham.
If Viswanathan is an unpleasant man, Janani is a weakly-etched character—who is forever torn between her castiest father and sexist husband. She is unable to make up her mind about anything in life, except maybe choose Viswanathan against her father’s wishes. Even her career path seems more like her father’s dream than her own and after marriage, she is struggling to fit in. She submits to Viswanathan’s whims and fancies, seldom rebelling and forever trying to please both him and her father.
Priyadarshan seems to be unusually hung up on the Brahmanical primacy of the characters. Vaidyanathan is a casteist snob who constantly derides Viswanathan’s caste, while Viswanathan keeps taunting Janani about her caste supremacy and his own inadequacies. But even the caste narrative is confusing—in one scene, Viswanathan’s uncle (Sankaradi) says he belongs to a gothra which is linked to the Devadasi community but soon after marriage, we see the thread worn by Brahmins around Vishwam! Even more ambiguous is his transition after marriage, into a big bungalow considering he always pitied himself as a poor man.
In the beginning we are told that he is a successful musician, but then the narrative suddenly shifts to his wife being the more popular among the two and no one being aware of his fame. Viswanathan’s chauvinism is attributed to his Brahminical upbringing (and we are still mulling over that part) where he says a Brahmin woman will welcome her tired husband with turmeric and lime, while Janani helps him in this regressive debate by pushing her own patriarchal conditioning about equating a Brahmin woman’s beauty to her husband’s loyalty!
When Viswanathan starts nagging her, she tells him— “stop behaving like a woman.” There is a whole song by Viswanathan about how an ideal wife should be—from equating her to a source of light that never fades away to the pinnacle in terms of forgiveness, to a radiance that makes a rainbow out of his tears, the song pays tribute to the indoctrinated patriarchy in marriages. The song was recreated two decades later in Ivar Vivahitharayal, where the hero fantasises about his wife-to-be around this song.
The film also puts down western music while maintaining the intellectual superiority of Indian Carnatic music, whereas classical dance is broadly declared as a career not fit for a married woman. We are also told that musicians live a largely deprived life.
Viswanathan is the kind of entitled husband who expects his wife to take care of his routine, from perfecting tea to the role of a mother. He is egoistic enough to mind being known as someone’s husband and is upset when at a party his wife takes the centre-stage. But then it's also true that the father-in-law leaves no stone unturned to humiliate him. In the midst of the sombre narrative, even the comedy pieces fall flat.
The characters, except for the main leads, are mostly underwritten. Janani represents the larger percentage of Indian married women who are forced to stifle their dreams and ambitions to accommodate their role as a mother and wife. She is constantly made to feel guilty for nursing a dream to be a dancer after marriage and motherhood. Strangely this narrative was more or less repeated two decades later in the Sathyan Anthikad film Kochu Kochu Santhoshangal where the husband (Jayaram) who also belongs to a lesser privileged background finds himself at odds with his wife (Lakshmy Gopalaswamy), who hails from a rich family and shows an inclination to follow her dreams as a classical dancer.
The father in both films is shown as the villain who tries to fulfil his dreams through his daughter and ends up creating a rift between the husband and wife. In both instances the father is a rich snob and looks down upon his son-in-law’s social status. And shockingly in both films the husbands opt to walk out of the marriage with their sons.
While in Rakkuyilin Ragasadassil one can possibly take heart in the fact that she doesn’t end her career and live in misery, in the Anthikad film, the heroine simply puts a hold on her career and lives in guilt and grief. When Janani meets a long-time friend, who is apparently happily married, the friend advises her to let the man’s ego win for a peaceful married life, to which Janani admits that it was all her mistake.
There is simply no justification for Viswanathan’s anger or hatred towards Janani when he was the one who walked out of the marriage, with their child. Viswanathan despises Janani who for the larger part of their marriage remained a dutiful wife and mother, even deciding not to pursue her dance if not for her father’s emotional blackmail. Janani surprisingly holds no grudge or anger against her estranged husband, who not only slaps her, derides her talents but also keeps a child away from the mother. And the climax typically ends with Janani falling at Viswanathan’s feet.
Maybe one can argue about the politics and significance in discussing a 1986 film but, even today, the narrative in Malayalam cinema has only altered at a superficial level (that too in the last three years), with political correctness seldom organically trickling into the narrative, otherwise the subtext is only tweaked a bit, and often the underlying politics of patriarchy and conditioning resurfaces at various levels. What we eventually see are more updated, glossier, milder versions of an old narrative.
Neelima Menon has worked in the newspaper industry for more than a decade. She has covered Hindi and Malayalam cinema for The New Indian Express and has worked briefly with Silverscreen.in. She now writes exclusively about Malayalam cinema, contributing to Fullpicture.in and thenewsminute.com. She is known for her detailed and insightful features on misogyny and the lack of representation of women in Malayalam cinema.