Thommy is massaging landlord Bhaskara Patelar’s back, pounding softly with his fists, as a few people gather in front of Patelar’s mansion. Patelar is seated in a chair while Thommy, his ‘servant’, stands behind him. What happens next is the most telling shot in Adoor Gopalakrishnan’s Malayalam 1994 classic, Vidheyan, where Thommy (played by MR Gopakumar) and his inhuman master are the main characters. Patelar (played by Mammootty) raises his head and asks “what do you want” and you spot on either side of his head the horns of a stuffed animal mounted on the wall behind him. The horns make him look like the devil of a character he is in the film – a man who believes he can do as he pleases with anyone.
Almost three decades on, the so-called progressive filmmaker suddenly finds himself cast in the image of the villain he created. The protesting students of the KR Narayanan National Institute of Visual Sciences and Art (KRNIVSA) in Kerala’s Kottayam have been using an edited screengrab from Vidheyan in which Patelar’s face is replaced with Adoor’s, horns and all. What the students are trying to say through this is clear – the prejudices that Adoor seems to harbour make him eerily similar to Patelar, a caricature of his own making.
Screenshot from Vidheyan featuring Mammotty and MR Gopakumar
Adoor Gopalakrishnan, who is also the chairperson of KRNIVSA, has been stubbornly backing the institute’s director Shankar Mohan who is facing serious charges of usurping reservations in admissions and of discriminating against students and sanitation staff on the basis of class and caste. Female members of the cleaning staff have accused Shankar Mohan of forcing them to perform domestic chores at his official residence as well as clean toilets with their bare hands using extremely small scrubbers.
“There are no allegations, only attempts at defamation,” Adoor said in a recent interview with News 18 Kerala. “These women dress up like members of the Women in Cinema Collective (WCC) and give interviews everyday now. They have become stars,” he added, taking a dig at the women’s body that has been at the forefront of the fight against sexism and misogyny in the Malayalam film industry.
For a viewer conversant with the cinematic universe of Adoor Gopalakrishnan,Vidheyan is among his most striking works. The film is a commentary on how feudalism and caste-based discrimination work hand-in-hand to guard savarna interests. Ruthless landlord Bhaskara Patelar verbally and physically abuses every man he feels like and sexually assaults the women he desires, especially those who work for him. Thommy, his employee, is a migrant Christian who is destined to be used, abused, and humiliated by his ‘Master’.
This is not to allege that Adoor is the mirror image of Patelar, or that he deserves the same apathy that Patelar does. Adoor is the man who led the parallel cinema movement in Malayalam, someone who is seen as a progressive cultural icon of our times. That he cannot fathom or perhaps not care for the underlying misogyny and casteism in his comments is appalling, blurring the lines between the filmmaker who presented Patelar and his oppression on screen, and his own personality. In that single statement, he has made the sweeping assumption that “these women” are not expected to dress up as they want, that dressing up itself is to be ridiculed, that resembling the outspoken members of the women’s collective formed in the aftermath of an actor’s sexual assault is something he could be sarcastic about. And lastly, becoming ‘stars’ was not their prerogative, his tone seemed to suggest.
Adapted from Paul Zacharia’s novella and written for the screen by Adoor himself, Vidheyan won the National Award for Best Malayalam Film and Best Actor (Mammootty), as well as six Kerala State Film Awards including Best Film and Best Director. If one’s art is any testimony of the ability to understand the society around us, then Vidheyan is proof that Adoor is aware of caste and class-based oppression, gender-based violence, and how power creates hierarchies that dehumanise those who are placed at the bottom of the social ladder. How then does one interpret the dissonance in his response to allegations of power abuse and caste discrimination at an educational institute under his leadership?
A work of art may be able to exist on its own as an entity separate from the artist. But art, especially something as commonly consumed as cinema which influences generations of viewers, cannot afford to be that separate from the filmmaker in our times. It is a mass medium that impacts people more strongly and hence, it is also a medium that is interrogated from time to time in the context of a society’s evolution.
Adoor Gopalakrishnan’s Vidheyan has no existence if one takes its politics out. The context is drawn from the social landscape of Kerala. It can be argued that the filmmaker does not have to conform to the politics of his films. But when a filmmaker like Adoor – who is celebrated not just for his craft but also for the underlying politics of his works – acts in complete contradiction to it, one must question the uncontested validation he receives for his contributions.
In a particular scene in Vidheyan, a man comes to Patelar’s mansion with an appeal. He brings along his wife and the lover with whom she had eloped, abandoning him and their two children. He pleads before Patelar to find a solution. Patelar first slaps the man asking, “How did you let her run away? Are you a man? Could you not control her?” He then walks towards the lover and assaults him until he falls to the ground bleeding, and banishes him from the village. “Behave yourself, no more complaints about you,” Patelar warns the woman.
Patelar believes that working-class women must only dress up for his gaze, in clothes that he thinks suit them. This is underlined when he picks a saree for Thommy’s wife Omana (played by Sabitha Anand), the day after he sexually violates her. Even within his own social circle, Patelar despises any comments from women. He decides to murder his own wife by orchestrating an accident because he does not like her constant nagging. The feudal patriarch will not take anyone’s critique. Labourers, social outcasts, non-Hindus, and women are all beneath him.
“These women among the cleaning staff who have been alleging discrimination were not equipped to speak this way earlier. Now they have been trained to rebel,” Adoor said in his one-on-one with News 18 Kerala. It must be factored in here that Adoor Gopalakrishnan is a savarna (Nair) man with social capital and gender privilege. As such, he has reaped the benefits of his social positioning throughout the process of building his professional and cultural stature. Even the usage of the phrase “these women” by Adoor to address the protesting KRNIVSA sanitation workers is very Patelar-esque, with a discriminatory gaze that others working-class women by slotting their protest as a performative stunt for attention. There can be no better example of how class, caste, and gender discrimination work within institutionalised power structures.
It also implies that the women cannot be so outspoken or rebel against the authorities on their own. Adoor seems to be turning his back on all the working-class protests across the world with that single line when in his very first film, Swayamvaram, he shot real-life protests as the backdrop to his struggling main character played by Madhu. He also said that those who come to study will study, not protest, invalidating the voices of students who have several grievances about the way things function at KRNIVSA.
Adoor Gopalakrishnan is a filmmaker who has paved his own path in cinema. His films are archived and used as material for studying the medium across the world. Nonetheless, does excellence in one’s field of work entitle someone to perpetual validation and protection, even when their words and actions are regressive?
Adoor had earlier taken problematic stances when it came to men named in MeToo allegations. Last year, he had initially justified the selection of Tamil poet Vairamuthu, who has been accused of sexual harassment by many women, for the literary award given by ONV Cultural Academy. Adoor, then chairman of the academy, had said in an interview that awards should not be given based on an individual’s character. However, after a lot of opposition, the Academy said it would reconsider the decision, after which Vairamuthu himself declined the award.
Our reverence and admiration for Adoor Gopalakrishnan stem from our exposure to his films – the craft, the politics, and the way they speak to us. We, as a society, did not respect him because any of us knew him in person. But now, we are beginning to see him as a person and an administrator – what he thinks and how he behaves when there is a conflict. The quality of an artist cannot be judged just by the number of their films, their gaze and politics also must reflect in their interactions with society, especially when they helm an educational institution, as in the case of Adoor.
As a medium that reaches the public widely, the maker of a film is often forced to have some kind of political correctness, which they know they must maintain for social validation. But inherent biases will show, nonetheless. If there is any truth to his art, Adoor must reflect, and try to be more empathetic to the concerns of the students and staff members of KRNIVSA. We may be able to accept his films as lovers of the medium, but is there really any value to filmmaking if there is no thought beyond what is projected on the screen, especially in the face of power abuse and caste-based violence?