Indira, Clara and others: Revisiting the strong women of '80s Malayalam cinema

The 1980s – considered the golden era of Malayalam cinema – is said to have created strong women characters, but were they really so?

Delve Gender and sexuality

Ammukutty (Seema), alone and looking after her old uncle in a Kerala village, is the heroine and unnamed subject of the title – Aalkoottathil Thaniye, ‘Alone in a Crowd’. Rajan (Mammootty), her cousin – the old uncle’s son with the big job in the city – had once been in love with her. But he is married to another now – city-bred Nalini who gave him a son. When they visit the ailing father, Rajan cannot hide his remorse looking at the old lover who had given “her all” for him, including the little money she earned as a schoolteacher to send him to the city for higher studies. He loathes the wife, rich and ambitious and wanting to leave for a better career.

IV Sasi’s 1984 film is an example of the two extremes of the portrayal of women in that decade, fondly called the golden ‘80s of Malayalam cinema. Directors – who are loved even today – gave some of their best in those years – in terms of stories and characters. It was a time when Malayalam cinema is said to have created strong women characters: strong in their words, deeds and expressions. But looking back, were they really so?

Sacrificial strong woman

Seema, as she often did in movies of the ‘80s, plays the woman who is portrayed as “bold” (because she doesn’t hesitate to be physically close to Rajan before marriage), nice (because she sacrifices her feelings when he gets a “better” alliance), caring (because only she takes care of the ailing uncle when his own children don’t want to) and proud (because she throws away the money Nalini offers to settle the old dues of sponsoring her husband’s education). And Unni Mary plays the rich and beautiful wife who is portrayed as arrogant (because she dares to offer money to Ammukutty), selfish (because she only cares about her career) and unloving (because she is ready to go away from her family). Seema is also be dressed in the traditional mundum neriyathum while Unni Mary is in fashionable nightgowns.



Aalkootathil Thaniye

“Here, Mammootty is at the centre and the women revolve around him. The woman who sympathised with the man is shown in a good light. And the career oriented woman is shown in a bad light, as one who doesn’t give priority to the family,” says Janaki Sreedharan, professor at the Calicut University, who writes on gender and cinema.

She points out another example, Aksharangal, another IV Sasi movie from 1984 with the same actors. In the movie, Mammootty plays a writer who had once been close to Geetha (Seema) but marries another writer (Suhasini). He leaves his wife when they fight, gets drunk and falls on the road from where Geetha saves him and then looks after him. Another version of Ammukutty, the sacrificing woman, who tends to the man who had abandoned her once. Here again, Suhasini’s character is shown in a bad light because she let go of her husband, and Seema’s character is shown as the “stronger woman” because she takes care of him. The woman who sympathised with the man is meant to win hearts while the one who took a stance is to be ridiculed.

Powerful body language

Academic Meena T Pillai, author of The Missing Look: Women in Malayalam Cinema, however, argues that a character like the one Seema played is immensely powerful when it comes to body language.



Meena T Pillai

“Seema’s character says in the film, I got him from the gutters and I was at a stage where I could tie any number of men to my skirt’s strings. Women today don’t have the physical strength to say that. I am not saying one is better than the other but there were moments when patriarchy was ripped apart in those movies in the way women carried themselves, in the way women mouthed dialogues,” she says.

Meena puts a picture into your head – of Seema standing with a sickle in her hand. “She might be an oppressed character but it is a powerful image. In comparison, what we see today is a kind of fixation on the potti pennu (naïve girl). How far have we proceeded from what we jokingly talk about as Nazir’s mandi pennu (Prem Nazir’s famous line fondly calling the heroine stupid girl)?”

Seema’s characters in Aalkootathil Thaniye, Aksharangal and another IV Sasi film Anubandham were all similarly strong: as Meena T Pillai would say, strong in the way she carried her body and mouthed certain lines, but never towards the man in her life.

Smart women characters ending in suicides

Women characters in the ‘80s films were on the cusp of change. And the scripts recognised this potential.

These strong women, Janaki points out, were shown as thinking, reading, dreaming women who became victims of middle class morality. In Jeassy’s Neeyethra Dhanya (1987), Karthika plays a smart woman, cheerful and witty with everyone, but who kills herself in the end when she is pregnant with the child of a married man. Shari, in another such portrayal of a smart young woman in VR Gopinath’s Oru Maymasa Pulariyil (1987), takes her life when she has a relationship issue.



Karthika in Neeyethra Dhanya

“A friend of mine used to ask after watching such movies if we would end up killing ourselves if we turn smart,” says Sreebala Menon, writer and filmmaker. “When we analyse the strong women characters of the ‘80s, it is mostly about strength within the system. By the end of the film, it would have faded off somewhere.”

Here, Bala mentions the example of showing women as rebelling against their families to marry a man of their choice, but losing all their rebellious spirit once they are married, reminding you of Poornima Jayaram’s character in the 1983 Balachandra Menon film, Karyam Nissaram.

“Maybe those were the norms they fought that day – like an arranged marriage. So love marriage would have seemed like a rebellion, whereas that is a norm today. Women going out of their home, working women – all these were signs of strength then, but these would have become nothing extraordinary later on. The portrayals of women those days were mostly black or white, there were no grey areas. There will be the family woman, the other woman, and the smart woman – they were even dressed stereotypically. This had such an impact in the society on how women dressed (mostly the family woman wore saris while the other women wore what was then modern clothes, like churidhar or midi). On the other hand, men were portrayed in different shades. It showed a lack of study of women,” she explains.



Sreebala Menon

KG George’s realistic women

Director KG George, however, was an exception, placing mostly realistic women characters in his films, Bala says.

Film critic GP Ramachandran says, “KG George’s films break the concept of village goodness and culture. In Yavanika (1982), there is a woman killer who is not treated as an evil person, but who is not justified either. Jalaja plays that character. In Adaminte Variyellu (1984), it is the most victimised character of Soorya who rises in the end.”

Adaminte Variyellu comes up in every conversation on films of the ‘80s portraying strong women characters. It discusses the lives of three women, belonging to three different societal levels: a rich and upper class Alice (Srividya) married to a businessman and living an unhappy life, a middle class Vasanthi (Suhasini) loaded with family responsibilities, a lower class Ammini (Soorya) who is a sexually exploited domestic worker. Alice kills herself and Vasanthi loses her sanity. It is Ammini, the financially poor and exploited domestic worker sent to a women’s shelter, who breaks open the doors and leads the way out for the other women at the shelter.



Ammini (Soorya) leads the women out in Adaminte Variyellu

“George points the lens to the women who push the camera away and run towards freedom,” says VK Joseph, National Award winning film critic.

Films recognising changing sensibilities

Joseph finds Indira of Panchagni (1986), played by Geetha, just as powerful. MT Vasudevan Nair wrote the character for Hariharan’s film, as an activist who goes to jail for killing a man who rapes a tribal girl. She comes out on parole, faces her family’s indifference, finds love and nearly gets the court order to be free but she can’t help herself when she confronts another abuser. Indira takes the gun again.

“I find that decision self-destructive,” says Bala. “How a woman’s decision in the end becomes significant to the film is what describes her strength. But quite a few of the strong women characters of the ‘80s sacrifice themselves to the system. In Desadanakili Karayarilla (1984) – both the girls kill themselves.” In the Padmarajan film, Shari and Karthika play girls who run away during a school trip and one of them falls in love with a man (Mohanlal) they meet on the way. When he doesn’t return her feelings, she decides to kill herself and the other girl joins her. The girls are so bonded together that some critics have seen it as the beginnings of a lesbian relationship.

Janaki sees it as the director’s and scriptwriter’s way of looking at a different world. “They are constructed in a way that’s fitting the popular film network. The makers can’t have women completely transgressing all boundaries. But they have potential. As a college student of those days, we could connect so well to such characters. Like Shanthi Krishna of Chillu (1982), directed by Lenin Rajendran. She is not a regular student in love, but an artist. Or for that matter, Girly, the character played by Nadhiya Moidu in Nokatha Doorathu Kannum Nattu (1985), directed by Fazil. She was not a sexual object, she needn’t show her figure or stand coyly, waiting for the attention of the hero. Even to the hero’s (Mohanlal) declaration of love, she responds so matter-of-factly. We could connect to such a character, because there were other things women wanted to do (than focus on getting a man’s attention) and this shifting sensibility was understood by some filmmakers.”



Nadhiya in Nokatha Doorathu Kannum Nattu

She also mentions a little discussed film of 1989, Alicinte Anveshanam, directed by TV Chandran. Jalaja plays Alice, going in search of her missing husband and on discovering certain disturbing facts about him, drops her search. Jalaja, unlike Seema, mostly played the subdued woman who spoke in smiles and glances and very few words. Yet it is she who turns out to be the killer in Yavanika after appearing as the weak young woman who suffered too much.

Another film that described the sufferings of women in a male dominated society is Sibi Malayil’s Ezhuthapurangal ( 1987). “It has Suhasini, Ambika and Parvathy playing three strong characters,” says Sibi. “It was a time when women and men could get equal spaces in cinema. Be it the characters in Bharathan’s movies like Ormakkai or Haiharan’s Panchagni. Then there is of course Padamarajan’s Clara in Thoovanathumbikal (1987).”

Padmarajan’s Clara

Perhaps the most discussed woman character of the 1980s even in today’s film forums is Padmarajan’s Clara. Sumalatha plays a woman whose face a man (Mohanlal) imagines seeing when it rains, even before he meets her. He falls for another woman (Radha played by Parvathy) who rejects him and he turns to Clara (Sumalatha), who begins her life as a sex worker with him. Disturbed by this (‘no woman’s destruction should begin with me’) he offers to marry her. But Clara leaves him, goes on with the sex trade and he finds his old love having a change of heart.



Sumalatha as Clara in Thoovanathumpikal

“If you notice, it is always men who discuss Clara. It is the rain and her sensuality that get noticed. But if you think about it, Clara is a very practical woman. It is her decision that gives clarity of thought to Jayakrishnan (Mohanlal’s character). But we don’t discuss that part,” Bala says.

Radha’s on the other hand is a “kulasthree” character, says Ramachandran. “Kulasthree” is a term that describes a traditional upper caste woman following the age-old customs of the land. Clara’s is also not a liberating character, says Joseph. “But it serves the sexual fantasy of a Malayali man. The character Jayakrishnan has one face at his home and another outside. The same way he wants one woman at home and another outside.”

The male gaze

What is pleasurable for the male gaze becomes a sign of strength as far as the women characters are concerned, says Meena. “For a man, a woman crying might be a sign of strength, in the sense that she is resilient enough and powerful enough. Going through a certain sense of misery to come out triumphant. Right now we don’t talk of women’s empowerment in those terms. Parameters have changed.”

However, she doesn’t feel that even now, women directors are disturbing that status quo enough. “There might be a handful of characters who do so but by and large, few challenge patriarchy. There might be an overgrown character who offers a very neutral, harmless kind of pleasure. In terms of the physique, in terms of the way you forayed into the society, in terms of the desires, there were significant moments that inscribed female strength and power in the ‘80s,” she says.



Chithram

In terms of the screen space, too, adds actor Ranjini who played quite a few memorable characters in the late 1980s. “There were more female oriented subjects. Even if you look at the posters that came out in those days, equal prominence was given to the heroine as the hero. Even in my film Chithram (1988), both the hero (Mohanlal) and I shared the same space.” But then in this Priyadarshan film, even as both the characters keep troubling the other out of mutual dislike in the beginning, it is Ranjini’s character who atones for her “sins” of harassing the man.

Cinema is commerce

“I left (acting) in 1990 and I don’t know what happened down the line,” Ranjini says. “But heroines appear to have been wiped out, especially in big budget movies. Cinema is of course commerce. Producers think that youngsters do not want to see women-oriented subjects, and that women artistes have very little satellite value. It is also expensive these days to watch a movie at a theatre. I think there should be subsidy for female-oriented subjects that will draw people back to the theatre.”

Another reason women and women-centric films slipped away from theatres in the 1990s is television, Bala says. “When serials came, the women crowd moved to television. Women-centric subjects became serials. When I went to watch Panchagni in the theatre it was full of women. But that changed after the ‘80s.”

After the ‘80s

The ‘80s women that Janaki described as on the cusp of change did not become predecessors of even stronger characters in the ‘90s. Male superstardom happened, superheroes came. Aaram Thampurans walked in and women took a backseat.



Mohanlal in Aaram Thampuran

“The character that Mohanlal played in Thoovanathumbikal paved the way for more such ‘Thampuran films’ in the ‘90s. Even in Boeing Boeing (Priyadarshan, 1985), women are treated as sexual bodies to be fooled around with and there are fragments of that in films that came later,” says Ramachandran.

Fortunately, cinema has continued to evolve. And Bala makes a point when she says the change in societal structure would definitely reflect on the women characters we see on the screen.

“If earlier, the mirror was turned towards the society, it is now turned towards the individual. Those were days when all kinds of women had a place in the extended family – the unmarried or the widowed or the working daughter or the relative who has come to study in the city. With nuclear families, there is no undefined space for a woman like that, there are clear positions for everyone. You would also see these changes in the movies.”

Survivor stories (like Uyare) would not have been considered as a theme in the ‘80s. The emergence of technology and social media has made a lot of difference. “A movie like Vandanam (Priyadarshan, 1989), would not have ended in a tragedy if the heroine had a mobile phone with her. A smartphone has empowered a woman of this decade like nothing else has,” says Bala.

But then, feminist ideas continue to be opposed, Ramachandran reminds you. “Even now, there are so many film organisations but everyone is ready to pounce at whatever the WCC (Women in Cinema Collective) has to say. Even in the new film Ishq, the symbol the heroine uses to say no to the hero is anti-woman, not that it is intended that way,” he suggests.



Zareena Wahab in Chamaram and Sai Pallavi in Premam

Were feminist ideas on screen more accepted in the ’80? In Bharathan’s Chamaram (1980), Zareena Wahab’s teacher character, abandoned by her lover, turns to her student (Prathap Pothen) who has a crush on her. Thirty five years later, Nivin Pauly’s George fell for his teacher Malar (Sai Pallavi) in Premam, but this was greeted with raised brows.

However, there are also characters that can transcend time, Bala says, like Ammini (Saleema) of Aranyakam (1988), written by MT Vasudevan Nair, and directed by Hariharan. “Ammini, if you notice, is mostly discussed among women. She is not sensual like Clara. She doesn’t fit into any stereotype, coming from a broken family and having her own ways in life. A character like that came in 2014 in Om Shanthi Oshana, but even there, the protagonist is focused on winning the man.”



Saleema as Ammini in Aranyakam

Not like Ammini, the girl who liked to roam the forests and write unsent letters to the authors she read. Too bad, there haven’t been more like her.