Sreenivasan might so willingly be ‘our little man’ as a result of in his coronary heart of hearts he by no means felt trivial or inconsequential. And to the very finish he stayed that approach, the shrimp who knew he was a large.
Sreehari Nair doffs his hat to the late legend.

IMAGE: Sreenivasan, the Malayalam film legend, handed into the ages final month. {Photograph}: Sort courtesy Srinivas/Instagram

‘You can’t think about Malayalam cinema of the final 40 years with out Sreenivasan’ is a truism, however so far as truisms go, it is an awfully helpful one.

Take away his contributions as actor, author and director, and it’s possible you’ll be left with fallow filmographies, half-formed careers, and a popular culture immeasurably poorer in punch-lines.

By 2010 or so, his sensibility was so integral to our cinema, to its mind-set and searching on the world, {that a} expertise like Syam Pushkaran needed to set himself in acutely aware opposition to Sreenivasan with the intention to create one thing radically contemporary.

All that is indeniable, kind of.

And but, I am going to exit on a limb and declare that the best factor Sreenivasan did for Malayalam cinema was invent the Sreenivasan character.

 

IMAGE: Mammootty and Sreenivasan as Karakoottil Dasan in Golanthara Vartha.

Shrimpy and sneaky, possessed of an acid tongue, anxious about his seems to be and conscious about his anxieties, the Sreenivasan character was a brand new type of consciousness, a brand new assault on actuality.

In Indian cinema, the Malayalam trade was the primary to show you that the essence of nice comedy is friction. (Good luck looking for proof of this dictum in a Hrishikesh Mukherjee film!). And the spleen and abrasive power that outlined the humour in mainstream Malayalam motion pictures from 1984 onwards wouldn’t have been attainable with out the Sreenivasan character and the sparks he set off.

Feudal lords and phoenixes and gallant duellists suffered compared to what the shrimp dropped at the buffet desk: You may carve out of him a phony mental discovering the constraints of his jargons, a weasel-like opponent pecking away at a domineering comedian accomplice, a husband arranging his personal cuckolding, a mom’s second favorite son.

Pump into him some heavyweight airs and he grew to become Karakoottil Dasan, a self-styled thug who talks about ingesting the blood of unique reptiles whilst he takes his first chew of home-cooked Sadya.

IMAGE: Sreenivasan and Mohanlal in Gandhinagar 2nd Avenue.

Sreenivasan’s was the comedy of ‘character inadequacy’, nevertheless it was brewed out of his inherent perception that there is extra to heroism than the macho perfect.

He was a closet case of self-confidence: totally safe in his dimensions, he was clever sufficient to not broadcast it to the world.

By the identical token, you could possibly argue that his greatest strains have been ones the place he trusted his viewers to fill within the gaps.

The true brilliance of these strains lay in what they selected to go away out; the omissions have been a key a part of their cadence.

Here is our man to Ashokan’s character in Gandhinagar 2nd Avenue, an incessant skirt-chaser in scorching pursuit of a woman: ‘Simply crossed that bend. Hurry up!’ (Discover how he would not say ‘She simply crossed that bend’ — the elided pronoun is what waves us into the joke).

IMAGE: Mohanlal and Sreenivasan in Nadodikkattu.

Here is Harmless, when Mohanlal in Nadodikkattu tries to behave all smarmy: ‘Expensive Ramdas, your father Narayanan Kutty was by no means this good.’ (In that second, you possibly can really feel the air going useless on Ramdas’ flattery).

Here is Thalathil Dineshan, readying himself for heartbreak, to a lodge bellboy who asks him if he wanted something to drink: ‘I’m but to determine.’

It is fascinating to notice that Sreenivasan (a Chaplin devotee) wasn’t Chaplinesque within the slightest, in that he by no means appeared to need our loving.

He at all times knew {that a} man of his proportions and background needed to be tough-minded to succeed. Not anticipating to be babied himself, the prime targets of his jokes have been these with hearts that gladdened too simply and those that wished maturity however with out the correct rite-of-passage.

Readers of sentimental weeklies have been skewered with a peculiar relish.

After which there was the teashop and barbershop common who had opinions on every thing from the LTTE, the working of the United Nations, the Israeli-Palestine battle and Gorbachev’s birthmark, however who scarcely knew what a kilogram of rice prices. (Followers of Jordan Peterson won’t be mistaken in discovering a prototype of their favorite social commentator in Sreenivasan.)

IMAGE: Sangita Madhavan Nair and Sreenivasan in Chinthavishtayaya Shyamala.

If I’ve the chain of occasions accurately labored out, Sreenivasan’s popularity reached its apogee with Chinthavishtayaya Shyamala.

This was when the common Keralaite-in-the-street lastly began to grasp how widespread his inventive genius was.

The Sreenivasan character he had so fastidiously curated now appeared much less like an extension of his private self and extra an invention for the viewers.

The masquerade was over.

It was time to come back out of the ‘self-confidence closet’.

IMAGE: Sreenivasan in Kairali TV’s Cheriya Sreeniyum Valiya Lokavum.

Future metamorphoses occurred at a charge that will’ve made Gregor Samsa blush.

Because the host of Kairali TV’s Cheriya Sreeniyum Valiya Lokavum, we noticed him rework right into a truth-teller, the person out to indicate the grime on everybody.

A typical episode of Cheriya Sreeni had the next format: Insider tales about award ceremony riggings and the idiocies of the cine-struck, noticed from a cool distance, would finish with a neat humanistic message or just a few recommendations on self-improvement.

My guess is that it was round this time that the Sreenivasan character grew to become mired in an identification disaster.

No extra on the service of the artist alone, he needed to pay his money owed to the general public mental too.

And when Sreenivasan now got here on because the little man, we could not make that direct connection, like how we do between the timid, death-obsessed hypochondriac that Woody Allen performs in his motion pictures and the one he tasks in his interviews.

IMAGE: Meena and Sreenivasan in Katha Parayumbol.

Someplace across the first half of the brand new millennium, Sreenivasan’s humour stopped being pure to him. At all times alert for a possibility to make a crack, the pressure started to indicate.

And as Udayananu Tharam (a poor, poor try at lampooning the famous person tradition) and Katha Parayumbol (unwatchable), his two most celebrated motion pictures from this era show, the slope from ‘humorous’ to ‘intelligent’ to ‘cranky’ to ‘foolish’ is a slightly slippery one.

Malayalam cinema was within the pits at this level. (It was not for nothing that information channels would take break day from discussing the intercourse lives of politicians and the falling value of rubber to debate the ‘disaster’ in Malayalam cinema).

As requires a change in guard grew louder, the brightest younger minds understood that it was necessary to show towards the strongest poets of the previous.

IMAGE: Mohanlal and Sreenivasan in Varavelpu.

Accordingly, folks like Rajeev Ravi and Syam Pushkaran pointed us towards a crucial flaw in Sreenivasan’s sensibility: In his earnest want to spherical up a story, he did not thoughts making his characters nearly nauseatingly two-dimensional.

The reveals have been throughout us to gaze upon and recoil.

Contemplate Varavelpu, by which all of Mohanlal’s family members and pals immediately begin performing self-centred, as if on cue.

Contemplate the chilly callousness of the youngsters in Sandesam, so faraway from primary human decency.

Contemplate the repeated roastings of pseudo-intellectuals that conveniently overlook that it is usually via a interval of pseudo-intellectualism and blind imitation {that a} younger artist discovers his voice.

IMAGE: Urvashi and Sreenivasan in Thalayana Manthram.

Sreenivasan’s politics (part-libertarian, part-conservative) would at all times stay some extent of debate.

However it’s true that he ‘privileged order’, that he prized standing quo above dissent.

And it’s simply as true that within the seek for satire, he steadily violated the primary precept of nice drama: What makes nice drama is when many characters have a declare on the story and people claims can’t be evenly resolved.

For a author like Syam Pushkaran, it was necessary to each acknowledge Sreenivasan’s affect and reveal his Anxiousness of Affect.

An in depth analysis of Pushkaran’s screenplays would reveal that they ‘privilege chaos over order’, and more and more you possibly can sense in them a distaste for straightforward resolutions.

If these a number of entries making up the debit column of Sreenivasan’s biography don’t take the sheen off his legacy, it ought to inform you one thing in regards to the satisfaction and fecundity of that comedian thoughts.

And together with his dying now, I couldn’t assist however go weak yet again for that interval in Malayalam cinema when the Sreenivasan character was a pressure to reckon with.

Chronicling nuances of behaviour that hadn’t been placed on the display but (have not all of us, sooner or later in our lives, moved our mouths to the wild gyrations of a automotive steering wheel, like poor Sukumaran in Thalayana Manthram?), bringing out the cockeyed poetry of sure marginal sorts (the henpecked husband of Pavithram who expresses his affection in considerate stutters is a private favorite), and documenting the violence and pressure that exists beneath the floor of peaceful-seeming households — that was how he did it.

IMAGE: Shobana, KPAC Lalitha and Sreenivasan in Pavithram.

I’ve by no means understood this blanket condemnation of masculinity, as if it have been some sort of a illness, simply as I do not perceive feminist critics losing their whistles on some male famous person strolling in gradual movement.

In an trade that was used to portray the masculine aura in a single hallowed tone, Sreenivasan confirmed us that masculinity might produce other shades too; he confirmed us that it could possibly be uneasy in its glorifications and imbued with misanthropic ideas, fly-by-night ideas, and moments of gracelessness.

Folks thought that he was being sincere about his complexes, that he was simply self-effacing.

However the reality of the matter is that Sreenivasan might so willingly be ‘our little man’ as a result of in his coronary heart of hearts he by no means felt trivial or inconsequential. And to the very finish he stayed that approach, the shrimp who knew he was a large.

Images curated by Satish Bodas/Rediff