The death of Sreenivasan has been met in Kerala with the solemnity befitting a lost oracle. Tributes paint him as the voice of the common man, a filmmaker who held up a mirror to Malayali society. To question this sanctified image feels, to many, like a betrayal. But Sreenivasan’s true legacy, the one he might have endorsed, demands not reverence but the critical thinking his dialogues so often championed.
To look critically is to see a more complicated portrait: not of a truth teller, but of a brilliant rhetorician; not a dismantler of systems, but their most charming apologist.
Most Sreenivasan films are about middle-class anxiety and aspiration. The pursuit of happiness, underwrites nearly every character motivation: a secure government job, a modest house, a good marriage.
Sreenivasan took complex social tensions and distilled them into sparkling, intelligible dialogue. He gave cognitive fluency to a class fantasy in the witty, relatable, and endlessly quotable language of the Everyman.
Cults create their own reality tunnels, wrote American linguist and author Amanda Montell. The right turn of phrase can make an ideology feel like common sense. Sreenivasan mastered this art. When something sounds that good, and so right, we stop asking questions.
Cognitive science offers a useful lens here. Processing fluency, the ease with which we understand something, makes information feel more trustworthy and real, regardless of whether it is actually accurate. What feels easier to process feels more true. His words powered a thousand barber shop and tea shop conversations, predominantly male spaces where his bon mots were treated as gospel.
Ancient Athens had the Sophists, masters of rhetoric who taught citizens how to persuade in a direct democracy. In such a system, persuasion is power. The Greeks also had the concept of the polis, the public forum where civic life unfolds. Even Diogenes, who asked Alexander the Great to step aside because he was blocking the sunlight, participated in the polis. The stoic who masturbated in public to make a philosophical point.
And what was the truth of Sreenivasan’s polis? Look closely at its citizens. From the bumbling Vijayan to the earnest Balagopalan, his protagonists and heroes are overwhelmingly upper caste, their caste identity airbrushed into a universal “Malayali” identity. In presenting upper-caste experience as the cross section, he effectively sidelined the lived reality of a vast portion of Kerala. The state that produced the radical social reforms of Narayana Guru, Ayyankali, and Poykayil Appachan is, in his cinema, exists outside his framing.
Sreenivasan-Sathyan Anthikkad collaboration that deserves closer examination. Both men came from communities historically marginalized by Kerala's caste hierarchy: Sreenivasan from the Thiyya community, Anthikkad from the Ezhava. Yet the cinematic universe they constructed together is saturated with upper-caste, upper-middle-class sensibilities. The Nair hero motif recurs with consistency across their filmography. The protagonists move through worlds where caste is never named, never visible as a structuring force. Yet its effects are everywhere. The homes, the mannerisms, the cultural references, the marriage anxieties, the professional aspirations: all coded upper-caste, all presented as "normal" Kerala.
Look, the logic goes, these men came from lower caste communities and they're telling us these are the stories that matter, these bourgeois concerns are what Kerala is really about. If they're not talking about caste, maybe caste really isn't important anymore. Maybe we really have moved beyond it.
The cunning of cultural hegemony doesn't require the privileged to do all the work of maintaining their privilege. It recruits talented people from below to do it for them, often without anyone involved quite realizing what's happening. The rewards include but are not limited to commercial success, critical acclaim, the satisfaction of speaking to and for a large audience. But the cost is also real: the stories that don't get told, the perspectives that remain unrepresented, the structural violence that continues unnamed.
When a character in Sandesham declares that “human stories are alike everywhere,” it sounds profound but is actually false and meaningless, a ‘deepity’ that Daniel Dennett referred to. A thought-terminating cliche which imposes a universal human nature conveniently erasing nuance around power, privilege and historical injury.
It is the rhetorical equivalent of Morgan Freeman’s controversial stance on racism: that the best way to end it is to stop talking about it. Sreenivasan’s cinema stops the conversation before it can begin. His “apolitical” stance was, in fact, a commitment to the status quo.
Ponmuttayidunna Tharavu offers a revealing counterpoint. Audiences often assume Sreenivasan wrote it. The humor has his fingerprints. But it was actually written by Raghunath Paleri, and if you look closely, the difference shows. Paleri's characters are archetypal rather than stereotypical. They have dimensionality that Sreenivasan's often lack.
His lower-class characters, like the perennial sidekick Dasan, are rarely afforded a fullness of being. They exist in the shadow of the alpha, defined by service or cunning.
In Akkare Akkare Akkare, Vijayan abandons Dasan without hesitation when he gets a chance to go to America. Dasan responds by volunteering his services, begging to be taken along. A master–slave dialectic played for laughs, with the power dynamic carefully preserved. Vijayan’s name signals victory; Dasan’s signals servitude. The nominative determinism is built into the premise.
Or consider Sreenivasan’s character in Kalapani, who boasts about killing a British officer but, when beaten by Mohanlal’s character, confesses he was actually jailed for rape. The scene suggests a kind of universal human meanness that transcends class (even the lower classes have dark sides). But this framing does ideological work: it provides plausible deniability for privilege, suggesting that structural inequality doesn't really matter because humans are uniformly flawed.
His secondary characters rarely experience transformation or liberation. The cunning of alphas is condoned. The mistakes of betas don’t go unpunished. Sreenivasan’s films have resolutions, but not redemptions. They return to equilibrium rather than imagining new possibilities.
Sreenivasan made a career of attacking straw men: the hypocritical communist, the pompous intellectual, the corrupt politician. But this satire was fundamentally comfortable with the market logic that underpinned his characters’ world.
He famously dismissed the idea that cinema could influence real-life behavior, arguing that a film on Gandhi does not create Gandhians. It is a hollow straw-man argument that betrays a willful ignorance of culture’s shaping power. He did not believe in the polis he so dominantly inhabited.
Sreenivasan mistook the Left’s failure to uplift the working class for the failure of class analysis itself, all while missing the caste forest for the class trees. Kerala’s Left now champions EWS quotas (affirmative action, but make it upper-caste) and the discourse of merit has never been louder. Inequality is increasingly explained as outcome rather than process. The social conditions that produce “merit” are bracketed off, treated as irrelevant or impolite to name.
By telling middle-class stories and presenting them as universal, Sreenivasan sidelined lower-caste experience. By refusing to name caste explicitly, he performed a kind of erasure.
How would a Sreenivasan fan counter this? Likely with a thought-terminating cliché: “He was just an entertainer,” or “You’re overthinking it.” To them, I propose a simple exercise: decentering. Step outside the egocentric pull of nostalgia and view the work from the perspective of those who were never its heroes. Use what psychologist Igor Grossmann calls the Solomon Effect. Adopt a third-person perspective.
The shortcuts Sreenivasan installed, the heuristics that feel like wisdom, continue to shape how Malayalis think about class, gender, work, and dignity. When the Gulf returnee in Varavelpu complains that unions ruin business, audiences agree without much question. “Unions are the problem”. But look closer and the complaint is basic: unions ask for minimum wages. In this view, the entrepreneur’s freedom seems to include the freedom to underpay workers.
Talk to entrepreneurs or Gulf returnees today and you’ll hear the same ideas repeated almost word for word. That’s how powerful Sreenivasan’s world has been. It’s like method acting in reverse–films shaping people’s emotions and real-life attitudes, instead of the other way around.
Sreenivasan’s films pushed these one-sided views and wrapped them in the language of common sense. His skill as a writer made them feel natural, reasonable, and true.
His sons now form a moral axis in Malayalam cinema, their capital built on their father’s social and intellectual inheritance. Their vocal support for Dileep during the actor assault case speaks to a continued alignment with entrenched power. They position themselves as purveyors of “Malayali values” while treating intellectuals and “new gen” voices as fodder for satire. The irony is rich and entirely of their father’s world.
To critique Sreenivasan is not to deny his talent. His dialogue oozed a genius for the vernacular. He gave us a language to talk about ourselves, but he also carefully curated the “ourselves” we were allowed to see.
Sreenivasan was, in more ways than one, the philosopher of the complacent, the voice of those who benefit from the current arrangement and see no reason to examine it too closely. His characters had self and ego, but no Dasein, no authentic engagement with being in the world.
To honour Sreenivasan’s memory, we should look for what has been left out of frame. Ask whose stories get told and whose get erased.
That would be genuinely Socratic. It might even be wise.
(Ebin Gheevarghese is a freelance journalist currently based in Mumbai)