Legacy of Adoor’s debut film Swayamvaram lives on 50 years since its release

Swayamvaram was an important film, made at a time when audiences in Kerala were not used to independent cinema. Adoor became a pioneer in many ways, saying here is another way of making films.
Still from Swayamvaram
Still from Swayamvaram
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A bus journey lasts several minutes, during which a couple seated next to each other exchange many shy smiles. In the unhurried introduction of the two main characters in this 50-year-old film, you spot the familiar touch of Adoor Gopalakrishnan, one of the most beloved filmmakers of Malayalam cinema. This was his debut, Swayamvaram, made a decade after he attended the Film and television Institute of India in Pune. It was funded by Chitralekha, a film society and organisation that he founded with friends. Saradha and Madhu, two leading stars of the time, became the leading couple in Adoor’s script, co-written with KP Kumaran, another great Malayalam filmmaker. The film was released on November 25, 1972, at the Sri Padmanabha theatre in Thiruvananthapuram.

Film groups and enthusiasts across the state are honouring Adoor for completing 50 years in cinema. “Quite coincidental that I am alive for the 50th anniversary, I had nothing to do with it,” Adoor said with wry humour, at a recent screening of a documentary on Swayamvaram. Madhu Eravankara’s documentary The Journey – Swayamvaram At Fifty had Adoor narrating the events that led to the film and the aftermath of it, with bytes from Saradha, Madhu, and others.

Swayamvaram was an important film made at a time when the audience in Kerala were not used to independent cinema. Adoor became a pioneer in many ways — saying here is another way of making films, that it doesn’t all have to be loud and elaborate. 


Adoor Gopalakrishnan

Sharada, as Sita, never narrates her backstory for the viewer. From watching her trail Viswam (Madhu) to a hotel, then a lodge, and later to a wretched house, you are to make out that she chose this life, distancing herself from family. It comes out in shards — from a bad dream Sita wakes up from, the silences she gives, to the questions about her family. The writers didn’t seem to believe in going to parts of her life that have little to do with the future she has chosen. Whether Adoor and Kumaran meant it to be so or not, Sita is the one that pulls you into the story, making you want to know what will happen to her. Viswam, with his kind eyes and warm smile, looks at her with love, asking her if she regrets her choices. He has dreams to fulfil and sometimes seems to forget that there is a woman with him. As days pass, he snaps at her when she asks about his writing dreams.

Madhu and Sharada look and behave a world away from the scores of characters that they had enacted until then. “We were all commercial artists and there would be a little bit of overacting [in those days]. But this (Swayamvaram) was art, it had to be all natural. If at times I overacted a bit, the director would slowly come near me and tell me to ‘lessen’ it a little, it would be nice,” Sharada said, laughing, in the documentary. Madhu, who had trained in the realistic approach to drama at the National School of Drama, was quite comfortable to work with someone who looked at cinema so seriously, he said. 

The couple in the film, who were initially in the excitement of beginning a new life, is pulled into tougher times. Money is short and Viswam loses his job as a lecturer at a tutorial college. He shelves his dreams of becoming a writer and takes up a job at a saw mill. Sita, never uttering a word of complaint, looks merry in the face of adversities, joking with a little boy next door, making do with whatever’s left in the house. But there was hardly any dialogue, no songs at all, and the background music was a theme, beautifully created by MB Sreenivasan.

Through Swayamvaram, Adoor and team introduced many firsts to the audience. You could start a film and not include any dialogue for several minutes, you could not have songs, or you could hear the real sounds of the location unhindered. In the film, you hear a speech, watch protest marches of workers to the Secretariat asking where their jobs were, and even devotees chanting “Hare Rama Hare Krishna'' on the street. All of these, Adoor said, were real occurrences that he simply shot and used as backdrop in the film. He set his fiction comfortably among the real events of Thiruvananthapuram.

The capital city is hardly recognisable in the 50-year-old movie. It had very little traffic on the roads and many buildings that no longer exist. It was exciting to watch Madhu walk hurriedly past the New Theatre, which still bears the same font to display its name.

Adoor had wanted new actors in the lead. But when he approached young women, they were hesitant to be seen in a film, a profession not considered honourable at the time, he said. He got in touch with Sharada through his production manager. “She did not know who was behind the project and named her amount — Rs 25,000 — which was a huge amount for our production. Our budget allocation was Rs 5,000 but we said yes, and got the remaining money from other sources. Recently, at a function when I mentioned this, Sharada was very upset. She said she didn’t know and wouldn’t have done that if she did, and I told her it was fine, how would she know,” Adoor said.

The money for production was not easy to come by. They had applied for a loan which was at first rejected but later came through after they submitted the script. It had taken seven years for the script to be complete. Two years ago, there was a controversy circling the script when Adoor was quoted in an interview to the Mathrubhumi magazine that his co-writer KP Kumaran had only done the job of a scribe. Kumaran, in a later interview to The Hindu, did not respond to Adoor’s comments but added that he was never known for his work in Swayamvaram but only the films that he had gone on to make.

In the documentary too, Kumaran’s absence is conspicuous, when everyone else associated with the film is mentioned and appreciated. But Adoor is a man who doesn’t seem to forget problems of the past. In the documentary, he spoke of the disappointment he felt when Swayamvaram won no recognition at the Kerala state film awards, and attributes it to the influences of outsiders on the jury. The film did win four national awards, which had surprised everyone, including Adoor. 


KP Kumaran

In those days, regional committees from the states would choose the films to be sent for the national awards, and Adoor had learnt that Swayamvaram was not recommended by two members of the state film awards jury. They shot off a letter to the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting, requesting the jury to watch the film. There was no reply to their letter, so it came as an unbelievable piece of news when one evening, Adoor and friends, drinking tea at a restaurant, heard on the radio that Swayamvaram had bagged four awards. He believed it only the next day when the newspapers printed it. The film won the awards for best film, best director, best female actor, and best cinematography (Mankada Ravi Varma). After the awards, Swayamvaram, which had little acceptance from the audience in the early days, went on to run successfully for weeks. The team made a profit large enough to repay the loan they took.

Meera, a Thiruvananthapuram-resident who was a teenager when the film first came out, said that she had liked the film even back then, despite its unfamiliar making. “I was a big fan of Sharada, and anything she played in was dear to me. But I was really saddened by the ending. After all that struggle they went through, I was hoping things would get better for Viswam and Sita,” she said.

She was talking about Viswam’s death, after he catches a flu that gets worse by the day. Sita is sitting by his side when he takes his last breath. Adoor does drown the scene in her uncontrolled sobs but there is no sad music in the background, only the sound of wood cut in a saw mill, played symbolically before everything goes quiet. “My use of sound is always psychological. When you suddenly hear that someone dear to you is dead, then everything stops and there is no sound for you,” he said.

That Adoor dives deep into every little heartbeat of his characters is perhaps what makes them leave lasting impressions on the audience. All you have to do is give them time. 

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