In finance, the greater fool theory describes buying overvalued assets with the expectation that someone else will pay even more. But there's another way to play the greater fool: to perform foolishness so convincingly that everyone underestimates what you're actually doing. Sreenivasan did both. He played fools on screen while building something far more durable than anyone recognised at the time. And Kerala is still living inside the worldview his films helped construct.
This is, admittedly, a corrective. In the days since his death, we've seen celebrations of his comic genius and grudging acknowledgments that his politics were "problematic," followed by a return to quoting his dialogues as if their effects could be separated from their pleasures. But the humour was inseparable from its social function. Understanding that function doesn't diminish the achievement. If anything, it reveals how remarkable the achievement actually was.
You already know the story: short, dark-skinned, physical attributes that conventional cinema treated as disqualifications, transformed into the source of psychological observation rather than broad comedy. Every tribute since his death has noted this. What's been less examined is what this self-deprecation actually accomplished beyond the screen.
By acknowledging one’s own inadequacy before anyone else could, his characters retained control of the narrative. They weren't victims because they were in on the joke. This created a triple identification: audiences laughed at the character, recognised themselves in him, and felt superior to both by virtue of perceiving the comedy.
They also did something else. By making social hierarchies into comedy, these films suggested that the appropriate response to inequality was ironic acceptance rather than anger. They never proposed that it was wrong to be judged by appearance, or that merit should translate into success. They suggested you should be smart enough to see how things really worked, and sophisticated enough to laugh about it.
There's a way to understand Sreenivasan as performing a particular kind of consciousness that we might now, in its degraded form, call woke. Not woke in the sense of being alert to recognition or injustice towards identity politics, but woke in the sense of performing awareness as a substitute for action.
The process works like this: identify a problem, demonstrate superior awareness of it, then do nothing except feel good about the awareness. Sreenivasan's films operated on exactly this logic. They showed corruption in political parties, absurdity in ideological commitment, gaps between stated principles and actual practice. They made you laugh at people who took politics seriously. Then they ended with platitudes about individual virtue or family values.
You watched a Sreenivasan film and came out feeling you'd learned something important about Kerala society. But what you'd learned was that trying to change society through collective action was foolish and naive. The sophisticated person stays above the fray. They see clearly precisely because they refuse to commit.
They're also perfect examples of what might be called the neoliberal consciousness— I know, in a Sreenivasan movie using words like this would make me the smug ideologue stumbling out of a party class spouting theory while everyone else rolls their eyes, but the term fits too well to avoid— in Kerala stepping into the liberalisation era.
The neoliberal consciousness worked by seeing yourself primarily as an individual rather than as a member of a class or community, believing in meritocracy even when evidence contradicts it, treating social problems as personal failures rather than structural issues.
The question isn't whether Sreenivasan consciously produced neoliberal subjects. It's whether his films, whatever his intentions, helped normalise a particular way of seeing that happened to align with the ideological needs of liberalisation-era Kerala.
When he says he has politics but not the kind that salutes flags, he's positioning himself as above organised political commitment. Which is itself a political position, just one that refuses to name itself as such. This studied apoliticism became the default mode of middle-class self-understanding in Kerala during exactly the period his films were most popular.
The impact of this is evident in several ways. Advocate Jayashankar, who began his career as a labour lawyer, recently spoke about how labour courts, after the film Varavelppu, began openly referencing the movie while admonishing labour activism. There are countless such stories, not all documented. Beyond these, there are other consequences that are felt subtly, without being directly attributable to a specific cause.
Consider the gap between how Kerala talks about its problems and what it actually does about them. When Dileep's film Bha Bha Bha released recently, just to quote one example from the movie industry itself, containing an actual joke about kidnapping from a man who spent years fighting conspiracy charges for allegedly masterminding an actress's abduction, the outrage was volcanic. Twitter erupted. Instagram was filled with condemnation.
But the film opened to decent collections. Outside theatres, there were fans dancing to their heroes instead of any organised pickets. This is the architecture of consciousness Sreenivasan films helped build, taken to its logical conclusion. Everyone knows what's wrong. Everyone can articulate it brilliantly on social media. The performance of awareness is impeccable.
And then, nothing happens on the ground. Because performing awareness has come to feel like enough, like what intelligent people do. Don’t you now miss Ajithas of the world, those selfless political activists who sacrificed themselves to a higher ideological cause and hit the streets with organised protest, so that there are consequences to bad actors in society, no matter the consequences they faced themselves?
I'm aware that blaming Sreenivasan for this is probably overstating his influence. There are many explanations for why feminist organising hasn't translated into street protest: the film industry's financing structures, the Left's abandonment of cultural politics, generational divides. But his films did help make a certain posture feel natural, the posture of the person who sees everything, comments on everything, and commits to nothing.
Even making these arguments risk the pompousness his films mocked. That's his power. He made certain kinds of analysis feel ridiculous in advance. Any critic connecting popular culture to grand ideological shifts could be one of his characters, could be mocked like a ridiculously serious politician in Sandesham, with wry dialogues that could make anyone with a functional understanding of Malayalam hurt their stomachs laughing. Which makes one ask: what do we do with a film like Sandesham?
The film Sandesham remains the definitive example of this trope, built around the comedic rivalry between two brothers whose opposing Congress and communist loyalties turn their household into an escalating farce. The script works because it gives each side enough rope to hang themselves. It elevates Thilakan's father character, who embodies a pre-partisan ideal of public service, and makes him an epitome of thoughts which should have been common sensical for any thinking individual.
Both Sathyan Anthikad and Sreenivasan had said they would’ve focused on communalism and corruption if making the film today, since Kerala politics in 1991 was relatively free of those problems. This suggests they saw themselves as engaged critics, not cynics. The question is what the film accomplished regardless of intent.
Consider Thilakan's famous advice: politics is good when practiced by good people, reform yourself before trying to reform the nation. These sound like wisdom. But they're also perfect expressions of a particular class position: people who had benefited from the Left's land reforms and education policies but were now impatient with the constraints organised politics placed on individual accumulation. They wanted social democracy's fruits without participating in the messy affair of maintaining it.
What begins as legitimate observation about how parties turn into self-serving bureaucracies becomes, by the third act, delegitimisation of organised political action itself. The gap between ideal and practice gets presented as proof that ideals are the problem, that anyone claiming principle is either deluded or performing.
The writing is so good that it is hard to not see anything except the Congress brother's venality getting matched by the communist brother's sanctimony. The film takes genuine delight in showing how political ideology functions primarily as a vehicle for personal ambition and family rivalry.
The father's refusal to take sides is getting elevated as maturity and wisdom, and it is seductive. But if you could squint past the disarmingly good humour and the gravitas Thilakan brings to his performance, you could see that the film is claiming objectivity by refusing commitment, treating equidistance to political ideologies as evidence of superior understanding, insulating yourself from consequences. What could be more appealing to an audience weary of politics?
Sreenivasan was aware his films would be subjected to such interpretations. My favourite example is his later admission that placing the final scene of Chintavishtayaya Shyamala, where Sabarimala pilgrims and party workers converge on the same road, was done deliberately without any particular meaning in his mind. An empty provocation to see how audiences would rationalise it. They did. There were theories about ideological alignment between the CommunistS and the rising Sangh Parivar based on that last scene, in which the critics hailed the genius about what the director meant by showing both groups proceeding in the same direction.
This reveals something about his method. He understood that his middle-class audiences wanted to feel they were engaging with something deeper than entertainment in commercial cinema. The Malayali wants to watch his movies like solving a puzzle, decoding cultural texts that may or may not be based on things within the movie. He also understood this desire could be manipulated, that you could gesture toward significance without committing to any particular significance.
The parippu (lentil) vada and black tea association with communist party meetings is a perfect example of how Sreenivasan's fictions became more real than reality. However improbable it may seem now, this association didn't exist before Sandesham. The actual beverage of party work was black coffee, kattan kappi, which appears throughout memoirs of old party workers. Tea was expensive, considered elite.
But Sreenivasan needed visual shorthand for party culture, something that felt austere but not too austere. So he invented the combination. Now the association is so naturalised you can't mention black tea and parippu vada without someone cracking a joke about the party.
This is world-building on a scale most filmmakers never achieve. Film after film through the 1990s would feature similar setups: corrupt union leaders, hypocritical party workers, idealistic young people learning politics is futile. Through repetition, what Sreenivasan regarded as common sense became background assumptions against which other stories were told.
The wedding scene works similarly. Before the 1990s, simple ceremonies were common among families with Left connections and often solemnised by the party rather than the parents. The invitation card for Pinarayi Vijayan, who married in a simple ceremony in town hall in 1979, was written by the party’s Kannur district secretary, Chadayan Govindan. But Sandesham made that austereness seem like a failure of imagination, a sign you couldn't afford or didn't deserve better.
You’d have already heard the story about how he could do this, especially with the CommunistS, because he came from inside. Growing up in Pattiam, a CPI(M) stronghold, meant being embedded in a culture where the party was a total social environment, where jobs and marriage prospects and neighbourhood respect flowed through party channels.
An understated subplot of this story is why he succeeded? Several others have tried before and after Sreenivasan to criticise the Left in Kerala, with varying degrees of success, but none as successful as him; why?
I think it has to do with a certain impulse gratification exercise that he did, and a spin he brought on top of it.
Let me explain. Before him, there were characters who worded dialogues like they just gulped a Malayalam typewriter. No one spoke Malayalam like that, and a more mature audience was taking note of the difference between the scripted and the real Malayalam. Sreenivasan then brought the influence of his native tongue (Kannur, as someone pointed out on social media after his death, is a place where if you ask someone "chaya veno," pat comes the reply "vendi varum," not a simple yes or no).
He combined this with his brilliant observations on the cadence in which the party members, the dominant men, spoke, all of which were so gratifying to an audience. That gratification translated almost automatically into popularity, as it captured the authentic rhythm of everyday political banter in a way that resonated deeply and felt refreshingly true to life.
His films introduced characters with uncannily familiar speech, helping the audience voice half-formed opinions that they didn’t know how to frame. This predates the realism trend in Malayalam cinema. What we today perceive as realism is focussing on settings or class texture of the characters, but his characters spoke a realistic argumentative language. It’s how people talk when they talk about politics in the living room.
Sandesham is full of such moments, including the standout scene showing two brothers trading escalating barbs at the dinner table, accusing each other's parties of opportunism, corruption, repression, and hypocrisy. Anyone who has sat through the tone of real Kerala debates in student forums, party classes, or news discussions would instantly recognise the cadence of this debate immediately. The famous line from it, "Poland ne pati nee oraksharam mindaruth" (Don’t you dare say a word about Poland), echoes because it draws from life, amplified for effect.
What he sneaked in using such brilliant use of dialogue and dialect is his criticism about gaps between the party's stated ideals and everyday practice. There should be some context here. By the time he was writing Sandesham in 1991, examining communist disillusionment was almost a popular fad among India's intellectual and artistic circles, a collective reckoning that had been building for decades. Poland too was rapidly freeing itself from Communism.
If the party were an individual, it was reaching its mid-life crisis in Indian politics back then, with all it thought it would become—a revolutionary force toppling colonial legacies, uplifting the masses through land reforms and workers' rights, and forging a classless society—being thwarted by the harsh grind of governance, internal schisms, and global shifts.
The early euphoria of independence-era victories, such as the 1957 Kerala election that installed the world's first democratically elected communist government, had given way to a sobering reality: cycles of electoral wins and losses marred by allegations of authoritarianism, union militancy that alienated the middle class, and a bureaucratic apparatus that often mirrored the very hierarchies it vowed to dismantle.
From auteurs like Satyajit Ray, whose Pratidwandi (1970) captured the alienation of urban youth amid Naxalite fervor and leftist ideological fractures, to Adoor Gopalakrishnan's Mukhamukham (1984), which dissected the performative rituals and hypocrisies within Kerala's communist cadre, everybody who’d want to be seen serious and had a voice had something to say about communist disillusionment. Countless novels, essays, and films had wrestled with the distance between the ideology’s emancipatory promise and the bureaucratic reality of party machinery. Especially as the 1991 Soviet collapse loomed, Indian leftists were forced to confront their movement's aging ideals in a liberalizing economy that prized pragmatism over dogma.
While commercial cinema mostly sidestepped such thorny introspection, and dealt with entertaining people, Sreenivasan's genius lay in blending high criticism with popular art, embedding his barbs in the vernacular wit of ordinary folks to make this introspection not just accessible but irresistibly entertaining, turning the party's mid-life malaise into a mirror for Kerala's own political soul-searching.
But where other works treated this gap as tragedy or critical examination, Sreenivasan treated it as farce, as evidence that collective politics was inherently absurd. I don’t want to say he acted like a messiah of this consciousness, because that would suggest he had a destination in mind and was leading people somewhere. He was following where many educated elites were already going, or maybe running slightly ahead of his audience, who usually came to the theaters for their heroes to beat the villains and laugh at slapstick comedy, yet found themselves chuckling at barbs that slyly unpacked the pretensions of their own political loyalties, turning the cinema hall into an unwitting classroom for self-reflection. They found a language for what they were beginning to feel.
Someone like him in commercial cinema, from outside the party fold, trying to make the same criticisms would have been dismissed as ignorant or malicious. Sreenivasan had credibility because everyone knew his background. His criticisms came packaged with a kind of affection, exposing problems out of disappointed love rather than hatred.
This is where assessing his legacy gets complicated. Insider criticism is often more legitimate, more earned, more accurate than outsider criticism. The fact that he knew the culture intimately made his observations sharper, not less valid. The question isn't whether his criticisms were accurate, many were, but what those criticisms accomplished when given the particular form he gave them.
To say he wrote memorable lines undersells what he did. He wrote lines that functioned as verbal end-points, intellectual shortcuts once spoken relieves speakers of the burden of thinking further. A well-deployed Sreenivasan dialogue could shut down an argument, make further inquiry seem pedantic, and position the speaker as too sophisticated for simplistic narratives.
When someone invokes the "why we failed" line or casually brings up Poland, they're deploying what might be called a thought-terminating device. It feels like critical thinking, because you're quoting a film that engaged with politics, demonstrating political and cultural literacy. But you're actually foreclosing political thought, substituting a memorable line for analysis.
He intuited early that emerging Malayalam public culture is tired of debating endlessly about things that went over the head of many commoners, felt abstract, repetitive or disconnected with everyday frustrations. What people increasingly valued was the ability to end long ideological discussions in favour of the gritty particulars of daily life. His dialogues catered precisely to this impulse. That's why they crossed political boundaries and survived transitions from theatre to television to memes on Facebook and WhatsApp forwards.
If you want to shut down two people going on endlessly about the Gaza-Israel war, what could be a better cultural shorthand than a meme of Sreenivasan caught with his eyes widened, often captioned with “Poland,” or some other dialogue about global politics and misplaced solidarities. Instead of posting what’s on your mind, take sides and argue about Gaza or Israel, you get a cultural shutdown switch that signals that the entire exchange has slipped into a familiar, pointless loop. All without a single line of fresh thought.
Continuing to argue after it appears feels humourless, as though one has missed the point. The meme’s power lies precisely in its refusal to engage: it makes you appear like a man who stands slightly outside ideological combat, armed with a knowing glance rather than a counter-argument, just like a Sreenivasan cinematic posture.
By now this anecdote is so familiar that repeating it without qualification risks sounding accusatory. In 2003, Atal Bihari Vajpayee cited Varavelppu at Kerala’s Global Investor Meet to suggest that the film showed how the state’s economic stagnation, despite strong social indicators, had something to do with its labour culture. This does not mean Sreenivasan set out to furnish the BJP with an ideological talking point; his later political sympathies, including support for the Aam Aadmi Party and even Twenty20, make that reading untenable.
But what it does show is that the film produced a narrative so portable that it could be lifted out of its context and repurposed across ideological lines. That malleability tells us less about the kind of cultural work the film ended up doing.
It would be dishonest to treat Sreenivasan as a villain in Kerala's intellectual decline. His films didn't create disillusionment with organised politics. That disillusionment had material causes: the Left's bureaucratisation, corruption scandals, Gulf money changing social relations. What his films did was give this disillusionment narrative form.
He had an extraordinary ability to sense what people of his own class—the “middle class,” as he called them—were ready to accept as truth. This was a class that imagined itself as squeezed and embattled, even though, statistically, it occupied a far more privileged position than it admitted. In the 1980s, fewer than one percent of Indians paid income tax, and during the 1990s it was fewer than four percent; by that measure alone, anyone with a stable salaried job, land, or a small business already sat near the top of the pyramid.
What Varavelppu quietly does is instructive here, not so much in what the hero says, but in what he is not shown doing. It leaves out certain questions that, in real economic life, are unavoidable. The hero is not shown grappling with fair wages, long-term job security, productivity-linked pay, or the basic fact that labour costs are not an external nuisance but integral to enterprise. Nor is there any sustained attention to whether the workers’ demands are excessive, justified, or rooted in structural insecurity. In that sense, the film simplifies the moral universe: labour appears mainly as disruption, not as a stakeholder.
But it would be inaccurate to say the film is simply lying or inventing a grievance. Kerala in the late 1980s did have a dense ecology of trade unions, frequent work stoppages, corrupt union leaders, and a political culture where even small enterprises could be caught in disputes far larger than themselves. For many Gulf return migrants, who had seen how other economies work, this experience was devastatingly real. What the film does is selectively take that genuine frustration and strips it of context, history, and counter-claims.
It does not show the flip side: why unions emerged so strongly in Kerala, what protections they secured, or how uneven power still was between owners and workers despite militant rhetoric.
Although Sreenivasan himself often framed his work as an intentional crusade against traditional political forces, I think what he was doing was closer to social calibration. He was acutely responsive to what this class felt burdened by, what it resented, and— this is crucial— what explanations it was ready to embrace. He provided an emotional vocabulary for the grievances that haunted every newspaper-reading Malayali of his time, but in a way that subtly spared them from any painful self-examination. He didn’t have to persuade people of something new, that is precisely why it travelled so well across decades and ideologies.
Sreenivasan's response to Shyam Pushkaran’s criticism that Sandesham was apolitical is instructive in this context. Shyam mentioned his liking of grassroots politics, especially student politics, which Sreenivasan's movies often ridiculed. Sreenivasan in response pointed to Thilakan's dialogue in Sandesham about reforming yourself before reforming the nation, asking how that could be apolitical. But he missed that the question isn't whether the film contains political statements. It's what those statements do. "Reform yourself first" places the burden of social change on individual moral improvement rather than structural transformation. It sounds wise while actually foreclosing collective action.
And yet. His films brought pleasure to millions. They created shared language spanning class and regional divides. They gave Malayalam cinema a distinctive identity it still trades on. The women in his early films, by contrast with the foolish men around them, often exercised more agency than was typical for the era. His detailed observations of male psychology, especially in Vadakkunokkiyanthram, were genuinely pioneering.
To write about Sreenivasan seriously is to hold the success and the consequences together without resolving them. He shaped the conceptual vocabulary through which a generation made sense of itself. This is real power, the kind that operates through culture and common sense. He wielded it for decades, through accumulated choices about what to mock and what to celebrate, what to make visible and what to render invisible.
And all this by making jokes about himself. Which feels like the lowest-hanging fruit, the easiest move for someone who looked like he did. Except it wasn't easy at all. It required perfect dialogue, immaculate drama, and the ability to turn personal limitation into universal language.
The self-deprecation was never just about being short or dark or unsuccessful. It was about creating a whole architecture of consciousness, a way of seeing the world where your own inadequacy became the lens through which everything else could be understood and, more importantly, neutralised.
He made all of these look effortless. That was perhaps his greatest trick. By the time you realised what the joke was doing, whom it was serving, what it was foreclosing, you were already laughing. And by then, it was too late.
Nidheesh MK is a Kerala-based journalist who writes on politics, crime and business.