My article on Dariush Mehrjui, Iranian director who passed away two weeks ago in High on Films.
Category: Poetry
Neela Velicham: A New Retelling Haunted by the Old
Tholkkunna Yudhathile Padayalikal
*Tholkkunna Yudhathile Padayalikal.* Dir. M. R. Rajan, 2019. English subtitles.
M. R. Rajan’s new documentary film *Tholkkunna Yudhathile Padayalikal* (*Warriors of Losing Battle*) is an intimate and contemplative glimpse into the life and the persistent and pioneering ecological and socio-cultural activism of the Indian poet Sugathakumari. Rajan who has previously directed masterful documentaries about the Koodiyaattam exponent Ammannur Madhava Chakyar (*Pakarnnaattam*), the Kathakali performers Kizhppaadam Kumaran Nair (*Nottam*) and Kottakkal Sivaraman (*Minukku*), and film director Kumar Shahani (*When the Bird Became a Wave*), among others, has found the perfect subject for his reflective and meditative filmmaking in Sugatha teacher, as the poet was affectionately known in her home state of Kerala. Poetry whose natural home is the human voice and the ear might appear to be a challenge to translate properly to a visual medium like cinema. However, poetry belongs to the domain of images, and, in this sense, partakes in the language of cinema. *Warriors of Losing Battle,* produced by Kendra Sahitya Akademi, is an exquisite visualization of a poet’s soulful and shattering awakening to intervene on behalf of mother earth, poetry as a happening, an act and mode of resistance, an interruption and warning to the forces of greed and environmental destruction. Sugatha teacher likens her ecological awakening to that of a religious conversion.
The title of the film – *Warriors of Losing Battle* – is not an admission of defeat. Rather, for Sugatha teacher and her fellow activists, each battle fought to protect the environment, regardless of the outcome, was a brilliant opportunity to dream of a better world, to turn human imagination into a vision with weight, mass, density and dimensions, to reverse the course of destruction and turn it towards the direction of nurture and growth. Ultimately, the warriors of losing battle are the only ones left who will speak for the mountains, the river, and the trees. Rajan’s film celebrates these warriors who will not give up the fight though they know they might never win. You want to be in their company.
The film opens with an establishing shot, almost three whole minutes long, of flowers, buzzing butterflies and the faraway hills of the Silent Valley National Forest in north Kerala, the site of the first people-led environmental movement in the state in the mid 1970s. Sugatha teacher’s poem “Ini ee manassil kavithayilla” (“No more poetry in my mind”) read by teacher herself in a voice-over holds this static shot in place for the duration of the poem’s reading. It is a close-up almost at our eye level. We are almost inside the frame, in Silent Valley, smelling the misty air, the deep pink flowers brushing our face, the butterflies flying around our eyes, while we gaze at the apparition of peaks in the distance. The perfectly balanced foreground and background of this sustained static shot transport us and lock us into place immediately. We are in the land for which Sugatha teacher donned the warrior’s armor in the 1970s. The relationship between the image and the poem is both ominous and momentous: something greater than the homely joys and sorrows of teacher’s poetry up to that point will have to go. Something far, far greater and more life-defining is about to impact the poet.
The majority of this one-hour film utilizes the static camera with intimate close-ups that require us to maintain eye-contact with the images on the screen. We cannot afford to look away as we are invited to reflect deeply on what the film shows us: the gentle, overwhelming, and precarious beauty of an endangered ecosystem carelessly plundered, and bought and sold for human profit. When the camera moves, as in the shot of the watch tower at the heart of the Silent Valley, it is with an almost human leap and lurch to climb over it and drown it inside the verdant immensity of the great forest surrounding it. This is film-making of a very high degree of certitude, finish and finesse; philosophically firm, conceptually refined, and imagistically eloquent.
When we see Sugatha teacher for the first time, she is seated, this time facing the camera and us, inches away from our face, in a mid-close-up directly speaking to us. We see teacher’s face, her rather tired eyes, and her infinitely expressive hands as she recounts for us her earliest memories. Except for a quick cut to a photograph of her parents, Sri Bodheswaran and Smt. Karthyayini Amma, this is an almost four-minute-long static shot. Teacher’s anecdotes are engrossing. Anecdote one: teacher as a little girl with her mother braiding and decorating her hair with flowers. Anecdote two: two little girls, teacher and her equally illustrious elder sister Professor Hrdayakumari, building play houses for ladybugs with the cotton falling and floating from the trees in the yard. Teacher observes melancholically that she tried to save the creatures as they were sometimes swept away in a sudden downpour, but while you save four or five, five hundred die, she notes. I became the warrior of losing battles right then and there, teacher says. A little girl with flowers in her hair trying to save ladybugs from being swept away in the rain might as well be an enduring symbol for the ecological warrior in our times.
The film is structured as above with teacher speaking to the camera, primarily about
four of the many major events and causes that connect the arc of her advocacy and activist interventions: the Silent Valley environmental movement, the establishment of Abhaya homes for those suffering from mental health issues, Adivasi issues at Attappaadi, and homes for destitute girl children. There are clean cuts without any frenetic transitions. Several notable public intellectuals both in and out of the Shastra Sahithya Parishad, teachers, writers, poets, and artists appear in teacher’s memories of the early days of the *Save Silent Valley* movement in the 1970s when the forest faced imminent destruction for the building of a hydroelectric dam: N. V. Krishna Warrier, Ayyappa Panikker, O. N. V. Kurup, Vishnu Narayanan Namboothiri, Kadammanitta Ramakrishnan, R. V. G. Menon, Vaikom Mohammad Basheer, Sukumar Azhikode, S. K. Pottekaatt, O. V. Vijayan, John C. Jacob, Sharmaji, K. V. Surendranath et al. Several of teacher’s poems recited by teacher herself serve as transitions between different anecdotes. The film is precious just for the visualization of these poems. The poems rise over incomparable images of the forest, the trees, the river, the animals, the birds, and the insects with an ekphrastic clarity.
Sugatha teacher passed away in December 2020, and we come close to an awareness of her true significance in Kerala’s environmental precarity in the sequence with Maruthi and other Adivasi women and children in an Adivasi village. Teacher speaks with her characteristic indignation, dejection and resolve about the deforestation in the Attappaadi hills and her cautious determination to reverse the balding and browning of the hills by planting thousands of trees on just one hill, “to show the government that it can be done.” However, it is in Maruthi’s quiet and homely concern for teacher and her well-being that we come to understand how deeply human love and compassion guided teacher’s instincts to fight for what is right. While the Adivasi community sees and listens to teacher in camera over a laptop provided by the film crew, and we follow their comments about teacher’s timely intervention to stop the destruction of their habitat, and their genuine love for teacher, we feel a retroactive anxiety at the spectre of that lost battle. We feel the same anxiety in the scenes of teacher with the mentally ill and at the home for destitute girl children. We do not want this to be the losing battle. None of them deserve to die or to perish in abuse, poverty and destitution. Thus, the overall framework of the title becomes a cautionary tale.
Scripted by Anitha Thampi, *Warriors of Losing Battle* is photographed by K. G. Jayan and edited by Jais Thampi. The ecological theme controls the narrative of the film, and the framework of warriors who fight a losing battle brings a masterful coherence to teacher’s life and work as interpreted by the film. Kerala has witnessed some of the worst ecological disasters in the last few years validating every single concern expressed by Sugatha teacher in the film. Above all, *Warriors of Losing Battle* emphatically shows that the same faculty of imagination that spurs the poet stirs up the quest for truth and justice.
Seeing is Believing: The Invisible through Aravindan’s Eyes
[March 7, 2016]
Perhaps no other artistic medium is as apt and made to measure the invisible as cinema. The very premise of the movie camera is that if there exists something that can be seen, the movie camera has the power and capacity to show it to you. Conversely, if it cannot be represented by the camera, it might not be an object of perception. The most enduring quality of Aravindan’s films is their search to depict on screen in three dimensional images, shapes, and colors that our five senses would be able to comprehend, things that are invisible
; in particular, entities that are the products of imagination and faith.
It is commonplace to assert that a story is an act of imagination, which it is, to be sure, but Aravindan’s stories work on more than just the narrative level. There are symbolic and allegorical levels that run alongside the narratives that reach out to a matrix completely outside the world we experience through the senses or our brain. Aravindan’s stories and films show us the simultaneous existence of both the visible world of phenomena, as well as the invisible world of noumena–or what is thought, products of our mind, in particular, myth and faith. Indeed his films may be read as subtle and sophisticated explorations of the capacity of myth and faith to create an ethical community, not merely the community within the space of the film, but also the community of the viewers..
Aravindan’s films trace the arc of the invisible as it lands and rests on a varied group of people bringing them together as a community. In his films, contact with the invisible changes the people for the better, even if in the most imperceptible manner. Two feature films, Kummatty (1979), and Esthappan (1980), in particular, and the biopic documentary about the philosopher and teacher Jiddu Krishnamurthy The Seer Who Walks Alone (1985) show us through Aravindan’s eyes our world imbued with “things” of sacred value and weight that possess transformative power to forge a new ethical community. We see fields, roads, the sea, rocks, boats, hands, trees, birds, animals, and the sky as
we have never seen them before. With great love, Aravindan shows us these “things” as they are in their original, uncorrupted and sacred state. In Aravindan’s eyes, these aspects of nature or the human mind become sacred images. Our encounter with such sacred images cannot be anything but ethical. The following is a brief appreciation of such an ethical encounter of one viewer and one film, Kummatty.
Kummatty, the earliest of these films, tells the story of a folk figure, the Kummatty, a relic of grandmother’s tales, a larger-than-life figure, a wandering folk minstrel who is also a boogeyman in popular imagination with an anecdotal propensity, it is suggested, to abduct children. Kummatty will take away unruly children from their parents. Thus Kummatty’s charms and powers are both positive and negative. He is a source of wonder and fear because his powers are unlike yours or mine. In other words, Kummatty is a liminal figure that embodies a pathway that connects the material world with the non-material world. He exists simultaneously in the visible and invisible worlds.
In the film, Aravindan is careful to expose us to the forged and fabricated aspects of Kummatty’s personality such as his fake beard, and his human necessities such as needing a shave. Kummatty falls sick as well and needs to be cured. The human limits of Kummatty are well established. When we first see him on the screen, he materializes literally out of nowhere—he simply shows up in the scene from a distance, his song preceding his form. Indeed much of what we know of Kummatty resides in products of imagination such as folk songs that the children of the village sing. Kummatty himself sings songs of the Brahman, as formless as the deep, dark and vast sky, formless as the rain, thunder or lightning as represented in the movie’s unforgettable song “Karukara Karmukil” written and sung with great devotional clarity by Kavalam Narayana Panicker.
Kummatty upsets the placid pace of the village life when he befriends the children of the village. Children are as much liminal figures, as he is, as they contain both the past of a community and its future. In a grand processional scene, the children celebrate the myth of Kummatty by recounting his story from the folk tradition in song form (“Manathe macholam talayeduthu”) as they follow him all across the mountain. The children are transformed by this contact. We see this in Chindan’s new solicitousness to the old grandmother.
That Kummatty represents something regressive from the progressive perspective is indicated in the earlier scene where Chindan’s mother, in particular, calls Kummatty a “mad man” and discourages Chindan from spending time with Kummatty. To be sure, there is a critique of modernity and progress, as we normatively understand it—“Forward! Forward!” is the chant of progress – in the film, in the episode where Kummatty turns the children into animals whose masks they were playing with. Human children turn into a peacock, an elephant, a monkey, a dog etc. The critique of modernity continues when Chindan—the boy turned dog—is abandoned by the wealthy family that initially takes him in only to cast him out as a “country” breed. Animal masks in folk traditions echo the totemic functions of their counterparts in the mythical world; animals are spirits. The children see them as toys. Thus in turning the children into the animal they were playfully mimicking, there is an implicit transformation of a toy into a totem, an encounter with the “uncanny,” an inanimate object turning into a living entity. This uncanniness is the ground of the children’s ethical transformation in Kummatty.
Ritual, community, the uncanny, the unknowable and the invisible come together in the final scenes of the film when the narrow domestic tragedy of a family that has its son turned into a dog opens into a communal ritual to reverse the metamorphoses. Oracles and priests attempt to reverse the transformation but to no avail. Kummatty alone can reverse the metamorphoses because Kummatty is not a part of stagnant village rituals, which are as meaningless as modernity itself. Kummatty’s power is of another invisible order, the order of the formless and the unknowable, the order of the sky, the rain, the lightning and the thunder. It is the order of openness. It is the order of freedom. It is instructive that in the one year that the Kummatty has been gone and Chindan lives his animal existence as a dog, the grandmother who was the repository of the old stories, including that of Kummatty, has died. This loss of communal memory, however, is offset by Chindan’s metamorphoses into a dog, and a family’s and community’s suffering over this transformation. The family and the community have to mourn. They have to believe in loss. They have to believe in the magic and the power of the Kummatty. They have to believe in the power of the invisible.
Chindan (and us, the community) learn the lessons of the metamorphoses in the final euphoric climax of the film where Chindan, now reverted back to being a boy, sets free the caged parrot and watches it fly away into the sky. For nearly four minutes we see nothing but birds flying in the sky, nothing but the rapid crisscross of birds traversing the sky in pure freedom, from one side of the screen to the other, as the children’s chorus sings the song of the Brahman, “Karukara Karmukil.”
The flight of the birds is much more than a simple metaphor of freedom. What is the flight of a bird? The flight of a bird is the pathless order of freedom. The overall plot of Kummatty is overdetermined to bring us to this vantage point where we dedicate our full attention to the random flight of birds, almost in real time, since not many of us would have watched birds in flight in nature as part of our daily routine. Yet, birds have flown in the sky without any particular pathways since the beginning of time. That is all they do. This simple and serious truth is the ethical promise of this cinema to its viewers. It is a direct representation of what Aravindan saw with his eyes.
Winter Solstice Blessings
I am awake enough now to write for the first time in the last one week. I had my achilles tendon reconstruction surgery done on my left ankle on Monday, December 16th. Posted final grades, took out the recycling and went to the surgery. I briefly remember waking up sometime in the hospital after the surgery, then the car ride home, then sobbing continuously as Krish propped me up on my non-weight bearing operated foot with crutches as he helped me up the long, wintry walkway and steps to our front door– it was a long walk; I didn’t think I would make it — slumping into bed, then searing pain, seething pain, screaming pain as the general anesthesia and nerve block from the surgery wore off, then periods of wakefulness and sleep, wakefulness and sleep, and wakefulness and sleep. Many many Percocets later, I am awake now with my pain manageable enough, so that I don’t have to dose myself into narcotic and narcoleptic oblivion for another four hours. I didn’t take even one opioid this morning. 
I had the following procedures done: they opened up my left ankle, cut out the extra bone growing out of my calcaneus and into my achilles tendon (Haglund’s deformity and resection), cut and repaired the achilles tendon where the extra bone had broken it, and rebuilt my achilles tendon by doing a tendon transfer from my big toe and giving new insertional points. I had the same surgery and the same recovery in 2017 for my right foot. I am in a splint for 3 weeks, in a cast for 12 weeks, in a boot for four weeks. I am in the splint stage now. I am non weight-bearing with full and partial immobilization of my left foot for the next foreseeable future. With physical therapy I will be able to walk and drive by the end of May 2020. I am on medical leave from the university for the spring 2020 semester. As my friend Sharon astutely observed: another saga of the Achilles without the glory of the Iliad! Indeed.
It is a strange Christmas. Dayani is home which is wonderful. I put up the tree for her before I was immobilized. But I am not able to bake the cookies for her and with her, which is something I have always loved doing over christmas: peanut butter cookies with chocolate and peanut butter candy, peanut butter cookies with hershey’s kisses, sugar cookies, oatmeal raisin cookies. Next year.
2019 was a good work year, except for the daily pain reminder. Four good classes; thank you, students. Some of the student evaluations were very sweet. Two presses gave me a contract for my manuscript on indigenous films: I accepted Rowman and Littlefield/Lexington Books. My SdB review essay is coming out shortly in SdB Studies; my review essay on Vera Hildebrand’s Rani of Jhansi regiment is also coming out soon. I will miss campus, my friends, colleagues and students in the spring semester. I have never not taught, so this feels strange to be marooned on this invalid bed like this for 20 weeks.
But here is my winter solstice blessings for you. May the great mother goddess Sun protect you through the dark pathways of your life.
“With faithful progress,
The Great Sun has traveled,
From north to south again,
And on this day pauses.
So we also stand still,
With the whole Earth,
In quiet thankfulness,
To the Source of Blessing,
The Giver of All Light.” [https://www.uua.org/worship/words/ceremony/292649.shtml]
“Norway of the Year”
(I wrote this in 2010 November for the local paper. It feels the same to me now, raking the planet. I miss you, Sally.)
“Norway of the Year”
I was walking down the hill to the university from my home yesterday morning, a beautiful fall morning. We had a week of no rains so everything was brown, cold and dry. Halfway down the hill, a huge pile of dry brown leaves blew past me left to right in a swift wave motion, away into the woods, imitating the sound of hundreds of tiny feet pattering on the asphalt. The sounds of fall are crackly, crispy and brittle. In a month’s time, these curving hilly roads will become rather treacherous to navigate. Mama, did you put snow tires on your car, my daughter reminds me everyday.
But yesterday, everything was bone-dry, brown and black, full of lines angles and planes. Walking down the hill, I could suddenly see all the neighboring houses, their back porches, the tarped patio furniture, the covered swimming pools, the knick-knack heaps–bouncy balls, plastic chairs, toy guns, pool supplies, push-mowers, chopped wood– piled against the back walls that you don’t normally see when the trees are lush and thick with leaves. In this part of Pennsylvania, trees cover everything over summer. Whichever way you turn, trees block your view far and near. With the trees all bone-bare in November with barely a dry leaf hanging on for dear life, a sudden clarity has manifested itself everywhere. You can see clearly near and far; you can see the squirrels scampering in the leaves in the neighbor’s yard; in the distance, you can see the thin, ribbon-like winding roads leading off into houses high up on what my daughter calls “the broccoli mountains.” As the poet observed, fall returns us to a plain and simple sense of things. Each fall we look at these houses that disappear in the summer and become visible again in fall with wonder: “My God, how on earth do they get up there? Who maintains the roads?” We ask in amazement.
In a letter to a friend, the poet Emily Dickinson called the month of November “the Norway of the year”: “The noons are more laconic,” Dickinson wrote, “and the sundowns sterner and Gibraltar lights make the village foreign. November always seemed to me the Norway of the year.”
Indeed, isn’t that what change of seasons do? Make what is familiar, foreign? Transport us from one mode of being to another? Make mercurial and unpredictable your own backyard? From my kitchen window, my daughter’s trampoline blends in with the bony trunks of the November trees in the backyard. It is now a collection cup for falling leaves; nearly a quarter of the trampoline is filled with dead dried leaves. Dayani and her friends go on the trampoline to jump on the leaves! Careful, I tell them; watch out for bugs in the leaves. Shake yourself and check for ticks before you come in! From the kitchen window to where our backyard slopes and dips, the ground is now an undulating sea of leaves into which our littlest dog sinks each time she goes out.
Each fall, we find ourselves filled with a new sense of solicitousness for all that we don’t know, and cannot predict, or prepare for in the coming winter months. This much we know: soon as we rake the leaves and clean the gutters, the ground would be covered by snow for the next five or six months. There is oil and heat to think about, blankets and comforters to be aired, shovels and driveway salt to be set aside. Throbbing with impatience in the near offing is the first snow day of the year when the bony clarity of fall will give way to the brooding dark heaviness of wet winter dawns.
Then there are those mornings when the car refuses to start, the pilot light in the boiler gives out, the heater in your daughter’s room quits working, and the dog runs away into the snowy woods. Sally, our smallest dog will refuse to go out; she will stand at the kitchen door looking at the mountain of snow; in her mind she will think– this is not my house, am I in Norway? Did I really see a truck drive by with a cargo of snow? Are they taking the snow somewhere? I will put three sweaters on and pull a blanket around, just in case, when I walk downstairs to the basement to do laundry. I will let the water run for 15 seconds before letting my fingers touch it. I will hesitate to touch metal surfaces–quick pass and then grab the handle– trying to outwit the static charge. I once read that “Victor,” the feral child they discovered in the woods of Aveyron in France, did not have any sensitivity to cold. Dr. Itard, who worked with “Victor,” and the other scientists, noticed that Victor would go out and play in the snow naked like an animal. Victor was not cold at all; nor did he catch hypothermia. Dr. Itard concluded that our sensitivity to cold is a learned response. I have learned the lesson really well; I am always cold.
It must be so with any extremity of season, which pits the frailty, and vulnerability of all things man-made, against the obdurate persistence of nature. Winter returns us to our most unadorned human selves. When you peel away all the colors and shows of life, as fall does, as winter does, what we are left with is the easy slide towards death. Emily Dickinson knew this too. What is a stone? Is it alive or dead?
“This is the hour of lead
Remembered if outlived
As freezing persons recollect the snow–
First chill, then stupor, then the letting go.”
It must be our awareness of how easy it is to die that makes us want to celebrate winter with festivals of sacred births. If there were no Christmas, no Hanukkah, no winter solstice, no winter celebrations, we would invent one. We would invent some excuse to contact friends and family that we have not seen in a while. It is our awareness of mortality that makes us take note of the occasional squirrel foraging for a pinecone, the rare bird in the ruined trees, the surviving deer traipsing across a snowy field. We stop to see if a stalled car needs help. We check to see if a neighbor needs a ride. It is Norway that teaches us the value of life.
Borges, “The Unending Rose”
I love this poem. I have always feared becoming blind.
The Unending Rose
To Susana Bombal
Five hundred years in the wake of the Hegira,
Persia looked down from its minarets
on the invasion of the desert lances,
and Attar of Nishapur gazed on a rose,
addressing it in words which had no sound,
as one who thinks rather than one who prays:
‘Your fragile globe is in my hand; and time
is bending both of us, both unaware,
this afternoon, in a forgotten garden.
Your brittle shape is humid in the air.
The steady, tidal fullness of your fragrance
rises up to my old, declining face.
But I know you far longer than that child
who glimpsed you in the layers of a dream
or here, in this garden, once upon a morning.
The whiteness of the sun may well be yours
or the moon’s gold, or else the crimson stain
on the hard sword-edge in the victory.
I am blind and I know nothing, but I see
there are more ways to go; and everything
is an infinity of things. You, you are music,
rivers, firmaments, palaces and angels,
O endless rose, intimate, without limit,
which the Lord will finally show to my dead eyes.”
(Translated from the Spanish La Rosa Profunda by Alastair Reid, 1971)
Translations from Kamala Das
I have been reading an edited anthology of Kamala Das’s writings called Pranayakaalathinde Album (Season of Love: An Album) edited and with an introduction by Arshad Bathery (Calicut: Olive Publications, 2005).
These are short haiku like entries — not syllabically speaking — taken from Kamala’s stories, poems and non-fiction writings pertaining to love. An interesting idea, to be sure. Here are a few that I translated. Rough translations. They need a lot of work, but you can get a sense of the tradition in which she writes. Many of these with their insistence on the materiality of the body for memory ( and thus for writing) validate the comparison between Kamala and the great French writer Marguerite Duras. All of these are prose excerpts in the original Malayalam. But you almost feel like putting in line breaks. Enjambment seems natural in some others.
1.
Your eyes are wild streams.
They flow over me
leaving me cool and refreshed.
2.
Love carries an unknowable weight.
Lust
light like milkweed
blown by the wind.
3.
In the mysterious morning light
fused together
like an egg with its white and yellow dissolved
my fingers move towards your body
without hesitation and with right
to recognize
that we are destined to be mates
through innumerable past lives.
4.
For whose embrace is this body waiting
For whose kisses are these lips opening
This poor body these poor lips
that will soon turn into a corpse.
5.
Spring filled me.
Eternal, imperishable love.
When you entered me
this body became your home
this soul your bed chamber.
6.
God was a lover who could not get up to embrace me.
7.
At other moments
it became clear to me
that this body is a barrier to loving.
What will my lover love if there was no body?
What will he caress?
The unseen soul? The inaudible breaths?
The mournful dirge of the sea that lies underneath
the foam and froth of smiling?
8.
My love was his wine.
I saw with great tenderness
how he droned and flitted restlessly
from one tree branch to another
like a drunken blue beetle.
9.
What links the heart with love?
Love is thought, a brain thinking.
Do hearts think?
10.
You are the poem to end all poems.
A poem complete like a tombstone.
The Red Earth 