It is an elusive film: at once earnest and fantastic, carefree and mindful, imaginatively kindred to a folktale and materially grounded in cinema. The scholar V. K. Cherian characterized it as an exercise in magical realism. Others have described it as a children’s movie for adults.
That ambiguity is typical of his oeuvre. In nearly a dozen features, made in a blaze of creativity between 1974 and 1991, Aravindan persistently blurred the line between reality and myth. Saints, oracles, and visionaries find their way into his stories, which are mostly set in Kerala, whose natural beauty he reverently lingered on. Forests, rivers, and hills take center stage, as if they were characters, while modernity is pushed to the margins, or ignored altogether. Enactments of shastriya kalas and lok kalas, or classical and folk arts, interrupt the narratives, layering them with allusions. Throughout, the gaze is both intense and tranquil, on the cusp of revelation, as in the films of Andrei Tarkovsky, an avowed influence. “I can never expect to be an atheist,” Aravindan once said. “Concretely, I believe in supernatural powers, in the mystical—these phenomena are very real.”
Kummatty may be his most emblematic project. By entering the world of children, and borrowing their license of serious make-believe, he was able to express more directly than elsewhere the spirituality that underlay his vision.
Govindan Aravindan was born in 1935 in Kottayam, a town at the heart of Kerala’s cultural life, where many publishing houses and newspapers are based. He hailed from a family of Nairs, a customarily matrilineal, generally landed community, at the higher end of the caste hierarchy. His father, M. N. Govindan Nair, a barrister, contributed satirical pieces to periodicals; writers frequented their tharavad, or ancestral bungalow. Aravindan was artistically inclined from his schooldays: he drew and painted, learned Carnatic music, sang at social occasions.
In 1954, after graduating from college with a degree in botany, he was hired by the national rubber firm as a field officer, a job that left him with time for creative pursuits. He first tried his hand at cartoons. Cheriya manushyarum valiya lokavum, or Small Men and the Big World, debuted in the venerable weekly Mathrubhumi in 1961. In spare, tender lines, the strip follows the misadventures of Guruji, an idealistic retiree, and Ramu, a college graduate with bourgeois aspirations.
Comic interludes about the middle class, sketched with similar irony, often break into Aravindan’s movies, which otherwise steer clear of social critique. In the latter part of Kummatty, a snow-white puppy (more on this poor creature later) strays away from Chindan’s modest village, where the bare huts are thatched, into a grand tharavad, home to a bourgeois family who wear stiff Western clothes and speak stiffer English. They take in the mutt, make their servant give him a bath, and then summon a vet, who warns them about adopting a “country” animal. “Don’t worry, baby,” the steely patriarch tells his heartbroken daughter. “I will get you a nice Pomeranian pup. Throw this away.”
Cheriya, which ran for thirteen years, was Aravindan’s ticket into Malayali artistic circles. In the late 1960s, he seems to have been everywhere, at one moment singing with the Sopanam music club, at another designing sets for the Navarangam theater company. He was particularly drawn to the shastriya and lok kalas, which younger artists were then revitalizing with the resources of modernism. No one did more for their revival than Kavalam Narayana Panicker, an exponent of Thanathu, or Indigenous, drama, whose early plays Aravindan directed. The playwright repaid the favor, writing several movie scripts, including for Kummatty.
Panicker’s stamp is all over the film, which pays an elaborate homage to Kummattikkali, a traditional dance of Malabar, performed during the Onam festival by men in animal masks and skirts of plaited grass who go from door to door to demand their fair share of the harvest on behalf of Lord Shiva. Panicker gave Kummatty these masks, which he carries in a bag, as well as the swaying choreography, which he exuberantly performs, along with the children, in multiple song-and-dance passages. Their sweet ditty, which Panicker composed, reminds us of the Kummattikkalis’ divine origins:
Kummatty has come to visit the world
Will he come flying? On a palanquin? On foot or seated?
Such is the procession of Kummatty of our fairy tales
The reference is made explicit when professional Kummattikkalis fleetingly pass through the story. They are first seen from up close, donning their costumes, then from a distance, hopping and leaping across the grassland, trailed by delighted children.
Aravindan was thrust into filmmaking by happenstance when the novelist Thikkodiyan approached him with a script. Uttarayanam (1974), which the director said “was shot essentially on instinct,” is a family saga that allegorizes the collapse of nationalist values. The black-and-white mood piece, which now appears dated, borrows much from the neorealism of Satyajit Ray: extended living-room discussions, troubled glimpses of street life, nondiegetic use of Hindustani music, a middle-class antihero. K. Ravindranathan Nair, a cashew exporter and patron of the arts, was so impressed that he funded Aravindan’s next five projects, no strings attached. The filmmaker put this creative freedom to good use in a series of quietly daring experiments, through which his style emerged.
Key elements of Kummatty appear in the two features that preceded it. Kanchana Sita (1977), which retells a late chapter of The Ramayana, can be described as a cinematic pilgrimage. The mythic heroes, Rama and Lakshmana, attend to various ritual errands, in the course of which they walk, for the better part of ninety minutes, across long stretches of the Godavari River Delta. Aravindan keeps their dialogue to a minimum and avoids narrative incident, finding drama in the warmly colored landscape itself.
Kummatty adapts this technique to Malabar. The tone is set in the first scene, which begins with the sun rising behind mountains on the horizon, its crimson glow flooding the dark valley below. Then the camera pans across the hills blanketed in mist. As crickets chirp, birds screech, and a rooster crows itself awake, Panicker is heard singing, in a deep voice, about the origins of the universe: “In the beginning / From the east and from beyond the hills / Deep red like a ripe betel nut . . .” By the time Chindan is seen, brushing his teeth with neem twigs, his surroundings have acquired an inner radiance.
From this point on, the movie largely unfolds outdoors: in the woods, where the children play hide-and-seek; beneath an aged tree where Kummatty sleeps; and, most of all, on an enormous steppe, which characters cross and recross under unrelenting sunlight, crisply framed against the sky. The flat, empty terrain allows Aravindan to adopt a number of perspectives, from the grass-level inspection to the wide-angle vista. When Kummatty leaves the village, he walks away from the camera, which is placed low to the ground, his figure disappearing down a slope as if he is returning to nature.
