A poet with camera, and his cinema of humanism

Hindustan Times

02-05-2025

Strap:
Unscripted, he spun stories on the loom of time, evoking a cinematography that touched your soul. Space elasticised. Nuanced narratives nudged your nerves. Cinematographer-director Shaji Neelakantan Karunakaran, better known as Shaji N Karun from Kerala, breathed his last on April 28 aged 73. Still a second-year cinematography student at the Film & Television Institute of India (FTII), Pune, Shaji, as I knew him, had started his filmmaking career at the age of 20, even before he shot his diploma film at the film institute. Once, while teaching at the FTII as a vising faculty, the well-known Malayalam director Ramu Kariat (best known for Chemmeen, which won the national award for best film in 1965), found in his classroom a student who shared his language and land. Kariat asked the young Shaji to shoot an event at Thrissur. Bollywood star, Dilip Kumar, was visiting the cultural capital of Kerala to inaugurate a function. The year was 1972, the silver jubilee of India's Independence. Fortunately, Shaji had Deepavali holidays and could accept the assignment. After the shoot, he went to Chennai to process the black-and-white (b&w) footage at the AVM Lab, where he met G Aravindan, who was there to process his debut film Uttarayanam. This short story led to a much longer one of a wonderful jugalbandi between Aravindan and Shaji that left behind one of the most enduring cinematographic legacies. A cinematography that, in its unique aesthetic, has warped human ethos in its wefts.
This duet worked silently in the noisy filmmaking world. Aravindan didn't even utter the word 'cut' during their entire filmmaking practice. 'He never said 'cut' while I was shooting. We had some internal tuning, a sort of telepathy. He would only touch me on my shoulder from behind and that would be enough,' Shaji told me during a conversation. This silence produced Aravindan's contemplative classic Kanchana Seeta, which had Seeta's character not in flesh and blood but in prakriti (nature) in its sensual organicity, where Seeta is felt in her spirit, not physically seen. Adapting a play by N Sreekanthan Nair, Aravindan transforms its verbal dialogues into eloquent silences, which, Shaji imbues with spiritual depth. Starring the local Rama Chenchu tribals of Andhra Pradesh, without any make-up or ornamentation, Kanchana Seeta, to my mind, remains one of the most austerely adorable cinematographic works our world has produced. When it was shot on location, Shaji had just graduated from the FTII with a gold medal. Along with the play, the film also mixed elements of the poet Valmiki's epic Ramayana. Produced with a budget of only one lakh rupees, Shaji had no high-speed film, nor adequate equipment, but he had his will and vision, which was stubbornly poetic. With no conventional script, Kanchana Seeta took only 17 days to complete shooting.
Shot with aplomb by Shaji, Chidambaram (the only film for which Aravindan wrote a 21-page screenplay) evokes memories of Peter Bruegel the Elder or one of our own miniature paintings. Compare the scenes of cows grazing in meadows in both these films. As a cinematographer, Shaji was widely exposed to the traditions of Indian and European paintings, including those of the Renaissance. This eye is evident in even some of the popular films he shot for other filmmakers such as Padmarajan (Koodevide), KG George (Lekhayude Maranam Oru Flashback), MT Vasudevan Nair (Manju), besides several other Malayalam film directors' works, and also Sukhwant Dhadda's Ek Chadar Maili Si, adapting Rajinder Singh Bedi's classic Urdu novella by the same name.
When the cinematographer Shaji N Karun took the directorial baton in his hands, a Malayalam film Piravi was born. Piravi, in English, meant birth. Shot by the 21-year-old Sunny Joseph, G Aravindan had composed the music for Piravi, along with Mohan Sitara. Piravi's poignant exploration of time and space like a musical rendering presents to us a face of an old man, Chakyar, immortalised by social reformer/playwright/ actor Premji. This face is turned into water, a boat, a mirror, a geography of Kerala's history and of the world's own at the same time, ensconced in space that viscerally envelopes us like the mysterious muslin. Shaji poured his internal illumination into this cinematographic work that won India over 30 prestigious awards, including the 1989 Cannes festival's Camera d'Or. Awards apart, the film imbues cinematography with a contemplative glow transcending all national boundaries. Metaphorically, the old Chakyar's search for his son is still on, anywhere in the world. It is the archetypal search that still haunts us. This archetype melts genders — father becomes mother and mother, father. The element of love turns universal.
Piravi, with the Emergency disappearances as the backdrop, in many ways, became a measuring master stick comparing Shaji's other directorial works, particularly Swaham (1994) and Vanaprastham (1999). Poeticising the emotional texture of sorrow, Swaham, in its womb, carries Piravi's pangs. In Swaham, the son dies in a demonstration protesting against State corruption. However, the search is to find a new form for a familiar Malayalam story, which is announced in a quotation from Kalidasa's Shakuntalam. Like a true artist, Shaji doesn't give up his own muslin for market. Like a weaver, he kept on weaving time on the loom, with space that was left to us to search for a feeling, a sthayi bhava, while meanings keep changing. Shaji owned his quest. He left an emptiness of an absence called death. The streak of light slithers brilliantly through the dark melody of Shaji's oeuvre.
Amrit Gangar is a Mumbai-based author, curator and historian. The views expressed are personal