How Ramu Kariat's Chemmeen Helped Malayalam Cinema Reckon With Caste, Desire, and Class

The Hindu

17-07-2025

Published : Jul 17, 2025 09:11 IST - 7 MINS READ
This year marks the 60th anniversary of the making of Chemmeen (Shrimp), which may be said to have first brought Malayalam cinema to the notice of the rest of the country. The director of the film had a short but crowded and creative life: Ramu Kariat was born in 1928 and died in 1979, a life of only 51 years.
Much water has flowed down Kerala's picturesque network of palm-lined canals since the making of Balan in 1937. The film was greeted with enthusiasm but, for one or more mysterious reasons, the Malayalam film industry refused to take off in the following decade or so. I use the word 'mysterious' because it was a time: the 1930s and the 1940s, when people in other filmmaking centres in the country were crazy about 'the moving image that also talked.
Be that as it may, with due respect to the earliest pioneers of Malayalam cinema, it must be said that the first truly creative spirit on the scene was the maverick Ramu Kariat. Notwithstanding his penchant for combining commerce with art, Kariat set many an original trend, and inspired more than one young filmmaker to aspire for the out-of-the-ordinary. In 1952, Kariat directed Neelakuyil, which brought a touch of maturity and confidence to an industry that fought shy of so-called 'forbidden subjects'.
Narrating the story of an affair between a schoolteacher and a so-called untouchable woman, the film caused many tongues to wag and imaginations to wander.
As anyone conversant with the southern regional cinemas knows only too well, in matters of choice of subject, if not always in matters of treatment, Kariat anticipated a hundred other films, which were to follow in the four major languages of the South. For instance, many of the Young Turks of the Kannada 'New Wave' who made their reputation critiquing caste in varied manifestations, materialised years after someone like Kariat repeatedly entered the world of social taboos and the 'hazards' of intermingling between the so-called lower and upper castes, particularly Brahmins.
Some 13 years after Neelakuyil, Kariat was to make a film that will always be used as a reference point in any serious evaluation of the growth and development of modern Malayalam cinema, which was till the other day the most important regional cinema in the country in terms of both artistry and social exploration.
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The film in question is Chemmeen, adapted with great visual energy from the legendary Thakazhi's moving odyssey of forbidden love. Marcus Bartley's camera contributed in no small measure to bringing home to viewers not just the tragedy of the doomed lovers, but also the deceptive nocturnal beauty of the long, foaming Kerala coastline, or the way of life by daylight of the fishing community. Added to this were Vayalar's lyrics, Salil Choudhury's music and Manna Dey's singing which, together, gave a soulful twist to the narrative; and last but not the least, the acting of Satyan, Sheela and Madhu. I have yet to come across a Malayalee, especially of my generation, who does not get carried away whilst recalling what Chemmeen did to him in his youth and even long after his salad days were over.
Today, when I see Chemmeen in the quiet of my drawing room, I cannot fail to notice the high-pitched, improbable drama in many passages. Obviously, these were meant to move impressionable audiences and thereby do well at the box-office. But when I first saw the film in a south Calcutta theatre, Menoka by name, in the late '60s, surrounded by sobbing Malayalees and Tamilians, I remember having been moved in a strange sort of way. The life of struggle of the coastal fishing community, enacted on an almost epic scale by professionals endowed with rare gifts of expression, stirred one and all. But it was the tragedy of unrequited love that made the Sunday morning audience, living at least a thousand miles away from home, cry like children.
The love of melodrama
In a discussion of this sort, it is important to consider that every film deserves to be assessed in the backdrop in which it was made, or is made. I say this because sometimes I get to hear that Chemmeen was so successful because large sections of the viewing public love melodrama more than anything else. Truth be told, it betrays a lack of perspective to compare Chemmeen with, say, Kodiyettom or Oridhathu, or some other well-known films of more recent origin. The subjects are different, the treatment is different, the aesthetics or social discourses are different.
The conditions in which Kariat and his contemporaries worked were vastly different from those in which Adoor, Aravindan, John, or K.G. George, who learnt much from Kariat, worked. In the days of Kariat, audiences were less developed in their understanding of the film medium than they are today; the film society movement as we know it today, did not exist then; most of the technical collaborators were self-taught, having learnt their craft (or 'trade', if one were not to question the haughtiness of some filmmakers privileged to attend film school); film equipment were often ancient and unpredictable; actors and actresses were in many cases professionals no doubt, but frequently given to tell-tale mannerisms and exaggerated, stylised rendition; and finally, familiar sources of official largesse, such as the National Film Development Corporation of India, Doordarshan or the state film-financing bodies, were to make their appearance years later.
It is in this context that we must consider Chemmeen, which won the President's Gold Medal for best film for the year 1965, or Bimal Roy's Udayer Pathay, or Ritwik Ghatak's first film, Nagarik. We ought not to forget that the efflorescence of talent that we were to witness in the course of time in Kerala, Bengal or Mumbai had much to do with the exertions of the pioneers who did their kind of work in difficult conditions, only to set an example for those who followed.
If, in certain years, Malayalam films are still seen filling the lion's share of slots in the Indian Panorama, one of the reasons for it is surely that the pioneers had stretched themselves so boldly in what were once the backwaters of Indian cinema. In time, Kariat's melodramatic treatment of individual traumas and collective aberrations paved the way for the arrival of such individualists as Adoor, Aravindan, John Abraham, K. G. George, Shaji Karun, P.A. Backer, M.T. Vasudevan Nair, and a host of others of varying artistic sensibility or political persuasion.
Despite working in difficult conditions with equipment that could hardly be described as being sophisticated, Chemmeen extracted the highest of praise for its technical excellence in important international festivals such as Cannes or Chicago. At Cannes, Marcus Bartley was awarded the gold medal for best cinematography. If anything, achievements of this stature go to prove that there is no substitute for innate genius.
While volumes have been written on the holy trinity of Adoor, Aravindan and John, joined in time by Shaji following the enormous success of Piravi, we should not be indifferent to the existence of a Malayalam middle-of-the-road cinema of considerable volume and some undeniable importance. This body of work was propped up by directors such as George, Bharathan, Padmarajan, Sethumadhavan and others. Many of their films may seem to have been made with an eye to box-office possibilities, but they were nonetheless characterised by able storytelling and an impressive grasp of the technical aspect of things.
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At this point, a story George told this writer many years ago in Delhi following a screening of, arguably, his most important film, Kolangal, is worth mentioning here if for no other reason than that it has a bearing on his own un-uniform career graph, qualitatively speaking. Soon after graduating from the Film & Television Institute of India (FTII) in Pune, his head buzzing with film theory, film aesthetics and classroom lectures on varied modes of storytelling, George went into independent filmmaking. But after the failure of his earliest ventures, chiefly because of the public's refusal to accept the terms and idioms of the new kind of cinema, George found it tough going. Thereupon, he decided once and for all to combine as little commerce as he could with as much art as possible and joined Ramu Kariat as an assistant.
Vidyarthy Chatterjee writes on cinema, society, politics. For several decades now, he has pursued New Malayalam Cinema with great devotion.