Aami – Movie Review

To be a poet is to suffer deeply.  The better a poet you are, the greater your inner agonies.  Aami surveys the inner turmoil that bilingual poet Kamala Das (Madhavikutty in Malayalam) went through for most part of her life.  Married at the age of 15 to man 20 years her senior, Kamala (Aami as she is called at home) did not receive the kind of affection she longed for from her husband.  As narrated in Kamala’s autobiography, My Story, her husband ‘raped’ her in the night of their marriage.  Kamala would have loved to get some affectionate fondling from him, at least to have him caress her face after that love-making, a touch on her belly, some expression of affection, instead of being treated like an object of sexual pleasure.

The longing for affection can create acute inner pains, especially when it is denied to a poet with intense passions.  Kamala said in her autobiography that she found an alternative in a man who made love to her passionately.  In the movie that man becomes Lord Krishna.  Kamala’s passionate love-making with a man who “was famous for lust, whose sexual gratification made me happier than the insane sexual urges he aroused in me” becomes her fantasies with Lord Krishna in the movie. Kamala Das had, in the autumn of her life, interpreted her own candid writing as her fantasies. 

Krishna appears as her solace throughout the movie.  Her husband appears as a man who is prosaically pragmatic. He also had a gay friend.  His homosexuality created a further gap between him and Kamala.  Though he overcomes that tendency eventually, Kamala is unable to love him passionately.  Even when she writes her candid autobiography, her husband is only happy to earn some money by selling the candidness.  But human relationships are never simple.  The director, Kamal, manages to portray the complexities that worked out between the passionate poet and her prosaic husband.

The movie also traces the attitude of the Hindu society toward widows when Kamala’s husband dies having acknowledged his wife’s love for him.  A Muslim admirer visits Kamala and arouses her passions once again.  He even manages to get her converted to Islam and change her name to Kamala Surayya.  But when her conversion leads to a communal riot-like situation, the man moves out saving himself.  He was no better than a wind that created some ripples in the water.  The attitude of the ordinary people to religion, both Hindus and Muslims, is shown vividly enough in the movie.  Individuals are of little importance in that struggle to prove the superiority of one’s own religion.  Who cares for your likes and dislikes, your personal freedoms?  What matters is the ascendancy of your religion.

Kamala Das died as Kamala Surayya, but as a terribly disillusioned person, disillusioned with religions.  The movie has successfully dramatized the dilemmas of a poet who struggles between her desire to be herself and her inability to do really so.  The only drawback is that quite often the movie gives us the feeling that we are watching a documentary.  Nevertheless I enjoyed watching it.  I loved the Krishna in the movie.  It is none other than Kamala’s personal god, the god that only each one of us can discover in the deepest core of our hearts in our own unique way, the only way of finding gods.