Love without frontiers

One of the classical love stories in Malayalam literature is Thakazhi’s Chemmeen (Shrimp). When the novel became a popular movie in Kerala, I was just 5 years old. Two generations later, neither the novel nor the movie is likely to ring any bell though the theme of love can never vanish from literature and arts.

The love affair in the story is inter-religious. A pretty Hindu girl is in love with a young Muslim trader. Today a lot of political organisations would have cried foul and shouts of “Love jihad” would have rent the heavens. Some seven decades ago, people weren’t more broadminded. If nationalist politics has arrogated to itself the chastity of Indian love today, religion had its own characteristic way of subjugating human passions in the olden days. Karuthamma’s love for Pareekutty withers in the fire of the traditions that her mother lights around her.

Karuthamma marries Palani, an orphan discovered by her father during one of his fishing expeditions. Eventually Karuthamma’s mother dies, father marries another woman, and Pareekutty is impoverished because of Karuthamma’s father’s clever manipulations. Frustrated lovers roamed copiously in the literary as well as real landscapes of Kerala in those days. They could be exploited easily too. Once you have lost the passion of your heart, wealth and other such worldly things lose their charm.

Destiny has its own ways of wreaking vengeance. It brings Karuthamma and Pareekutty together once again on the romantic sands of the raging sea. Rumours about their earlier affair had already tarnished Karuthamma’s marriage and Palani became an outcaste for no fault of his except that he married a woman who had had an affair about which he knew nothing.

The extra-marital romance brings about everybody’s ruin. One of the sacred traditions among the fisher folk is that the wife’s infidelity will kill the husband at sea. Palani who has baited a shark is caught up in a whirlpool.

In the end, the sea washes ashore the dead bodies of Karuthamma and Pareekutty. A little away, the same sea brings ashore bodies of Palani and the shark that he killed. The lovers die for their love and the cuckolded husband is killed by the sea. Tradition wins in all of these deaths. You should not overstep the lines drawn by traditions, the story seems to suggest.

I would like to look at it from another angle, however. What would have happened if Karuthamma and Pareekutty were allowed to marry and live together? What if their religions could accept the sanctity of human love as superior to mere traditions? There would have been more happiness in their world.

Even today, we create all the unhappiness around us in the name of some vapid traditions and superiority of one religion over another. Most of us seem to be incapable of accepting the sanctity of human love above other things. And so we create so much misery around us.

PS. Written for In[di]spire Edition 270. #LoveStory

PPS. Today is Good Friday, a day that commemorates the crucifixion of Jesus who asserted the supremacy of love above everything else.