An Aberration of Kali Yuga

Are we Indians now living in an aberrant period of history? A period that is far worse than the puranic Kali Yuga? A period in which gods decide to run away in fear of men?

That’s a very provocative question, isn’t it, especially in a time when people are being arrested for raising much more innocuous questions than that? But I raise my hands in surrender because I’m not raising this question; the Malayalam movie that Maggie and I watched is.

Before I go to the provocations of the movie, I am compelled to clarify a spelling problem with the title of the movie. The title is Bhramayugam [ഭ്രമയുഗം] in Malayalam. But the movie’s records and ads write it as Bramayugam [ബ്രമയുഗം] which would mean the yuga of Brama. Since Brama doesn’t mean anything in Malayalam, people like me will be tempted to understand it as the yuga of Brahma. In fact, that is how I understood it until Maggie corrected me before we set off to watch the movie by drawing my attention to the Malayalam spelling of the title. Maggie has common sense and I don’t. What follows is a reading of the movie by a person who lacks common sense. Get ready to ride on the clouds, dear reader.

Bhramam is a kind of delusion. I think that’s what the director of this movie means the title to be too. The movie can be interpreted in numerous ways. That’s one of its many positives. I interpret its whole world as a delusion for the contemporary audience. It is as much a delusion as India’s contemporary politics is.

Do you believe that a centralised power like what we now have in India is good? It sounds good because it gives you the feeling that there is one particular power sitting on top of the apex of the power structure controlling everything below. Like God. Like God, let me repeat. We are on a cloud, remember. [If you don’t remember start reading again, especially paragraph 4.]

The plot we have to navigate is simple. Seventeenth century Kerala, South India. A low caste guy named Devan is fleeing from Portuguese slave traders. He sees a dilapidated mansion – a palatial building of an upper caste exploiter of people in those days, no better than the colonial slave traders – and runs into it because he is hungry. Potty, the Brahmin owner of the mansion, receives him as a guest because guests are deities in the Hindu scriptures. Potty quotes the scripture verse too. Not the cliched Aditi devo bhava stuff. Something else which I can’t remember now because I heard it only once, in this movie. But I’m sure it’s a real quote. All scriptural quotes in this movie are real. Only the reality is fake. Like the political reality in contemporary India.

We are led to believe that fake is real. That is what makes this movie a tremendous success. We are caught in a trap just like Devan. If Potty controls Devan, we are controlled by the movie’s impact on us. We get involved in spite of ourselves. I tried to tell myself a hundred times that this was a movie. But I went back to a world of delusion, the world controlled by the lead character, the owner of the dilapidated mansion in the middle of what looks like a jungle. Potty is the name of that master, played by Mammootty as no one else can. The very name is symbolic. Or is it allegorical? Or rhyming?

We are on a cloud, dear reader, don’t forget. On a cloud where you will hear Potty as Modi or something. Such things happen in life even on a cloud. Especially on a cloud.

Potty is Satanic. He controls the whole jungle around his dilapidated mansion. All that jungle was his family’s property, now laid waste because of the narcissism of Potty the Boss. Now the mansion is like a Black Hole. Did I tell you that the entire movie is Black & White? It is. And its impact is ghostly. We are in a ghostly world. And there are real ghosts too!

You really don’t know what reality is and what fakery is. Potty can shift between reality and illusion like Satan. Chathan, in Malayalam, as he turns out to be  in the end.

Well, I seem to be revealing too many things which is not good for anyone who would like to watch this movie which is still running houseful though most Malayalam movies don’t run houseful beyond a week. This movie is a success in Kerala. I’m sure the Malayali audience got the connections between the 17th century and the 21^st century right.

“We’re in Bhramayugam,” says Potti to his antagonist. “This is an aberration of Kali Yuga. The situation is so bad that even gods run away from it.” Evil reigns supreme and we have no escape from it.

Potty and Modi. Bilabials and nasals. The difference isn’t much. Hats off to Rahul Sadasivan, director and script-writer. I loved the movie though I was highly disturbed by it. By the realism in its delusions.