Skip to main content

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 [à´­്രമയുà´—ം] in Malayalam. But the movie’s records and ads write it as Bramayugam [à´¬്രമയുà´—ം] 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 21st 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.

Comments

  1. Is it scary. At my age I'm still not fan of scary.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Understandable. Watching Hollywood horror movies as a young man, I used to think that Americans got scared pretty easily.

      Delete
  2. I felt it as good movie

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. One way of looking at it is as another horror story or historical fantasy or something equally familiar. But i choose to see more.

      Delete
  3. Recently watched Bhramayugam trailer, looks wonderful, Glad to read your review. Loved Mammootty's works.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Adventures of Toto as a comic strip

  'The Adventures of Toto' is an amusing story by Ruskin Bond. It is prescribed as a lesson in CBSE's English course for class 9. Maggie asked her students to do a project on some of the lessons and Femi George's work is what I would like to present here. Femi converted the story into a beautiful comic strip. Her work will speak for itself and let me present it below.  Femi George Student of Carmel Public School, Vazhakulam, Kerala Similar post: The Little Girl

The Little Girl

The Little Girl is a short story by Katherine Mansfield given in the class 9 English course of NCERT. Maggie gave an assignment to her students based on the story and one of her students, Athena Baby Sabu, presented a brilliant job. She converted the story into a delightful comic strip. Mansfield tells the story of Kezia who is the eponymous little girl. Kezia is scared of her father who wields a lot of control on the entire family. She is punished severely for an unwitting mistake which makes her even more scared of her father. Her grandmother is fond of her and is her emotional succour. The grandmother is away from home one day with Kezia's mother who is hospitalised. Kezia gets her usual nightmare and is terrified. There is no one at home to console her except her father from whom she does not expect any consolation. But the father rises to the occasion and lets the little girl sleep beside him that night. She rests her head on her father's chest and can feel his heart...

I’m Alive

Illustration by Copilot Designer How do you prove to anyone that you’re alive? Go and stand in front of the person and declare, “I’m Tom, Shyam or Hari”? No, that won’t work in India. Let me share my personal experience. It’s as absurd as the plight of Kafka’s protagonist in The Castle. A land surveyor is summoned for duty, only to be told that the mere fact a land surveyor was summoned does not prove he is that land surveyor though he has the appointment letter with him. I received a mail from the Life Insurance Corporation of India [LIC] that I should prove my existence in order to continue receiving my annuity on the sum I had invested with them five years ago. They’re only paying the interest on the sum I have given them. They’re not doing me any charity. Yet they want me to prove to them that I am still alive in order to continue getting the annual amount they are obligated to pay me. This is India. LIC is a government undertaking. If I don’t follow their injunction, I wil...

Hindutva’s Contradictions

The book I’m reading now is Whose Rama? [in Malayalam] by Sanskrit scholar and professor T S Syamkumar. I had mentioned this book in an earlier post . The basic premise of the book, as I understand from the initial pages, is that Hindutva is a Brahminical ideology that keeps the lower caste people outside its terrain. Non-Aryans are portrayed as monsters in ancient Hindu literature. The Shudras, the lowest caste, and the casteless others, are not even granted the status of humans.  Whose Rama? The August issue of The Caravan carries an article related to the inhuman treatment that the Brahmins of Etawah in Uttar Pradesh meted out to a Yadav “preacher” in the last week of June 2025. “Yadavs are traditionally ranked as a Shudra community,” says the article. They are not supposed to recite the holy texts. Mukut Mani Singh Yadav was reciting verses from the Bhagavad Gita. That was his crime. The Brahmins of the locality got the man’s head tonsured, forced him to rub his nose at t...

Independence from Dictators too

Kerala Governor Rajendra Arlekar asked the state to observe ‘Partition Horror Day’ on 14 Aug instead of celebrating the country’s Independence. His organisation, the RSS, as well as its ideological sibling the Hindu Mahasabha, had explicitly directed its members not to celebrate the Independence on 14-15 Aug 1947. From Bombay Chronicle, 9 Aug 1947 Dominique Lapierre and Larry Collins gave us a graphic description of what the RSS did on 15 Aug 1947, in their classic book Freedom at Midnight . When the rest of India celebrated its new Independence, the RSS hoisted its own flag, “an orange triangle, emblazoned upon which was the symbol that, in a slightly modified form, had terrorized Europe for a decade, the swastika.” About 500 RSS men stood saluting the swastika on 15 Aug 1947 in Poona. Lapierre and Collins describe the RSS as a “para-fascist movement” whose members “saw themselves as the heirs to those ancient Aryans.” Rajendra Arlekar is an RSS man. He has been doing whate...