URUMI The Warriors Who Wanted to Kill Vasco Da Gama
- Director
- Santosh Sivan
- Country
- India
- Language
- Malayalam
- Year · Runtime
- 2011 · 172 min
- Starring
- Prithviraj Sukumaran, Prabhu Deva, Genelia D'Souza, Nithya Menen, Arya, Jagathy Sreekumar
Introduction
Santosh Sivan's Urumi opened in Kerala on 31 March 2011. Sivan directed and photographed it from a screenplay by Shankar Ramakrishnan, and Prithviraj Sukumaran, who plays its hero, produced it with Sivan and their friend Shaji Nadesan under the name August Cinema. The film goes back to the first years of the sixteenth century, when Portuguese ships came to the Malabar Coast, and to the man Indian schoolchildren are taught to call a discoverer. Its Vasco da Gama sets fire to a ship of pilgrims bound for Mecca. A boy whose father dies in that fire makes an urumi, a flexible sword, from the ornaments of the women and children who burned, and swears to kill him.
Sivan was plain about his target. In an interview carried by The Indian Express on the day of release, he called the film an attempt to take a second look at the glorified story of da Gama, and put the question bluntly: was he a brave explorer or an invader after gold? He tied the story to the present as well. Corporate lobbies, he said, were displacing indigenous people across the world, and his film centred on a similar situation removed by a few centuries. So the sixteenth-century tale sits inside a modern one, a quarrel over forest land that a mining company wants to buy. The film keeps asking one question. Has the appetite that brought the Portuguese to the coast gone, or has it only changed its paperwork?
It was an expensive film by Malayalam standards. The Times of India, interviewing Prithviraj during the shoot in September 2010, gave its cost as Rs 20 crore and counted 45 British actors in the cast. Scale is the least interesting thing about it. The argument is what holds.
Cast
- Prithviraj Sukumaran Chirakkal Kelu Nayanar / Krishna Das
- Prabhu Deva Vavvali
- Genelia D'Souza Arakkal Ayesha
- Nithya Menen Chirakkal Bala
- Arya Chirakkal Kothuwal
- Jagathy Sreekumar Chenichery Kurup
- Amole Gupte King of Chirakkal
- Ankur Khanna Bhanu Vikraman
- Alexx O'Nell Estêvão da Gama
- Robin Pratt Vasco da Gama
- Vidya Balan Cameo
- Tabu Song appearance
Crew
- Direction Santosh Sivan
- Story and screenplay Shankar Ramakrishnan
- Cinematography Santosh Sivan
- Editing A. Sreekar Prasad
- Music Deepak Dev
- Production design Sunil Babu
- Costumes Eka Lakhani
- Make-up and hair Ranjith Ambady
- Action Anal Arasu
- Sound design M. R. Rajakrishnan
- Production Shaji Nadesan, Santosh Sivan, Prithviraj Sukumaran (August Cinema)
Background and production
By Prithviraj's account, Sivan first told him the story about three years before the shoot, while the two were working on Ananthabhadram. It took real shape during the making of Raavanan (2010), and Prithviraj and his friend Shaji Nadesan then joined Sivan as producers. Sivan told Rediff that the production company had not been planned. It simply happened. The screenplay went to Shankar Ramakrishnan, a long-time associate of the director Ranjith, best known until then for Island Express, his segment of the anthology Kerala Cafe. Sivan said his writer was really into historical drama, and admitted to a simpler excitement of his own at having cannons, swords and urumis in a film.
The shoot ran for about seven months across Kerala, Karnataka and Maharashtra. Much of it took place in the forests of Malshej Ghat in Maharashtra, where Sivan found the rain so beautiful that it became the backdrop of the drama. He preferred locations to sets and said that the moods of nature were meant to signal the turns of the plot. In October 2010 Prithviraj was at Malshej for the climax, a battle that by his count used more than 150 stuntmen, over 100 horses, several cameras and explosives. Nithya Menen, who plays the Chirakkal princess Bala, remembered it less fondly. The unit stood in slush almost round the clock, she told Rediff. People got foot infections, and the jewellery and the hair were a labour of their own.
Sunil Babu designed the production, Eka Lakhani the costumes and Ranjith Ambady the make-up and hair. Anal Arasu directed the action, A. Sreekar Prasad edited, and Deepak Dev wrote the songs and the score. The costumes were never meant as reconstruction. Sivan pointed out that the women of the period went uncovered above the waist, and said the film stylises what they wore instead. He gave the wider principle to the Express: he would sooner recreate a period with his own details added than recreate a realistic modern room.
The film was aimed beyond Kerala from the start. Prithviraj spoke of an English version called The boy who wanted to kill Vasco Da Gama, and Sivan said that a shorter English cut had been selected for a festival in Hong Kong. The project had also been through the Hong Kong-Asia Film Financing Forum, and Oliver Stone, whom Sivan met in Mumbai, asked to be sent a copy when it was done.
Kelu (Prithviraj Sukumaran), Vavvali (Prabhu Deva) and Princess Bala (Nithya Menen) in Urumi (2011)
Story
The film opens in the present. Executives of a mining corporation tell Krishna Das, who runs a music troupe in Goa, that his family's land in north Kerala, long leased to a non-governmental organisation that runs a tribal school on it, is rich in minerals and free to be sold. They offer a large advance. When he and his friend Thanseer go to see the property, tribal men seize them and take them to a cave in the forest. There the chief, Thankachan, tells Krishna Das whose descendant he is, and the film falls back five hundred years.
Portuguese sailors under Vasco da Gama capture a ship of Muslim pilgrims. The Kothuwal, general of the Chirakkal kingdom, sends a Brahmin negotiator with his own son Kelu, as custom requires, to bargain for the prisoners. Da Gama cuts off the negotiator's ears, has the prisoners locked in the hold and sets the ship alight. The Kothuwal storms the burning ship to save his son and is killed. Vavvali, a Tamil Muslim boy, takes the orphan home. He raises Kelu as a brother, and Kelu makes his urumi from the ornaments of the dead and swears that he will one day kill da Gama. The episode has a historical source. On his second voyage, in October 1502, da Gama's fleet seized a ship carrying Muslim pilgrims to Mecca off the Malabar coast, looted it and burned it with its passengers inside.
Years later Kelu and Vavvali rescue Bala, the Chirakkal princess, from abductors armed with Portuguese pistols, and are drawn into a court where the prince Bhanu Vikraman is already plotting and the minister Chenichery Kurup is already selling. They set out to seize da Gama and capture his son Estêvão instead, helped by Ayesha, a warrior princess of the Arakkal house. Kelu is made Kothuwal. Bhanu Vikraman shoots his uncle the king with a Portuguese pistol, takes the throne and strips Kelu of command. Kelu, Vavvali and Ayesha go to the villages and raise a resistance among ordinary people. At an audience with da Gama, Estêvão kills Bhanu Vikraman, and the Portuguese reward Kurup with the governorship of the Laccadives.
The Chirakkal army and a Portuguese column attack the rebels in their village, and Vavvali is killed in the fighting. The rebels then storm the palace. Kelu breaks through the Portuguese line, reaches da Gama and attacks him, and the musketeers shoot him down. The revenge is never completed. In the present, Krishna Das refuses to sell.
Prithviraj plays both Kelu and Krishna Das, and the casting runs in pairs through much of the ensemble. Arya is the old general and the tribal chief, Genelia D'Souza is Ayesha and a modern woman named Urmila, Nithya Menen is Princess Bala and the mining company's property executive, and Jagathy Sreekumar is both Kurup and a Kerala minister. The last pairing makes the film's thesis before a line of dialogue does. Kelu's allies are divided by caste and faith, the traitor is rewarded, and the princes of Chirakkal sell their own house for foreign pistols. Much of the conscience belongs to the women. Ramakrishnan said in 2025 that the film had always been about reviving a forgotten cultural memory of Kerala.
Bala (Nithya Menen) and Vavvali (Prabhu Deva) in Urumi (2011)
Direction and craftsmanship
Sivan photographed the film himself and planned it around the weather. He said that the moods of nature would signal the twists in the plot, and he chose the rain of Malshej Ghat over studio sets. When ANI reported his Cannes tribute in 2024, it dated his move to digital cameras to Urumi. Paresh C Palicha, reviewing the film for Rediff, saw the Sivan stamp in more than the camera angles. Even the gait of every actor, he wrote, is choreographed to give each performer an individual style, sometimes so far that they seem to be posing for a still photograph. That describes the film's main pleasure and its main limit. The images are composed to be held, and the drama sometimes waits while they are.
Shekhar Hooli, in Filmibeat, singled out Anal Arasu's action, Genelia D'Souza's sword fights as Ayesha and Deepak Dev's music. The score later won the Kerala State Film Award for background music, and M. R. Rajakrishnan's sound won as well. Hooli was harder on the film's shape. He found the narration slow and dragging, the songs forced in, and the climax too close to that of Pazhassi Raja. Sivan had defended the songs before release as part of the tradition the film was recreating. The version the British Board of Film Classification passed in April 2011 runs 172 minutes. The length is felt.
Prithviraj plays Kelu as a man defined by an oath he cannot put down, and Palicha called him masculinity personified. Prabhu Deva's Vavvali is cast against him. Palicha noted the contrast of his bony frame, and Nithya Menen described the pairing of Vavvali and Bala as the comic thread beside the intense romance of Kelu and Ayesha. Jagathy Sreekumar plays Kurup as an effeminate villain, a weary opportunist and more unsettling for it. Amole Gupte, whom Sivan had known since his own student days at the Film and Television Institute of India, plays the old king, and Sivan liked the body language he brought to the part. Vidya Balan's much-publicised cameo is another matter. Palicha found the part underdeveloped and wondered whether it had been cut down in the edit.
Kelu (Prithviraj Sukumaran) in one of the film's fight sequences
The cinema of Santosh Sivan
Sivan trained at the Film and Television Institute of India and made his name as a cinematographer before he directed. He shot Thalapathi, Roja, Iruvar and Dil Se.. for Mani Ratnam, and won the National Film Award for Best Cinematography four times, for Perumthachan, Kaalapani, Iruvar and Dil Se... The American Society of Cinematographers, which counts him as its first Indian member, puts his National Awards at twelve in all. He received the Padma Shri in 2014. In May 2024 the Cannes festival gave him the Pierre Angénieux tribute for his work behind the camera.
As a director he keeps returning to people caught between larger forces. The Terrorist (1998) follows a young woman who volunteers to carry out a suicide bombing. Asoka (2001), his account of the Mauryan emperor's turn away from conquest, was shown at Venice and Toronto. Tahaan followed in 2008. Urumi reads as a companion to Asoka. Both are historical epics that distrust the glory of empire and put their sympathy with the people it grinds down. Asoka examines the conqueror's conscience. Urumi speaks for the conquered, and for their descendants still bargaining over the same ground.
Santosh Sivan, director and cinematographer of Urumi
Reception and legacy
Saraswathy Nagarajan, writing in The Hindu on the day of release, called Urumi a decisive turn for Malayalam cinema, a film that broadened the industry's horizons and reached for a global audience. The reviews that followed were warmer about the craft than the drama. Palicha headed his Rediff review 'Watch Urumi for the effort', allowed that it may have borrowed from international films in the genre, and still found it highly watchable. Hooli praised the production values and the casting and complained about the pace.
The early trade news was good. Filmibeat reported on 8 April 2011 that the film had taken about Rs 2.5 crore in its first week from 77 theatres in Kerala, running ahead of Prithviraj's Anwar. The Times of India took a cooler view in 2025, writing that the film may not have made huge numbers at the box office.
It was one of seven Malayalam films chosen for the Indian Panorama at the International Film Festival of India in Goa in 2011. In May 2012 it won Best Film at the 11th Imagineindia International Film Festival in Madrid, where Sivan was named Best Director. The Kerala State Film Awards for 2011 gave it two technical prizes, and the Asiavision Movie Awards in Sharjah named it Best Movie, Sivan Best Director and Genelia D'Souza Best Actress.
The film travelled into other languages with mixed fortune. The Tamil version, Pathinaindham Nootrandu Uraivaal, opened in May 2012 with a few changes for local audiences, and the official channel of its Tamil producer, Kalaippuli S. Thanu, now carries it in full. A Hindi version, Ek Yoddha Shoorveer, followed in March 2016, shorter and with new characters. The Times of India called its Hindi dubbing laughable and said that it ran down the power of the revenge story.
Looking back over the decade in December 2019, Nagarajan wrote in The Hindu that Urumi had pushed the envelope in storytelling, though she placed it in her notes on 2011 and left it out of her list of twenty-five films. The story is not over. In September 2025 Ramakrishnan said that he had at last finished the script of a sequel after twelve years, set a century after the first film, in Vadakara. Whether Sivan will direct it or Prithviraj return had not been confirmed.
The film is sharper as diagnosis than as cure, and its ending is more comfortable than its premise deserves.
Awards & honours
- Won Best Background Music (Deepak Dev), Kerala State Film Awards for 2011
- Won Best Sound Recordist (M. R. Rajakrishnan, shared with Chaappa Kurish), Kerala State Film Awards for 2011
- Won Best Film, 11th Imagineindia International Film Festival, Madrid, 2012
- Won Best Director (Santosh Sivan), 11th Imagineindia International Film Festival, Madrid, 2012
- Won Best Movie, Asiavision Movie Awards, Sharjah, 2011
- Won Best Director (Santosh Sivan), Asiavision Movie Awards, Sharjah, 2011
- Won Best Actress (Genelia D'Souza), Asiavision Movie Awards, Sharjah, 2011
- Entry Indian Panorama, International Film Festival of India, Goa, 2011
Reference
- 'Urumi' is my comment on globalisation: Santosh Sivan, The Indian Express, 31 March 2011
- Santosh Sivan: 'Shooting Urumi was exciting', Rediff.com, 29 March 2011
- 'Urumi was difficult to shoot for', Radhika Rajamani, Rediff.com, 31 March 2011
- Review: Watch Urumi for the effort, Paresh C Palicha, Rediff.com, 1 April 2011
- Vidya's a committed artist: Prithiviraj, Sreedhar Pillai, The Times of India, 29 September 2010
- Man with the golden sword, Saraswathy Nagarajan, The Hindu, 31 March 2011 (archived copy)
- Prithviraj shoots for climax of Urumi, Filmibeat, 22 October 2010
- Urumi - Movie Review: A must watch epic drama, Shekhar Hooli, Filmibeat, 1 April 2011
- Sivan-Prithvi's Urumi creates wonders at Box Office, Filmibeat, 8 April 2011
- Urumi, Adaminte Makan Abu in Goa Film Festival, Filmibeat, 20 October 2011
- Urumi bags best film award at Madrid fest, indiantelevision.com, 2 June 2012
- Southern stars shine at Asiavision Awards, Gulf News
- 42nd Kerala State Film Awards, Wikipedia
- Pathinaindham Nootrandu Uraivaal - Movie Review, Shekhar Hooli, Filmibeat, 25 May 2012
- Urumi to get a new twist in Bollywood, Deccan Chronicle, 10 March 2016
- Ek Yodha Shoorveer movie review, The Times of India, 2016
- The 25 best Malayalam films of the decade, Saraswathy Nagarajan, The Hindu, 19 December 2019
- 'Urumi' sequel: Shankar Ramakrishnan says script is finally ready after 12 years, The Times of India, 11 September 2025
- Urumi, British Board of Film Classification
- Santosh Sivan, ASC, ISC: Angénieux Tribute, American Society of Cinematographers, 2024
- Indian cinematographer Santosh Sivan receives prestigious Pierre Angenieux Tribute at Cannes, ThePrint (ANI), 22 May 2024
- Santosh Sivan, Padma Shri, RED Digital Cinema, 16 March 2014
- Asoka, Lee Marshall, Screen Daily, 19 September 2001
- National Film Award for Best Cinematography, Wikipedia
- Vasco da Gama, Wikipedia
- Urumi (film), Wikipedia
- Urumi: The Warriors Who Wanted to Kill Vasco Da Gama, full cast and crew, IMDb
Urumi (Tamil version) on YouTube
Image credits: Banner: August Cinema, All rights reserved; used for criticism and review, via source. Image: Thachan.makan, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons. Image: August Cinema, All rights reserved; used for criticism and review, via source. Image: August Cinema, All rights reserved; used for criticism and review, via source. Image: August Cinema, All rights reserved; used for criticism and review, via source. Image: August Cinema, All rights reserved; used for criticism and review, via source.
Commentary
What stays after Urumi is the quarrel with official memory, more than the choreography of blades. Sivan and Ramakrishnan take a name fixed in the textbooks and ask what it cost the people already living on the coast. The modern frame could easily have been clumsy. Here it earns its place, because it refuses to let the past settle into entertainment. The mining company's men and the sixteenth-century collaborator rhyme too closely for comfort, and the doubled casting makes the rhyme impossible to miss. The film strains under its own scale. Its melodrama and its stylised costumes show the seams of a hard production, and none of that cancels the seriousness of the attempt.
The argument has a soft centre, and it should be named. Urumi sets out to indict the logic of extraction and resolves that indictment through one act of private conscience. One man declines one cheque. The tribal school keeps its land because a descendant learns his lineage and is moved by it, a remedy open to almost nobody in the situation the film describes. Everything structural that the sixteenth-century half establishes, the bought ministers and the outside power that needs no one's permission, drops away in the last minutes. The film is sharper as diagnosis than as cure, and its ending is more comfortable than its premise deserves.
Its place in Malayalam cinema is easier to state. It showed that the industry could mount a large historical film on its own terms and carry a political idea through it, at a moment when the received story of the ships was still the one in the schoolbooks. A culture that celebrates the arrival of the fleet is asked who was standing on the shore, and who holds the deeds to it now.