Agraharathil Kazhuthai (1977)

AGRAHARATHIL KAZHUTHAI  [Donkey in a Brahmin Village]
John Abraham
India. 1977. 96 min
Cast : M.B. Sreenivasan, Swathi, Sreelalitha

Introduction

Agraharathil Kazhuthai opens with a voice reciting Subramania Bharati in praise of fire. The same poem returns at the end, over a funeral pyre lit for a dead donkey, and the fire spreads until it has burned down a Brahmin settlement. Everything in between explains how the animal came to be killed. John Abraham made the film in 1977 in Tamil, the only one of his four features in that language, after training at the Film and Television Institute of India in Pune under Ritwik Ghatak. He wrote it with the Tamil critic Venkat Swaminathan.

The idea arrived in Coimbatore, where Abraham was staying on screenwriting work. Walking through a Brahmin village he noticed donkeys with their foals and wondered why nobody ever raised a foal as a pet. Robert Bresson's Au hasard Balthazar (1966) supplied the shape, and Abraham said so openly. What he built from the question is a satire on caste and on priestly authority, ninety-six minutes long and in black and white, which arrives at the position that a village capable of stoning an animal to death will build it a temple once the guilt sets in.

The film took the National Film Award for Best Feature Film in Tamil at the 25th National Film Awards. The Tamil press then ignored it. Brahmin organisations pressed for a ban, no theatre in Tamil Nadu would show it, and in late 1989 Doordarshan cancelled a scheduled telecast rather than take the argument on. Recognition arrived late and from elsewhere. IBN Live listed the film among the hundred greatest Indian films in 2013.

Background and Production

Abraham left FTII with gold medals in screenwriting and direction. He had come to Pune late, after a degree in history and politics at Mar Thoma College, Tiruvalla, work as a private college teacher and a spell as an office assistant with the Life Insurance Corporation in Udupi. At the institute he studied under Ghatak and knew Mani Kaul, and he worked as assistant director on Kaul's Uski Roti in 1969. His first feature was Vidyarthikale Ithile Ithile, which sources date variously to 1971 and 1972. Five years separate it from the second.

Money was the first obstacle. Abraham applied to the Film Finance Corporation for a loan and was refused after he declined to change a title the corporation found offensive. His sister Susan Joseph provided the funds instead. By his own later account, given in an interview with the writer Kakkanadan, he obtained the money on the understanding that he was making a documentary about a bishop, and defended the substitution afterwards on the ground that a donkey is better than a bishop anyway. Nirmithi Films is credited as the production company, with Abraham and Charlee John as producers.

Principal photography ran to roughly thirty working days. The locations were Loyola College in Madras and Kundrathur, near Chengalpattu. Ramachandra Babu photographed the film, with Ananda Kuttan credited alongside him in the Indiancine.ma record; Ravi cut it and Jeevan Thomas designed it. M. B. Sreenivasan wrote the music and played Narayanaswami, the professor. Swathi took Uma. Abraham cast himself as one of the three fortune-tellers and put T. V. Chandran, later a director of standing in Malayalam, in another of those parts.

The best-known difficulty of the shoot concerned a prop. Abraham needed a donkey's skull for the closing sequence and could not find one in veterinary hospitals or colleges. A friend proposed a fake made from gypsum plaster, which he refused. Another friend remembered burying a donkey three days earlier. The team went to the spot, exhumed the carcass and cut off the head, which had not yet decayed. They stripped the skin and cleaned what was left.

Distribution came from Kerala rather than Tamil Nadu. Janashakthi Films, a company registered in January 1977 and set up by the CPI(M) with the Deshabhimani Study Circle to circulate off-beat cinema, bought the outright rights for Rs 2.5 lakh once the opposition in Tamil Nadu had closed the theatres. It screened the film at its own festival at the Kavitha and Shenoys theatres in Ernakulam between 20 and 26 October 1978, alongside Mrinal Sen's Oka Oori Katha, Alain Resnais's Stavisky, Shyam Benegal's Bhoomika and Girish Kasaravalli's Ghatashradha.

Story

A female donkey is killed by a mob in Madras. Her foal wanders into the house of Narayanaswami, a Brahmin college professor, who learns from a neighbouring boy what has happened and decides to keep the animal. He calls it Chinna. His housemaid refuses to clear up after it, even for extra money, which she would not have done for a dog or a cow. His students mock him. The principal tells him the donkey is damaging the standing of the college and asks him to do something. Narayanaswami resigns and takes Chinna to his agraharam.

His parents are baffled and then persuaded. Uma, a deaf and mute girl working as a maid in the house, is given charge of the animal, and Narayanaswami returns to Madras. The village begins to complain. A gang of boys carries out a run of pranks and arranges for Chinna to be blamed for each of them. One elderly Brahmin, helped by one of the boys, deposits the donkey at a neighbour's house on the day a prospective bridegroom's family has come to see the daughter, and the visitors leave insulted. Narayanaswami's brother Venkat moves back with his wife, who objects to the animal in the house. Narayanaswami takes Chinna out, pays Uma to look after it and goes back to the city.

Uma meets a labourer in the fields while grazing Chinna. The relationship becomes physical, she becomes pregnant, and the man disappears. The child is stillborn. Uma's mother leaves the body at the mountain temple to conceal who its mother was. The priest finds it, calls the village and declares the temple polluted. Srinivasa Iyer suspects Uma and questions her mother, who confirms the suspicion in fright but says the donkey carried the corpse there. Chinna is taken to a pit and beaten to death.

The village astrologer predicts omens as punishment for the killing. What follows instead are miracles. Iyer's long-lost son comes home. A paralysed woman walks. Venkat's wife, childless for years, conceives. The village concludes that the dead donkey is responsible, and Iyer proposes a temple in its honour. Narayanaswami and Uma find the skull. The villagers take it from them and give it a ritual cremation, and the fire spreads and consumes the agraharam. The two of them are the only survivors.

The argument about caste is made through the animal's position rather than through speeches. Donkeys sit at the bottom of the domestic hierarchy in the village's reckoning, treated as polluting, worked hard and beaten, and the film sets that treatment beside the treatment of the people the same theology calls impure. The maid's refusal to clean up after Chinna makes the point in thirty seconds. What interests Abraham beyond the hierarchy is the speed of the reversal. The community that stones the donkey deifies it within months, and the theology that justified the killing supplies the vocabulary for the worship, with nobody in the village noticing the contradiction. Uma is the other half of the case. She and the animal share their scenes, and they are the only two figures in the story with no voice in what is decided about them.

Direction and Craftsmanship

Abraham cuts fast. The print catalogued by Indiancine.ma runs ninety-five minutes and forty seconds at 1.333:1 and averages 7.87 cuts a minute, a rate closer to comedy than to the contemplative register the film's reputation implies. The comedy is deliberate and the cutting carries it. Episodes of persecution are staged as anecdotes and strung in sequence, and between them Abraham returns to one shot: Chinna and Uma crossing the frame while Narayanaswami and his father sit talking in the background. The repetition turns a run of separate incidents into a habit.

The Bharati recitations work against the images rather than with them. When the labourers take Chinna to the pit, the narrator's voice returns with verses describing God present in every atom of every living and non-living thing. Nothing on screen agrees. Arun A.K., writing in Film Inquiry on 29 March 2021, reads the juxtaposition as an attack on a priesthood that quotes selectively from its own scriptures, and the reading is hard to dispute, since the film allows the priests no other defence.

Two moments show how far Abraham was prepared to move from observation. When Narayanaswami arrives at the village with the donkey he passes a funeral procession in which the mourners are dancing to the band, and the sequence ends on a shot of that revelry taken across the basket holding the donkey. At the killing site, after the miracles begin, the camera moves in a single choreographed pass across the faces of the villagers. Abraham said he was after the dramatic quality of the illusion people call a miracle.

The fire is a model. Abraham built the burning agraharam as a miniature and said he gave the shot particular weight because fire cleanses in the Indian imagination, in poojas and at weddings, and is divine for Christians as well. He said in the same interview that there are resemblances between Christ and his donkey, and that the founding of churches after a killing interpreted as a miracle was on his mind. The book beside Narayanaswami's bed in the closing stretch carries Che Guevara's face. Abraham was not being subtle. Whether the miniature carries the weight he wanted from it is a separate question, and the answer is probably no.

The Cinema of John Abraham

Abraham finished four features and died at forty-nine. Vidyarthikale Ithile Ithile came first, then Agraharathil Kazhuthai in 1977, Cheriyachante Kroorakrithyangal in 1979 and Amma Ariyan in 1986. Ramachandra Babu photographed the first two, Madhu Ambat the third and Venu the last. The subjects change and the position does not. Each film puts a figure outside the community at its centre and then watches the community decide what to do about him.

The Bresson debt is real and limited. Arun A.K. places Abraham closer to Eisenstein than to Bresson on the point that matters, which is that Bresson's sufferers endure while Abraham's fight back. Balthazar dies quietly among sheep on a hillside. Chinna's skull sets fire to the village that killed him. The same instinct returns in Amma Ariyan, where the poetry is Pablo Neruda's rather than Bharati's and images of Che recur.

The other half of the work was economic. In 1984 Abraham started the Odessa Collective with a street play in Fort Kochi called Nayykali, and Odessa financed Amma Ariyan by going from village to village with drums and skits, carrying a bucket for contributions. Showings of Chaplin's The Kid raised more. Amma Ariyan was then exhibited across Kerala on a non-commercial basis, and Odessa Sathyan kept that arrangement alive after Abraham's death. It is the only South Indian feature on the British Film Institute's 2002 list of the top ten Indian films.

Abraham died on 31 May 1987, the day after a fall from a rooftop following a party in Kozhikode. The hospital did not know who he was. B. Ekbal, a surgeon at the Kozhikode Medical College at the time, said twenty-six years later that the internal bleeding went undiagnosed and that Abraham could have been saved had his identity been known. The casualty staff took him for a film representative when he said he was a filmmaker.

Reception and Legacy

The jury at the 25th National Film Awards gave the film the Tamil award and singled out Abraham's use of Bharati's verses for creating a parable set against the orthodoxies and superstitions of a Brahmin village community. The film went into the Indian Panorama. Then nothing happened. Ashish Rajadhyaksha and Paul Willemen record in the Encyclopaedia of Indian Cinema that the Tamil press ignored it despite the national award. Brahmin organisations campaigned for a ban and succeeded in keeping it out of theatres in the state.

The refusals ran on for more than a decade. In late 1989 Doordarshan cancelled a scheduled telecast, eleven years after the state that ran Doordarshan had honoured the film. S. Theodore Baskaran records the cancellation in The Eye of the Serpent. What altered the standing of the film was time and a different audience. G. Dhananjayan, in Pride of Tamil Cinema, describes the cult status it acquired later, and IBN Live's 2013 poll of the hundred greatest Indian films included it.

Availability is now better than at any point in the film's life. The National Film Archive of India print has been posted to the Internet Archive, a restored high-definition transfer circulates on YouTube, and Indiancine.ma carries the film with a shot-by-shot annotation. Abraham's own reputation has done most of the work of keeping it in view. The Federation of Film Societies of India, Kerala instituted the John Abraham Award for Best Malayalam Film in 1998, and the John Abraham National Awards for documentary and short features have been given since 2005. Prem Chand's documentary John, written by Deedi Damodaran and released in 2018, refused to cast anyone as Abraham and made the camera stand in for him while the people who knew him talked.

Commentary

The method is the argument. Abraham does not ask for sympathy for the donkey and never films it as an object of pathos. Chinna is an animal, photographed as an animal, and the persecution accumulates in small comic instalments until the beating arrives as the next item on the list. The comedy is what makes the violence legible. A viewer who has laughed at the bridegroom's family walking out in a huff has already accepted the village's terms, and the film then presents the bill.

The weakness is Uma. She is given the film's clearest parallel with the donkey and very little else. The labourer who makes her pregnant is a device and vanishes. Her stillborn child exists in order to be found at the temple and blamed on Chinna, and her survival at the end is granted rather than earned. Abraham said in interview that the speech-impaired girl is the image of shakthi and that a viewer watching closely would see it. The film does not show it. Uma is acted upon for ninety minutes and then walks out of a burning village, and the honest account of her function is that she supplies the plot with a corpse.

The ending is the second reservation. A miniature agraharam burning is a wish, and the film knows it is a wish, which is why Bharati has to return on the soundtrack and tell the audience what to feel. Arun A.K. defends the choice, arguing that Abraham has the courage to suggest a way forward instead of leaving the viewer with unanswered questions. The courage is not in doubt. The suggestion is thin. Nothing in the preceding ninety minutes has shown a village capable of being changed by anything, and setting it alight in model form does not answer the problem the film has spent its length describing.

Against the people who wanted it banned, Rajadhyaksha and Willemen are right that the film is closer to a morality fable about innocence and guilt than to the assault on a community its opponents took it for, and they trace the resemblance to Ghatak's Ajantrik of 1957, where the object of attachment is a car. The reason to watch it is narrower than its reputation suggests. It lies in the stretch in the middle, where the pranks pile up and the same shot of a girl and a donkey keeps returning, and a village stops being a collection of people and becomes a mechanism.

Awards & Honours

• Won - Best Feature Film in Tamil, 25th National Film Awards, for films of 1977

• Selected - Indian Panorama, International Film Festival of India

• Listed - 100 Greatest Indian Films of All Time, IBN Live poll, 2013

• Screened - Janashakthi Films festival, Kavitha and Shenoys theatres, Ernakulam, 20 to 26 October 1978

Reference

• Agraharathil Kazhutai - Wikipedia

• John Abraham (director) - Wikipedia

• Agraharathil Kazhuthai (John Abraham) 1977 - Indiancine.ma

• Bigotry and Hypocrisy in John Abraham's Donkey in a Brahmin Village, Arun A.K. - Film Inquiry, 29 March 2021

• 25th National Film Awards - Directorate of Film Festivals

• Agraharathil Kazhuthai (1977), National Film Archives of India - Internet Archive

• Biopic John documents the life of avant-garde Malayalam director John Abraham - Scroll.in

• M. B. Sreenivasan - Wikipedia

Agraharathil Kazhuthai On YouTube