A short excerpt from the booklet essay by Suranjan Ganguly.


Kathapurushan is arguably Adoor Gopalakrishnan's most ambitious film, epic in scale but intimate in tone, covering nearly forty-five years of Kerala's history.  Adoor has described it as "an emotional journey through time and history" to distinguish it from a socio-historical document which it superficially resembles. The film begins with the protagonist Kunjunni's birth and ends with the publication and subsequent banning of his first novel, The Hard Consonants. Thus, in many respects, Kathapurushan is a cinematic Bildungsroman, charting the emotional and psychological evolution of a man and his consciousness, framed by some of the key developments that have shaped Kerala's complex transition from feudalism to modernity. Kunjunni, in fact, belongs to a land-owning family whose decline is linked to unfolding historical events.

Kunjunni enters the world precariously. As a result of a breach delivery, he has to be held upside down and smacked so that he can take his first gulp of air. He will, later in life, develop a stammer and a limp. Along with these markers of ‘otherness’, which point to his physical and emotional frailty, he must also live with the social stigma of having been abandoned by his father. Thus the protagonist of Adoor's epic is not the prototypical tough-guy landlord but an ordinary - even flawed - human being whose private destiny is linked to the social and historical processes shaping Kerala as well as India as a nation.  He is the ‘Man of the Story’ (as per the English title of the film) who will step outside his own class, become author of his life, and find the common humanity he shares with everybody.

Kathapurushan begins in 1937 and covers the following historical events:

• The assassination of Gandhi;
• The Communist electoral revolution of 1957;
• The Land Reforms Bill of 1959;
• The Naxalite uprising of 1968;
• Indira Gandhi's declaration of the Emergency in 1975;
• The return of the Left Alliance in Kerala in 1980.

These events define the context of Kunjunni's evolution and the reciprocal nature of his relationship to them. As he interacts and struggles with the forces unleashed by history, Kunjunni is moulded by them just as he, in turn, moulds them to a certain extent. For Adoor, history progresses through such a struggle between the individual and the system within which he/she functions. He believes it is the duty of every man and woman to question and oppose all political systems - even the ones they create - as soon as they become (inevitably) rigid and oppressive.

Suranjan Ganguly’s complete essay, from which this excerpt is taken, appears in the booklet which accompanies the DVD release.