Amma Ariyan

The story revolves around the incidents following the death of a young Naxalite, upon whose death his friends travel to the village where his mother lives to inform her of the death of her only son.

Amma Ariyan is considered to be a complex movie and was one of the biggest experiments in Indian cinema when funds were raised to make a film without giving the slightest heed to its commercial viability. Since its release in 1986, critics have read several layers of meaning in its story. The film was the only South Indian film to feature on British Film Institute’s Top 10 Indian Films list.

In the thinly populated forest area of Wayanad in northeast Kerala, the jeep in which he is traveling is stopped by the Police, who take possession of it to carry a dead body found hanging on the wayside tree. The dead man’s face looks familiar to Purushan. He becomes restless and is seized with a pathological obsession to find out the identity of the deceased. Against the wishes of his girlfriend, he abandons his trip to Delhi and sets out to seek his friends who may have some clue. Purushan meets journalist friends, doctors, and finally a veteran comrade, fondly addressed as Balettan who identifies the dead as the fellow musician who accompanied Satyajit, the guitarist. Satyajit confirms the deceased is his friend Hari, the tabla player. Together they decide to inform Hari’s mother who stays in Cochin. They set out on a long eventful journey from the northern highlands of Wayanad to the Southern port city of Cochin.

As they move from Kozhikode to Beypore, Kodungalloor, Thrissur, Kottapuram, Vypin, and finally to Fort Kochi, the group swells as they meet many mothers and their sons and relatives who have known Hari; some had known him as a tabla player, some as Tony, the jazz drummer, and others as a silent political activist, a victim of police brutality, and a loner. And for others, he was a drug addict and one who used to drown his sorrow and pain in his music. Through their recollections, Hari’s rather diffused identity unfolds. His classmates remember Hari as an introvert, weak and indecisive. His worker comrades identify him as a staunch revolutionary with strong resistance and willpower. But then what went wrong?

The colonial past of the places, what they took from us and what they left behind as well as the people’s protests and uprisings, the region witnesses, and their heroes and victims are integrated into the narrative, by way of information as well as critique.

While reporting to his mother about Hari and his friends and their mothers on his southbound journey, John also reconstructs the history of the land through a series of class struggles, student protests, and workers union clashes that took place in the region where Purushan traversed. Starting with the medical students agitation against commercialization of medical education, to a short dialogue with Karuppuswamy, the unfortunate victim who had lost both his legs in a colliery workers struggle for better wages and human dignity, in Kottapuram, to Vypin island where several mazdoors (labourers) either died or lost their eyesight in the man-made hooch tragedy, to the Citizens group’s forcible taking over of rice and sugar hoarded by unscrupulous black marketer traders and distributing to ordinary people at fair prices and giving back the money collected to the traders, to the manipulated fight between workers of two feuding unions in a Mattancherry street in Fort Kochi, where four fishermen had died, and also some targeted working-class leaders in a fake Police encounter, an abortive factory workers strike extending solidarity to the retrenched women workers in Fort Kochi, are some of the long list of peoples protests and struggles reported with deep concern and feeling by Purushan in a long letter to his Mother.

As Purushan and his group wait for Hari’s mother to come out of the Baptism ceremony from the church, they analyze their own past, noting the emerging debate focusing on the romantic evasions and tragic failures of the extremist movement. When Hari’s mother finally turns up and faces the youth congregation, she asks “Suicide wasn’t it?” The film ends with Purushan’s mother watching Hari’s mother wiping her tear.