Thusharam

This was a movie I so wanted to watch as a kid. Because it had snow. It was shot in Kashmir. In India people used to associate Kashmir with beautiful winter scenery and snow, inaccessible and exotic to majority of India’s plains dwelling population. Kashmir was a popular shooting location for Bollywood movies in the sixties and the seventies.  In the 1980s and 90s the number of Indian films shot in Kashmir drastically came down as it became less safer and more expensive to shoot in Kashmir as a result of the Valley’s disputed territory status and frequent militants/army skirmishes.

Thusharam was the first ever Malayalam movie shot in Kashmir. Thusharam means snow or dew drop. Unlike Eskimos with 50+ different words for snow, we equatorial people only have a couple of words for snow. These words also stand in for anything that remotely resembles snow – fog, dew, slush, sleet, you say snow we say ‘manjchu’ (or ‘thusharam’ if you want to be fancy.)

Till to date there are only a handful of Malayalam movies shot in Kashmir valley. I.V.Sasi was a quite an adventurous director, with his stories and themes set in exotic locations. Ezhaam Kadalinakkare (Beyond the seven seas) was another 1980s I.V.Sasi movie set in a foreign location – United States of America and the first Malayalam movie to be shot in the US of A. I did get lucky to watch that movie on big screen as a little kid, where I saw Niagara Falls for the first time.

Back to Thusharam, the story takes place at an Army base in Kashmir. Jayan, a famous Malayalam actor was originally cast as the hero of the movie. Jayan died while shooting a stunt sequence for another I.V. Sasi film, Kolilakkam. This paved way for the introduction a new hero to Malayalam movie industry – Ratheesh Rajagopal. Along with Ratheesh there is Seema (I. V. Sasi’s real life wife and a major Malayalam movie actor of the 80s), Balan K.N air, Jose, Johnny, Rani Padmini, Kunchan, Nellikkode Bhaskaran and others.

The story is a revenge drama that involves army personnel. The revenge is extracted by kidnapping the heroine. I am not heavily invested or critical of Malayalam movie stories of the late seventies or early eighties. They reflect what audience appreciated at the time and to me they offer a window to the life that existed in the background.

It was fascinating to see ordinary Kashmir neighborhoods and city streets from forty years ago. Bollywood movies shot in Kashmir in those days only showed the best profile of the region with rolling snow-covered hillsides and shikaras floating on Dal lake.  Kashmiris in Thusharam look authentic. In the more recent Mallu Singh movies, Kashmiris would have been played by Malayalis in pherans talking in perfect Malayalam and heavily accented Hindi.

The story line is taut, although with more fight sequences and loud BGM than is necessary. But that is 1980s Malayalam movies for you. Entertaining, nevertheless.