This concluding part of Professor V Vijayakumar’s essay engages with Nizhalkuthu and Oru Pennum Randaanum, where Adoor Gopalakrishnan extends his inquiry into state power, justice, and ethical collapse. In Nizhalkuthu, he examines the life of a hangman burdened by inherited guilt, caste legacy, and institutional hypocrisy. Oru Pennum Randaanum, adapted from four short stories by Thakazhi, draws us into the moral and social contradictions of everyday life—through narratives like The Thief’s Son, Law and Justice, Oru Koottukaran (A Friend), and the unforgettable portrait of Pankiyamma. These films question the boundaries of virtue and utility, of personal desire and collective judgment. Adoor’s late work becomes less about memory or revolution and more about the slow violence of systems that shape how we live, choose, and forget.
Nizhalkuthu (Shadow Kill) doesn’t rank among Adoor’s major works, yet significantly focuses on another dimension of state power – the life of a hangman. Adapting his own story, Adoor crafts a cinematic narrative about humans transformed into instruments of state oppression. Can we call the hangman an instrument of torture? This impoverished torture instrument itself undergoes suffering.
The film centers on an aged hangman who grieves, weeps, and drinks to forget his suspicion that he executed an innocent man. Dissatisfied with his profession, he remains sorrowful and hopeless, yet enjoys certain social recognition. Royal authority sustains hangmen through tax-exempt land, housing, and other privileges. His community even ascribes divinity to the hangman’s noose, with people seeking the ashes of burned ropes as medicinal cures. These royal concessions constitute attempts to mask the inherent brutality of this wretched occupation. The state’s approach to capital punishment proves profoundly hypocritical – tradition holds that the king issues last-minute pardons, though messengers invariably arrive post-execution, allowing the ruler moral evasion while the hangman bears the sin. The film concludes with the hangman’s son – a freedom fighter who opposed capital punishment – inheriting his father’s profession. This transmission of the despised occupation surprises none, as heredity qualifies one for such roles. Here we witness caste system values reincarnated differently – the occupational divisions that reinforce caste permanently trap oppressed communities in subjugation.
All historical narratives remain incomplete, whether through words or cinema, the complete representation of past history or lived experience proves impossible. Every creator confronts this limitation in certain moments of self-realization. Historians write interpretations – they articulate the particular readings their contemporary world demands and desires. The writer’s worldview, ideology, and prejudices inevitably permeate the text. Those who inscribe the stories or histories of bygone eras upon celestial scrolls remain equally subject to this imperative. When Adoor Gopalakrishnan adapts Thakazhi’s stories into cinematic language, he does not merely reproduce the past as depicted in Thakazhi’s writings, but rather re-presents them through elements that the new historical moment requires, while still maintaining their identity as Thakazhi’s narratives. Though these characters may appear as people of the past in their dress and dialogue, they have assimilated the conceptual world of the present. Contemporary problems and dilemmas manifest through them. While this adaptation remains Thakazhi’s story, it responds to the calls of a new era. This examination will focus on the film Oru Pennum Randaanum (One Woman and Two Men) to explore this phenomenon.
Certain portions from the adaptation of the story Oru Koottukaran (A Friend) in this film warrant description. Two friends travel together in a boat, both trapped in distressing circumstances. One man’s lover has become pregnant. Seeking abortion medication, they visit a traditional healer. The matter remains secret – its exposure would bring great shame. Sitting silently in the boat, they are ferried by a boatman who attended school with one companion. The boatman speaks partly to himself, partly to them:
“Each person’s fate is preordained. Isn’t complaining just foolishness?”
“How do we determine what’s good or bad, anyway?”
“They married me off before I turned twenty-one. Before I knew it, three little ones arrived. If you think about it, this is good – when we grow old, they’ll be grown.”
“Can we ever truly decide what’s good or bad?”
The boatman compares his life situation with his passenger’s. He articulates the understanding gleaned from his lived experience: one cannot determine good or bad. He cannot judge whether his life is good or bad. How can he decide whose path proves better – his educated, employed classmates or himself, a boatman? Yet marrying at twenty-one and quickly having three children brings its own peace – he consoles himself that they’ll be grown when he ages. While initially seeming to reflect a villager’s simplistic worldview, this proves deceptive.
In this writer’s assessment, Oru Koottukaran ranks fourth among the four stories in One Woman and two men when evaluated, comparatively. However, the philosophical world articulated through the boatman directly illuminates the value conflicts interwoven through all four narratives. Where lay the boundaries separating virtue and vice, right and wrong, good and bad? Can value judgments hold amidst life’s vast currents? What remains of life without such judgments, of positions that don’t distinguish right from wrong? Thakazhi’s stories transform into propositions enabling the director to create profound problematizations and interpretations. All four stories in Oru Pennum Randaanum interrogate beliefs and conceptions about morality and ethics. Value systems tested against abject living conditions like starvation and poverty (The Thief’s Son); justice rendered helpless and mute before corrupt officials’ authoritarianism (Law and Justice); moral dilemmas reduced to question marks before human temptations… Adoor’s cinema opens great doors of dialogic potential.
The value-system that always positions the thief as antagonist is what the boy in The Thief’s Son internalizes at school. This child lacks the capacity to recognize or articulate society’s role in creating thieves. He cannot bear knowing his father is a thief. Determined to tell his father to stop stealing, he repeatedly says this to his mother, insisting she wake him when his father returns at night. In the final scene, seeing the new clothes bought with stolen money, the boy’s moral consciousness collapses helplessly. Before his mother, he sobs that father has stolen again. At the story’s core lies the woman’s struggle, caught between her husband’s dishonorable profession and imprisonment, the shame and poverty they bring, and her son’s moral anguish.
The portrayal of Pankiyamma’s story becomes particularly noteworthy through its profound psychological analysis. The author Thakazhi introduces Pankiyamma as an attractive woman – young men in the village would fight over her. Ramakurup, an older relative, eventually married her. Though Ramakurup tried to keep Pankiyamma as his exclusive possession, she developed a friendship with Kittappilla during her husband’s absences. This culminated in violence: Ramakurup went into hiding, Kittappilla was hospitalized. Pankiyamma helped both the accuser and the accused. Their conflict persisted even after returning, escalating into communal clashes between factions. Both Ramakurup and Kittappilla were imprisoned. Upon their release, they found Pankiyamma living as another man’s wife with a child.
Within patriarchal marital morality, Pankiyamma stands condemned as sinful and immoral. She knows society speaks ill of her, and recognizes she doesn’t conform to its moral codes. She feels she’s doing wrong – society’s value system has subjugated her subconscious. In one scene, she tells Kittappilla “I must do what even God wouldn’t approve.” Another moment shows her pausing while reading Changampuzha’s ‘Ramanan’ at the line “What business do others have to judge so much?” Pankiyamma refuses to live by conventional morality or conceal her desires. She behaves according to her inner longings, maintaining affection for both Ramakurup and Kittappilla.
The film’s final scene shows Ramakurup and Kittappilla visiting Pankiyamma’s home (Ramakurup’s former house) after prison. They see a young man on the verandah and hear a baby crying inside. When Pankiyamma emerges with the child, a hate-filled Ramakurup demands “Whose is this?” Unflinching, she replies “My baby’s father,” then calmly asks “When did you get out of jail?” This moment reveals Pankiyamma’s complete self-actualization – rejecting societal morality while embodying love and compassion. Such liberated Pankiyammas form part of Kerala’s history.
Adoor’s Pankiyamma doesn’t languish pining for husband or lover. Society doesn’t view her as virtuous. External moral judgments don’t influence her. Only her own desires determine which men she accepts. While married to Ramakurup, she maintained relations with Kittappilla; when Ramakurup hid, she intensified this bond; when both were imprisoned, she took another husband – fulfilling her changing desires. Neither past memories nor future dreams obstruct her present. Her amorality manifests as urgency to immerse in present pleasures.
Each of these narratives testifies that we do not inhabit worlds of ideals. Real life remains distant from ideal existence. We are shaped by our circumstances. However, one must not overlook the role our consciousness plays in determining social existence. All problematizations emerge from contradictions forged by the confluence of circumstances and consciousness. If in real life we accept only what proves immediately useful, if our answers remain confined to this sphere alone, then ethical considerations become irrelevant. The inability to distinguish right from wrong may create a world devoid of moral consciousness. In such a world without moral values, ideals become worthless. Life lived for ideals would be judged foolish, while utilitarianism would dominate all spheres of existence. When moral consciousness becomes irrelevant, the sole surviving value becomes utility. Anything not immediately useful would be deemed meaningless and discarded.
The loss of moral consciousness may manifest as enthusiasm for celebrating the present. Certainly, any life gains meaning by confronting the present moment – just as every good writer gains the capacity to properly engage with the future through works that respond justly to their own lifetime. However, a life that celebrates the present while trampling the past and suspending the future cannot be called human. This contemporary mantra of “celebrate the present” operates as a double-articulation: simultaneously legitimizing late-capitalist subject formation through compulsive consumption while enforcing collective amnesia through temporal alienation In the era of globalization, it contributes to an ideological framework that serves the interests of the status quo. Those who succumb to utilitarianism become subservient to the values of the system.
Through his cinematic adaptations of Thakazhi’s stories, Adoor Gopalakrishnan presents a significant philosophical problem our era faces in language accessible to common viewers. Even amidst middle-class life submerged in consumerism and deconstructing existence itself, Adoor manages to project the belief that even the life of those considered lowliest retains meaning. Yet we must suspect how the attachments of Pankiyamma’s identity might relate to the dominant ideological world that measures everything by immediate utilitarian value. When contextualizing Pankiyamma’s story within contemporary realities, we also derive the lesson that women’s lives may quickly succumb to the system’s seductive strategies.
This article attempts to examine how Kerala’s master filmmaker approached history of Kerala and certain subtle power structures – those invisibly operating yet intensely effective. These realistic cinematic expressions about humans ensnared in ideological webs of power constituted unparalleled visual experiences in Malayalam cinema, did they not?
Adoor, The Maestro series ends here.
