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9 Union with Nature In his film Kanchana Sita, Kerala filmmaker G. Aravindan (1935–1991) portrays Sita not in human form but as a representation of the philosophical concept of Prakriti, the animating force of the natural world conceived as female. In the film, Sita speaks only through movement in nature, such as when leaves rustle or the surface of the river ripples. Although Kanchana Sita touches upon several episodes from the final section of Ramkatha, Aravindan’s attention to the absence and presence of Sita animates his film. Aravindan was a painter, cartoonist, musician, and film director who worked most of his adult life as a Kerala Rubber Board administrator. Aravindan’s second full-length film, Kanchana Sita, contains features that developed into his distinctive cinematic style.1 He created a visual look of stark purity by filming large vistas in remote Andhra. The film reveals the inner life of characters such as Rama and Lava, rather than focusing on plot. Aravindan’s interest in marginalized people led him to cast Adivasas in most of the film’s roles. Finally, his incorporation of music to signal the presence of Sita is masterful.2 As Zacharias’s essay on Aravindan’s Kanchana Sita demonstrates, even particular retellings of Ramkatha generate their own subsequent retellings. In his original 1960 play, Kanchana Sita, C. N. Sreekantan Nair had rewritten the final section of Valmiki’s Ramayana as a critique of brahminical privilege and political repression. Using Nair’s play only as a starting point, Aravindan transformed the script according to his interpretation of Indian philosophy and his minimalist aesthetic. He replaced Nair’s crisply articulated exchanges of dialogue with a cinematic meditation on Rama’s separation from, and eventual union with, Sita, thus carrying the concept of Sita as Prakriti to its visual limit. Prakriti and Sovereignty in Aravindan’s Kanchana Sita film analysis by usha zacharias Aravindan’s unique contribution to world cinema and to the Ramayana tradition emerged out of the creative energy that colored the artistic milieu of Kerala in the 1970s and 1980s. His work related to, and was inspired by, a generation of iconoclastic artists, filmmakers, writers, painters, and sculptors who 1. He created the cartoon serial “Small Man and Big World” for a major Malayalam newspaper for eighteen years. In the early 1970s, his cartoons emphasized large blank spaces with tiny people at the bottom of the frame, similar to the look of his later films. 2. For surveys of Aravindan’s oeuvre, see Madhavan Kutty (1981), Rajadhyaksha and Willemen (1994: 45), and Robinson (1979: 92). 100 Sita in Context were deeply disillusioned with post-independence “modernization” and leftist democratic politics. The solitary colors of this generation’s rebellion, its selfdestructive impulse, and its masculine profile are etched into Aravindan’s film as well. A written commentary that throws light on Aravindan’s interpretation of the play precedes his film proper. This opening scroll reads, “This film is an interpretation of the uttara-kanda of the Ramayana. Our mythologies and the epics are constantly re-created in retellings. The epic is the basis for this visual interpretation as well. This film deviates from established norms in how it visualizes the protagonists and portrays the course of events in the epic.” The scroll explains that the film will try to reflect what it calls the epic’s adi-sankalpam, “original conception,”of the theme and protagonists. It states that“the inner essence of this film”is that woman is Prakriti. Ultimately Purusha, here conceived of as the (masculine) self, dissolves into Prakriti. Interpreted in this context, Rama’s journey (ayana) follows a compelling narrative path: the dissolution of the self, Purusha, into the female animating power of the universe, Prakriti.3 Eluttacchan’s Adhyatma Ramayana, the classic Malayalam telling of Rama’s story, views Rama as Purusha and Sita as Prakriti, an interpretation familiar to audiences in Kerala.4 However, in contrast to almost all other tellings of the uttara-kanda (final section), and in what probably constitutes Aravindan’s single most significant creative intervention in the film, Sita herself is physically absent. The title of C.N. Sreekantan Nair’s play, Kanchana Sita, refers to the golden image of Sita that substituted for her presence by Rama’s side in rituals that required a queen. In Aravindan’s film, Prakriti takes Sita’s place. In an interview, Aravindan stated that “C. N. [Sreekantan Nair] had made clear the prakriti-purusha notion in Ramayana” but, as director...

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