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A counter-culture icon remembered

Exactly a decade back, on May 31, 1987, Malayalees awoke to an impossible reality that John Abraham is no more. The day before, john Abraham had stepped into the void of time effectively murdering any hope of reviving the radical cinema which he held dear to him. A lot has been written on John Abraham as an artiste and as an individual, but few attempts have been made to critically evaluate the contributions of the most robust filmmaker the State has ever produced who, with just three films, redefined the contours of Malayalam cinema. The huge volume of potboilers being churned out every year is a grim reminder of the simple truth that the State is yet to find a true heir to John.

The film society movement which provided a fertile ground for John’s creative harvest already settled into a deep slumber. Even the Odessa movement which created history along with John through Amma Ariyan is in shambles, with activists forming warring groups.

John’s short stories, collected in two volumes, after his death, display a rare genre combining satire and surrealism. The searing honesty and raw energy of his works remain unparalleled.

His attempts at street theatre, Naikkali and Chennaikkal Athava Pattinimaranam, remain a cut above the stuff which floods the streets today.

Later on, John’s wayward lifestyle was perfected into a cliché by his pale imitators who had the least trace of the subversive creativity manifest in his body of works. None, however, had dared to venture into his kind of dangerous living. And his Bohemianism was subsumed by society. To what extent is John, a product of the pervasive disillusionment of the Sixties, relevant to the highly complacent and self-centred Malayalee milieu which turns everything into silly sentimentalism? A sure misfit in a culture which aims only at the lowest common denominator. Here rhetoric and moral posturing replace intelligent questioning and critical discourse. Perhaps it is more convenient to absorb John as a counter-culture icon than to encounter the inconvenient questions he raised.  

The Indian Express

Expressweek (supplement)

31 May 1988