Prakash Belawadi
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The Times of India, Feb 14 2016
Sandhya Soman
The grumpy Malayali migrant in Airlift, the `CDI' chief in Talvar and the RAW agent in Madras Café...Prakash Belawadi's southern characters are remarkably shorn of cliches
In Airlift, Georgekutty is one among the 1,70,000 Indians waiting to be rescued from Kuwait in the wake of Iraq invasion. But Prakash Belawadi's cynical Malayali migrant who will trust no one and thank no one, not even his rescuer, stands out even in that massive cast. The audience gets this man -the rude, irascible bully in a shabby safari suit who has been around the world and taken too many knocks to be any different. In the end, when he awkwardly hugs the hero, he gets almost as many taalis.
This is not the first time, the Bangalorean Belawadi has played a believable southern character -there was Talvar where he plays a cynical `CDI' chief and before that, Madras Café, where he was a bent RAW agent. Belawadi, with his easy acting skills and unapologetic accent, seems to be the thinking filmmaker's Bala SwamyGeorgekutty . In Airlift, there is a scene in which he spies a Kuwaiti woman among fleeing Indian refugees. He decides to out her to avoid the wrath of the invading Iraqi troops. His wife pleads with him to spare the woman but he snaps: “Jnan entha viddi aano? (Am I a fool?), and dismisses her with a sexist “Nee ithilu idapedanda“ (Don't interfere in this). So comprehensible is Belawadi's body language that it needed no translation or subtitling.
A seasoned Kannada actor-director, Belawadi says he had to summon his acting chops and his memories of Malayali friends to perfect the diction and intonation. He wanted to ensure that “nobody laughed when I speak“.
South Indian seriousness is no laughing matter in Hindi cinema any more. The `Madrasi' template set by the actor Mehmood 50 years ago -oil-slicked hair, sandalwood tikka, and a ludicrous accent -has fewer takers now.Take for example the cool Tam-bram girl Ananya in 2 States (Alia Bhatt) or even Rohit Shetty's Tuluspeaking character in Singham. They are all everyday characters.
In recent years, one exception was Shah Rukh Khan's curd-slurping nerd Shekhar Subramanium (Ra. One). “That's the nature of caricaturing. It flattens everything to one layer and here, it all came down to the accent,“ says Belawadi.
When the trend started in the 1960s, Hindi filmmakers were mostly clueless about south India. “In the 60s, if the character didn't have sandalwood on his forehead, or wore a lungi, there was no way of identifying him,“ says film historian Bhawana Somaaya. The trend con tinued up until the 1980s though there were several collaborations between Bollywood and the Tamil film industry during this period.
The scene changed post-2000 when the me dia and television boom led to a better north south connect. Also, filmmakers like Mani Ratnam made Hindi movies Roja and Yuva where the colours and flavours of the south were tastefully presented. But what has really changed the depiction of ethnic identities is the evolution of a pan-India filmmaking where directors care only for the character's rele vance to the plot. “In Company , Mohanlal is just a straightforward character. Malayalis may find it difficult to speak Hindi but the south Indian accent has not been caricatured,“ says Raja Krishnan Menon, director of Airlift.
Filmmaker Shoojit Sircar wanted his RAW officer to be Malayali because his research said so. “We wanted him to be as normal as possible, and mostly speak English, and sometimes in south Indian-toned Hindi,“ says Sircar.
There is the growing diversity of the film industry too. “Airlift's writers are from across the country: one from Kashmir, two from Kerala, an other from Punjab. This is reflect ing in our cinema,“ he says. But he predicts that lazy stereotypes will persist because they help build a character quickly.
Belawadi says he doesn't like caricatures that aren't “affectionate“.Bengalis and their love for fish, Kan nadigas and their penchant for paan are cultural eccen tricities that commu nities don't mind being parodied.
“But if you make fun of a person's non-erasable iden tity, their accent or complexion, it is unfair. What's so funny about a Ma layali speaking English with an accent? Do we m a ke f u n o f French speaking English?“ he says.
