Malayalees love to appropriate place names and so Mangaluru becomes Mangalapuram and Chennai’s old moniker Madras becomes Madhirashi. It is pronounced with a lot of love, a touch of yearning and is frothy like the tea you get in the innumerable Chetta-kadais dotting the city.
The current Chennai and the former Madras have always surfaced in Malayalam films, also called Mollywood by those who prefer labels. The umbilical cord between artistes from beyond the Western Ghats and the sunshine city on the Coromandel Coast has always remained intact. When the great movie studios were based in Madras, it was inevitable that Prem Nazir, Bahadur, Jayabharathi and Sheela, to name a few, preferred settling down in this metropolis.
Directors like I.V. Sasi and Priyadarshan followed suit and it was inevitable that Madras played a part in many Malayalam films, be it as a location or by lending studio assistance.
Madras was the coast where Mohan Lal and Sreenivasan landed on a boat while presuming it was Dubai in that cult classic Nadodikkattu. Another romantic comedy starring the duo — Mukundetta Sumitra Vilikkunnu — offered slice-of-life segments from the city’s streets. The long line of pots before the hand-pump, water issues and local politics were all highlighted in a humorous vein.
The whodunnit spirit, too, was in vogue when No. 20 Madras Mail released. The film starring the two Big Ms — Mammootty and Mohan Lal — dealt with a murder-mystery on the Trivandrum-Madras Mail with hat-tips to all the significant railway stations, including Madras Central, while the story moved forward.
Homage to the city
If this was all in the past, the Chennai touch was evident even in films of a more recent vintage like Neram, Hridhayam and Varane Avishyamund. These movies were all things Chennai as big heart, people’s warmth, impromptu chats, catharsis, romance (both teenybopper and mature), beach vignettes, delicious food and filter coffee got woven into the screenplay’s tapestry.
If older films rooted in the then milieu focussed on Madras’s innate charm and water issues, the recent ones trace a cosmopolitan urban space which is on a perennial gallop with its freeya vudu maame (just chill) vibe.
For the land of the swaying coconut palms, Chennai remains an important destination even if Bengaluru has had its share of Malayalam films doing hat-tips to that Garden City, be it through Bangalore Days, 100 Days of Love or even the latest horror-comedy Romancham. However, with actors and musicians traipsing on the Tamil-Malayalam bridge, Chennai will remain an evolving locale in Mollywood and the viewers aren’t complaining, be it here, Kerala or among the Malayalee diaspora and all we can say is: Adipoli or Semma (both meaning ‘ah, that’s excellent’).
