Ritwik Ghatak’s stint as vice-principal of FTII left something of him in his students. A John Abraham would never have happened were it not for the tutelage of Ghatak. John did what he did because Ghatak validated his angst. Similar was the case with his other protegee, but besides these few men, the legacy of Ghatak seems to have terminated. We need more people to be aware of this great man’s oeuvre and humanity. We need young filmmakers to continue in the tradition of this alternative school of filmmaking.’
John Levich, American film critic.

John Abraham died in a tragic accident 20 years ago. He was not yet 50 and at the height of his powers as an artist who combined in his vision the philosophical calm of a prophet with the bewildering unpredictability of a mad man. When he died, there departed with him a part of what may be called the “Ritwik universe”. What exactly is meant by that expression is difficult to say except for a vague awareness of a creative richness that is not given to many to possess.

Ghatak had faith in Abraham; he sensed in the young man a capacity for creativity that he did not find in too many of his students. Talking to an interviewer, Ghatak once said that he “pinned” his faith on John Abraham; and John did not fail his Ritwikda. Especially in his last film, Amma Ariyan, which may be read as a homage to both Mother and Mentor.

One first heard of John Abraham sometime in the late ‘70s after his second film, Agraharathil Kazhuthai (Donkey in a Brahmin Village), had caused a wave of critical interest. Made in Tamil and not in the director’s native Malayalam, the film is a delightful and disturbing satire on Brahmin superstition and bigotry told through the story of a helpless little donkey. The poor creature is blamed for all the ills that descend on the village and finally done away with by some hired killers. But habitually tongue-in-cheek John wouldn’t let the story rest at that. The humble four-legged was invested with posthumous miraculous powers, as also with a capacity to invoke an apocalyptic end. Following the death of the donkey, an absconding son returns out of the blue, a lame woman is able to walk again, so on and so forth. The sinner becomes a saint overnight: a temple is raised to the memory of the benevolent donkey, and black humour expressed in an almost documentary style has a field day.

While the film succeeded in giving an idea of how people with closed minds give birth to rigid and cruel societies, it could also be read as an allegory with recognisable parallels in human experience. Many an innocent person is hounded out of his wits in his lifetime, only to be pronounced blameless when he is dead and gone. When Ghatak was alive and made his kind of films with rare skill, insight and a conviction bordering on vengeance, he was declared insane as a result of excessive drinking over a period of many years. But once he was dead and could no longer be a thorn in anyone’s flesh ~ or so they thought ~ retrospectives of his films began to be held all over and such homage started being paid to him by word of mouth or in writing as would have caused him to wither away in embarrassment had he been living.

A similar fate was reserved for John Abraham His drinking and his offhand lifestyle caused some people, obsessed with bourgeois standards, to look upon him as a pariah. Little or no mention was made in well-defined circles of his importance as a filmmaker and intellectual. Truth to tell, if the likes of John Abraham are allowed their pilgrim’s progress without hindrance, they can prove to be a threat to the inequitous, established order of things. So the world’s gatekeepers and policemen try to laugh off the rebels and the non-conformists ~ but what nervous laughter it can be!

After graduating from Kerala University, John Abraham took a job with the LIC and adorned a clerical chair in the Bangalore office of the organisation for a while. Soon he joined the FTII where he counted KK Mahajan, Mani Kaul and others among his friends. His first film, Vidyarthikale Ithile Ithile (This Way Students, 1971), won the national award for best story, but went largely unnoticed. It was with Donkey, his second film, that he made many sit up with a start. It was another five years before he could make his third film, Cheriyachente Kroora Krithyangal (Cruelties of Cheriyachan, 1979).

Amma Ariyan, his fourth and final work, deservedly made John Abraham a legend. Rarely has a film established a director as firmly in the minds of serious viewers as Amma Ariyan did. Crossing State boundaries and regional frontiers with a sureness that was difficult to believe when it first began to happen in the late 1980s, Amma Ariyan now has a pan-Indian audience that is characterised by mature thinking about cinema as art, as politics, and as philosophical discourse not confined to metaphysical niceties. John Abraham’s political philosophy is full-bodied, rooted to the searing lives and experiences of the people he chooses to portray, and yet ethereal in a moving, contrary sort of way. Here is a saint of the gutters in whose vision the profane became sacred and the sacred, ordinary.

On the subject of near-hysterical allegiance on the part of many viewers in Kerala, Bengal and elsewhere to the artistic and political legacy of John Abraham , one vehemently repudiates the suggestion heard occasionally that it is juvenile or reeks of over-enthusiasm. Come to think of it, it is people like John Abraham and Ritwik Ghatak who have given to film art in India that memorable cutting edge without which the viewing experience becomes listless and grey. Cinema is a many-roomed mansion; and the master and his pupil, who was himself maturing into a master when prematurely called away, inhabited a particularly ill-furnished chamber reserved for those fanatically opposed to mathematical precision or clinical cleanliness in art. One daresay that making it big in the world in his lifetime may not be the best thing to happen to an artist.

John Abraham was a ‘romantic artist’ in the highest and noblest traditions of the expression. Believing that cinema could be used as an effective tool for social change, he spearheaded the Odessa Collective which aimed at the production and exhibition of creative and meaningful cinema with the active participation of the man-in-the-street. The importance of the Odessa Collective is that it was the first ~ and perhaps only ~ attempt in India to take on the intervention of market forces. Understandably, Odessa’s first film and Abraham’s last ~ Amma Ariyan ~ cast all conventions to the winds and rewrote the grammar of filmmaking to suit the director’s purposes.

The John Abraham folklore, or mystique if you like, is to be understood in terms of not just the films he made, but the mythical life he led that mocked decisively at norms and notions of accepted social behaviour. While trying to neutralize the tyranny of the market, he forged direct ties with common people who consisted in a large measure of poor, illiterate villagers. Significantly, their lack of means or distance from books did not prevent them from recognising Abraham as someone special and quite apart from the general run of Kerala intellectuals, many of whom lead self-engrossed lives in ivory towers. It does not require acute intelligence to realise why these self-important creatures of conformity shiver like leaves at the very mention of John Abraham’s name. Like the Biblical saint who gave his head to a tyrannical king and a dancing girl but not his faith after whom he was named, John Abraham is a spectre that will continue to haunt the mediocre for a long time to come; a dead man who refuses to die, who drew spiritual sustenance all his life from the example of his teacher and older kinsman.