By Joe (Jo) Palathunkal
The Malayalam movie “Pulimurukan” darts into 100 crore (1 billion) rupee collection club, just in a month, the first Malayalam movie to scale that height, that also in such a short period.
As I watched the Mohanlal starrer Pulimurukan translated as the Wild Hunter, two famous short-stories came to my mind – “Journey By Night” by Norah Burke, and another one by Ruskin Bond – “The Tiger in the Tunnel.” Both these stories have a powerful message for the cranky, wild lovers of the wild (both forests and animals) and the reasonable ones like philanthropists Kochaousep Chittilappally and Jose Maveli and Kerala Minister K. T. Jaleel.
Norah Burke writes about one of her characters Sher Singh Bahadur – “He could find tigers where there were no tigers.” In Pulimurukan Mohanlal is like Sher Singh Bahadur and those adivasis in the forest who have a tremendous sense of the wild which today’s unscientific, unreasonable votaries of the wild miss. “Pulimurukan” tells them be reasonable and scientific in thinking and approach.
What impressed me about Pulimurukan was its forest-mountain backdrop along with the struggle for survival by the adivasis. Norah Burke vividly brings out this struggle in her story by showing the courageous journey by foot of a tribal boy through the forest at night carrying his precariously sick younger brother Kunwar to the hospital far away in Kalaghat (50 miles away). As he moves on, Burke makes a perspicacious observation: “Around him lay primeval forest in which the struggle of vegetation and the struggle of life continued as they had done since the beginning of the world.”
Pulimurukan is a portrait of this struggle between the human life and the wild. Ruskin Bond shows this struggle in a very poignant way in his story “The Tiger in the Tunnel” by describing the killing of Baldeo by the tiger and the killing of the tiger (fatally wounded by Baldeo using his axe) by the train in the tunnel.
Bond brings out the typical characteristic of a tribal in the story when he writes: “Baldeo walked confidently for, being a tribal himself, he was used to the jungle and its ways. Like his forefathers, he carried a small axe, fragile to look at, but deadly when in use. With it, in three or four strokes, he could cut down a tree as neatly as if it had been sawn, and he prided himself in his skill in wielding it against wild animals. He had killed a young boar with it once, and the family had feasted on the flesh for three days.”
Mohanlal is the Baldeo in “Pulimurukan” and he has lived his tribal character to its logical heights of excellence. My hats off to the cameraman who gave us a lively visual treat by sensitively depicting everything almost like a da Vinci brush or a Michelangelo chisel. Melodious and meaningful song-music combination and the telling dialogues make the movie worth watching again and again.
And finally when the police officer hands over to Mohanlal the license to do what Baldeo did to the tiger, it powerfully tells us what a young man spoke with authenticity and authority on the shores of the Galilee: “You are worth more than a thousand sparrows.” “The Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath.” (Mark 2: 27).
In today’s India when people advocate even the protection of mad dogs and the dogs that kill human beings quoting laws and legal provisions, Pulimurukan is a wakeup call for the whole nation. In this sense, the movie is worth more than a 100 crore.
Remember, what Marshall Mcluhan said: “Medium is the message.” If so, “Pulimurukan” is a powerful medium and an equally powerful message for our times. I hope Vaisakh will give us another memorable treat in the sequence to “Pulimurukan” he has promised, and I am waiting for the day.
(Contact: josephpalathunkal00@gmail.com. Mob. 9726800249)