Kamal Hassan’s Anbe Sivam: An underrated classic

Madhavan, a young upper-middle-class Indian ad moviemaker, encounters a middle aged trade union activist in an airport. Due to heavy rain the flight gets cancelled and the two make an arduous trip by every means available from Orissa to Chennai. Their conflicting values and approaches constantly creates frictions and through this journey changing values  in India is beautifully portrayed. The movie comes with a great plot, brilliant story telling, humour and music.

It took me two years to write this review since the movie overwhelms me. I have seen the movie atleast 15 times so far and each time I discover some layer that I did not notice before. But thanks to brilliant story-telling and direction these layers of complexity do not overwhelm the viewer, even when we see the movie for the first time. I have unpacked some of these themes below.

The Journey

The flood forces Madhavan to stay in a room with Kamal Hassan who looks “less classy”. Madhavan also finds him meddlesome and garrulous. As flights and trains get cancelled and Madhavan is forced to go without comforts he is accustomed to, and complains bitterly that India is a country where you cannot get things even if you can pay for it.

Being accustomed to poorer ways of life, Kamal Hassan takes these discomforts with stride and acts resourcefully to steer them out of their troubles, especially in their common quest to reach Madras quickly. Madhavan discovers as the movie goes along that while Kamal Hassan is disagreeably garrulous, his social skills make him resourceful; while he is meddlesome, he is thoughtful and helpful; and while he is less classy, Kamal Hassan works for a cause that is worthy. The different locations of the two characters and their approach to life set the context for the movie.

The movie is a metaphorical journey for the ad maker who has not seen discomforts in life. The flood forces him to see acute poverty and helplessness that he has not encountered in his sheltered middle-class life. The movie beautifully introduces such images in brief shots initially spanning just one or two seconds (scantilly dressed children jumping into dirty flood water, helpless people sitting in a corner, etc.). As the movie goes along such encounters increase in length. Madhavan first faces a robber who tries to steal his suitcase and then he travels on the top of a bus to reach Andhra Pradesh. He then witnesses the victims of a train accident and finally travels in an ambulance with a boy who is badly injured in the accident with the boy finally dying.

In his first encounters with poverty he is disdainful and distant. As his encounters grow Madhvan starts engaging and slowly becomes empathetic. When he donates blood to save a dying boy and sees him dying despite it, he is moved and his sense of humanism and love for the random stranger finds an expression. These encounters challenge his assumptions in life and he has conversations with Kamal Hassan who has dealt with these experiences. These conversations take them through religion, consumerism, communism, and other themes about the society.

Love, religion, communism & consumerism

When Madhavan learns that the boy had died he questions if god exists.  Kamal Hassan answers that god exists, and Madhavan is god himself when he is moved to shed tears for an unknown boy. God is nothing but love, he argues (and hence the title, Anbe Sivam – or love is god). Kamal Hassan constantly reinterprets religion, communism and ‘goodness’ on the whole as love for the stranger.  This idea is drawn from the Bhakti movement and even the title, Anbe Sivam is drawn from the poetry of Thirumular who wrote more than 1,500 years ago.

Yar yar sivam captures this idea in a beautiful song

In keeping with the Bhakti ideology, the movie also mocks people who practice religious rituals but exploit other people in their routine life. Affection, even for the stranger, becomes his prism through which he evaluates all ideologies and practices.  This is succinctly portrayed in the poem Thirumulam (also the source of the title Anbe Sivam) in the following excerpt:

“One can use his bones as fuel

Cut his flesh to pieces and makea golden fry

But it is no use

Those who have compassion for

their fellow human beings

Only they can reach the abode of God”

This theme comes out through the conflicts between the two, but more importantly through the father of the woman that Kamal Hassan was in love with, played by the great actor Nazar.  Nazar plays the role of an unscruplous businessman who keeps claiming that god will protect him since he prays regularly and engages in all rituals.

The movie is a reflection of the Tamil socio-political milieu, especially from the interaction of ideas between Tamil revivalist movement, the Dravidian movement and the communist movements of the twentieth century.  Reflecting this, the movie has a seamless debate on religion, economic structures and human values in general.  In the movie, communism is brought into the picture through Kamal Hassan’s engagement with Trade Unions, and this ideological difference forms one layer of the movie.  A memorable scene in the movie involves Madhavan challenging Kamal Hassan that Communism is dead since Soviet Union has fallen.  He retors by askign if “Romeos” like him will stop loving if Taj Mahal is destroyed. When Madhavan responds by saying love is a feeling, Kamal Hassan argues that Communism too is a feeling.

Many styles of humour

The movie combines slapstick comedy with satire and wordplay that makes it a thorough laugh amidst the seriousness of the theme. There is a healthy dose of satire with communism, government, consumerism, tamil society, religion, love, and what not being mocked. There are many occassions when conversations become serious like when Kamal Hassan talks of his father dying in an accident or when Madhavan discusses the boy’s death and just when I would think that I may start crying, there would be a dose of humour that would completely change my emotions; this is perhaps the most memorable aspect of the movie for me.

Characters that make a brief appearence

At one point the duo reach a small railway station from where they can get a train to Madras. They ask the station master if they could each make a phone call to their families and station master arbitrarily says only one person can make one phone call. An angry Madhavan asks him why to which he coolly responds, “because I am the station master”. This character appears for about a minute but is still well developed as a government official with little work who likes to joke around and use his power arbitrarily. Many such characters wade in and out of the movie often and leave an impression though they appear for as little as 10 seconds or at most for 3 minutes.

To conclude…

In one of his movies Kamal Hassan tells his girlfriend that they should go and watch Schindler’s List. It’s a great movie and so no one will be watching it and we can have our private space to be romantic, he tells her. This cheeky comment captures the fate of many a greate movie. Anbe Sivam did not fail in the box office, but it did not do as well as it could have. With such great acting, storytelling, humour and music, the movie could have done a lot better than it did but such are the ways of Tamil society and movie fans. I feel that the movie is so subtle in the way it treats the ideas that it has not reached a mass audience despit the presence of stars like Kamal Hassan, Madhavan and Nazar. But thankfully for people with my taste, there are people like Kamal Hassan who are willing to make great movies periodically even if they know that they will not succeed in raking in the big bucks.