Sumathy’s Ingirunthu

(Here and Now):

The Malaiyaha and Memory of the World 1823-2023

“It is intensely composed. I greatly appreciated the tension and obstacles to resolution along the way. We so rarely now see films that place that kind of creative demand/opportunity on the viewer.”

Anne Blackburn (Professor of South Asian & Buddhist Studies, Cornell University, 2017).

by Laleen Jayamanne

Continued from yesterday

Esther Valley, the newborn in that scene, is shown grown up mute and mentally simple, childlike in her non-verbal gestural communications with the community, a few of whom abuse her, but mostly feed her and are kind to her. She spends her days wandering around the community aimlessly but willingly doing small tasks when asked. But she is shown to be a keen observer at times, as when little Shadana is unaccountably pushed out of her house by her mother Sarasa, who slams the door behind her and she comes down some steps crying as a little boy comes up to her and takes her away with care.

She discovers some guns stashed in a derelict building as she explores it and appears to want to prevent Sarasa’s brother, Sekhar from going to Colombo as though she has a sense that he is vulnerable to some unknown lurking danger. She observes him with mounting agitation, when he is seen at a tea-shop arguing with a stranger, who appears to be connected to perhaps an outside political group, perhaps the Tigers. When Sekhar is arrested and interned in a camp these minor scenes line up and we remember Esther Valley’s anxiety on his behalf.

She is a purely fictional character unlike Peter, who is given both fictional traits and actual ones of the actor himself. Yet these two characters together enable Sivamohan to present the Malaiyaha as a community, from several angles in situ, rather than through a linear narration. We learn that Peter took care of Esther Valley after the deportation of her grand-mother. Neloufer de Mel has compared Esther Valley to Beloved in Tony Morrison’s novel of the same name, who coincidentally was on Sivamohan’s mind when creating her. While Beloved was a murdered ghost child who haunts the living palpably, the orphaned Esther Valley with her lack of speech and vulnerability, as I see her, provides Sivamohan (an outsider to the life in the layams) with a mediatory figure, together with whom to observe the community and to learn to talk with the Malaiyaha folk. I feel Esther Valley is a guide to the director, without whom she could not really experience the kind of intimacy and sense of trust, so perceptible in the work of the film. The crew of men entering the small domestic interiors of the layam, unravelling intimate family dynamics (however fictional), could have been a violation of sorts but doesn’t feel so. Sivamohan refers to the film as a ‘conversation’ she had had with the community. Here, the phatic, non-verbal aspects so vital to the living immediacy of any human communicative act is provided, magnified, by Esther Valley’s eloquently silent, light, affective, gestural presence in the film. She enables (through her different abilities) Sivamohan to show what is imperceptible to a normal person.

Melancholy Bewitchment

In this regard there is a scene set around 4 o’clock in the afternoon (judging by the sunlight that dapples on the walls of a high building as mist floats), where Esther Valley just hangs around. Nothing much happens and yet it’s a bewitched moment sensitising us to dancing light, wafting mist and the young girl’s gentle presence amidst the tea bushes. Tea estates are iconic advertising images of Ceylon-Lanka, but here we are given a different glimpse, delicate sensations and feeling for the infinitesimal in nature, that are not readily marketable because they are elusive and quiet, barely perceptible threshold events, for which we have no patience any more (even on film) with a sensorium pulsed by digital technology firing at the speed of light. The mute Esther Valley is a conduit to this world, a part of its melancholy ephemeral beauty and pain.

The Community

Ingirunthu is structured with a loose weave of several narrative strands which it picks up without an explicit pattern, creating a sense of a community with gendered manual work on the estate as dominant activity, with the men operating the machines and the women plucking tea.

We are introduced, in a mid-long shot, to the every-day-life of the layam (line dwellings), at dawn, cloaked in light mist with the residents getting ready for the day. A large cauldron sits on an open fireplace. A father bathes a little toddler in warm water, an old woman enjoys a steaming metal mug of tea, a child brushes teeth and a woman washes clothes while a dog sits near a wall curled up in the morning chill. A rare establishing-scene for those of us who have only ever gone to a state-of-the-art tea factory to see how the tea is made.

There are discussions among women about work, interviews where they explain how the unions have enabled better pay. We see women bring in their baskets full of tea leaves to be weighed to determine their wages, paid by the weight they produce each day, according to the industrialisation of labour through exact measurement of output; award wages given only if it’s 18 kilos per day! We hear a woman sing a song as she plucks tea leaves.

Another strand follows a married couple, Sarasa, her husband and two children, with her brother Sekhar, all lives that are brought into a sustained focus in the film through a plotted set of emotional scenes about shortage of money, food and much else, that ends in a climactic conflagration.

Along with these scenes, there is a narrative voice-over which reads out historical information regarding the origin of the plantation system and other major historical events at the opening of the film.

A young middle-class female Researcher arrives, introducing an outsider from Colombo, a feminist intellectual researching the lives of the women. In an obvious sociological sense, her role is not unlike that of Sivamohan’s, both feminist intellectuals engaging with a community they know very little about, but with a desire to know their conditions of life, through a technique of ethnographic conversations. This parallel between the two is given a social context by situating the Researcher back home in Colombo after her research trip to the estate. A rather humorous scene in an upmarket restaurant has her chatting with close friends about her recent research trip, expressing a sense of anxiety about being surveilled. Later we learn that all her research notes of conversations with the women on the estate have mysteriously disappeared from her office. A white van follows her placing the political time precisely.

Georgia on My Mind

But what I found completely surprising was the background entertainment provided at the restaurant while the Researcher and friends ate Italian food and chatted. A brooding seated guitarist accompanies a short-haired singer standing (wearing a stylish bluish-green, handloom sari and a sleeveless blouse) and singing the blues number ‘Georgia on my mind’ (about African-American nostalgia-homesickness) in an uncompromisingly mannerist style. The singer is Sivamohan’s own sister, Vasuki. This then is a milieu where Sivamohan herself would be at home. But then I learnt some vital details from my interview with her, which reveals a unique family history.