Pasa Malar reexamined
Tears for a Brother, and a Doctor Who Is Never Asked
The proprietor of Rani Cable Networks (Kamal Haasan) is luxuriating in the last scenes of a black-and-white Tamil melodrama (kai veesamma kai veesu) when his young assistant saunters in and cannot resist a dig at the misty-eyed boss. The boss dabs his eyes with the edge of his veshti and fires back: “Even the toothbrush-mustached Hitler wept, watching films.” Besides, he demands, if someone watches PasaMalar and doesn’t cry, should that person even be considered human?
The assistant asks, deadpan, whether Hitler had watched PasaMalar, then adds another jab: the boss doesn’t need a film at all, since seeing “Starring Sivaji Ganesan” in the title credits is enough to set him off. Jeyamohan, who wrote the dialogue for Papanasam, meant to mark the character as a Sivaji devotee. But the joke lands because it is easy to picture the real Kamal Haasan weeping over a Sivaji classic. For decades PasaMalar has been the film people cry at, and cry together at.
I have always wondered about the person the tears are not for. The film gives its running time to Raju, Radha and Anand, who talk, sing and break each other’s hearts at length. Dr. Malathi, the one who outlives them all, barely gets to speak. She is educated, employed and independent, and she is the character the script hands the fewest words. Since the film will not tell us what she thinks, I am going to do some of the speaking for her. I will say where I am describing what is on screen and where I am inferring.
Two sets of siblings
The 1961 film, directed by Bhimsingh, is an unapologetic box-of-tissues weepie about a brother and sister. Raju (Sivaji Ganesan) and Radha (Savithri) were orphaned young and have meant the world to each other ever since. They climb out of poverty together: he goes from factory worker to factory owner, learns English, takes piano lessons and wears tuxedos on occasion; she, bubbly and nicely turned out, learns to drive. When she takes the wheel of her Plymouth, onlookers ask, “Which principality is she a princess of?”
The film pairs them with another set of orphaned siblings, this time from wealth: the architect Bhaskar (M. N. Nambiar) and his sister, Dr. Malathi (M. N. Rajam). A well-wisher proposes that each man marry the other’s sister. Raju is all for his sister marrying the architect, but demurs at his own match. How can an uneducated man like him marry an educated woman? Malathi, however, is smitten. At a party, she hands him sherbet in a nice glass and he politely says, “thank you.” His diction, a friend observes, is better than our professor’s. Later he accompanies her on the piano (pattu ondru ketten, paravasam annen).
Notice who discusses her future here. A well-wisher proposes the match, Raju demurs, and a friend urges her not to miss the chance. Malathi’s own feelings are announced rather than heard.
A brother’s love, and its cost
The double wedding seems assured until Raju learns that Radha loves Anand (Gemini Ganesan), his friend from the old factory days. Raju thrashes him. When Anand urges Radha to elope, she insists she will marry only with her brother’s blessing. “He will have to fall at my feet first,” Anand retorts in anger. Radha will not tolerate any disrespect to her brother and is ready to call the whole thing off. Raju, watching in secret in a rose garden, wipes a tear from his cheek with the barrel of his loaded pistol. Secure in her loyalty, he throws the gun away and blesses the match.
It is the film’s most famous scene, and also its warning. Raju’s love for his sister is magnificent and ruinous. Though the story has its designated villains, Anand’s atthai and her son, it is Raju’s sentiment that brings the house down. Overcome, he signs away the rights to the home he built and hands it to his sister’s family.
The doctor in the background
Malathi, now married to Raju, is a rare thing in Tamil cinema: a female physician who drives herself to work and is absorbed in her profession. The clearest glimpse of her inner life comes in one short exchange. She tells Raju she cannot attend a social engagement because she has a physicians’ meeting at Town Hall at 5 PM. “I am so sorry,” she says, firmly and politely, when asked to reconsider. It is a small moment, but it is the one place where she states a priority and holds to it.
Raju then decides he won’t attend either, and phones his friend to claim that his wife is unwell, though she is about to address a public forum. It is an absurd deception. The film does not let Malathi’s firmness stand. Later she falters, regretting her professional ambition over family duty. Her regret is reported; we are not given the scenes in which she arrives at it.
The same pattern shows up when Raju’s finances collapse and Malathi is offered a scholarship to study abroad. She hesitates, and we are not told why. The decision is settled elsewhere. Raju encourages her to go, persuaded by Bhaskar that a change of scene might restore Radha’s spirits. The man who proposed her marriage, the man she married and the brother who is advising him all weigh in on whether she should advance her career. She is the one person in the conversation who is never shown giving her opinion.
Tamil cinema of the era struggled to portray an independent woman doctor without undercutting her, yet real women had already defied convention, and they had spoken their terms aloud. Gemini Ganesan’s own atthai, Muthulakshmi Reddi, was one of the first female doctors in the country. Her biography, Muthulakshmi Reddy: A Trailblazer in Surgery and Women’s Rights, tells us she graduated from Madras Medical College in 1912. At 28 she married a fellow physician, Sundara Reddy, on the condition that he “always respect me as an equal and never cross my wishes.” She became the first woman legislator in British India and, as a policy maker, helped end child marriage and the devadasi system of dedicating girls to temple deities. She remained dynamic until her death in 1968. Did she watch this film, I wonder? After all, her nephew starred in it. Did they ever talk about how women were portrayed in the black-and-white classics of the fifties and sixties?
Set Reddi’s demand beside Malathi’s polite “I am so sorry.” One woman wrote her terms into her marriage; the other apologizes for keeping a meeting.
The ending, reconsidered
Raju promises to care for their son while Malathi is abroad and does a terrible job, dragging the child along on a pilgrimage. He loses his eyesight and dies a blind pauper. Radha rushes to his hospital bedside with her daughter, only to collapse and die beside him. Anand, realizing at last how wicked his atthai has been, rushes to beg Raju’s forgiveness, far too late.
Malathi returns to India just after her husband’s death. Her last line: “This is such a big punishment for not staying by your side and looking after you!” She says it to a man who can no longer hear it. The film asks us to hear a woman blaming her ambition, and I would argue it places undue blame on her. She did not give away the house, and she did not take the child on the pilgrimage. For years she has been present in the film mostly as the person others decide things about, and in her last line she becomes the person who is punished.
From here on, I am speaking for her, and the film is not. Once her initial anguish passes, I hope Malathi recognizes that larger duties await a person with such excellent medical training. There is some support for this on screen. Remember what her brother once told her husband, with quiet dignity: “We come from a well-off family of educated individuals who have derived joy from work.” Women like Muthulakshmi Reddi show what such a person might do with her grief. Maybe this pair of siblings go on to lead fulfilling lives and to serve society, the very thing the other pair sang about (vaazhvu vandhaal anaivaraiyum vaazhavaipomae): when we prosper, we will help others succeed too.
In the 1960s, audiences stepped out of theaters with their eyes brimming, taught that sacrifice and devotion to family are supreme. Watching it now, I find a different film inside that one, in which grief is a bridge to resilience. The tears belong to Raju and Radha. The future, if someone imagines it for her, belongs to the doctor.