Indrans has just left the shooting location at Vattiyoorkavu, Thiruvananthapuram. Untypically early, he reaches home before 7 in the evening. Home is easy to locate, it is just a bit off from his famous tailoring shop Indran’s Brothers at the Medical College – the work that had first brought him in touch with cinema, more than 36 years ago, before he made his first appearance as an actor. The count is more than 500 films now — there has never been a break for Indrans, even as technologies changed, and new generations of filmmakers came with their new ideas. He cooperates, through all of it, happily. But then change seems to have come into the characters he plays. There have been more serious characters in recent years, a world away from the comical roles or sidekicks he played through the 90s.
As we sit down to speak about his newest avatar — as an Ottanthullal artiste — Indrans in his soft voice and humble ways, says he just picks up what’s taught to him. For the character he plays — 70-year-old Pappu — he has kept some grey in his hair and stubble. “It is old age – a man whose wife died and son ran away many years ago. He is alone and goes out in search of the lost son, with an old photo,” Indrans says of Aalorukkam, directed by Abhilash.
It reminds of the old man he played a year ago in Munroe Thuruthu, a critically acclaimed film by Manu P.S. It is not that Indrans has deliberately switched over to serious characters, they have just been coming like that. “I don’t have any demands, any big desires to play big roles. I am happy when I get offers like these,” he says in that same modest way of his. Anyone who has met Indrans knows him as extremely unassuming, gelling into a crowd as one of the people.
It is not just one now. There have been four or five films in recent years, where he plays the main character. Paadhi, Lona, Makkana, Buddhanum Chaplinum Chirikkunnu, Indrans names them one by one. In Paadhi, he is again attached to an art form — Theyyam — but doesn’t get to perform. “Because he is ugly (viroopan), he can’t play. So he becomes a makeup man for Theyyam artistes,” Indrans says and goes back to his own youth and his petite form that wouldn’t let him be a hero like Prem Nazir or Sathyan, the stars he grew up watching. “I always had the desire to act. People will laugh if I say I dreamt to be like them. Even in the dramas made by friends, I was always given the role of a servant or a gardener,” he says, but without a trace of complaint. It is how it is, his tone says, and he has no problem with that.
But then ideas of what a hero should be have changed. So, in Makkana, Indrans will play a farmer whose daughter falls in love with a Thangal’s (a Muslim man) son. “They elope and the girl converts. But then the farmer and family couldn’t see her anymore.” In Lona he plays a repairman, like the many men you see on the streets with their little box of tools. When it becomes necessary that he has an ID card, he goes in search of his parents that he never knew, to get an address for the card. Buddhanum Chaplinum Chirikkunnu, directed by R Sarath, is another film with him in the lead, where he plays a comedian idolising Charlie Chaplin. Indrans rarely has time to go to his shop now. “It is looked after by my cousin Jayan, who has been there with me since the beginning, and who got National Award for costume design in Athmakatha.” Tailoring is not something he desired, that was to live, Indrans says. The same way he went to work in a workshop as a young lad. He has done costumes for 111 films. Through all of that and all of what’s happening now, the smile remained on Indrans’s face, because, he says, he is happy with what he gets.
