THIRUVANANTHAPURAM: Filmmaker K.P. Kumaran, who is credited with co-writing Adoor Gopalakrishnan's Swayamvaram, said that he had disassociated himself completely from the movie that triggered the Malayalam New Wave. Kumaran was both the co-writer and assistant director of the film. He said that he was least interested in speaking about Chithralekha Film Cooperative either. The cooperative, which produced the film, was co-founded by Kumaran. Incidentally, Kumaran’s debut Athithi, which came out in 1974, was not produced by Chithralekha.
“You will have to look at the stills of the film to know my contribution to Swayamvaram,” Kumaran said with a hint of bitterness and refused to speak more. A retrospective of K.P. Kumaran’s films were showcased at the IFFK this time. Old timers who had associated with Swayamv-aram recollect how Kumaran’s wife came with her own little one when Adoor Gopalakrishnan’s attempts to find the right child to cast as the son of the lead pair had hit a blank. Nonetheless, it is with a wistfulness bordering on nostalgia that Kumaran remembers meeting Adoor Gopalakrishnan for the first time.
“It must have been in 1972. I was standing near the statue of Dewan T Madhava Rao when Kulathoor Bhaskaran (film critic) came with a fair handsome young man and introduced him to me as Gopalakrishnan. He had just returned after passing out of FTII, Pune,” Kumaran said. It also seemed that Kumaran’s radical ideas clashed with Gopalakrish-nan’s conservatism.“One day I carried a set of books to Chithralekha’s office in Sasthamangalam (Thiruvananthapuram) and told Gopalakrishnan to keep them with the other books in the shelves. Not wanting to hurt me he accepted the books,” Kumaran said, finding hard to control his laughter. Later that day, another friend came to Kumaran’s house and returned the books saying that such books could not be kept at the office. “I accepted the books without saying anything,” he said.
