The Lost Idealism of M. Azad and Malayalam’s Experimental Cinema

The early 1970s and 80s are often portrayed as the beginning of parallel narratives in Malayalam cinema. The period witnessed a major transformation and a new generation of filmmakers and viewers began to see cinema as an independent artistic language rather than an extension of stage drama. The rise of film societies in Kerala exposed audiences to world cinema, especially the French and Italian New Wave movements, while the Film and Television Institute of India (FTII) in Pune produced technically trained filmmakers who challenged conventional storytelling and visual styles. 

Directors such as P.N. Menon, Adoor Gopalakrishnan, M.T. Vasudevan Nair, G. Aravindan, K.G. George, K.R. Mohanan, P.A. Backer, M. Azad, John Abraham, Padmarajan, Bharathan, and Shaji N. Karun became part of a wider cinematic turn that moulded Malayalam parallel and experimental cinema. Their works dealt with politics, alienation, migration, social change, memory, youth unrest and the contradictions of modern Kerala with a new visual and narrative sensibility.

Screengrab from the movie Amma Ariyan.

Nearly four decades after its release, John Abraham’s landmark Malayalam film Amma Ariyan (1986) returned to the global spotlight with its restored 4K version being screened in the prestigious Cannes Classics section at the Cannes Film Festival recently. The restoration, undertaken by the Film Heritage Foundation, revived one of the most politically powerful and artistically unconventional works in Indian cinema for a new generation of international viewers.

While parallel cinema slowed down during the 1980s, the movement deeply influenced Malayalam cinema as a whole. Filmmakers like Padmarajan and Bharathan gradually evolved a ‘middle cinema’ that combined artistic seriousness with popular appeal, narrowing the distance between commercial and parallel cinema. This period remains one of the most creative and intellectually vibrant chapters in the history of Indian cinema.

The period also saw a distressing twilight phase – a period where artistic dedication frequently met with economic loss. Among the casualties of this turbulent era, few profiles are as tragically moving or intellectually formidable as that of Azad.

Passing away by his own hand on August 9, 1981, at age of just forty, Azad’s life was an uncompromising story of the hazards of treating cinema as pure art within a predatory market ecosystem. To remember Azad is to look at a singular intellectual matrix that bridged the academic rigour of the Film and Television Institute of India (FTII) with the rustic, raw sensibilities of Kerala’s political and theatrical setting.

The intellectual genesis

Hailing from Ayiroor, Varkala (near Kerala’s capital), Azad’s early creative impulses found expression in theatre. While pursuing his graduation at S.N. College, Kollam, he wrote and staged Mulkireedam (The Crown of Thorns), a play that caught the attention of amateur theatre troupes across the state. This initial fascination with narrative structure soon guided him to FTII Pune, where he specialised in screenplay writing.

While studying cinema, Azad absorbed its global syntax. Graduating with a first rank and a gold medal, he became one of the earliest conduits of world cinema into the cultural consciousness of Kerala. Recognising the depth and astonishing canvas of Azad’s film scholarship, Vasudevan Nair – then the editor of the prestigious Mathrubhumi Weekly – invited him to write regularly. Through these seminal essays, an entire generation of Malayalam readers was introduced to the complex cinematic universes of Ingmar Bergman, Akira Kurosawa, Michelangelo Antonioni and others. 

Azad’s influence extended beyond essays and reviews. He was literally a catalyst for others. When Vasudevan Nair visited FTII, it was Azad who curated screenings and guided him through the nuances of international classics, effectively setting the stage for Vasudevan Nair’s own directorial evolution.

Later, Azad shot several crucial sequences featuring Ravi Menon and Sumithra for Vasudevan Nair’s landmark directorial debut, Nirmalyam. Even the legendary auteur G. Aravindan originally envisioned Azad to direct his seminal film Uttarayanam, offering to step back as an assistant, a testament to the immense regard contemporaries held for Azad’s directorial vision.

Azad and John Abraham

It is impossible to contextualise Azad without invoking his classmate, collaborator, and alter-ego in artistic rebellion: John Abraham. The history of modern Malayalam cinema's anxieties is effectively written through their parallel lives. If John – later hailed by a critic as the true heir to Ritwik Ghatak – was the nomadic, chaotic iconoclast who sought to democratise cinema through people’s collectives like ‘Odessa,’ Azad was the intense, sensitive romantic who tried to negotiate with the existing industry machinery, only to be crushed by it.

Their creative camaraderie culminated in the 1971 film Vidyarthikale Ithile Ithile, written by Azad and directed by John. Though both later dismissed it as an experimental failure, the project cemented a deep-seated disillusionment with commercial structures.

The cost of dreams

Azad’s directorial debut, Pathiravum Pakalvelichavum (1974), written by Vasudevan Nair, garnered critical attention but failed to succeed at the box office. His sophomore – and final – effort, Vilkkanundu Swapnangal (1981), remains a milestone for two reasons. It was one of the earliest diaspora Malayalam films to capture the melancholia and fractured identity of the Gulf migration, and it marked the onscreen debut of Mammootty.

Also read: From Kerala’s Red Rebel Era to Cannes 2026; ‘Purushan’ Remembers John Abraham’s Amma Ariyan

But the film became Azad’s undoing. Plagued by severe financial crises during its gruelling schedule across the Gulf and Kerala, the project was compromised to suit market calculations. It failed commercially, and more destructively, Azad was systematically exploited by its producers.

Upon the film’s completion, the visionary director who had mounted an international production was handed a mere hundred rupees and a second-class train ticket back to his village in Varkala, according to P.K. Sreenivasan, a journalist-contemporary of Azad. A lengthy, agonising letter written by Azad to Vasudevan Nair detailing this humiliation was later destroyed by a mutual friend, who wished to spare the surviving literary giant the agonising sting of an unanswerable grievance.

The silence of the end

Returning to Varkala broken and depleted, Azad attempted to cobble together a new project, Velutha Pakshi, under the banner of Indo-Overseas films. But as the financial scaffolding collapsed, so did Azad’s psychological resilience. The very peers who had shared his intellectual intoxications in Madras and Pune vanished when the darkness closed in.

Albert Camus once remarked that suicide, like any great work of art, prepares itself within the silent caverns of the heart. For Azad, the inability to sell his dreams in a marketplace that demanded compliance became an existential dead-end.

He also has a troubled time with his father who refused to acknowledge the demands of the intellectual world of his son. On August 9, 1981, he chose the silence of death, leaving behind a young family and an unfinished canvas.

Years later, John Abraham would make Amma Ariyan, a film that opens with a young man’s suicide, attempting to politicise and socialise the self-inflicted deaths of brilliant, romantic youths who found themselves incompatible with their realities. 

Sadly, when Azad died, none of the leading figures from the film industry arrived at his remote village to bid farewell. He passed as he lived in his final days, an intellectual exile in his own land, a pioneer who gave Malayalam cinema its modern grammar, only to be paid back in copper coins and a ticket to oblivion.

K.M. Seethi is director, Inter University Centre for Social Science Research and Extension and academic advisor to the International Centre for Polar Studies at the Mahatma Gandhi University (MGU) in Kerala. He also served as ICSSR senior fellow, senior professor of international relations and dean of social sciences at MGU.

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