B. Kolappan

If Bharathiraja taught people how to look at villages, then it was certainly S. Janaki who taught them to listen to the women in these villages. She was the perfect acoustic accompaniment for Bharathiraja’s vast rural landscapes. There’s no scientific way of telling how this combination dressed up folklore as a living, breathing, urgent way of life through celluloid, but it would be safe to say they pulled off something there.

At a time when Malayalam film music was still finding its feet came Thaliritta Kinakkal as a whiff of fresh air. The unified Kerala State was on the cusp of a whole new era in all walks of life, and the voice of S. Janaki sounded similar to that of the ubiquitous koel in its verdant vistas. When Bollywood jived to S. Janaki’s infectious voice Set to tune by composer M.S. Baburaj, the song penned by poet-lyricist P.

Acknowledged as an ace wordsmith and famed for his intuitive comic timing, K. Bhagyaraj, interestingly, believed that out of crisis comes comedy. The comic track in his films does not run as a parallel track alone, but inside the main plot; it runs alongside the conflict vein, mixing drama and crisis with comedy, elevating the resolution and making it Bhagyaraj’s own. This is particularly prominent in films where he donned hero roles.