This is an old Malayalam movie directed by Hariharan. This was supposedly loosely inspired by D H Lawrence's novel Lady Chatterley's Lover. I felt 'loosely' was an understatement as I felt the ideologies espoused were the polar opposite.
As English isn't my first language, I find D H Lawrence's novels are an assault on my limited vocabulary and regular understanding of sentence structure. His writing style reminds me one of Kannada's foremost writers, Kuvempu. Kuvempu came from a caste which, though dominant, wasn't allowed to learn Sanskrit. Now, in olden days Sanskrit was the language of learning and it made all the difference. As a protest against such discrimination, he inundated many of his Kannada works with Sanskrit words. I wonder whether the working class background of D H Lawrence forced him to showcase his command over the language. Or whether it was a challenge to the critics to measure up to his intellectualism, considering the fact that his books would have been considered pornography and thus low.
In Lady Chatterley's Lover, the main female character part of the upper class, lusts after and loves a man from the working class. The plot is loosely similar upto this point. Then the characters start diverging. While in Lady Chatterley's Lover, the working class hero is a good man, in Sharapanjaram, he's evil. As I already mentioned about D H Lawrence's working-class background, I was interested in knowing that Malayalam movie director's background. I couldn't find the caste of the director Hariharan. However, Malayattoor Ramakrishnan, the script writer, comes from a privileged caste. So, we have a working-class writer writing the original story about a working class person and questioning the class differences and trying to prove that true differences lie in our attitude or in our feelings that have nothing to do with the class they belong to. Love is a classless feeling in the original story. And then we have a privileged caste person writing a script which basically reinforced the stereotype that working-class men are brutes and who don't understand love at all. The mistake of the upper-class woman in falling in love and marrying a working-class man had to be corrected by eliminating the working class man.
Also, D H Lawrence's working class man is much more complex. In fact, he could move between the upper class and working class worlds with ease. Even though the relationship was built on the compatibility of love and lust between upper and working class persons, the author made sure that working-class man was intellectually equal to the upper-class woman. I think this is important as the feudal upper-class men of that era in fact married woman only based on their class and not on educational or intellectual compatibility (as education was optional for women in general). So, D H Lawrence's working-class man basically mocked at the existing class system which only considered birth and had no place for compatibility of love and lust and also intellectualism.
It would be unfair to expect such a high-level thinking in the Malayalam movie, however, one can only say that it was basically anti-Lady Chatterley's Lover.
As English isn't my first language, I find D H Lawrence's novels are an assault on my limited vocabulary and regular understanding of sentence structure. His writing style reminds me one of Kannada's foremost writers, Kuvempu. Kuvempu came from a caste which, though dominant, wasn't allowed to learn Sanskrit. Now, in olden days Sanskrit was the language of learning and it made all the difference. As a protest against such discrimination, he inundated many of his Kannada works with Sanskrit words. I wonder whether the working class background of D H Lawrence forced him to showcase his command over the language. Or whether it was a challenge to the critics to measure up to his intellectualism, considering the fact that his books would have been considered pornography and thus low.
In Lady Chatterley's Lover, the main female character part of the upper class, lusts after and loves a man from the working class. The plot is loosely similar upto this point. Then the characters start diverging. While in Lady Chatterley's Lover, the working class hero is a good man, in Sharapanjaram, he's evil. As I already mentioned about D H Lawrence's working-class background, I was interested in knowing that Malayalam movie director's background. I couldn't find the caste of the director Hariharan. However, Malayattoor Ramakrishnan, the script writer, comes from a privileged caste. So, we have a working-class writer writing the original story about a working class person and questioning the class differences and trying to prove that true differences lie in our attitude or in our feelings that have nothing to do with the class they belong to. Love is a classless feeling in the original story. And then we have a privileged caste person writing a script which basically reinforced the stereotype that working-class men are brutes and who don't understand love at all. The mistake of the upper-class woman in falling in love and marrying a working-class man had to be corrected by eliminating the working class man.
Also, D H Lawrence's working class man is much more complex. In fact, he could move between the upper class and working class worlds with ease. Even though the relationship was built on the compatibility of love and lust between upper and working class persons, the author made sure that working-class man was intellectually equal to the upper-class woman. I think this is important as the feudal upper-class men of that era in fact married woman only based on their class and not on educational or intellectual compatibility (as education was optional for women in general). So, D H Lawrence's working-class man basically mocked at the existing class system which only considered birth and had no place for compatibility of love and lust and also intellectualism.
It would be unfair to expect such a high-level thinking in the Malayalam movie, however, one can only say that it was basically anti-Lady Chatterley's Lover.
