Sreenivasan could so willingly be 'our little man' because in his heart of hearts he never felt trivial or inconsequential. And to the very end he stayed that way, the shrimp who knew he was a giant.
Sreehari Nair doffs his hat to the late legend.
'You cannot imagine Malayalam cinema of the last 40 years without Sreenivasan' is a truism, but as far as truisms go, it's an awfully useful one.
Take away his contributions as actor, writer and director, and you may be left with fallow filmographies, half-formed careers, and a pop culture immeasurably poorer in punch-lines.
By 2010 or so, his sensibility was so integral to our cinema, to its way of thinking and looking at the world, that a talent like Syam Pushkaran had to set himself in conscious opposition to Sreenivasan in order to create something radically fresh.
All this is indisputable, more or less.
And yet, I'll go out on a limb and declare that the greatest thing Sreenivasan did for Malayalam cinema was invent the Sreenivasan character.
Shrimpy and sneaky, possessed of an acid tongue, anxious about his looks and acutely aware of his anxieties, the Sreenivasan character was a new form of consciousness, a new attack on reality.
In Indian cinema, the Malayalam industry was the first to teach you that the essence of great comedy is friction. (Good luck searching for evidence of this dictum in a Hrishikesh Mukherjee movie!). And the spleen and abrasive energy that defined the humour in mainstream Malayalam movies from 1984 onwards would not have been possible without the Sreenivasan character and the sparks he set off.
Feudal lords and phoenixes and gallant duellists suffered in comparison to what the shrimp brought to the buffet table: You could carve out of him a phony intellectual discovering the limitations of his jargons, a weasel-like opponent pecking away at a domineering comic partner, a husband arranging his own cuckolding, a mother's second favourite son.
Pump into him some heavyweight airs and he became Karakoottil Dasan, a self-styled thug who talks about drinking the blood of exotic reptiles even as he takes his first bite of home-cooked Sadya.
Sreenivasan's was the comedy of 'personality inadequacy', but it was brewed out of his inherent belief that there's more to heroism than the macho ideal.
He was a closet case of self-confidence: utterly secure in his dimensions, he was wise enough to not broadcast it to the world.
By the same token, you could argue that his best lines were ones where he trusted his audience to fill in the gaps.
The true brilliance of those lines lay in what they chose to leave out; the omissions were a key part of their cadence.
Here's our man to Ashokan's character in Gandhinagar 2nd Street, an incessant skirt-chaser in hot pursuit of a girl: 'Just crossed that bend. Hurry up!' (Notice how he doesn't say 'She just crossed that bend' -- the elided pronoun is what waves us into the joke).
Here's Innocent, when Mohanlal in Nadodikkattu tries to act all smarmy: 'Dear Ramdas, your father Narayanan Kutty was never this good.' (In that moment, you can feel the air going dead on Ramdas' flattery).
Here's Thalathil Dineshan, readying himself for heartbreak, to a hotel bellboy who asks him if he needed anything to drink: 'I am yet to decide.'
It's interesting to note that Sreenivasan (a Chaplin devotee) wasn't Chaplinesque in the slightest, in that he never seemed to want our loving.
He always knew that a man of his proportions and background had to be tough-minded to succeed. Not expecting to be babied himself, the prime targets of his jokes were those with hearts that gladdened too easily and those who wanted maturity but without the proper rite-of-passage.
Readers of sentimental weeklies were skewered with a peculiar relish.
And then there was the teashop and barbershop regular who had opinions on everything from the LTTE, the working of the United Nations, the Israeli-Palestine conflict and Gorbachev's birthmark, but who scarcely knew what a kilogram of rice costs. (Fans of Jordan Peterson will not be mistaken in discovering a prototype of their favourite social commentator in Sreenivasan.)
If I have the chain of events correctly worked out, Sreenivasan's reputation reached its apogee with Chinthavishtayaya Shyamala.
This was when the average Keralaite-in-the-street finally started to comprehend how widespread his artistic genius was.
The Sreenivasan character he had so carefully curated now seemed less like an extension of his personal self and more an invention for the audience.
The masquerade was over.
It was time to come out of the 'self-confidence closet'.
Future metamorphoses happened at a rate that would've made Gregor Samsa blush.
As the host of Kairali TV's Cheriya Sreeniyum Valiya Lokavum, we saw him transform into a truth-teller, the man out to show the dirt on everyone.
A typical episode of Cheriya Sreeni had the following format: Insider stories about award ceremony riggings and the idiocies of the cine-struck, observed from a cool distance, would end with a neat humanistic message or a few tips on self-improvement.
My guess is that it was around this time that the Sreenivasan character became mired in an identity crisis.
No more at the service of the artist alone, he had to pay his debts to the public intellectual too.
And when Sreenivasan now came on as the little man, we couldn't make that direct connection, like how we do between the timid, death-obsessed hypochondriac that Woody Allen plays in his movies and the one he projects in his interviews.
Somewhere around the first half of the new millennium, Sreenivasan's humour stopped being natural to him. Always alert for an opportunity to make a crack, the strain began to show.
And as Udayananu Tharam (a poor, poor attempt at lampooning the superstar culture) and Katha Parayumbol (unwatchable), his two most celebrated movies from this period prove, the slope from 'funny' to 'clever' to 'cranky' to 'silly' is a rather slippery one.
Malayalam cinema was in the pits at this point. (It was not for nothing that news channels would take time off from discussing the sex lives of politicians and the falling price of rubber to discuss the 'crisis' in Malayalam cinema).
As calls for a change in guard grew louder, the brightest young minds understood that it was important to turn against the strongest poets of the past.
Accordingly, people like Rajeev Ravi and Syam Pushkaran pointed us toward a critical flaw in Sreenivasan's sensibility: In his earnest desire to round up a tale, he didn't mind making his characters almost nauseatingly two-dimensional.
The exhibits were all around us to gaze upon and recoil.
Consider Varavelpu, in which all of Mohanlal's relatives and friends suddenly start acting self-centred, as if on cue.
Consider the cold callousness of the children in Sandesam, so removed from basic human decency.
Consider the repeated roastings of pseudo-intellectuals that conveniently forget that it's often through a period of pseudo-intellectualism and blind imitation that a young artist discovers his voice.
Sreenivasan's politics (part-libertarian, part-conservative) would always remain a point of debate.
But it is true that he 'privileged order', that he prized status quo above dissent.
And it is just as true that in the search for satire, he frequently violated the first principle of great drama: What makes great drama is when many characters have a claim on the story and those claims cannot be lightly resolved.
For a writer like Syam Pushkaran, it was important to both acknowledge Sreenivasan's influence and demonstrate his Anxiety of Influence.
A close evaluation of Pushkaran's screenplays would reveal that they 'privilege chaos over order', and increasingly you can sense in them a distaste for easy resolutions.
If these multiple entries making up the debit column of Sreenivasan's biography do not take the sheen off his legacy, it should tell you something about the pride and fecundity of that comic mind.
And with his death now, I could not help but go weak all over again for that period in Malayalam cinema when the Sreenivasan character was a force to reckon with.
Chronicling nuances of behaviour that hadn't been put on the screen yet (haven't we all, at some point in our lives, moved our mouths to the wild gyrations of a car steering wheel, like poor Sukumaran in Thalayana Manthram?), bringing out the cockeyed poetry of certain marginal types (the henpecked husband of Pavithram who expresses his affection in thoughtful stutters is a personal favourite), and documenting the violence and tension that exists beneath the surface of peaceful-seeming households -- that was how he did it.
I have never understood this blanket condemnation of masculinity, as if it were some kind of a disease, just as I don't understand feminist critics wasting their whistles on some male superstar walking in slow motion.
In an industry that was used to painting the masculine aura in a single hallowed tone, Sreenivasan showed us that masculinity could have other shades too; he showed us that it could be uneasy in its glorifications and imbued with misanthropic thoughts, fly-by-night principles, and moments of gracelessness.
People thought that he was being honest about his complexes, that he was just self-effacing.
But the truth of the matter is that Sreenivasan could so willingly be 'our little man' because in his heart of hearts he never felt trivial or inconsequential. And to the very end he stayed that way, the shrimp who knew he was a giant.
Photographs curated by Satish Bodas/Rediff
© 2026