“Polandine patti nee oraksharam mindaruthu (don’t you dare say a word about Poland).”
Few lines in Malayalam cinema are as instantly recognisable or as persistently debated as this one from Sandesam (1991). Written and delivered by Sreenivasan, the line has been celebrated as a masterstroke of political satire and criticised as a symbol of cynical disengagement. When news of Sreenivasan’s death broke on December 21, it was this line that surfaced repeatedly in tributes, serving as a shorthand for his sharp wit and his ability to distill social behaviour into everyday dialogue.
In Sandesam, a film he wrote and acted in, Sreenivasan plays Prabhakaran, one of two brothers whose ideological arguments consume the household they share with their ageing parents. Prabhakaran says this line during a lunch-table argument with his brother, a supporter of an opposing political ideology. As the quarrel escalates, global political histories are dragged into a thoroughly local dispute, until a reference to Poland abruptly shuts the conversation down. The brothers storm out without eating. Their father is momentarily impressed by his sons’ command over world politics. Their mother is simply exhausted. She is tired of grown men who argue endlessly about the happenings of the world, but accomplish little that is of immediate concern to those dependent on them.
The scene captures what Sandesam does best: Expose how politics, when reduced to identity and performance, drains everyday life. It is also why the film and Sreenivasan’s writing more broadly have often been labelled apolitical. The brothers’ ideological battles bring no clarity, no change, only noise. Their convictions end up becoming burdens their parents must carry.
But Sandesam does not present this cynicism in isolation. The film stages a deliberate contrast between the brothers and Udayabhanu, an agriculture officer of a similar age, who continues to do his job quietly and efficiently despite the surrounding chaos. While the brothers treat politics as spectacle, Udayabhanu represents an ethic of work and service. He does not speak in slogans or theoretical references. Instead, he just works. This contrast is crucial.
As I see it, in Sandesam, Sreenivasan is not mocking political engagement itself, but the way ideology replaces responsibility. The problem is not belief, but obsession; not politics, but performative politics. The film holds a mirror up to a section of men in Kerala who claim to be “political” and use that identity as an excuse to avoid doing any meaningful work.
The hallmark of Sreenivasan’s writing lay in bringing the perspective of the everyman to Malayalam cinema. When he emerged as a screenwriter in the mid-1980s, the industry was still shaped by moral certainty and emotional excess. Its most influential writers explored memory, tragedy, and interior conflict through elevated language and heightened drama. Sreenivasan arrived with a different sensibility altogether. He wrote about the present tense of middle-class life. His stories spoke about frustration rather than loss, irritation rather than longing, systems that stalled rather than destinies that collapsed. In no time, he came to be recognised as one of Malayalam cinema’s sharpest contemporary voices.
His protagonists were not heroes in waiting. They were failed, flawed, and often deeply problematic men. In Nadodikkattu (1987), Dasan and Vijayan are unemployed graduates whose survival depends on bluff, luck, and self-deception. In Vadakkunokkiyantram (1989), jealousy and insecurity consume a man who cannot cope with his own ordinariness. Thalayanamanthram (1990) charts how consumer aspiration corrodes a marriage. Chinthavishtayaya Shyamala (1998) exposes a man’s evasion of emotional responsibility disguised as spiritual quest. These characters do not always undergo redemptive arcs. Sometimes, they simply continue being who they are. Sreenivasan normalised failure as a way of being. He allowed audiences to recognise themselves without shame, making ordinariness narratively dramatic and sufficient.
His films were anchored in the institutions and anxieties that middle-class Kerala confronted daily: Unemployment, migration, bureaucratic inertia, consumerism and political opportunism. Varavelppu (1989) dismantled the romanticism surrounding the migrant returning from the Gulf by showing how state systems exhaust individual initiative. Midhunam (1993) traced entrepreneurial frustration not to incompetence but to procedural paralysis.
Sreenivasan’s observational gaze extended across institutions that shaped middle-class life. Doore Doore Oru Koodu Koottam (1986) interrogated the pressures and hypocrisies of the education system. Sanmanassullavarkku Samadhanam (1986) and T P Balagopalan M A (1986) captured anxieties around employment, marriage, and social legitimacy in a society obsessed with markers of success. In Vellanakalude Naadu (1988), he turned development politics into satire, revealing how public projects become sites of corruption, spectacle, and self-interest rather than collective good. These films reinforced his central concern: Systems meant to organise life often end up distorting it.
In his works, Sreenivasan did not argue, campaign, or instruct. He observed how systems shape behaviour and let humour do the explanatory work. This understated approach also explains why his films are frequently described as apolitical. In a cinematic culture trained to recognise politics through slogans, speeches, and ideological certainty, Sreenivasan’s refusal to take sides is often called out as neutrality. Sandesam mocked political parties without endorsing one. Nadodikkattu exposed economic stagnation without offering solutions. For critics accustomed to political cinema as mobilisation, satire without prescription felt evasive.
What this reading misses is that Sreenivasan was probably less interested in ideology than in how politics became identity, performance, and habit. His scepticism was maybe not apathy but distrust of the belief that ideology alone could fix lived dysfunction.
Perhaps his most enduring contribution is linguistic. His dialogues outlived his films. Lines from Sandesam remain shorthand for political hypocrisy. “Oronninum athintethaya samayamundu, Dasa (everything comes in its own time, Das),” from Nadodikkattu resurfaces as a slogan of stubborn hope, invoked to underline a silver lining amid chaos. Thalathil Dineshan from Vadakkunokkiyantram formed the cultural vocabulary for fragile masculinity. These references circulate through memes, WhatsApp forwards, and casual conversation, often detached from the films themselves. Long before Shammi from Kumbalangi Nights (2019) entered pop culture, it was the image of Thalathil Dineshan awkwardly straining to match his wife’s height in a photograph and ending up with a side-eye that captured the anatomy of male insecurity.
His later work, including Udayananu Tharam (2005), turned this scepticism inward, satirising the film industry’s hunger for fame, its tolerance for mediocrity, and its complicity in spectacle. Even in films where the tone appeared lighter or more contemporary, Sreenivasan’s scepticism remained intact. Azhakiya Ravanan (1996) examined wealth, ego, and masculinity beneath spectacle, while Oru Naal Varum (2010) returned to governance as farce, depicting corruption as routine rather than an aberration. More recently, Njan Prakashan (2018) showed how little had changed. The protagonist Prakashan navigates ambition, shortcuts, and delayed responsibility in a society that continues to reward appearance over effort.
Another criticism often levelled at his writing is that Sreenivasan’s worldview was largely middle-class and male. His female characters were frequently written as moral anchors rather than fully realised individuals. Many of the men in his films escape accountability because their flaws and insecurities invite empathy. By contrast, characters like Kanchana in Thalayanamanthram or Sulu in Midhunam are framed as impractical dreamers, disconnected from the realities the men around them face. One notable exception was Shyamala in Chinthavishtayaya Shyamala, who initially refuses to take back her husband after he abandons his family in pursuit of a so-called spiritual awakening following a visit to Sabarimala.
These critiques matter, but they do not diminish the scale of Sreenivasan’s contribution to the grammar of Malayalam cinema. He used humour with rare intelligence to hold up a mirror to the educated Malayali and his hypocrisies. He trusted the audience to recognise itself in flawed men and broken systems. He taught Malayalam cinema how to laugh at itself without cruelty and critique itself without despair.
Sreenivasan will always be remembered for what he gave Malayalam cinema: The courage to be ordinary and to laugh at our miseries and complexities without losing hope.
Majeed is a writer, editor and content strategist based in Kerala