Amrita TV’s new serial ‘Chila Nerangalil Chila Manushyar’(Certain people in Certain Circumstances) is the miniscreen version of Jnanpith Award winner Jayakanthan’s masterpiece of a novel ‘Sila Nerangalil Sila Manithargal’ that was bestowed the Sahitya Academy Award in 1972.
Based as it is on Jayakanthan’s immortal classic, the serial follows the broad contours of the original plot but refashions the storyline to be in tune with modern times and thoughts.
Starring Praveena in the pivotal role of Ganga, the main protagonist and supported by a cast consisting of the moghuls of the TV serial scenario-Vijay Menon, Shobha Mohan, Jayan, Balachnadran Chullikkadu etc- it will be launched on January 17th at 9.00pm and will subsequently be aired every weekday at the same time.
Written in the late 1960’s Jayakanthan’s timeless work of art has at its centre Ganga, a sweet naïve teenager. One rainy night, she has a physical encounter with a total stranger who offers her a lift in his car , an experience that shifts the course of her life in unforeseen directions. In a sequence that she finds incomprehensible even to herself, Ganga surrenders
her honour to the stranger whose face is blurred in the darkness as well as in her memory.
Unable to explain why she didn’t put up a struggle to her hysterical mother, her ‘compliance’ so enrages her brother that he throws her out of the house. She seeks asylum in the house of her maternal uncle, who puts her through college, after which she attains a top managerial position in a reputed firm. The intervening years had transformed her into a cold, reticent, frigid individual who never went anywhere, had no friends and kept herself aloof from everyone, even her own mother.
Ganga who had ruled out marriage for herself is determined to remain a spinster all her life. Her lewd bachelor uncle who is not above making lecherous advances to his tainted niece, advices her to find out the identity of the stranger and if possible to marry him. Ganga finally tracks down the villain who is responsible for her miserable state of life – a reprobate, alcoholic multimillionaire named Prabhakaran, who is married and a father of three.
There are no recriminations or violent eruptions when at last she stands face to face with him after 12 years, for Ganga realizes that she was equally responsible for what happened that night. Ganga and Prabhakaran are drawn close to each other in a relationship that matures into love….
Ganga, the compelling central figure is strong yet pathetic; thrown on the eddies of time, she floats, sinks, drifts, swims against the current and finally goes under. Against the vividly drawn canvas of this dominant character, the novelist portrays situations unfathomable to the conservative society of those times- of a well brought up orthodox girl willingly acquiescing to a stranger’s advances ; of the heroine pursuing the stranger not to avenge herself but to become his concubine; a platonic friendship developing between the seducer and his victim which does not wind back to its physical beginning. In the depiction of their relationship that begins in carnal pleasure and later ascends up the refined planes of understanding, friendship, and finally to love he turns the notion of love on its head and hurls questions at society’s very concepts of right and wrong.
Through the well chiseled character of Ganga, the iconoclastic writer jerks the orthodox society from its well-ensconced beliefs and demonstrates that life cannot always be steered along proper, comfortable, well set attitudes and that sometimes it scripts itself along unpredictable lines when, in certain circumstances certain people behave in singular ways.
