Malayalam scenarist and theatre practitioner Gopan Chidambaram on writing ‘Thuramukham’ and ‘Iyobinte Pusthakam’

Scriptwriter and theatre practitioner Gopan Chidambaram talks speaks about how ‘Thuramukham’, a play written by his father in 1968, was adapted to the screen

Watching Rajiv Ravi’s critically-acclaimed historical drama Thuramukham, which streams on SonyLiv from April 28, is like being a fly on the wall, witnessing first-hand the struggle that thousands of Cochin port workers went through for generations to earn labour rights. The characters and the story are written with such care and depth that you can’t help be immersed in the epic tale. This is largely thanks to Gopan Chidambaram, who scripted the movie based on the play of the same name that his father, playwright and school teacher K. M. Chidambaram, wrote in 1968.

Also read |‘Thuramukham’ movie review: Rajeev Ravi’s film is an important document of the struggles to unionise for rights

“The original play was a domestic drama set in the highly political backdrop of 1953 Mattancherry, which witnessed a police firing that killed three port union workers and injured several others,” says Gopan, a faculty member at the Theatre department of Sree Sankaracharya Sanskrit University, Kallady.

Although the play was published in 1971 and had several readings during the Seventies, it was not performed on stage during his father’s time. Gopan recalls how veteran theatre writers and artists used to visit his father to persuade him to let them stage it. “Playwrights from that era were possessive about their work. I think he wasn’t convinced by any of them. So, it was never performed on stage back then,” he adds. However, Gopan resurrected the play in 2018 and staged it for the first time at Uru Art Harbour in Mattancherry, with local residents playing the lead characters.

While the play is set entirely in 1953 at the time of the police firing, the movie delves deeper into the sociopolitical setting that led to the 1953 incident. “We wanted to flesh out the historical setting and political atmosphere surrounding the incident. So, we began with a story of a family involving a father, a mother, two sons and a daughter, starting from the time when the port was being built in 1930,” says Gopan.

The movie explores in-depth the inhumane Chappa system that forced port workers to physically fight to get hold of copper coins thrown by gang leaders into the crowd. Getting one of the coins gave them the right to a particular amount of work and pay that day. It narrates how this violent and exploitative system changed through years of the workers’ struggle, culminating in the police firing.

Scripting an epic tale spanning more than two decades is not an easy task for any writer. However, this is not the first time that Gopan has pulled it off. He also wrote the script of Amal Neerad’s 2014 period drama Iyobinte Pusthakam , which again told the story of a struggle — a fight for the land against those who were exploiting it for profit and power.