It was supposed to be Pascal’s Triangle but you two came

Few words are as university-sounding as the nomenclature ‘Optional English’, named so to give it a separate identity from General English and Additional English. Despite this, in 2021, the year the National Education Policy was implemented, a student who had to drop one subject from three majors: Theatre and Performance Studies/Optional English/ Psychology- dropped Optional English because he thought it was optional. Three years later, we still tease him about it as he continues to kick himself. Occasionally, he will take a peek into the Optional English syllabus and curse himself in three languages.

Earlier this year, we put Premalu on our I B.A. Optional English syllabus. I had watched and loved the film but years of teaching have trained me not to appear too excited about things I find exciting, especially in the classroom. Students are hard work, and at present, they are neither amused nor charmed easily. It takes months, sometimes years to show them why something must be cherished and loved full-bodily. Often I have already failed even before beginning. So when the class found out about Premalu – a few of them clapped, some frowned, two rolled their eyes but most of them were puzzled. What is a Malayalam film doing in an Optional English syllabus?

In many ways, the experience of running an Optional English programme is somewhat similar to the experience of watching Premalu on Hotstar. An undergraduate classroom in Urban Bengaluru is easily a mix of at least seven to eight languages. The classroom is a mini city, several languages meet here, and so do many cities and villages. Premalu itself begins in Salem, moves briefly to Aluva before progressing speedily to Hyderabad and then to Chennai. Despite the several two-way tickets to each of these cities, we don’t return to a singular idea of one home, one city.

A student once narrated his unfortunate tryst with Tamizh, a language he was trying to learn from someone at home. She taught him for about three weeks before he began to feel confident. When he hopped out of the shower one morning, he couldn’t find his underwear so he proceeded with great faith to ask her in Tamizh, “namma jatti yenge”? She threw water on him and decided never to teach him anything after that.

The class erupted in big volcanic laughs. The Tamizh and Kannada speaking students quickly translated what had happened to the others and soon everyone was slapping the boy on his head and whacking his back while howling.

Premalu greets its viewers similarly. Its small moments are held sweetly by the capacity language has (regardless of which) to make us laugh while its grand moments are directed towards asking us the question ‘don’t awkward people get a chance at love?’

In between these two moments, Premalu stands quietly, flirting with language, romance, and the thrill of young people finding love in the city. To the question, ‘what is it that makes people fall in love’, Premalu’s answer seems to be – the capacity they have to laugh together. Nothing comes quite as close as laughing does to hold this film together. In a cutting scene, Reenu tells Aadhi that talking to Sachin and Amal Davis is like talking to friends from school and even the sting of Aadhi’s casteist insult about people coming from trashy schools doesn’t allow Reenu to erase the memory of laughing with these boys.

A few scenes earlier, Aadhi tells Reenu he’d give her ‘humor sense’ 0.5 out of 10 for laughing at Sachin and Amal Davis’s joke. Reenu finding them funny is a way of feeling at home with what’s familiar and comforting in a big, strange city, even if Sachin later says, ‘I don’t think I can leave Reenu’s Hyderabad now’

When they are in each other’s company, Sachin’s ‘Baaya, 2 packet pyaal’ and Amal Davis’s ‘Baiii, Karthiga committed hai’, and ‘kya kartha?’ make me gleeful and relieved that the film didn’t come anywhere near Bangalore which needs a few more decades to recover from Bangalore Days.

The people that Sachin and Amal Davis meet in Reenu’s world are cautionary extensions of what we are told is the real world. Aadhi is what they call in Malayalam, ‘settled’— demonstrated not once but several times in the film. He has his own house in Mumbai, Hyderabad, and land in Vizag but despite his awkwardness, land enables in Aadhi a kind of caste-confidence we have seen similarly in many young adults. So Aadhi can continue being awkward and feminist and owner of lands while Sachin can blindly only seek love without being either of those.

The city offers young people many opportunities to live without and outside of caste, whether they choose it or not is the beginning of an adventure the constitution can only promise us. We’ve heard tales of real estate agents persuading young people that the modern apartment no longer comes with the pooja room but we’ve also heard stories of young people coming up with something they call the mobile pooja suitcase, an invention that is easily transferable from home to home, bearing all manner of Hindu pooja items – karpoora, generic photos of gods and goddesses, agarbattis and the likes – to prop up quickly onto unused platforms on sudden family visits.

I once went to Cochin with a few friends. They called themselves liberal to the point where they ‘allowed’ their girlfriends to wear short skirts or go for jobs. But I didn’t really know them until we sat for a buffet dinner at a hotel, and they called the waiters over and yelled at them for not informing them that what they were eating was beef not mutton. They spent the next few days of the trip sulking, stopping at as many temples as possible, sprinkling their heads with gomutra.

For lack of a better word, I was amused that teenagers could begin mimicking elders and in no time become adults too. Often what causes young adults to accommodate caste back into their lives, even when they are far away from home, is the fear of life itself, of not being prepared enough to live without caste. It is here at this point that I liked how willingly the film submits itself to someone like Wanderlust who is just floating in and out the film, almost castelessly. Reenu is perhaps aware enough to point out that without Karthika, it’s just her and Wanderlust which is as good as being alone. Then we have someone like Thomas of Thomas Fried Chicken who is cautious about the city, enough to tell his Rapido companion, ‘dude, ride safe’

Sachin’s awkwardness in love is endearing to watch. Male awkwardness usually is. I screened Area Bois in class last semester and a student mentioned that for a film called Area Bois, the boys are oddly more awkward than anything else, giving us a new way of imagining the words Area and Bois. Awkward then became a word I found myself happily returning to while watching Premalu.

Reenu is sometimes thick and immune to Sachin’s awkwardness and perhaps for good reason. While Premalu makes room for male awkwardness to be addressed as a response to the various kinds of masculinities we’ve been seeing over the years, it also makes it clear that we don’t pamper our girls enough to ever allow them to be awkward. I don’t know many young girls who are awkward but I know a lot of boys who are.

Sachin snaps out of this quickly, thanks to Amal Davis. There’s that mad, comedy moment in the pub where Sachin happily tells him that Reenu doesn’t mind him drinking and Amal Davis slaps him out of his day dream- ‘That’s not what she said. She said she doesn’t give a flying frak if you drink and die.’

Several such pataki moments eventually bring us to the crescendo when drunk Amal Davis and Sachin credit every other achievement of Aadhi’s—(knowing Forest minister Nijalingappa and owning land for instance) to his being nothing but a CBSE boi. At this point, Premalu became for me, a love letter to those of us who don’t know what to do with our hands in social situations, an ode to the awkward and in love, those who show affection in laughter, by laughing, those who dare to dream outside of template boxes, perhaps the state board rejects who show care by inviting you to laugh, not by knowing your blood sugar, not by faking anger as care but by masking care in hurried, anxious, and wrapped giggles.

Sachin struggles to believe that the affection he shows is enough even if affection and laughter are the only two things that come naturally to him. The idea of writing care for someone despite shaky and awkward hands is at the heart of this film. I like Reenu for taking her work and life seriously and also for trusting herself enough to know when to leave a boy who didn’t like how she showed care to then falling in love with someone who liked it even if he wasn’t by any measurement, caste or otherwise, a suitable life partner.

I am left with four bomb words Sachin says to Amal Davis towards the end of the film, ‘You are the hero’, which is truer than anything else the film promises. For it’s only in Amal Davis’s world that two malayali men can fight in Hyderabad because one of them called Yuvan Shankar Raja’s song pathetic. For this, for how he loves and holds Sachin, for expert-level attempts at kunu-vavaing his kunu vava, for the laughs, and many other reasons, Amal Davis is both hero and heroine.

In another part of the film, he calls out Reenu for telling Sachin that her having rejected him couldn’t have been his first rejection which is a heavily caste-garnished way of asking someone how they could afford to not be used to rejections especially after choosing to dream of someone outside their worth. Amal Davis asks Reenu, “How do you get the confidence to say such things?” Whether voluntary or not, I see in this question a refusal to accept the confidence that caste gives young people who must learn to live on their own. There isn’t much in the film to assess their caste positions and maybe that’s a good thing. There’s more to it when a friend tells Sachin, ‘Life is unfair, especially for us.’

Even so when Sachin does find luck in love, English lifts its sweet puppy dog legs only to pee all over it. ‘I think I am falling for you’, says Reenu to Sachin. Amal Davis pops up from somewhere to bark at her, ‘He won’t understand all that, say it in Malayalam!’ So Reenu says, I love you which is perhaps more Malayalam than English at this point which is a pretty good reason for Premalu to be in an Optional English classroom.

Some reviews of Premalu have issued a longing to see female friendships like Sachin and Amal Davis’ on screen, a few have complained that the female friendships in the film aren’t adequate. I am in no hurry to choose either side because I am still curious to know why there was such a deep, and loud feminist purring coming from inside me when I saw two state board bois hugging and sleeping on someone’s roof party.