For a long time now, Kani Kusruti has resigned herself to the likelihood that she will never quite reach the top tier of mainstream Malayalam cinema. Even having won international accolades and the Best Actress Award at the Kerala State Film Awards for her role as Khadeeja in Sajin Babu’s Biriyaani, she remains circumspect. While the 35-year-old actor has constantly intrigued viewers with her choice of roles and immersive portrayals, she believes that being typecast as ‘unconventional’ has limited her prospects.
That, of course, does not mean she is ‘conventional’, which became clear when she spoke to HuffPost India about her progressive upbringing and a career that has been more about testing boundaries than taking the centrestage. Even her lifestyle defies what one might expect of an award-winning actor.
It has been two years since Kani Kusruti (a self-given surname, ‘Kusruti’ means ‘mischief’) shifted base from Mumbai to Goa, and she has been savouring a spell of relative isolation ever since the lockdown began. This phase of partial inactivity and quietness, according to her, has been “absolutely satisfying and a privilege”. She is taking sitar lessons, watching movies recommended by friends, and reading a lot. While she does miss Kochi, she admits that it can get too “noisy” and that peace, quiet, and stability appeal to her as a welcome contrast to the constant travel and hotel stays that her work often demands. She is disarmingly candid and has an infectious laugh, but she is quick to point out that though she is friendly, she does not make friends easily.
She also has a light touch when it comes to self-promotion – her Facebook wall, for instance, looks rather muted for someone who has just won a major award. She smiled when asked about this. “I shared an interview I did after the awards. Anyway, people came to know about the award so I did not think I should announce it separately,” she said.
Kani is frank about what the award might mean in terms of more substantial roles in the future. “Not just me, so many of my talented colleagues are getting stereotypical roles. Besides, Biriyaani is a parallel film. That’s not going to help either.”
However, in Biriyaani, unlike in her other films, Kani plays a lead role. Her performance as a young Muslim woman whose life changes after her brother joins ISIS has been widely praised for how she gets under the skin of the character. According to director Sajin Babu, Kani’s performance in the Tamil short film Maa inspired him to approach her for the role. He describes her as a true professional who asks intelligent questions, is game for any number of retakes, and does not take much time to get into character. The role also fetched Kani the Best Actress Award at the fifth BRICS Film Festival, which was held alongside the 42nd Moscow International Film Festival.
But Kani has not always received her due in her long association with the Malayalam film industry.
The tyranny of ‘image’
Kani made her big screen debut in Lenin Rajendran’s Anyar (2003), but it was in the anthology film Kerala Café (2009), that she first drew attention for her part in the segment titled ‘Island Express’. It was a brief role, in which her character was described by the hero (played by Prithviraj) as his “editor, publisher, and a bitch”. This fleeting introduction was an indication of the kinds of roles that since came her way in Malayalam cinema. She was never asked to play the heroine, but was seen as a good pick for unusual or ‘edgy’ appearances.
She played a sex worker in 2010’s Cocktail (and was greatly appreciated for her nuanced portrayal), a cop in Oru Indian Pranayakadha (2013), a Naxal in Shikkar (2010), a rustic traveller in North 24 Kaatham (2013), and a mentally ill woman in Oolu (2019), in addition to other less memorable appearances. Kani was noticed by critics in many of these films, but she is still struggling to emerge from the niche she has been placed in. Her “image” is such, she said, that she continues to be typecast in mainstream cinema, adding that though she has had calls for some substantial roles (including for Vineeth Sreenivasan’s Hridayam and Mahesh Narayanan’s upcoming Malik) she has not been able to take them on for various reasons.
She told HuffPost India that she religiously sends in her work for audition calls, including for short films, but the results have not always been encouraging.
“When I see a call for auditions and I send them feelers they tell me that I have a different image and if something comes of ‘that nature’, they will let me know. That hurts.” What sort of image does she think she has? “I really don’t know,” she said.
However, what we do know is that Kani is seen as a feminist who is allied with progressive causes. This has partly been an outcome of her choice of roles – such as Rajesh Rajamani’s satirical short film, The Discreet Charm of the Savarnas (2020) – as well as her stated opinions and much-talked-about family background.
An ‘unconventional’ upbringing
In conservative Kerala, Kani’s upbringing is considered ‘unconventional,’ a term the actor takes exception to. Her mother, the community health specialist and activist Dr Jayasree A K, and her social worker father Maitreya Maitreyan never got married. Both rejected caste identifiers, including their surnames, and encouraged their daughter to call them by their first names.
These things did not register as unusual to Kani until she was nine or 10 years old, when her school friends pointed out that it was “odd” that she called her parents by their names. Nevertheless, Kani has always said that her parents were mindful of the challenges she might face and strove to prepare her for them. She remembers attending a workshop at Pallikoodam, a progressive school founded by Mary Roy (author Arundhati Roy’s mother), and being thoroughly impressed with the beautifully designed classes. A young Kani asked her parents why they did not send her to this school. “They said ordinary people came from the schools I was sent to and that this would help me equip myself for the real world,” Kani recalled.
When people call her childhood a ‘quirky experiment’, it vexes her. “I am used to how the outside world criticises our way of life without really knowing anything about it. At times it does hurt me a lot. This level of disrespect gets to me,” she said. She consciously tries to ignore the negative labels ascribed to her family’s way of life, but is still sensitive to jibes. “I know how lucky I am. Some people think my parents shrugged off responsibilities and that makes me angry when I know the reality is different.”
According to her, the term “unconventional” is too “extreme”, perhaps because it is used as shorthand for irresponsibility and carelessness.
Her reality, as Kani describes it, was a gender-equal household, where curiosity and inquiry were encouraged. Her father was responsible for everything from household chores to alerting the electricity board if there was a short circuit in the neighbourhood. Her mother, on the other hand, loved reading and her line of work frequently took her outside the bounds of domesticity.
When Kani stepped into temples and churches, her father would gently question her about why she chose to. “He never gave me any advice. They both enabled my mind to develop on its own, encouraging dialogue,” Kani said. If she did some mischief, her father would sit with her and patiently encourage her to evaluate the pros and cons of her actions.
She was promised that she would have “ultimate freedom” when she turned 18, but until then, “you can negotiate with us, we will have discussions and figure things out,” she shared.
When she turned 18, her father wrote her a long letter of guidance which she recently shared on Facebook (read an English translation here). In this message, he underlined that she was now a free adult in a society that was fractured and not always fair but that her parents would be there for her. In the letter, her father advised her to be prepared to fight patriarchal society and to assert her sexual and reproductive rights. He wrote that she would have her family’s support no matter who she chose as a partner – man, woman, or transgender person – but also ‘requested’ her to take care of her health by not smoking or drinking to excess, and to never accept any ideology that promotes hatred along the lines of caste, class, language, or religion. He ended the note by telling her to spread love and happiness in whatever she does.
Theatre: A first and lasting love
Kani’s mother Jayasree, along with Sajitha Madathil and Ajitha, was an active part of the feminist movement of the 1980s. Kani would often accompany them when she was a child, and first did street plays based on the work of author C S Chandrika. As her social consciousness grew, so did her love of theatre. Kani found herself particularly fascinated by the women’s theatre workshops conducted by practitioners from around the world.
When she was 15, an acting workshop with theatre director Deepan Sivaraman – for a production of Vijay Tendulkar’s Kamala – gave her life a different perspective. “It was very self-reflective and helped me discover a lot about myself. That was the magic of theatre,” Kani said.
She went on to do a lot of amateur theatre at the Abhinaya Research Centre, toured festivals, and later joined the School of Drama & Fine Arts in Thrissur. When she was called for Lenin Rajendran’s Anyar (2003), she signed on but theatre was still a more powerful calling. She then decided to go to Paris for an education in physical theatre – as opposed to the more realistic schools of acting that she had been trained in thus far – at the prestigious L’École Internationale de Théâtre Jacques Lecoq. “I was enthralled by theatrical clowning, buffoonery, and masque,” Kani said.
When she returned from Paris, she was called for Kerala Café. “I would take whatever came to me, and I was mostly typecast. But then cinema was only a means to earn money so that I could pursue theatre.”
In 2012, she worked in a theatre group in Europe and earned enough money to buy a small plot in Puducherry, although the film roles that were coming her way were still far from monumental. It was around this time that she fell in love with filmmaker Anand Gandhi and moved to Mumbai with him, taking a break from acting. Briefly, she made detours to Kochi to pursue theatre and was charmed by the Navarasa classes conducted by G Venu at Abhinaya Kalari (acting laboratory).
Although she is not classically trained, dance for her is the most expressive form of art and her “most pleasurable activity”, even though according to her when she dances “it looks nothing like anything”.
“I can dance on the road… it’s my high,” Kani said.
Taking a stand
Kani recently used her dance skills for a good cause, taking to Instagram and flaunting her long legs in a wacky jig as a gesture of support for a young actor, Anaswara Rajan, who was cyber-bullied for posing in shorts.
That, of course, is not the only time that she has demonstrated her politics. When she won the Best Actress prize at the Kerala State Film Awards, she dedicated it to P K Rosy – a Dalit actor who was hounded out of Malayalam cinema in 1930 after essaying the role of a high-caste woman – and to the complainant in the sexual assault case in which actor Dileep is an accused.
Do her ideological affiliations affect her choice of films? Kani’s response to that is refreshingly frank: “I don’t think I have the option to be choosy. And I do not think art can survive only if it is politically correct. In our country, cinema mostly falls in the genre of realism as we are trying to recreate what we see around us.”
However, she points out that there is a difference between representing and celebrating misogyny or casteism, and that the latter should be called out. “The problem is not misogynistic characters; it is about how they are placed,” Kani said.
Though she believes that P Padmarajan films have casteist and anti-feminist undertones, she notes that they also have excellent characters and a lot of depth. “K G George and he are the only auteurs in Malayalam cinema. I love Kallan Pavithran, Arappatta Kettiya Gramathil, Oridathory Fayal Man.”
When asked to pick a recent character that inspired her, she decided on Nimisha Vijayan’s character in Eeda (2018) and Aishwarya Lekshmi’s in Mayanadi (2017). According to Kani, the quality of films in Malayalam cinema is looking up (she admits she had stopped watching films from the industry between 2002 and 2010), with stand-outs such as Chappa Kurishu (2011), Traffic (2011), and Annayum Rasoolum (2013) leading the way.
What kind of films does Kani enjoy the most? In response she is most clear about what she does not care for. On top of that list is violence on screen. “Even the action scenes in Mazha Peyyunnu Maddalam Kottunnu put me off. The sounds are difficult. I am not interested in watching scenes of sexual violence either.” She also dislikes surprises in films, and prefers to be told the entire story – spoilers and all – before watching. She’s not a big fan of hyper-realistic slice-of-life films either, but enjoys “quirky realism”, spoofs such as Lijo Jose Pellissery’s Double Barrel, and mysteries. “I loved P’tit Quinquin, which is a fabulous murder mystery and also finished watching the Unbelievable series on Netflix,” she said.
What does she envision for her future in Malayalam cinema? Kani is stoic and believes that as an independent actor, uncertainty will probably be her companion for a long time. “There is no system in place for that. But considering I don’t have many other responsibilities, I should be OK,” she said.