Ceylon cuckoo to cine siren

Thavamani Devi, the first ‘glamour girl’ of Tamil cinema, captivated audiences with her bold portrayal on screen even when she was in her early teens, but she approached her debut in the industry with the same apprehension as any young schoolgirl stepping into the world of cinema for the first time.

When the American Ellis R Dungan, who had begun to direct Tamil films, approached the young girl as she came out of her school in Kandy, the salubrious city that nestles amid the hills in the central province of Ceylon (as Sri Lanka was then called), Thavamani, self-admittedly, almost shrank in fear at the strange man who had accosted her with a highly priced chocolate and the enticement of a meaty role in cinema. ‘‘I told him to ask my father and ran back home,’’ she told an interviewer when she was in her 60s.

Hailing from an influential family originally from Kopay, in Ceylon’s Jaffna district, Thavamani was the daughter of Kathiresu Subramanian, a successful lawyer who had later become a judge. As Thavamani had been born after five boys, her parents doted on her. When Dungan carefully broached the subject of her taking up the title role in his friend, director-producer T R Sundaram’s ‘Sati Ahalya’, he was met with a firm ‘no’. But as Thavamani wanted to be an actress, she convinced her parents and took the flight booked for her new destiny along with her family.

Despite the orthodox values of her family and their initial attempts to rein her in, an ambitious Thavamani, who modelled herself on Hollywood actresses of the era, was bold, brash, cheeky and extremely unconventional in fulfilling the expectations of voyeuristic filmmakers and their audiences. In 1937, at her first press conference in Chennai, in which she was introduced as the heroine of ‘Sati Ahalya’, she sassily buttressed her statement that girls from respectable families should come forward to act in films. She then displayed pictures of her in a swimsuit.

The sartorial boldness would have been enough to throw the cat among the pigeons in a conservative society, but the effect was exacerbated when juxtaposing it with the role of the chaste wife of a sage that she would be playing in the film. Several film journals headline her a bad influence on Tamil cinema. She had quite the effect on audiences back home as well. Friends who lived in Jaffna recall that one of Thavamani’s brothers shot at the screen when a film starring her was being shown.

‘Sati Ahalya’ did not make much of an impression, though V Rama Rao, ace statistician of South Indian films in its early decades, noted that Thavamani Devi, ‘Ceylonese radio singer’, had made her debut in Modern Theatres’s first film (Thavamani had learned Sinhala and upon singing some Sinhala songs in Ceylon Radio, had been given the title ‘Sinhalese Cuckoo’, translated in Tamil as ‘Sinhalathu Kuyil’).

Thavamani’s reputation as a woman with seductive appeal was used in the film ‘Sakunthalai’, in which M S Subbulakshmi played the title role. In the film, Thavamani is the nymph Menaka, dancing to thwart the penance of Viswamitra. Though she acted as the pious Sita and Vedavathi in ‘Vedavathi alladhu Sita Jananam’ (1940), it was her role as the scantily-clad jungle lass in ‘Vanamohini’ as well as her songs in the film that marked the high point of her cinematic career. Music director C Ramachandra (billed as Ram Chitalkar then) notes how Thavamani sat between him and director Bhagwan during the shoot in the forests of Malabar, and “grabbed” their hands and “placed them on her shoulders”! Though he had taught her to sing that absolutely bewitching melody, ‘Alaimodhudhe alaimodhudhe’ (My heart’s heaving), Ramachandra kept to himself as he had vowed to the producer that he would leave the female artists alone.

In the film titled ‘Shyamsundar’ (also called ‘Radhaiyin Kaadhal’), Thavamani donned the title role, and was introduced as the ‘Nightingale of Ceylon’. But despite the prominent part as well as a preponderance of songs, somehow the film did not make an impact. In the film ‘Krishnakumar’ (1941), Thavamani played a supporting role. As the years went, she seemed to land ‘bad girl’ roles. For example, in ‘Vidyapathi’ (1946) she is a scheming woman out to grab a zamindar’s wealth, and in ‘Rajakumari’ (1947), MGR’s first film as hero, she is a circean queen who vainly lusts for the hero who swears by his Indian values of not casting eyes on other women (with Independence round the corner such sentiments were common).

While anecdotes circulated within the film industry regarding her conduct on set, accounts of her escapades, if any, were seldom heard. She appeared to have been an ambitious yet rather spoilt child, believing that self-exposure and taking liberties with others were shortcuts to fame. However, such behaviour ultimately tarnished her reputation.

By the 1950s, as acting opportunities faded, she gave way to that ultimate and mostly lethal infirmity of many a film personality: film production. Half-way through her ‘Vijaya’, she found it was a morass and gave it up. Her mother had died earlier, and after a few years, her father passed away.

It was at this time that she met Kodilinga Sankara Sastri, the son of the family’s priest at Rameswaram temple (her father had been a follower of Saiva Siddhanta). She fell in love and married him in Madurai, and gave birth to two sons. From then on it was a fairytale ending for this rebel princess, who lived with her children and grandchildren. Thavamani Devi died on Feb 10, 2001, at the age of 77.

(The writer is a film historian)

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