The clown as the keeper of conscience

Parattai wants to know if only he is the recipient of Chappani's massage services. Parattai, the village baddie in ���16 Vayithinile��� who sees himself as the local dada, can't imagine that anyone else in the village is big enough to get a massage from Chappani. But Chappani innocently tells him that he applies oil on buffaloes and other cattle, too.With inimitable sarcasm that later became his trademark, Koothu, played by Goundamani, quips: ���So you are saying Parattai is a buffalo.���
Koothu is the villain Parattai's sidekick. Koothu is part of Parattai's coterie. He plays along with Parattai's capers but tries to pull back in almost every scene. He may be Parattai's sidekick but a subversive one.
When a man comes to the village to look for a marriage alliance with Mayil, Parattai is quick to plant stories about Mayil's character. While appearing to go along, Koothu seems to hush him and, moaning helplessly, says, ���Parattai! You have lit the fire.���
Not for nothing did Goundamani get his name. Known to give ���counter��� to the main character in plays, Goundamani has since then revelled in playing the sidekick of the villain or the hero. He would bring down their egos when their bluster and evil intentions would threaten to go beyond limits. In ���Indian���, Goundamani almost does a Mehmood on Kamal �� stealing the show with his sarcasm in full rustic flow.
16 Vayithinile has become a cult classic �� for Kamal's histrionics, Rajinikanth's punch dialogue and Sridevi for being Sridevi. Despite its radically different story and the rural backdrop �� then a novelty , now a clich�� in Tamil movies �� Koothu's character is steeped in the narrative traditions of Tamil theatre and folk art.
M D Muthukumaraswamy , a folk lorist, says Koothu is a movie adaptation of the concept of the king and the clown. ���It's a universal concept, found even in Shakespeare. In Indian mythology too, the concept is ubiquitous.���
The wise clown showing the way to the foolish king is a part of Indian stories and has been well studied by scholars. Akbar had a Birbal.Krishnadevaraya had Tenali Raman.���The wise fool always subverts the king's power,��� says Muthukumaraswamy who points to a seminal work on this topic, ���The King and the Clown in South Indian Myth and Poetry��� by David Schulman, a noted indologist. The book discusses the tragi-comic aspect of Chola royalty .The Chola kings with their grand ambitions surely needed some subversive skewering.
Muthukumaraswamy says the fool provided an objective view of what the main characters were up to. The clowns had sub-plots in which they doubled up as narrators who gave a sarcastic take on what was going on.
Goundamani was perhaps the last comedian in Tamil cinema whose fort ��e was playing the subversive sidekick. ���We still have comedians who hang around the hero like Santhanam. But that role is no more there,��� says Theodore Baskaran, film critic and historian.
Since the 1980s, cinematic narration has changed, he says. ���In the past, stories were linear and theatrical. Now movies go back and forth in time. Audiences tolerate, even like, jump cuts. A film-maker is able to pack in a lot more through these devices and can bring in the necessary objectivity without needing the sidekick as outsider,��� he adds.
Baskaran believes viewers today don't need a lot of explaining whereas, earlier, film-makers had to explain everything. ���It's as if something is happening and it has been filmed and shown,��� he says.