Not all laughter takes you by surprise at a joke where you knew the end from the start; there are some instances when the humour stems from an observation that is so perfectly accurate that it takes you by surprise as you see yourself or others for the first time. This was Salim Kumar's unique talent. It wasn’t really the jokes. Rather, it was more like distorted mirrors that reflected the aspects of life we already understood ourselves, but couldn’t put into words.
It was news that came late on Saturday night, striking Kerala with an uncanny sense of shock and disturbance, one that felt less like sorrow than a shock at hearing no more of what had always been there. Salim Kumar was 56 and had been admitted to a hospital in Kochi when his health began to decline, placed under ventilatory support and then left there permanently. It had been the liver problem that had plagued the latter part of his life, which eventually got the best of him, taking with it everything else that could never be put into words, all the lines and responses and facial movements that would be missed without even being noticed.
He was born in the month of October 1969 in the town of North Paravur, situated in the backwater region of the Ernakulam district. His father, Gangadharan, was an atheist who respected the Paravur-born social reformer Sahodaran Ayyappan and decided to call his youngest son Salim in order to avoid any religious connotations. According to the account of Salim Kumar, when the time came for his father to register him in school, the teacher complained because his name implied Muslim origins, despite being a Hindu. The answer proposed by the teacher, which was easily adopted by everyone, was to append the term "Kumar". Thus, as the man would say with the humour of a mischief-maker, Salim was basically a Muslim up till the fifth grade and a "vishaala Hindu (a broad-minded Hindu)" after that. Even the origin of his own name he turned into a punchline about the absurdity of identity categories, and that instinct to find the comic fault line running through something entirely ordinary never really left him. It is the kind of story that tells you everything you need to know about the man before you have even reached his films.
He discovered his true vocation early, through mimicking. Stage mimicry in Kerala involves a higher degree of skill than casual observers may realise, since you have to observe your subject carefully to be able to mimic them accurately: how they behave when they want to make an impression, how they huddle when they feel vulnerable, how far apart the face they show to the world is from the one they keep to themselves. This, too, is in its way a form of education. Salim Kumar received this form of education at Maharajas College in Ernakulam; he won the university mimicking championship three years in a row, graduated to Cochin Kalabhavan, and appeared on the Asianet TV show called Comicola, along with a young Dileep, among other actors and comedians who had yet to find fame in movies. He did not arrive at the film industry through any comfortable door and told in so many words that he was not right for the role. What happened after that feels less like a success story than like a slow, persistent refusal to accept the first verdict.
This was followed by his appearance in Ishtamanu Nooru Vattam in 1997, which received little recognition, but the years that came after that belonged to every working actor. The shift came around 2000, with Satyameva Jayathe and then more decisively with Thenkasipattanam, in which he played Muthuraman alongside Dileep. And then things just kept getting better from there.
The films that came after this spanned the early part of the 2000s and yielded characters that, while the Malayalee public loved watching, began to become theirs. Advocate Mukundan Unni in Meesa Madhavan was a little-known advocate whose introduction into the movie with an absolutely brilliant line went thus: "Kandaal oru look illenneyulloo. Odukkathe buddhiya (Doesn't look like much, I know. But the brains are extraordinary).” The line works because the man is anything but stupid; on the contrary, it is his awareness of just how little he looks that works in his favour, making him both sympathetic and endearing. Then we have Pyari in Kalyanaraman, a lackey of the wedding circuit whose utterance of lines in English was without even the remotest knowledge of their meaning. Omanakkuttan in Thilakkam, Usman in Kilichundan Mampazham with Mohanlal and many more. But most importantly, Manavalan in Pulival Kalyanam, who, in his helpless state and misplaced dignity and occasional emotional outbursts, created something of a folk hero. Co-star Jayasurya called Manavalan the true hero of this film, and he had a point. Some characters belong more to the viewer than to the film. Manavalan was one of those.
Then followed Kannan Srank in the Mammootty-starrer Mayavi, Dance Master Vikram in Chathikkatha Chanthu, and Maakri Gopalan in Mammootty’s Chattambinadu. All of these became part of the real world beyond the screen, their dialogue being used in teashops, college hostels, WhatsApp groups, and ultimately, thoroughly, in Kerala’s meme culture, giving Salim Kumar an afterlife among those too young to have seen any of the films when they first appeared. That much can be inferred about the power of his work since it was able to translate itself seamlessly into another medium many years later. But the whole point of a reaction image is that there must have been something truthful about what he said.
The lasting appeal of those lines is something we should reflect upon because they had a certain structural value that was unique compared to other lines of comic dialogue in the sense that they were able to separate from their initial setting and attach themselves to a different one effortlessly.
"Appo ente chodyam ithanu, njan aaranu? (So my question is this, who am I?)"
"I am the sorry, aliya. I am the sorry. (I'm sorry, brother-in-law. I'm sorry.)"
"Pandithan aanu ennu thonnunnu. (Seems like a scholar.)" You still hear that last line spoken in hushed tones among friends when the person talking in the room is discussing something that neither of you understands, and you've probably spoken that line yourself without ever thinking of Chattambinadu. It is the act of speaking the lines in that unconscious way that tells you just how good the delivery of the line by Salim Kumar truly was.
It is common in the film business to look upon a comedian’s transition to dramatic acting as a kind of promotion, as though all that preceded was just practice before doing the serious stuff. It is patronising on two levels because it is untrue: it takes just as good a knowledge of the human character to make people weep than to make them laugh at the insecure and deluded fool who dreams of being something he is not. In fact, it may take better insight, since there is less room for mistakes. One false note in dramatic acting may not ruin the entire act, while a comedy too broad fails utterly.
Nevertheless, what Salim Kumar had done with his later dramatic ventures required new techniques and came as a shock to many people when they saw how effortlessly he could wield them. Perumazhakkalam, in 2004, marked the start. Achanurangatha Veedu, a film in which he appeared as Samuel, the father broken down by personal tragedy, won him the Kerala State Film Award for Second Best Actor the following year, proving to any doubters that there were plenty more layers to his acting than the comedic ones already known. He was able to deliver a performance that didn’t depend upon the vocal ability he so often deployed in comedy.
Then came Adaminte Makan Abu in 2011, directed by Salim Ahamed, and this was the one that changed how people saw him forever. The film is about Abu, an old man who sells attar in a small coastal town and whose one real wish in life is to go on the Hajj before he dies. That is more or less it, and nothing much happens in the way films usually make things happen. There are no big confrontations, no dramatic turns. Just a man getting older, running out of time, trying to hold on to something he has wanted for as long as he can remember. What Salim Kumar did with that was remarkable. He did not act the longing so much as wear it. You kept forgetting you were watching someone perform. He reportedly did not take any payment for the role, and you can almost believe it, because there is nothing in the performance that feels calculated or done for effect. The National Award for Best Actor followed, and it was deserved, but the award is almost beside the point. What people actually remember is the feeling of watching Abu stand in his little shop among his bottles and jars, quietly hoping for something he was not sure would come. That feeling stayed with people long after the film ended, and it still does.
He directed three films of his own as well, which not many people remember to mention. The most significant was Karutha Joothan, built around Aaron Eliyahu, a member of Kerala's fast-disappearing Jewish community. It won the Best Story award at the Kerala State Film Awards in 2017, and the choice of subject was telling. He was drawn to people on the edges of things, communities and stories that mainstream cinema tended to walk past without noticing. He also worked in Tamil, Bengali and Oriya films over the years, including the Dhanush-starrer Maryan, though Malayalam always remained where he was most himself.
Beyond cinema, he was an open and vocal member of the Indian National Congress at a time when political declarations from film people tended to be carefully hedged or strategically timed. He made predictions about elections and stood behind them. Ahead of this year's Kerala Assembly elections, he was among those who said the Congress-led UDF front would cross a hundred seats. When V D Satheesan became Chief Minister, he was visibly happy about it. His last public appearance was a reception for the new Chief Minister in his hometown of North Paravur, just days before he died. He had spent years hoping for exactly that outcome, and he got to see it. Not everyone does, and there is a certain comfort in remembering that one of the last public moments of his life was spent in the company of a hope fulfilled.
He lived in North Paravur in a house he called Laughing Villa, with his wife Sunitha and their two sons, Chandu and Aaromal. Chandu has since started appearing in films himself, which feels fitting. He kept a mimicry troupe going, Cochin Stallions, which over the years put a number of performers on the path to their own careers. When films were not happening, he farmed, and that was simply what he did with his time. None of that is incidental, and it is actually the whole point. He won a National Award and kept farming. He became one of the most recognisable faces in Malayalam cinema and stayed in the town where he was born. Whether that was a conscious choice or just the way he was wired is hard to say, but it was consistent all the way through. There was never a version of Salim Kumar who had left North Paravur behind. The address stayed the same even when everything else changed.
There is a clip going around on social media right now that is difficult to watch. It is from a television programme, one of those informal chat show appearances he did over the years, and in it, he talks about the film Gramophone, where he played Tabala Bhaskaran. He describes switching on the television one night, alone at home, and finding a song from that film playing. He watched it for a bit and then realised something. He was the only person in that frame who was still alive. Everyone else in that scene had died. He said he turned the television off and that the song, ‘Enthe Innum Vanneela’, had made him uneasy ever since. Not sad exactly. More like the feeling of being watched by something you cannot see. He told it simply, the way he told most things. No build-up, no attempt to make it more than it was. Just a man saying out loud that it is a strange thing to be the one who is left. People are watching that clip now and feeling the weight of it differently, because he is no longer the one who is left either. The song has claimed him, too, and that is the kind of thing that is hard to find the right words for, so it is probably better not to try too hard.
What held all of it together, the comedy and the drama and everything in between, was that he never seemed to be pretending. That sounds like a simple thing, but it is not. Most actors, given enough time in front of a camera, get very good at producing the right feeling on demand. It becomes a kind of craft in itself, knowing which lever to pull and when. Salim Kumar never gave the impression of pulling levers. Mukundan Unni's awkwardness felt real because it was played as real, not as a comic type to be wheeled out for laughs. Manavalan's wounded dignity felt real for the same reason. Pyari's completely misplaced confidence in himself felt real. And when Abu stood in his shop quietly hoping for something he was not sure he would get, that felt real too, just in a different way. He never talked down to any of them. He found something genuinely human in each one and stayed there. That is harder than it looks, and most people who try it either oversell the emotion or keep such a careful distance that nothing lands at all.
Malayalam cinema has always had a different relationship with its comic actors than most other film industries. Elsewhere, the comedian tends to exist at the edges of a story, there to lighten the mood between more important scenes. Here, it never quite worked that way. From Adoor Bhasi onwards, through Shankaradi, Oduvil Unnikrishnan, Mamu Koya, Jagathy Sreekumar, Innocent and Cochin Haneefa, the comic actor in Malayalam was never peripheral. He was central, not just to the films but to something larger. These were faces and voices that people carried around with them, that turned up in conversation and in memory in a way that had nothing to do with box office numbers or award citations. The biggest dramatic stars maintained a certain distance, which is perhaps inevitable when you are that big. The comic actors did not have that distance and did not want it. They felt like people you actually knew, which is a harder thing to achieve than fame and probably more valuable.
Salim Kumar was the last person to fully occupy that space. Manavalan's face turns up in memes shared by teenagers who have never seen Pulival Kalyanam and would not know where to find it. Kannan Srank gets quoted in office group chats by people who watched Mayavi on a scratched VCD sometime around 2007. Dance Master Vikram's way of delivering instructions has become its own small idiom, entirely detached now from the film it came from. That kind of cultural embedding does not happen by accident, and it does not happen to everyone. It happened to him because what he put into those characters was genuine enough to last.
The grief that swept across Kerala on Sunday was not quite the usual kind, and it was not only the sadness of losing someone admired from a distance. It was the sadness of people who had spent years using his lines and his faces and his expressions as a kind of shared shorthand, and who woke up that morning to find that the person behind all of it was no longer there. That is a different sort of loss. A favourite actor dying is one thing, but losing a shared point of reference, something that a whole community had quietly built into the way it communicated, is something else, and it takes longer to settle.
He once said, at some public appearance or another, something that has been quoted back ever since. "Chiri oru vikasana pravarthanamanu. Naalu inch chund, aaru inch aayi marunna oru vikasana pravarthanam. (Laughter is a development project. The kind of development project where a four-inch lip becomes six inches).” It was such a him sort of line. Funny and exact and entirely unscripted, the kind of thing that sounds written for someone but wasn't. The characters he left behind are still there, of course. Manavalan with his pipe and his misplaced sense of importance. Mukundan Unni is talking up his own brain to whoever will listen. They are not going anywhere, and neither are the lines.
What stays, more than anything, is the habit. The reflex of reaching for one of his lines when the right words are not coming. The instinct to send a particular expression to a friend who will get it immediately without needing an explanation. The small private laugh at something he said two decades ago that somehow still lands as if it were new. Salim Kumar is gone, and that is a loss that will take time to fully feel. But the habit he built into an entire generation, that is not going anywhere. That, at least, is some comfort.