Can You Dance in Malayalam?

Decoding the adichu-poli era of Malayalam film music

In the age of Instagram reels, it has become universally acceptable to break into dance anywhere, anytime. But growing up through the late 90s and the early aughts in a small town in central Kerala, dancing in public—the simple act of moving one’s body to the sound of music—was unheard of. Unlike other parts of the country where dance was integral to weddings and celebrations, it was largely absent in the Malayali daily life back then.

When a singing reality show debuted on our television screens in 2006, contestants were graded, for the first time ever, on not just their singing, but also on how they performed. I remember a lot of them being baffled by this demand—and so were we, the viewers. The show Super Star, was modelled on Indian Idol, already popular in the country’s Hindi-speaking regions and big cities. While an Abhijeet Savant, a Sandeep Acharya or a Meiyang Chang made it look effortless, something was amiss when Malayalis attempted the same. The men especially. There is a certain softness of body that movement or dance of any kind demands of you, which stiff Malayali men found hard to emulate at the time.

I have felt that Malayalam, as a language, also lacks that ease. It is not easy to write lyrics that surrenders itself to beats in my mother tongue. To make a song that’s dance-able, the writer must choose words that are most malleable, and then hammer them into the confines of the composition without a break or crack in the flow.

Malayalam, in the form that it is spoken and written now, has loaned way too many words from Sanskrit—a language where every syllable and sound screams to be heard with equal gusto. It refuses to twist, bend and attune itself to a rhythm .

A language like Tamil, on the other hand, has fewer alphabets and each sound is an interpretation. The words can be tamed at will, easily melding with the music and hitting just the right way at each beat. To add to this, Tamil Nadu has the dappan kuthu folk dance tradition, the beats of which modern dance numbers borrowed from to a great extent.

Of course Malayalam can sound poetic, but it is hardly lyrical.

This was perfect for the sadboi era of the 1970s, where the hero would typically be a brooding, disillusioned, artsy young man. He barely danced. That was reserved for the women who serenaded him, the sidekicks who pranced around him. He wrote poetry using words that were tough to bite into, which his love interest romanticised to no end. Her dance was often with the poem, and not with the man himself.

This brand of hero, with his shabby-chic looks and existential dread, was a product of his time. The intellectual rumblings coming from within the state, and tensions in the political climate of the country at large. He disappeared from the scene, as I grew up and got on to a steady diet of Malayalam cinema.

Fast dance numbers were part of the formula of every commercial film during this time. This era, that lasted roughly from the late 90s to 2010, is what I’d refer to as the adichu poli era of Malayalam film music.

Back then, we had two superstars. One who could famously dance, and one who couldn’t. [They still exist and are active in the movies. But it’s just that the audiences eventually showed them their rightful place. As characters in a film, and not as larger-than-life figures.]

Mohanlal was the playful, romantic kind. He was masculine in a foolish and oblivious way. In a way that needed tending, caring, loving and “mothering” from the women around him. Though not formally trained in dance, his body was extremely pliable. He was a natural dancer in the way someone like Mithun Chakravarthy was. The other hero, Mammootty, was the distant and aloof patriarch. The kind that silently hovered, watching over the world to safety. His stiff body was unfit for dance of any kind.

Mohanlal clearly had it easy in the adichu poli era, dancing away to glory.

Mammootty, not so much. He tries hard to play the cool, mysterious guy at the party in this song from the 2006 movie Balram vs. Tharadas, leaving the dancing duties to his exotic girlfriend (played by…Katrina Kaif.) In a scene from the comedy film Thuruppu Gulan, where he plays a gambler, Mammootty is seen as a clueless Bharatanatyam student dancing off-beat among a group of eight-year-olds. He tries to break a leg in a song from the same film, and weirdly, the only thing that works for him in the sequence is his comedic inability to dance.

There was probably a renewed interest in entertainment for entertainment’s sake at the time, with cable TVs becoming less aspirational and more accessible. It led Malayalam TV channels like Asianet, Surya TV and Kairali to start separate channels for music. This news piece from January 2005 reports the launch of Kiran TV, which plans on “tapping the youth through the music programmes.” Besides, this was also a sweet spot where both audio cassettes and CDs/DVDs were in existence.

For school farewells and college fests, inside volvo buses with blinding disco lights enroute water theme parks, boys and girls danced to these bangers like there was no tomorrow. And the phrase adichu poli, which literally means ‘slash and break,’ became slang used to refer to anything cool and peppy. A comparable term in Hindi would be dhik-chik, used to refer to a certain kind of song and eventually—an aesthetic. But this term, I believe, came to have different connotations eventually.

By this time, the lyricists had found multiple workarounds for this specific language problem that Malayalam was faced with. While these tendencies would have been common across Tamil, Telugu and Hindi film songs of the time, I’d argue that it is more universally applicable to Malayalam film songs of the time.

Unlike the other languages where the entire song would be dance-friendly, Malayalam songs typically had only a couple of lines like that. In a song from the movie Niram (1999), when the performer on stage breaks into a classical tune, someone from the cool gang in the audience yells: oru adichu poli paattu paadeda mone (give us an adichu poli song, man). And then he breaks into singing something that essentially sounds like Malayalam rap, before segueing back to melody again.

So, the first task before a lyricist was to identify this hookstep/line. Now, they had to fill it with words. But this is a challenge, given the kind of words the language had.

One way lyricists bypassed this was by resorting to repetitive phrases or words in a gibberish tongue. These could be complete non-words, like Hosaina-hosaina (Chathikatha Chanthu, 2004), Malamalalooya (Ananthabhadram, 2005), Avva avva (Satyam Shivam Sundaram, 2000). Or a word turned into a non-word by repeating the initial sound, like Thuthuru thu thumbi (Chronic Bachelor, 2003), where the word Thumbi, meaning dragonfly, is beaten out of shape to make the song danceable.

Another way out was to borrow from another language, like Tamil or even Arabic. In the song Pathinalam raavinte (Sharjah to Sharjah, 2000), the major dance portions of the song are in Arabic. It goes…Dil Dil Salaam Salaam//Bin Muhammad Salaam Salaam//Ya Allah Ya Allah Yahalla Yahalla Yahalla Yahalla, before transitioning into Malayalam (and back again).

Once the hookstep is sorted, you find a way to transition into some sort of a melodious or semi-classical vibe—something that’s seldom necessary for a Tamil dance number.

There have been earnest attempts at breaking this rut, but they were either pushed to a niche or widely deemed uncultured, crass and even “Western” at the time. Case in point is Kalabhavan Mani, a comedian turned character-actor who had an immaculate sense of timing and rhythm. He breaks into dance in this song from the 2001 film Karumadikkuttan with an ease that is rare for on-screen Malayali male bodies of his time. Jassie Gift, a singer and composer, drew inspiration from Western music to create iconic songs like Lajjavathiye and Annakili (4 the people, 2004). He attained a kind of feverish virality at the time, inciting critical Op-eds from irritated Malayalee intellectuals and invoking love and devotion from the youth.

He faded from the scene a few years later; newspapers referred to him as a one-hit wonder. But Mani continued dancing, though on the sidelines. He owned the scene in his own ways, mostly thanks to the demand for big ticket stage shows among Malayali diaspora at the time.

Dance songs from this era give me unbridled joy and comfort—notwithstanding the lyrics that consist of words and non-words crammed together and elaborate choreographies executed to comedic perfection. Not very long ago, I watched Jayaram’s dance sequence in Pathinalam raavinte on loop, sitting inside an auto on a humid and muggy Mumbai evening, to calm an ailing heart. On those rare days I hate my job, I work out of cafes, my emotional support coffee in tow, and my favourite adichu-poli song pumping in my ears.

My cloying sense of nostalgia aside, most of these songs and their choreographies—cobbled together with a lot of jugaad tactics — failed to evolve into a coherent genre/style of its own. Nobody expected it to, even then. The Malayali intelligentsia, in fact, wished for its death. And die, it did—in the 2010s, when the industry witnessed a shakeup of sorts.

But weirdly, the format has turned out to be extremely Reels-friendly. After all, the key to Instagram virality is not a fully choreographed dance sequence but a beautifully cut and edited 30-second hook.

The adichu-poli era is currently in its after-life. And it’s thriving.

Medha V edits non-fiction and writes fun, snacky Instagram copies for a living. Find her on Substack for more of her personal writing, and follow her on IG—for vibes.

Video Sources: Central Talkies/YouTube, Manu Cs/YouTube, Matinee Now/YouTube, satyamvideos/YouTube, Malayalam Stage Shows/YouTube, EMPIRE VIDEO/YouTube