Sufi Paranja Katha

By Baiju NT, "Priyanandanan's Sufi Paranja Katha" - Malayalam Galatta - Chennai, Tamil Nadu, India
Thursday, September 25, 2008

Priyanandanan, director of Pulijanmam which won the best feature film award at the 54th National Film Awards 2006, is all set to direct his next venture, Sufi Paranja Katha (What the Sufi Said), an adaptation of famous Malayalam writer K.P. Ramanunni's first novel by the same name.

The film will be produced by some NRIs in the US. Script and dialogues are handled by the author himself while camera is by Hari Nair.

Set in the early nineteenth century Kerala, Sufi Paranja Katha evolves around the inter-religious marriage between a Muslim and a Hindu, played by Mammootty and Karthy.

Though converted to Islam, Karthy is unable to resist the primeval tug of her original religion.

The theme of the film is that no one is free from his cultural heritage of generations, irrespective of the religion that one is born into or chooses.

Ramanunni's novel ‘Sufi Paranja Katha’ has already been translated into English, French, Tamil and Hindi, and has won the two prestigious awards in Malayalam - the Kerala Sahitya Akademi Award and the Edasseri Award.

Ramanunni, born in 1955 in Ponnani, recently won the Rashtriya Sahityik Puraskar instituted by the Bharatiya Bhasha Parishad. He won the award for his latest novel, ‘Jeevithathinte Pusthakam’. His other works include ‘Charama Varshikam’, ‘Vidhathavinte Chiri’, ‘Vendappettavante Kurishu’, ‘Purusha Vilapam’ and ‘Jathi Chothikkuka’.