Synopsis-of a real Kerala story

Ennu Swantham Sreedharan (Yours Truly- Sreedharan) is a film based on a real-life story of a Kerala Muslim woman who raised three Hindu kids as her own, without changing their religion or way of life. Subaida and her husband - Abdul Aziz Haji - stand as shining examples of benevolence and ultimate humanity in a society that is increasingly defined by religion and related hate politics. 

The family of Subaida in Malappuram, a Muslim majority district of Kerala had no qualms in bringing the three children of Chakki, a Hindu –lower caste-domestic help of theirs, to their home when the latter passed away and a poor husband, a daily wager, was left to fend for three kids. The kids were brought up as Hindus in the Muslim family with their own, making it a house of six children. Hindu kids growing up in a Muslim household without converting to Islam is like a square peg in a round hole for the general mindset. All six children are still living as siblings even today, as a testimony to the longstanding generations of cohabitation and culture of brotherhood and humanness of Kerala, irrespective of faiths.

No one celebrated the generations of cohabitation in Kerala-the real Kerala story- till the boy of Chakki, Sreedharan in his forties, wrote a touching farewell tribute through a Facebook post from Oman where he was working, when Subaida died. The FB post was the proverbial inspiration for Siddik, the filmmaker, a resident of distant Eranakulam district, near Kochi. Siddique has already made his debut film “Thahira” about a Muslim woman fighter and survivor and the film was in the competition section of IFFI 2021. The film won honours at Bangalore International Film festival of the year too.

The real story of the film happened in the Muslim majority Malappuram district of Kerala in a village called Adakkakund, in Kalikavu Panchayat near Nilambur town. When the filmmaker went to the village for his research in 2019, no one in the locality thought something extraordinary had happened. The villagers remembered the house of Subaida, a house which celebrated six marriages, three Muslim and three Hindu ones. Subaida had died of kidney failure and the local church too arranged a prayer for her recovery, as she was popular among the locals for her humane interventions for the needy people around. 

The film was shot in an upper cast household of the locality, which was freely given to the filmmaker by the retired teacher, a Nampoodiri  Brahmin as a mark of respect to the departed Subaida.

The film gives us beautiful glimpses of this coexistence and simplicity and ultimately proves that it is humanness which defines people, not religion or faith. Their lives prove that love and humanity can truly transcend religious, class and caste boundaries and unite everyone as human beings in a very ordinary village situation, despite all hate build-ups around us.