Who was Savithri Sreedharan? The Umma of Sudani from Nigeria dies at 83
The theatre veteran won a National Award Special Mention for Sudani from Nigeri
Dubai: Savithri Sreedharan, the veteran Malayalam theatre actor who became a household name late in life as Jameela in Sudani from Nigeria, has died.
She died at around 4am on Wednesday at her home, Sreedhareeyam, in Mankavu, Kozhikode, after a prolonged period of age-related illness. She had been bedridden for some time.
Who was Savithri Sreedharan?
To most film audiences, she was simply Umma: the gentle, softly spoken mother at the heart of Sudani from Nigeria, the 2018 film that swept Kerala and travelled far beyond it.
To Kerala's theatre world, she had been known for decades. Savithri was a professional stage actor from Kozhikode who spent more than 40 years in Malayalam drama, performing in thousands of productions with a string of troupes before cinema ever came calling.
She acted in exactly one film in that time, a brief appearance in 1991, and then returned to the stage for another 27 years. When she finally came back to screen acting in her seventies, she won a National Film Awards Special Mention for it.
Her filmography after that runs to more than a dozen titles, most of them mothers and grandmothers, all played with the same restraint that made Jameela land.
Four decades on stage
Her troupes included KT Mohammed's Kalinga, along with Chiranthana, Sangamam and Stage India, and she took on demanding roles across all of them.
The recognition came steadily. She won the Kerala State Award for best theatre actress twice, in 1977 and again in 1993, and received the Kerala Sangeetha Nataka Akademi Award for her contribution to drama in 2009, along with a lifetime achievement honour.
A first film, then a long gap
Her screen debut came in 1991, in a brief appearance in MT Vasudevan Nair's Kadavu.
Then nothing, for nearly three decades, while she carried on with the stage work that had always been her livelihood.
Her breakthrough role
In 2018, Zakariya Mohammed cast her as Jameela in Sudani from Nigeria, the mother of Soubin Shahir's football manager Majeed, in a story set among the sevens football tournaments of Malappuram.
Audiences simply called her Umma. Her performance, built out of small gestures rather than big scenes, became the emotional centre of a film that went on to win Best Feature Film in Malayalam at the 66th National Film Awards.
Savithri took a Special Mention at the same ceremony, and won the Kerala State Film Award for Best Character Actress, as well as Asianet and Filmfare awards for best supporting actress.
'I don't really know how to speak for interviews'
Speaking to The News Minute after her national award, she was disarming about her own success, saying she did not really know how to give interviews and had told everyone she did not know much about acting in films.
She described the film itself with more certainty. "I think of Sudani with sadness. It touches your heart," she said, recalling a quiet scene with the late actor KTC Abdullah in which her character's new husband leaves without drinking his tea.
The work that followed
After Sudani, the offers did not stop.
She appeared in Dakini the same year, then in Aashiq Abu's Virus in 2019, playing another Jameela, in a performance that drew wide praise. Her later credits included Mera Naam Shaji, Mohabbathin Kunjabdulla, Ittymaani: Made in China, Oru Kadathu Katha, Ice Orathi, Pada, Madappally United, Paappan, Christy and Vayasethrayaayi? Muppathiee..!!
