Vincent Peppe introduces his mother as an Angamaly achayathi, with five brothers, and a taste to make beautiful pork curry. Jolly Chirayath had no trouble calling him da and giving him orders to do this and that. That’s how she spoke at home, to her kids. So she became Thresiyamma for Lijo Jose Pellissery's Angamaly Diaries after an audition and a three-day grooming that the director put together for all his 86 new actors.
Jolly has acted before, in independent films — a small role in TD Dasan Std. VI B, an activist that she is in real life too for Jayan Cherian’s Ka Bodyscapes, and her longest role as the mother of Kani Kursuthi in Vipin Vijay’s Prathibhasam.
The first time she faced a camera was for a Milma Feeds film by Mani Lal. Her acting and activism are so connected that you could trace both back to her school days, growing up in Thrissur, admiring her big brother Joy who was into cultural activities. “Those were days girls didn’t take part in school plays. I thought that unfair and in our Malayalam medium school, I wrote an English play when I was in sixth grade. I also played a male character,” she says between splits of laughter. That sense of working against injustice grew with her. So did her love for acting. As a 17-year-old, without telling anyone at home, she sent off a photo she tore from her concession card to Balchandra Menon when he put an ad inviting new faces for April 18. “But mother knew it when they returned the photo saying they already fixed someone!”
She had even tried going to the NSD but had to leave it midway, join the Thrissur School of Drama, leave that too. But then she attended a theatre camp by Sthree Padana Kendram by Mini Sukumar, learnt lots, wrote plays. Her biggest achievement came in 2001, in the days she lived in Sharjah. Jolly realised that for 25 years there hasn’t been a theatre camp held for Indian expats because of a misunderstood play by P.M. Antony called Shavamtheeni Urumbu. Jolly talked to schools, to associations, but everyone had discouraged her. “I looked at the students there, spending their vacations inside the four walls of their house, because they couldn’t afford to visit India or the expensive cultural activities other kids went for.” So she went on relentlessly till one day she went into the National Theatre Institute of Sharjah and managed to convince the director of Cultural Ministry. Late actor Murali and Abhinaya theatre founder Reghoothaman had become directors of the camp.
Jolly’s activism continued when she came back to Kerala in 2010, becoming part of a group called Sthreekootayma, that had famously protested against the rape and murder of two Dalit girls in Badaun by going to the Kochi high court, wrapped in sheets. She left the group later. But Jolly’s voice would still rise for justice, every time she found it hurt.
