Sasthamkotta, and a Life in Three Trades

He was born on 2 February 1952 in Sasthamkotta, the Kollam district village best known for the freshwater lake at its centre, to Padmanabha Pillai and Saraswati Bhai. P. Balachandran would go on to work in three distinct crafts — the stage, the screenplay and the actor's role — and in Kerala he is one of the few figures who is genuinely difficult to file under any single one of them. He remained rooted in the small-town Kerala of his childhood in a way that shows plainly in his writing: his characters are rarely heroic, usually cornered, and almost always recognisable.

His higher education began close to home, at the Devaswom Board College in Sasthamkotta. The decisive move came when he joined the School of Drama and Fine Arts at Thrissur, then the most serious training ground for theatre practitioners in Kerala. The school gave him a grounding in dramatic structure and performance that would later distinguish his film scripts from those written by journalists or novelists moving sideways into cinema. He worked for many years as a teacher and professor alongside his creative output, and the pedagogic instinct never quite left him.

Paavam Usman and the Stage

Balachandran's reputation was made in the theatre before it was made anywhere else. His play Paavam Usman — Poor Usman — became one of the most discussed Malayalam stage works of its era, and in 1989 it brought him the Kerala Sahitya Akademi Award for Drama along with the Kerala Professional Nataka Award. The play's power came from its restraint: an ordinary man, an ordinary predicament, and dialogue that refused to inflate itself into speechmaking. It is still studied and staged.

In 2008 he received the Kerala Sangeetha Nataka Akademi Award for drama, confirming that his standing in the theatre was not the product of a single celebrated play but of sustained work over two decades. Even after cinema became his main livelihood, he continued to be spoken of first as a dramatist.

Writing for the Screen

His screenwriting career began in 1991, and it began at full stretch. That year alone produced Ulladakkam, directed by Kamal, Aparahnam directed by M. P. Sukumaran Nair, and Uncle Bun directed by Bhadran. Ulladakkam, a psychological drama set largely in a mental hospital, remains one of the most admired Malayalam films of the decade and demonstrated Balachandran's willingness to write characters whose interior lives are unstable and unresolved.

He followed it with Pavithram in 1994 and Thacholi Varghese Chekavar in 1995, both directed by T. K. Rajeev Kumar, and Agnidevan in 1995 for Venu Nagavalli. Pavithram, a study of a brother's devotion to his sister, became a durable popular favourite. In 1997 came Manasam, and in 2000 Punaradhivasam, a spare and difficult film that found its audience at festivals rather than in theatres. Police followed in 2005 for V. K. Prakash.

His most influential late script arrived in 2016 with Kammatti Paadam, directed by Rajeev Ravi — a sprawling account of land, caste and displacement on the margins of Kochi, told across decades. It was a substantial critical success and introduced Balachandran's writing to a much younger audience. He wrote Edakkad Battalion 06 for Swapnesh K. Nair in 2019.

Behind the Camera and In Front of It

In 2012 Balachandran directed his first and only feature, Ivan Megharoopan, built around the life of the poet P. Kunhiraman Nair. It was a personal project — a dramatist and screenwriter turning to the biography of a wandering poet — and it drew considerable critical attention for its handling of a difficult, unruly subject.

By then he had also become one of the most recognisable character actors in Malayalam cinema, appearing in more than sixty films. His performance in Trivandrum Lodge in 2012 is often named as his best; he was also Usman Ikka in Charlie in 2015, Krishnan's father in his own Kammatti Paadam, Varghese in Minnal Murali in 2021 and Gopalakrishna Pillai in Kurup the same year. He had, decades earlier, appeared uncredited in the 1982 film Gandhi. His screen presence was quiet and unshowy, the presence of a man who had spent a lifetime watching actors from the wings and knew exactly how little was required.

Last Years

Balachandran was married to Sreelatha; the couple had two children, Sreekanth and Parvathy. His final years were shadowed by illness. He suffered from brain fever over an extended period and was hospitalised repeatedly, with his last admission in July 2020. He died on 5 April 2021 at Vaikom, aged sixty-nine, and was cremated with full state honours — a recognition from the Kerala government of a man whose work had run through the state's theatre and cinema for more than thirty years.

Several of his performances were released after his death, so that for a strange stretch of 2021 audiences continued to encounter him on screen. It suited a career built on the idea that ordinary people, written carefully enough, outlast the plots they are placed in.