Vilakkupara: A Village Without Electricity

Resul Pookutty was born on 30 May 1971 in Vilakkupara, a small settlement near Anchal in the Kollam district of Kerala, roughly forty kilometres inland from the town of Kollam itself. He was the youngest of eight children, and his father worked as a ticket checker on private buses. By his own repeated account the village had no electric supply during his childhood, the nearest school was several kilometres away on foot, and schoolwork was done by the light of a kerosene lamp. The detail is worth holding on to, because the boy who grew up in that darkness went on to win an Academy Award for the way a film sounds.

He has spoken of the particular quality of nights in a village with no electricity, where the ear does most of the work: insects, wind in rubber trees, a distant bus, water. It is tempting to read that as a tidy origin myth for a career in sound, and he has been careful not to overplay it, but the connection is not fanciful either. Attention is a trainable faculty, and his was trained early.

From Physics to the Mixing Desk

He took a bachelor's degree in physics at Milad-E-Sherief Memorial College in Kayamkulam between 1987 and 1990, then began a law degree at the Government Law College in Thiruvananthapuram. Cinema intervened. He applied to the Film and Television Institute of India in Pune, was admitted to its audiography course, and graduated in 1995. That was the decisive turn of his life. Characteristically, he did not simply abandon the abandoned degree: years afterwards he sat the remaining law examinations and enrolled as an advocate in 2012, saying that he wanted to complete what his father had wished for him.

The institute gave him a technical vocabulary for something he had already understood intuitively. He has often described a fascination with silence rather than noise, with the way an absence of sound can carry more information than a musical score. The physics helped as well; sound is, after all, a problem of waves and materials before it becomes an art.

He moved to Mumbai and started out as a location sound recordist and designer, making his feature debut with Private Detective: Two Plus Two Plus One in 1997. Through the late 1990s and early 2000s he built a reputation for meticulous recording on location at a time when much of the Hindi industry still leaned heavily on post-production dubbing, and his insistence on capturing real acoustic space rather than manufacturing it in a studio slowly changed expectations. His work on Sanjay Leela Bhansali's Black in 2005, a film about a deaf and blind woman in which sound design is not decoration but subject matter, brought him wide critical attention. Credits followed across several languages and industries, including Hindi, Malayalam, Tamil and Telugu productions as well as British films.

The Night of the Oscar

In 2008 he worked as a sound mixer on Danny Boyle's Slumdog Millionaire, alongside Richard Pryke and Ian Tapp. The film demanded that Mumbai be heard as much as seen: crowded lanes, trains, a call centre, a television studio, a riot. At the Academy Awards ceremony held in February 2009 the three of them won Best Sound Mixing, making Pookutty the first Indian to take an Oscar in that category. The same picture also won him a BAFTA for Best Sound, shared with a slightly wider team including Glenn Freemantle and Tom Sayers.

His acceptance speech became famous in India. Instead of reeling off a list of executives, he spoke of coming from a civilisation that had given the world the syllable Om, and dedicated the award to his country. In Vilakkupara, where relatives and neighbours had gathered around a television set in the small hours, the response was exactly what one would expect.

After the Award

Recognition at home followed quickly. The Government of India conferred the Padma Shri on him in 2010. He has won National Film Awards for audiography, including for the Malayalam historical film Kerala Varma Pazhassi Raja and later for Otha Seruppu Size 7, and a Kerala State Film Award for his sound design on Aadujeevitham. An honorary doctorate came from Sree Sankaracharya University of Sanskrit.

He published a memoir tracing the distance between the kerosene lamp and the awards stage, and he has been an unusually articulate public advocate for sound as an authorial craft rather than a technical afterthought. He teaches master classes at film festivals, has spoken bluntly about the working conditions of technicians, and has campaigned for better projection and sound infrastructure in Indian cinemas. In 2023 he moved behind the camera himself, directing the Malayalam feature Otta.

Why the Village Matters

Pookutty's story is retold so often in India that it risks hardening into a slogan, which would be a pity, because the specifics are what give it force. There was no film culture in Vilakkupara to inherit. There was no equipment, no mentor, no relative in the industry, no obvious route from a bus conductor's household to a Hollywood mixing stage. What there was, on his own telling, was an unusually acute ear developed in a place where the nights were genuinely dark and genuinely quiet, and a family that did not treat an eccentric ambition as an embarrassment.

He has remained anchored in Indian cinema, and particularly in Malayalam cinema, rather than settling permanently abroad, and he speaks often about the obligation that comes with being the one from the village who got out. For anyone interested in what Indian villages actually produce, Vilakkupara has a claim as strong as any: it gave the world a man who changed how a global audience hears an Indian city.