Amma Ariyan is considered to be a complex movie and was one of the biggest experiments in Indian cinema when funds were raised to make a film without giving the slightest heed to its commercial viability.
In the thinly populated forest area of Wayanad in northeast Kerala, the jeep in which he is traveling is stopped by the Police, who take possession of it to carry a dead body found hanging on the wayside tree.
Purushan meets journalist friends, doctors, and finally a veteran comrade, fondly addressed as Balettan who identifies the dead as the fellow musician who accompanied Satyajit, the guitarist.
As they move from Kozhikode to Beypore, Kodungalloor, Thrissur, Kottapuram, Vypin, and finally to Fort Kochi, the group swells as they meet many mothers and their sons and relatives who have known Hari; some had known him as a tabla player, some as Tony, the jazz drummer, and others as a silent political activist, a victim of police brutality, and a loner.
Starting with the medical students agitation against commercialization of medical education, to a short dialogue with Karuppuswamy, the unfortunate victim who had lost both his legs in a colliery workers struggle for better wages and human dignity, in Kottapuram, to Vypin island where several mazdoors (labourers) either died or lost their eyesight in the man-made hooch tragedy, to the Citizens group's forcible taking over of rice and sugar hoarded by unscrupulous black marketer traders and distributing to ordinary people at fair prices and giving back the money collected to the traders, to the manipulated fight between workers of two feuding unions in a Mattancherry street in Fort Kochi, where four fishermen had died, and also some targeted working-class leaders in a fake Police encounter, an abortive factory workers strike extending solidarity to the retrenched women workers in Fort Kochi, are some of the long list of peoples protests and struggles reported with deep concern and feeling by Purushan in a long letter to his Mother.
As Purushan and his group wait for Hari's mother to come out of the Baptism ceremony from the church, they analyze their own past, noting the emerging debate focusing on the romantic evasions and tragic failures of the extremist movement.
A group of young friends of John Abraham who wanted to make it into a "people's movie", constituted the Odessa Collective, aiming at production and exhibition of good cinema with active participation of the general public, without the intervention of market forces.
The traditional matrilineal kinship, sensitively shown in the scene between the mother and the son's betrothed drying the wet cloth in the sun, waypoints to the strong influence Purushan (The Man) has in defining his personal radicalism.
As the journey proceeds and Purushan takes stock of his life and goes into reflections of his umbilical links with his mother and the beloved as they always appear together as a single entity in his mind, he finds himself more and more alienated from the group and their ideology, (if they have one).
Starting with the medical students' agitation against the commercialization of medical education (a topical issue to this day), to a short dialogue with Karuppuswamy, the unfortunate victim who had lost both his legs in colliery worker's struggle for better wages and human dignity, in Kottapuram, to Vypin island where several mazdoors (laborers) either died or lost their eyesight in the man-made hooch tragedy, to the citizens group's forcible taking over of rice and sugar hoarded by unscrupulous black marketer traders and distributing to ordinary people at fair prices and giving back the money collected to the traders, to the manipulated fight between workers of two feuding unions in a Mattancherry street in Fort Kochi.
Where four fishermen had died, and also some targeted working-class leaders in a fake Police encounter, abortive factory workers' strike extending solidarity to the retrenched women workers in Fort Kochi ¦ are some of the long lists of people's protests and struggles reported with deep concern and feeling by Purushan in a long letter to his Mother ¦ The metaphors used by John in Amma Ariyan are powerful, but often obscure.