Made more than a decade after Elippathayam, Vidheyan (The Servile, 1993), based on Paul Zacharia's Bhaskara Patelarum Ente Jeevithavum (Bhaskara Patelar and My Life), also features outsiders—men in crisis—occupying a liminal space in a post-feudal world. And it too focuses on the relationship between power and powerlessness within the contexts of abuse. What has changed is the representation of such abuse. The earlier film adopted an understated poetics of symbol and metaphor, but Vidheyan describes, in vivid detail, the brute force with which power aligns itself to terror and violence. In fact, it is Gopalakrishnan's most graphic film in which he portrays oppression—both physical and mental—in all its intense rawness. The master-slave relationship at its center is far more venal and sordid than the one implied between Unni and Rajamma.

During the intervening years, Gopalakrishnan's vision had darkened as India's track record of social inequality and injustice had worsened with its entry into the free market economy in the early 1990s. Meanwhile, the rise of Hindu fundamentalism and the spread of ethnic and communal violence had made the problem of the Other even more acute. There is thus a new directness with which Gopalakrishnan describes the abjectness of the human condition. At the same time, the issue of transcendence acquires a new urgency, placed within the contexts of religion and faith and linked to a vision of human innocence and goodness.

Vidheyan's protagonist, Bhaskara Patelar, clings to the vestiges of a bygone era but, unlike the diffident and reclusive Unni, is a full-blown, malevolent villain who keeps a whole village in thrall. The innocent are not spared as they become the victims of some of his gratuitous displays of aggression. His well-aimed kicks send them crashing to the ground, after which he pummels them into submission with his feet. The most powerful and feared man in the village, Patelar is also known for his alcoholism and voracious sexual appetite—no young woman, married or single, is safe from his clutches.