Sethurama Iyer

The character is said to have been inspired by the police officer Radhavinod Raju, who in 2009 was appointed as the first chief of India's National Investigation Agency.[2] Raju's excellence while probing the Polakulam Peethambaran murder case and SI Soman murder case, when he was acting as Superintend of CBI Kochi, attracted the attention of many. His "Dummy-to-Dummy" experiment in Polakulam Peethambaran murder case was used in Oru CBI Diary Kurippu. When Oru CBI Diary Kurippu became a hit, Mammootty became more famous in films and Raju in his services. Incidentally, Raju was Mammootty's senior in Maharajas College.[4]

Radhavinod Raju was also associated with the probes into Rajiv Gandhi assassination case and hijacking of Indian Airlines plane to Kandahar. The films Mission 90 Days and Kandahar were respectively inspired by the operations of Raju in these cases.[4]

Sethurama Iyer is depicted with a distinctive style in the films. The character is heavily based on Kerala Iyers (A Brahmin community which resides mostly in the Palakkad region of Kerala, though significant populations also reside in Cochin and Travancore). Mammootty thus in the series speaks Malayalam with traces of Tamil to represent the fact that the native language of this community is Tamil. The most charactertistic mannerism associated with him is his peculiar gait, as he folds both his arms behind his back while walking. He used to scratch his head using forefinger as a gesture while he is in intense conceptualization. In the second movie "Jagratha", he was shown as chewing betel, but this was dropped in the later films. His entries and exits in most scenes of the movies are punctuated by the signature background score of the series, composed by Shyam. He is always shown wearing a kumkum stripe on his forehead. He usually wears plain light coloured half sleeve shirt and dark plain trousers, without tucking in. He is married, and has a son, who appears in the film 'Jagratha', though not reappearing later.

Originally K. Madhu, the director of the film series had visualised the protagonist of the first film in the series as a tough cop named Ali Imran. It was Mammootty who convinced him that a pious intelligent Tamil Brahmin would be better.[1]

• CBI film series