Thiruvananthapuram: Students of the KR Narayanan National Institute of Visual Science and Arts on Tuesday denounced the 'baseless' and 'condemnable' allegations made by the institute's chairman Adoor Gopalakrishnan against faculty member M G Jyothish.

They flayed Adoor's comment in an open letter. Adoor made the comments during an interview with a newspaper recently.

Refuting Adoor's charge that Jyothish was a lazy teacher, students said Jyothish has trained many of the best actors in Malayalam cinema.

"Thank you for making it clear how caste still works in your mind, even though you claim you have removed the caste title from your name. No matter how good the teacher is, if he belongs to a backward community, he is cast as unfit and as a bad person...This is nothing but the arrogance of the caste," the students of the Department of Acting wrote in the open letter.

Meanwhile, CPM leader M A Baby has come out in support of the award-winning filmmaker, calling the opposition against him a 'senseless, personal attack'.

"It is irresponsible and defamatory to cast Adoor as a casteist and tarnish his image. He had been a secularist all through his life and has stood against communalism and caste domination," Baby wrote in a Facebook post.