POSTSCRIPT CRICKET | CINEMA

The Celluloid Women of Kerala

For all its applauded elan, Malayalam cinema has engendered the myth and the mystique of the empowered Malayali woman.
Meena T Pillai

he much-hyped Kerala model of development, which posits spectacularly superior social development indicators in the face of low per capita income, and helped lift Keralas image to enviable heights globally, has not augured well for the women of the state in terms of a liberatory potential that would translate into tangible gains in their everyday lives. Commendable indices on female literacy, employment, sex ratio and healthcare, together with reservation of one-third seats in local governance bodies, are often aunted as proof that Keralas women have scored, socially and politically, in the public domain. Thus was born the myth and the mystique of the empowered Malayali woman. Ironically, none of these indices nd echo in the images of women in Malayalam cinema. From Vigatha Kumaran (1928) to date, on screen, Kerala women have joyfully surrendered their independence and identity, too willing to be putty in the hands of male desire and the male gaze. All through its 85-odd years of history, Malayalam cinema has, time and again, colluded with reformulated patriarchal ideologies to function as a false mirror, one which has the magical and delicious capacity to inate the gure of the Malayali man to twice or thrice its natural size while trimming women to the tiniest possible proportions metaphorically, of course!
NOVEMBER 30, 2013 vol xlviII no 48
EPW Economic & Political Weekly

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Malayalam cinema reects the gender paradoxes that remained on the margins of viewing experiences, and the muchcomprise the blind spots of Keralas experience of modernity. lauded lm society movement failed to accommodate the femiOnly by bargaining and compromising their autonomy and nine or offer less gendered public spaces for the female spectator. agency within the private sphere have the women of Kerala By the 1980s and 1990s the rhetoric of the popular in an been able to negotiate their way into the public domain. overtly commercial cinema succeeded in hitching female Screen images bear testimony to the double burden and fantasies of empowerment and transformation on to the reiterative identication with familial norms and ideals that bandwagon of consumerism. The allure of commodity was have given the women of Kerala a visibility in the workforce the nal blow to the emancipatory possibilities that cinema of the state. And yet, paradoxically enough, their ...on screen, Kerala could offer women. The collusive tactics of capipay cheques enhance only family exchequers and women have joyfully talism, neo-conservatism and patriarchy together hardly ever guarantee either nancial autonomy contributed to a re-feudalisation of the public surrendered their or individual mobility. sphere as many of the post-1990s lms (Aaram independence and Cultural critics have pointed out how, in enforcThampuran, Ravanaprabhu, Narasimham, King, identity, too willing ing gender norms, the liberal democratic spaces Commissioner) illustrate. to be putty in the of Keralas public domain are increasingly becomOf late, a new crop of lms (22 Female Kottayam, ing punitive and disciplinary. Malayalam cinema hands of male desire Salt and Pepper, Chappa Kurissu, Trivandrum Lodge), and the male gaze offers a trenchant insight into the historical roots parading as New Generation, seems hugely sucof this sexual and moral policing. P K Rosy, the rst Malayali cessful in subverting some of the entrenched paradigms of woman actor, was ostracised and hounded out of the state by Malayalam cinema and reviving an industry that was in the the collusive ideologies of caste and patriarchy, illustrating grip of a nameless apathy. The new-gen cinema appears to how misogyny became woven into the fabric of Malayali culaccommodate the anxieties of a generation moulded by the ture in the early 20th century. Rosys offence was that not exigencies of liberalisation and the iconographies of satellite only did she, as a dalit, dare to enact the upper-caste body television and virtual digital worlds. Nonetheless, this genre but that, as a woman, she dared to write herself so unasham if it can be called that remains, by and large, politically and edly and indelibly into as public an arena as the movie screen morally ambivalent. The new-gen lms pose as radical chic and the movie hall, inviolably masculine spaces. The tragic and wallow in public self-stylisation. But whether they can fate of Rosy signalled the subsequent taming and grooming offer the celluloid paper dolls of Kerala a political identity other of all women in the public sphere who dared offer themselves than their familial or sexual connections to men seems moot. to the specular Malayali male gaze. Meena T Pillai (meenatpillai@gmail.com), Director for Cultural Studies, University of Only by the 1950s did Malayalam cinema break free from Kerala, Trivandrum, edited Women in Malayalam Cinema: Naturalising Gender Hierarchies (Orient Blackswan). Tamil inuences and begin to consciously evolve an idiom of its own. However, its egalitarian, socialist base, derived from progressive reformist literary traditions that long invoked the language of social realism, only neutralised caste while strengthening gender stereotypes. The much-celebrated Neelakuyil (1954) is a case in point. In negotiating the transition of a traditional society to a more contemporary, secular one, Malayalam cinema reimagined the modern bourgeois family and reallocated roles and models, especially for women. The woman was thus further tamed and made docile under a conjugally ideal paradigm that regulated female sexuality. This project of sabotaging women through love continued into the 1960s. It is through copious tears, self-sacricing acts of martyrdom and torture, and self-effacing bouts of compassion and tenderness that Malayalam cinema offers to legitimise its women and procure for them some amount of respectability. The New Wave of the 1970s, led by a host of brilliant directors like Adoor Gopalakrishnan, G Aravindan and T V Chandran, followed by advocates of a Middle Cinema like K G George and Padmarajan did attempt to critique the tokenisation of women and the idealisation of the hegemonic male subject. But the high modernist imperatives of the New Wave unwittingly contributed to the dichotomisation of Malayalam cinema into art and popular lms. Women themselves
Economic & Political Weekly EPW

NOVEMBER 30, 2013

vol xlviII no 48

141