May 17, 2024 11:19 PM IST
Women’s empowerment is not rocket science. It does not require complex theories as have been noted in political manifestos ahead of the elections.
A large chunk of Malayalam cinema that has emerged in the last decade — broadly called new-generation cinema — has garnered the attention of progressive minds largely because of the domestic or hyperlocal tropes they pull at in the plot’s journey to emancipate the woman protagonist.
Anand Ekarshi’s directorial debut Aattam (The Play) was released earlier this year and despite being a stellar theatrical depiction of its plot, it did not create the waves Sudipto Sen’s controversial The Kerala Story did, outside of Kerala. Both stories are about women’s bodies and their violations — yet both received very different receptions because of the intentions of their plots. The Kerala Story, which got a second life just ahead of elections in the state with a screening on Doordarshan and special screenings in some parishes, was promoted as a window for the non-natives to peek at “what goes on in the rebellious state”. Aside from the hackneyed depiction of women from Kerala — wearing kasavu sarees, adorning our long hair with jasmine flowers and interacting with Kathakali artistes are not what we do all day — The Kerala Story uses the deeply sensitive issue of sexual violence to further the agenda of sectarian politics. Its cause is not to rescue the woman from the violence but to rescue a community from an imagined epidemic — the threat of “love jihad”.
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Contrarily, no violence is directly depicted in Aattam. The violation of the body is quiet but its ripples are susurrant. For Anjali, who gets molested by someone she works with, it is the quietude of her colleagues, and the subsequent apathy, that is more distressing than the attack itself. The stage is a dining table that turns into a courtroom and meets the survivor with the same questions that plagued social media during the #MeToo movement. “What were you wearing? Were you drunk? Maybe you should arrive at a compromise.” One character even calls what the survivor underwent “tactile hallucination”.
In similar veins, Jeo Baby’s The Great Indian Kitchen (2021) and Vipin Das’s Jaya Jaya Jaya Jaya Hey (2022) — both important works of art — underline what constitutes domesticity for a woman in an average Malayalee household. Some critics have even pointed out that it was the repetitiveness of actions that frustrated the audience while watching such films, which is later calmed by their cathartic endings.
Despite its social indicators that point towards a high literacy rate portraying a picture of freedom and equity, the reality of Kerala screams otherwise. The reality of a woman is what the character of Priya Paul undergoes in Amal Neerad’s Varathan (2018) — moral policing, the penetrative male gaze and the anticipated sexual assault she is subjected to. The misogynistic reality reprimands the woman for being too forward in her choices of clothing, it accuses the literacy of enabling her freedom, castigates her values and then faults her for it. For women who assert themselves and exercise their franchise, a term has been coined in the last decade — feminichi. The origins of the word are unknown but one can say it is loosely based on “feminazi” or a woman who pushes the code of conduct.
The congregation of feminichis happened not long ago when a Malayalee actress accused Dileep, another actor, of abducting and sexually assaulting her inside a car for over two hours. Dileep was accused of orchestrating the ordeal but his fanbase was unwilling to accept this. Other actors, who came out in support of the survivor, were termed “feminichis”. “Feminichis” are the opposite of women with adakkam and othukkam — words that signify a morally dignified woman. This woman does not wear “Western clothes”, she picks up after the men in the house, keeps her ambitions in check and maintains her composure when treated with disrespect (physical and verbal).
In Aattam, Anjali’s plight is questioned time and again because she deviates from this code of conduct. In the Malayalam films mentioned above, this transgression is without embellishment. It allows the woman protagonist, coarse and unrefined, a poetic justice like none other.
A lot has been said about what the “real Kerala story” is, especially in the aftermath of Sen’s film. The dialogue had the Internet divided on absolute terms. Most conversations arguing against Sen’s case spoke of an invented utopia that is Kerala. They drew parallels between the state’s political rebellion against aligning with majoritarianism with its ostensibly open-minded people.
However, the real story of Kerala’s women is that of women everywhere. This story comes alive in some of the formidable depictions of women in cinema that are a loud departure from the “Malayalee manga”, a beautiful woman from God’s Own Country with dark, expressive eyes, a well-endowed body, and long black hair, who does not go astray.
Women’s empowerment is not rocket science. It does not require complex theories as have been noted in political manifestos ahead of the elections. It is learned at home, during social interactions and through the art we consume. It begins with the according of agency to a fellow human, without hampering the route they take to arrive at the myriad meanings of empowerment.
A shorter version of this article was carried in the print edition dated May 18. The views expressed are personal
