Gone are the days of fanfare movie releases, of the bustling vitality of movie halls, the wafting fragrance of popcorns, coffee, and the warmth of milling bodies. The sociality of strange human voices, booing, cheering and clapping in unison are things of the past. The Covid pandemic has taken many lives, amongst them the throbbing vitality of movie halls. But then, it is their second death, the first happened when satellite television struck. Nevertheless, that popular punch dialogue remains spot on, “Picture abhi baaki hai mere dost”. Come pandemic or lockdowns, cinema continues, as does life itself. The nation is coming together as never before over new toasts to cinema that have brought down regional and ethnic walls and fences. Busting the myths of a monolithic national popular, this time the entertainment industry in India is waving flamboyant and variegated flags of polyphony, bursting upon OTT platforms, painting the nation red, and narrating it in daring new voices from the margins that proclaim that there can be no one India. That this is happening often from the fringes of regions, not ever considered ‘mainstream’ or ‘national’, is what contributes to the beauty of this phenomenon. It also sings a requiem to television, which for many today is no more than a screen for watching personalised digital fare.
Dial 'മ' For Malayalam: Streaming On An OTT Screen Near You, A Revolution In Cinema
Polyphony bursts forth, hegemonic ‘stud’ narratives are out. New Malayalam films, mirroring the gendered anxieties of a generation, bust the myth of a ‘monolith’ national culture.
Spaces of cinema viewing have changed, and so have tastes. Many who would never have taken a ticket to watch a Great Indian Kitchen from Malayalam or a Mandela from Tamil are doing so now, ensconced in the comfort of living rooms with pressure cookers singing in the background or enjoying the warmth of a cosy closeness with kith or kin, engrossed in ‘other’ Indian lives, putting themselves on hitherto strange new maps of the nation. Growing up in Ranchi, I was always a ‘Madrasi’, no matter how much time I spent enlightening my friends on the difference between Kerala and Tamil Nadu, and other South Indian states. Today over 40 OTT platforms, including Amazon, Netflix, Neestream or Hotstar, among many others, seem to be doing this with elan, dispelling cultural myths around lungis and idlis that had sedimented as stereotypes in the national popular. The idea of India is being rewritten from the regions, even as the pandemic has created a new ‘normal’ around entertainment. But, of all other cinemas, what is blooming now is a Malayalam spring, a cinema that with nimble flair is mounting a challenge to the entrenched idea that Hindi cinema is national cinema. The hegemony of the colossal culture industry of Bollywood is being challenged by small collectives from faraway Kochi or Kozhikode with shoestring budgets, in the process creating new screen ecologies where the age-old tags of popular, arthouse or independent cinemas get blurred in significant ways.
Malayalam cinema has long shaken off those popular binarist stereotypes that defined its oeuvre as Janus-faced, caught between esoteric arthouse and sleazy grindhouse. Trailblazing craftsmen of cinema like Adoor Gopalakrishnan, G. Aravindan, K.G. George, Bharathan, P. Padmarajan and many others created a niche of excellence and cemented Malayalam cinema’s status as one of the leading lights of Indian cinema. A host of contemporary filmmakers like Shyamaprasad, Biju, Sanal Kumar Sasidharan, Lijo Jose Pellissery, among a galaxy of others, have perfected the craft in order to rise up to this cinematic past. Malayalam cinema has delivered new promises in the new millennium, however, with a radically altered technique, style and content to suit the exigencies of a new era and new modes and technologies of film-making. It has almost been a decade since the cult popularity of Traffic (2011), which many believe heralded a ‘new generation’ in Malayalam, ushering in a new aesthetics in both crafting and consumption, creating in its wake movies like Chappa Kurishu, 22 Female Kottayam, Ee Adutha Kalathu, Diamond Necklace, among others. This turn brought a new zest to a flagging industry, reviving it with the middle-class aspirations of a generation that had hitched their wagons to the offers of liberalisation, while imbibing the visual iconographies of the satellite revolution. Many of them were schooled in the new terrains of digital cultures, and found fresh possibilities of an advertising and marketing economy on social media platforms. But what it most crucially enabled was a veering away from a male/stale superstardom, the bane of Malayalam cinema. Larger-than-life star icons whose oomph defined hegemonic masculinity—not content with huge cutouts, spectacles of fandom or pompous prefixes to their names—had monopolised the industry, creating ‘star-mafiadoms’ that owned everything from production houses to cinema halls to distributing agencies. The ‘new gen’ movies brought back ordinary men and women to the plotlines, their little worlds and fractured time, mapped on split screens, and punctuated through non-linear, disrupted narratives. These films were also tuned to the exigencies of a more universal ‘multiplex’ culture that loved sanitised viewings, as also radical chic posturings. Thus, Traffic was remade in multiple languages, as Chennaiyil Oru Naal in Tamil, as Crazy Star in Kannada, and under the same name and by the same director, Rajesh Pillai, in Hindi, starring Manoj Bajpayee. 22 Female Kottayam was remade in Tamil and Telugu simultaneously as Malini 22 Palayamkottai and Malini 22 Vijayawada. Thus, the circuits these new avatars of Malayalam cinema chart also create a new Indian league, a resurgence of the regional penetrating the hegemony of Hindi. Nevertheless, many of these films remained strategically silent around key national-political issues, veering towards moral ambivalence. Thus, they remained regional without being grounded in the earthy or instituting the politics of regionalism, without speaking of the specificity of caste or gender that constitute the regional in a particular manner, as movies like Paruthiveeran or Subramaniapuram had done in Tamil by unfolding a visual cartography of Dravidian sub-nationalism.
The second half of the decade brought in a rich harvest for Malayalam cinema. Maheshinte Prathikaram (2016), Angamaly Diaries (2017), Thondimuthalum Driksaakshiyum (2017), Sudani from Nigeria (2018), Kumbalangi Nights (2019), Ayyappanum Koshiyum (2020) among many others—all now streaming on OTT platforms—while remaining engaging and realistic, would nevertheless be what I call ‘cinema of a crisis-ridden masculinity’. By this time, both at the national and regional levels, strong macho leaderships had emerged, making ordinary men feel emasculated. Moreover, there was an explosion of market-driven models of cosmopolitan masculinities within the prolific narratives of the consumerist culture so endemic to Kerala. The discourses around women’s empowerment helped create social investments, however superficial, in gender equity, and an emergent ‘feminist’ capital at the microsocial level, perceived by many men to be a threat, fostered a sense of social and sexual inadequacy among them. Thus, here were men, pale shadows starting at the ghosts of their once-omnipotent fathers, fighting to be relevant in a changing social milieu, where they are no longer sole breadwinners, where women outnumber men in public spaces, and the fragility of masculinity begins from staring at them from close quarters.
The thin veneer of paternal patriarchy that often covers the misogynist portals of Malayalam cinema haunts the prolific oeuvre of the second decade of the new millennium too and can best be exemplified in what became a cult classic, Drishyam (2013). Directed by Jeethu Joseph and remade in many languages, including Hindi, Drishyam is a Mohanlal starrer sans the superstar paraphernalia. Yet, its charm is its autumnal tones, maybe evocative of the swan song of an ailing superstar culture, fighting to make itself relevant amidst changing times where ‘its’ women need to be protected from the pornographic gaze of a new cyber age. That a girl’s honour and a family’s pride are lost if a hidden camera in a bathroom captures her bathing, and therefore legitimises murder in order to protect that honour, seems to be a theme that popular audiences, even while riding the digital wave, consumed unproblematically. The audience is prompted to align itself all the time with the hero, who is fighting to cover the crime. It is interesting to speculate that Hindi cinema in 2020 offered a befitting reply to Drishyam through Sleeping Partner, the second film in the anthology Zindagi in Short, that arrived on Netflix in 2020. The middle-aged woman, filmed on camera in a steamy act with her lover, turns the tables on her habitual marital rapist of a husband and his ‘influential’ partner who happens to be her MMS-happy boyfriend. Her parting punch dialogue to both, delivered with a swagger, that there are sex video clips of a thousand ‘aunties’ online and she does not care if she becomes the thousand and oneth, reminds the audience of the subversive brilliance of Scheherazade, and of women who can yet turn the tables upon male plots that script their bodies in line with the codes of patriarchal desires. This rather trite feminist reply goes back in time to snub the smug paternal logic of Drishyam. Interestingly, Drishyam 2, released in 2021 on Amazon Prime, continues the search for the buried male body, which surfaces and resurfaces across executive, judicial, and social institutions that sabotage female agency in order to valorise the superhero male logic, all the while creating a shroud of victimhood around women’s bodies and immuring them in the mystique of the family.
A still from Paruthiveeran (2007) directed by Amir Sultan
The turn to the third decade of the millennium has seen the rise of a new leisure and entertainment media economy in India—of the privileged, urban ‘work from homes’. Their viewing practices have changed from the spatial and ideological dynamics of multiplexes to streaming platforms, especially corporate giants like Amazon and Netflix. And these have, to a large extent, globalised the local by investing in regional online content that cater to audiences that spill across linguistic and geographical boundaries created by nation-states. The demand for what Malayalis call ‘katta local’ or thickly local has been harvested by such platforms as part of a soaring market for the regional and ethnic flavours of India’s teeming multiplicity. The easy marketability of the ethnic and the local in the global, transnational culture industries, the booming trade of nostalgia to a significant diasporic population, and the growing entertainment demands of a whopping 624 million internet users in India together open up a market landscape that seems boundless with possibilities. Corporates like Amazon and Netflix also understood the market wisdom of localisation and glocalisation, as is evinced by the dubbing of many foreign language films into regional languages. It is the alacrity and niftiness with which a young brood of innovative content creators in Malayalam cinema responded to new technologies and platforms, and took up the nascent opportunities they afforded to alternatively imagine the region and community while strategically packaging them for the emerging modes of online entertainment, that is commendable. During the pandemic, the Malayalam cinematic outburst on OTT platforms, as they began localising their content strategies, offered a home-bound nation a rich and varied regional fare, toppling the ideas of a homogenised India, politically speaking back to attempts that seek to instal jingoism as a natural discourse.
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It is in this context that a host of Malayalam movies released specifically on OTT platforms during the pandemic—C U Soon, Nizhal, Joji, Nayattu, Aarkkariyam, Kho Kho, Kala et al—mark a new shift in the nation’s cinema viewing and aesthetic practices. If a century ago, it was the figure of the maternal uncle or karanavar in Kerala’s matrilineal tharavads that faced opposition from the then new generation of English-educated Nair reformers, today it is an ailing patriarchal industrial stronghold which continues to exercise petty despotic power over cinema, of which there is a wishful and symbolic decimation in movies like Joji and Kala. The writing on the wall is too loud to be missed. The society which systematically abolished matriliny in favour of patriliny and patriarchy is today, in its cinematic representational practices, in the grip of a deeply psychic fear of/violence against the castrating father, an image symbolic of the manner in which a hegemonic film industry had conducted itself. The law of the father seems no longer tenable in a field where technology has transformed the playing ground. A field where new media platforms, more democratised networks, the plurality of smaller actors, and the rise of social media as moulder of opinions and fact-checking the aura around celebrity cultures, are all foundational to the emergence of a new cinema. Local markets transformed into global markets and as existing hegemonies of film distribution and stalemates of exhibition underwent paradigm shifts, the time was ripe to castrate the castrating father. Armed with the new digital mobility of cinema and freed from the regimes of superstar-controlled cine associations that exercised oppressive power tactics in production, distribution and exhibition, Malayalam cinema has pioneered a path towards a vibrantly interconnected, dynamic ecology of entertainment in India.
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Nimisha Sajayan in The Great Indian Kitchen.
Malayalam cinema’s localisation practices within the OTT platform economy, with booming support from a vast diaspora, has both contributed to and resisted the pandemic-induced wave of media globalisation. It highlights the significance of the regional, not just as a sub-ecology, but as constitutive of a larger new national screen ecology shaped by both global and regional screen entertainment platforms. For example, when the iconoclastic feminist movie The Great Indian Kitchen was rejected by Amazon and Netflix, regional digital platform Neestream came forward. The rest became history. The film was such an iconic success that subsequently Amazon bought the streaming rights, probably illustrating how the regional and the global vie to create market-viable affective communities over not just language, content and style, but platforms too. The Great Indian Kitchen, though espousing the national in its title, nevertheless used the rich political flavours so culturally specific to Kerala, while pitching itself precariously on a spatial geography overpopulated by the visual and libidinal economies of hegemonic English and Hindi cinemas. At the same time, it connected with an overpowering relevance to the national and global gender politics in a post-#MeToo moment of great contemporary significance. Menstrual taboos and Sabarimala debates over women’s impure bodies became part of the stench from the leaking sink in the national kitchen, where a great Indian patriarchy had sat spinning the yarn of the spiritualised family, chewing regressive platitudes and spitting revivalist mores, mindless of the sea-changes happening around gender politics in the world around.
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The formation of the Women in Cinema Collective in Kerala, the first ever registered association of women cine artists in India which foregrounds a feminist consciousness, and their efforts to mainstream the gendered anxieties of a generation as also puncture the easy allure of the popular with feminine anxieties and protests, did contribute in large measure to the attempts to break away from the vice-like grip of the traditional masculine order in the Malayalam cinema industry. Even the debates within WCC initiated a more intersectional approach to gender questions, critically claiming reflexivity around caste and class in issues pertaining to gendered capital, privilege, and labour in the industry. In 2020, the corridors of Bollywood and the wider social portals of India resounded with a slap that shook their conscience. While Thappad finally managed in exposing to some extent the much-hyped ‘angel in the house syndrome’ of Indian cinema, much of the OTT crop of Malayalam movies, except The Great Indian Kitchen, remained unmoved by issues of caste and gender, preoccupied as they were with their father fixations and masculine violence. In fact, Hindi seems to be faring better on this front, especially films like Geeli Puchi, the third film in the anthology Ajeeb Dastaans, released in 2021 on Netflix—with a rare candour and finely nuanced intersectional politics, it unsettled many received archetypes around gender, caste and sexuality. Nevertheless, the Covid-19 virus has mitigated the toxicity of Malayalam cinema’s virus of misogyny, toppling its hegemonic masculinity spectacles and mammoth superstar-fitted ‘stud’ narratives, replacing them with fragile, psychotic and emasculated heroes.
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The pandemic has kept the Indian middle class locked in an often-inflated agony to their mundane routines within the secure entitlements of their homes, even as millions battle for lives and livelihoods outside. But the giant ferris wheel of the Indian entertainment industry continues to turn, helping many live in the magic world of denial and delight, making lives bearable and light as the heavy weight of dismal hours drags one into the dregs of depression. For many Indians who breathe and dream cinema, uninterrupted binge-watching is after all the new mantra to sanity. The ‘Mollywoodisation’ of larger viewing habits or tastes might not be on the cards as far as the spectators of online streaming platforms are concerned, but Malayalam cinema has definitely given the nation a run for its money.
(This appeared in the print edition as "മ For Malayalam and OTT Nation")
Academic and writer Meena T. Pillai, Director, Centre for Cultural Studies, University of Kerala, has edited Women In Malayalam Cinema: Naturalising Gender Hierarchies.