“The casting couch is a thing of the past. Only bad girls would share the bed with someone.”
—Innocent, AMMA president and Lok Sabha MP
“The victim was friends with the assailant. She should be careful about the company she keeps.”
—Actor Dileep
***
The ‘Kerala model’ is a phrase that buzzes around in those debates about development—till it turns into a sexist WhatsApp joke, complete with dodgy visual memes. Yes, for all those social indices that put this state on par with western Europe, it’s a culture thrashing about in a kind of ugly reactionary conservatism. Don’t go by the Malayalam film industry’s feminine-sounding moniker, Mollywood. To the uninitiated, a large part of Kerala’s popular culture can be a guidebook to what a patriarchal blowback looks like.
Go instead by the name ‘AMMA’, as the all-powerful actors’ association calls itself. Sacrificing mother, wicked paramour: these are the ruling tropes. The recent spectacle of AMMA’s all-male panel addressing the media, on a controversial case of a sexual assault on a top actress, pretty much nailed it. No different from photos of a khap panchayat, or of the Trump cabinet that abolished abortion, they thought it fit to aggressively defend the male superstar, Dileep, who’s now formally come within the arc of suspicion.
The trouble is at two levels. As AMMA’s composition shows, the industry is controlled by powerful males. At a deeper level, popular Malayalam cinema itself bristles with male anger. Films are littered with scenes that reek of misogyny. Amazingly for a wholly literate society, with a long history of independent-minded women, the cinema often seems like an excuse for a reassertion of the injured male ego. Scenes of wife-beating are thrown in casually; invocations to an idealised penmanassu (feminine mind) or female fragility come like punctuation marks. The space a woman must occupy in society, how she must behave even in the face of a sexual assault, these are constant themes.
And it’s largely unchanged through the decades. Take two films separated by 32 years, both coincidentally starring superstar Mammootty, a man generally seen as decent but on whose broad shoulders the prototype sits well. (The filmography of other actors is scarcely more flattering—Mohanlal, for instance, has starred in an endless string of odes to machismo, complete with routine woman-baiting.)
Ente Upasana (My Worship, 1984) is a glorified rape film. Lathika (played by Suhasini) is offered a lift by her friend’s brother Arjunan (Mammootty) in his fancy car. She’s driven to a desolate place, raped, then dropped off. Her resistance, her appeals are all dismissed: male desire must be met, and she’s conveniently there. The usual vocabulary surrounding rape is missing. The casualness of the act, in a picturesque setting with the patter of rain, almost gives it a visual-aural sanction.
Lathika’s life is wrecked (only “bad girls share the bed with someone”): dumped by her fiancé, she carries the burden of shame and moves to the city to single-handedly bring up her child. The culprit now reappears as a boss. The denouement: he accepts the suffering woman, the mother of his child. The raptor is not punished but doubly rewarded. The film is a eulogy to the ‘true Indian woman’, one who must bear male dominance, even sexual crime, in all meekness. If she’s lucky, the raptor may even accept her.
In Kasaba (2016), Mammootty plays a cop called Rajan Zachariah who tucks his hand into the waistband of a woman IPS officer’s pants and pulls her crotch towards him, telling her, even if she is the boss, he could “disrupt her periods”. “Pardon me for not saluting you,” he says, as he proceeds to manhandle her. Then struts away. Sexual harassment in the workplace? Says who? Even if he’s a junior officer, the audience must know who the real boss is in a patriarchal society.
The Kerala Women’s Commission had, in fact, issued a notice to the actor and the filmmakers against the sexually demeaning dialogues and even advised Mammootty against doing such roles. The letter said, “In the name of freedom of expression, women cannot be insulted.” If Mammootty mouths such dialogues, such ideas will actually be reinforced, the letter added.
But how many cinema moments can be erased by censure? In Baba Kalyani (2006), Mohanlal’s character, a tough cop, pulls a defiant woman lawyer towards him in public and forces a kiss on her. The smart, literate, ‘modern’ prototype (played by Mamta Mohandas), expectedly, crumbles. Later in the film, he defends himself in front of a caricaturised women’s panel by saying the lawyer is actually his wife (read: ‘property’), so a kiss was no misdemeanour at all.
This world of images is not all illusion either: it spills over onto behaviour in real life. The newly formed Women in Cinema Collective (WCC), comprising female actors, directors and scriptwriters, cites sexual harassment on film sets. It received enough complaints from actresses and women employees that when they met CM Pinarayi Vijayan, prevention of sexual harassment in the workplace was one of their chief demands.
When actor-director Geethu Mohandas, a member, was asked if it was rampant in the film industry, she was guarded, saying the Collective had decided to stick to formal statements. But rumours are that it’s bad enough: a couple of women even quit acting because of it. Actresses Parvathy and Lakshmi Rai had openly given interviews about the casting couch problem in Mollywood. But when asked, Innocent, MP from Chalakuddy and president of AMMA (Association of Malayalam Movie Actors), who made his name primarily as a comedian, responded with that seriously dubious line quoted on top.
The blatant misogyny in Malayalam films dates from the ’80s, says film critic C.S. Venkiteswaran. “Earlier, actresses like Sharada shared screen space with their male counterparts and seemed to enjoy equal status. From the ’80s, there was a shift. Family audiences moved to TV serials; the theatre audience is male.” The inner logic may have been the same. “We have seen the murder/suicide of actresses Rani Padmini and Shoba because of sexual relations.” Now it has moved to a more public attempt to humiliate: the recent sexual assault being the headline event.
On February 17 this year, a top actress was abducted by a gang of six, molested for two-and-a-half hours, and the assault videographed in an attempt to blackmail her. The 30-year-old victim, unlike Lathika in Ente Upasana, reported the assault to her colleagues and registered a complaint with the police, becoming an icon for other rape victims. On February 19, a huge gathering of actors rallied in support. Actor Devan said, “This has happened to ente (my own) sister....” The huge crowd, following Mammootty’s lead, took an oath about creating “a society that makes a woman safe”. In hindsight, perhaps one of the best performances by Mollywood.
Five months later, as leads pointed to what was only rumoured earlier—that superstar Dileep and director Nadirshah could have been the masterminds of the crime—the mask dropped and the film fraternity started singing a different tune. Both are proceeding apace: dramatic developments in the case itself, and the disquieting sight of male actors banding together to protect one of their own, slighting the victim, heckling the media, everything in a spirit of tribal loyalty.
Conspiracy theories and clues are both swirling about. The phone records of the main accused, a driver called Pulsar Sunil, and his letter from the jail to Dileep have forced the police to investigate him. But even as police put Dileep and Nadirshah through a marathon, 13-hour interrogation—the latter being suspected by police of being involved in cheating—AMMA was holding its general body meeting in the same city, Kochi. The peers started an astounding counter-attack: misogyny flowed freely.
One worthy pointed out in a heated TV debate that the actress was molested only for two-and-a-half hours while poor Dileep had been hounded for five months! (Based on the fact that his involvement had long been rumoured, as a possible act of revenge relating to a tangled web of relationships.) Salim Kumar, a national award-winning actor, wrote on FB that the victim should undergo a lie detector test. And Aju Varghese, a young actor who could have been expected to be more in sync with the victim’s generation, named her in a FB post and asked her not to drag Dileep’s name into the crime—he earned a police case for his troubles.
The victim-blaming echoed how Dileep comported himself. In an interview with Reporter Channel, he said he had heard from director Lal (who denied having said it) that the victim and the assailant were good buddies. “She must be careful about the company she keeps. She was friends with the driver, he was her driver in Goa.” (Implication: if this is the company she keeps, she was asking for it.) He had introduced her to films, Dileep added dramatically, and had paired with her for 7-8 films before they parted ways. Finally, the victim issued an open letter: Dileep’s words had really pained her, there was no basis for such a statement and, if necessary, she would take legal action. “I am innocent and I’m not afraid of anyone.”
A day after the interrogation, Dileep’s presence at AMMA’s presser made for high drama, or perhaps low drama. What action would be taken against actors who demeaned the victim? Innocent, with an expression of mock innocence, said: “The case is in court, the police are investigating.” No pledge to protect a beloved sister. Neither superstar, Mohanlal or Mammootty, spoke a word as AMMA office-bearers asserted they would not let one of their own be crucified by the press. Actors Mukesh and Ganesh Kumar, both MLAs, fulminated. Dileep said his words had been twisted. (Not true, for the interviewer had him repeat it several times.)
Writer N.S. Madhavan, who had tweeted that “AMMA stands for Association of Money-mad Male Actors”, thinks it odd that the body’s council has only two actresses when half its members are women. “There have been powerful female-oriented Malayalam films, but this is a paradox: AMMA is not concerned about a colleague who was abducted. They are more bothered about protecting the male actor. And these same actors run all the associations, AMMA, MACTA, FEFKA. They pretend to be progressive but their actions betray them. Three of them (Mukesh, Ganesh Kumar and Innocent) have been put up by the Left. It really needs to examine their conduct and take them to task.”
But monopoly speaks—the industry is in the hands of a few. Money and muscle power rule, and superstars use goons to control the industry. If anyone speaks against them, they are immediately sidelined or ‘banned’ so everyone toes the line. Actors like Thilakan, the victim herself, Manju Warrier and directors like Vinayan have had to struggle to be in Mollywood.
The younger crop is attempting to rewrite the narrative. Director Ashiq Abu’s 22 Female Kottayam and Rani Padmini are strong woman-centric films. And actor Prithviraj had promised on FB that he would no more act in films that demean women. But they’re up against a Goliath. Director Amal Neerad and producer Anwar Rasheed this week complained of an ‘undeclared ban’ on their films—and Ashiq Abu wrote on FB they would defy “fascism in Malayalam films”.
Fascism with a gender, one may add. Writer Sarah Joseph says the Malayalam film world does not seem to understand what a woman is. “They define her through her body. The colour of her body, her shape and size. There is no place for bold, independent women characters in popular films. If they create such a character, in the end the male gives her a slap and subdues her. These are the people that set the values for society.”
That’s a sad epilogue to a progressive, educated, non-stereotypical society, one that has known permissiveness in the not-so-distant past, and where some outstanding actresses have performed. Now the female is there mostly to be sexualised, and thus humiliated. She is defined by her lips, her cleavage, her breasts, her butt and thighs and legs. In 1949, Simone De Beauvoir wrote in The Second Sex that the two sexes have never shared the world equally and women are of another caste. Gender too is a caste in the kitsch part of Mollywood. And sadly, its superstars are no longer in sync with Kerala society.
