‘Camera Obscura’ to ‘Camera Dentata’: Women Directors and the Politics of Gender in Malayalam Cinema

Initial Interventions

The first Malayalam cinema to be directed by a woman was Kavitha (Poetry, 1973) by Vijaya Nirmala. She finds a place in the Guinness Book of World Records for her phenomenal feat of having directed 47 films in different Indian languages, a record still unbeaten by any other woman in the world. She has said that it was after her anxieties around the enormity of funds required for making a film were allayed by a young male director I. V. Sasi that she ventured into film making (Nirmala, 2016). However, while all extant records chronicle Vijaya Nirmala as the director of the movie, I. V. Sasi’s Wikipedia page offers an addendum titled ‘Trivia,’ stating that the movie was actually directed by I. V. Sasi (Sasi, n.d.). This is interesting, given the blatant manner in which it valorises male agency while delegitimising the film’s title credits and debunking its claims to the first female directorial venture in Malayalam. Even if I. V. Sasi’s claims are true, it would have been impossible, even within the rather dubious ethical codes of ‘ghost direction’, to claim credit in this manner had the director been a man. It is Malayalam cinema’s culturally inscribed notions around textuality and sexuality that make it so unproblematic for a director of Sasi’s stature to stake claims of this kind which is contrary to the title credits. The rendering weak of a woman director’s claim to professional status here cannot be taken as a personal instance of sabotaging female agency but reflects a larger political and ideological climate that sanctions such practices both within the film industry and the larger social milieu of Kerala. I begin this essay with this incident to illustrate how a significant instance of ‘coming to voice’ of women directors in Malayalam cinema has been historically sabotaged in order that the power of that voice be carefully deflated and made questionable. Vijaya Nirmala’s voice, the specific modalities of her textual practice of cinema, both formal and ideological and the attempt to render it as inconsequential to the history of Malayalam cinema reveal a sociological poetics that make the prefix ‘woman’ to director a spectral tag precariously situating her at the critical juncture between social codes and cinematic production. It is the woman director as precariat that this article seeks to address. This historical and ideological desubstantialisation of the woman director fits well with the tradition of Malayalam cinema’s patrifocal pasts. It took a long time for the Kerala society to write P. K. Rosy back into the annals of cinema, an act that redeemed history by invoking the female precariat, excluded from those early forms of industrial labour that cinema basically was, alongside its claims to the privileges of art. In seeking to address the woman director as precariat and in attempting to engage in an act of historical writing that critically locates her in the histories of Malayalam cinema, this article also seeks to approach women directors in Malayalam as ideological subjects who engage with the patriarchal codes of mainstream filmmaking in complex ways.

While conforming largely to the thematic codes and conventions of the time, Kavitha was yet different in its ideological moorings. The story revolves around a woman who is forced to take to sex work in order to educate and bring up her daughter but ends up killing the man who offers her sanctuary when he rapes her daughter. This rather macabre melodrama has a disruptive excess at the core that challenges conventional mores of the society. That a woman needs a man and a safe location within the institution of marriage to be secure in life seems to be an argument the film makes; yet, it endorses the limited agency of the sex worker and her dignity. The narrative is thus dialogic and double voiced, at one level uncritically accepting the logic of patriarchy, while at another puncturing and disparaging its gender blindness.

A similar ideological complexity marks the intervention of Sheela, a veteran film star considered to be one of the most versatile of female actors of the 1960s and 1970s. Along with Prem Nazir, she holds a world record of having acted together in the largest number of films, a phenomenal 110, as ‘hero’ and ‘heroine’. She reigned supreme in the cinema industry in Kerala for two decades before attempting a stint in direction, first with Yakshagaanam (The Song of the Yaksha, 1976) followed by Sikharangal (Branches, 1979). Yakshaganam interestingly was a horror movie with Sheela as the female protagonist coming back from the dead to haunt the living body of the heroine, thus enacting both the tame ideal domesticated feminine and its recalcitrant uncanny ‘desiring’ other. Both are placed within heteronormative and domestic frameworks, though the latter lures the hero to wilder canvasses of desire. The sociocultural and literary milieu of Kerala in the 1970s is marked, for example, by the serialisation of Madhavikutty’s autobiography Ente Kadha in the weekly magazine Malayalanadu in 1973, which created a furore in Kerala society and boldly inserted a desiring woman with sexual appetites and emotional cravings into its social psyche and public sphere debates – a representation that was hitherto slipped under the cultural carpets of propriety and chastity ³ .

Yakshaganam like Ente Kadha refuses to spiritualise woman’s love, linking it with physical passion and bodily hungers.

Instead of reading Yakshagaanam in isolation, it would be useful to place it alongside Shalini Usha Nair’s Akam (Inside, 2011). Released more than three and a half decades later, Akam is another movie by a woman director that taps into the cultural repertoire of the monstrous feminine, in the process attempting a deeper analysis of what it is that makes the feminine most terrifying and horrific to a culture and its patriarchal logic. While Yakhshagaanam in its visual economy dips into mainstream scopophilic investments of popular cinema, it nevertheless invokes the monstrous feminine not in terms of what Kristeva calls abjection as a source of horror but in a celebration of the feminine abject. The ideal domestic heroine as the subject is inhabited and terrorised by the abject, one that disturbs ‘identity, system, order’ (Kristeva, 1982, p. 4). Interestingly, unlike classic horror movies, the abject is not radically excluded by means of ritual in both these films. Creed argues that this is the fundamental ideological project of the popular horror film, the ‘purification of the abject through a ‘descent into the foundations of the symbolic construct’, bringing about a confrontation with the abject (the corpse, bodily wastes, the monstrous-feminine) in order to finally ‘eject the abject and re-draw the boundaries between the human and non-human’ (Creed, 1986, p. 75). Contrary to Creed’s arguments, it is the abject’s corporal attraction, sexual immorality and its subversive logic that refuse to acknowledge borders, positions or rules that come to triumph in the end in Yakshagaanam. It is the dead heroine Rajani, come back to reunite with her male lover, who thwarts the efforts of the rational doctor to lead her living hero into the abyss of the unknown. The tame meek domesticated feminine subject, ironically called Savithri, the mythical heroine who is the epitome of chastity, is rendered immobile, while the masculine subject Ravi is emasculated and bereft of sufficient strength to expunge the abject embodied in Rajani. Savithri, the ideal feminine subject makes an appeal to patriarchal logos, played out through the character of doctor Venugopal for help, but is left on this side of the symbolic with no certitude of guarantee to her place within it, even as Rajani, the ‘desiring’ abject crosses over to the imaginary, where the rules of the symbolic fail to exert any meaning or power. In Akam, Ragini too crosses over to the other side where the laws of conventional morality cease to hold any validity.

Within this framework, the endings of both films reiterate the frailty of patriarchy, beckoning the feminine self to cross over to a space where meaning is in doubt, where there is an endless play of desire and where the fear of self-annihilation loses its terrifying dimensions. Yakshagaanam, in spite of the genre of the horror film, is curiously clean of images of abjection, decaying flesh and bodily waste or mutilations. In fact, it ends in a scintillating desire for the abject and its ambiguities, as the only possibility of castrating the symbolic and its invincible logic of power. Both Yakshagaanam and Akam have striking similarities in terms of visual iconographies. In both films, the female protagonists lead a debilitated/emasculated masculine figure deeper and deeper into a presymbolic order of wild nature, a preverbal dimension of language that resonates with the hues and sounds of unrepressed pleasures and drives, almost hinting at a oneness with the repressed and banished mother. It is a maternal semiotic order, where the masculine can either only be swallowed like Ravi in Yakshagaanam or remain like Sreeni in Akam, shell shocked on the fringes of the symbolic. In both films, what is perceived as abject by the codes of the genre, refuse to be purified by any rituals as is wont in films of the horror genre. Both films end by panning down on an abyss and water. They are also connected in evincing a culture-bound syndrome, what Carstairs (1955) and Joel Paris (1992) call an anxiety about semen loss. Doctor Venugopal does not want Ravi to sleep with Savithri believing that spilling his semen would strengthen the monstrous feminine and therefore advises Ravi to practise asceticism. Sreeni in Akam also has similar anxieties, probably more prone to an erectile dysfunction in the face of the monstrous feminine, which is more ambiguously expressed. The linkages between vagina dentata and semen loss anxiety syndrome haunt both the visual and libidinal economies of Akam. The ‘climax’ in both movies renders the heroes devoid of all strength, reflecting a crisis of masculinity that is much more pronounced in Akam. Women directors like Sheela and Shalini Usha Nair therefore take up codes of mainstream filmmaking like the visual semiotics of the ideal feminine and subvert it to expose the frailty of Malayalee masculinity through a celebration of the feminine abject, explaining their reluctance to purify the abject.

Feminist Impulses

Two Malayali women directors, Suma Josson and Ligi J. Pullappally can be credited with what can be called the originary impulses of feminist counter cinema in Malayalam. Not coded to the schema of visual pleasure offered by the mainstream, their films in fact sought to question and destroy those scopophilic pleasures by politically engaging with the task of attempting alternate and radical modes of re-imagining and representing the feminine. Their films definitely have to be read as political practices critically informed by agitations for gender justice and debates around feminism in Kerala during the 1980s and 1990s. Josson’s films question the myth of a stable subject vision that popular cinema often seeks to create. Both her films Janmadinam (The Birthday, 1998) and Saree (1999) seem to deal with mirages, cataracts and blind spots, all integral yet inimical to the act of seeing for the female spectator. By weaving into the narrative, the aporia of seeing, Josson forces her spectator to confront the uneasy link between the sexual and the political, and the impossibility there on of a narrative suture, given the fluid nature of identifications. Janmadinam has multiple women, that is, grandmother, mother, daughter and granddaughter, each written by and written into the dreams of the other. The woman who finally comes to be born/borne by other women inscribes tales of numerous other women into her conception and birth. To write, to narrate, to make films and to be born as a woman are to be inscribed by the desires of numerous other women, thus making feminine meaning within the signifying practices of cinema. This involves a rejection of patriarchal modes of significations in an attempt to reclaim matrifocal signifying processes. In stark contrast to the cinematic apparatus within overarching male theatres of desire, it invokes a different set of libidinal imaginaries and spectatorial relations where woman is the subject of desire and not its object. Sarayu, her mother, her grandmother all inhabit a time and space that is contradictory to the spectatorial horizons of expectations. This creates ruptures that burst the seams of narrative space and time, making linear continuums impossible.

Though a narrative film, Saree is experimental and avant-garde in its orientation, marking the journey of two girls, Gita and Radha as they shuttle to and fro between their fantasies and the phantasmagorical realities of everyday life. Selected as an entry for the 1999 Berlin Festival and the opening film of the Mumbai International Film Festival in 2000, Saree too remains yet another film on the fringes of mainstream viewing, challenging it by radically re-visioning the popular at a time when Malayalam cinema was increasingly moving towards the politics of spectacle and revivalism. The sartorial metaphor of the ‘Saree’ as epitomising the affective and libidinal imaginations around clothing of the ideal female subject in popular Malayalam cinema is suffused with a subversive logic, where the tale of a girl who does not have a good saree and borrows one with deeply unsettling consequences pricks holes in a culture’s sentimental ideals around gendered moral legibility.

Ligi Pullappally’s Sancharam (The Journey, 2004) is probably one of the most radical films ever made in the history of Malayalam cinema. The two female protagonists Kiran (Suhasini V. Nair) and Delilah (Shruthy Menon), the former an upper caste Hindu and the latter hailing from a devout Catholic family, fall in love with one another. Their difficult journey of self-realisation and sexual fulfilment comes at a very high price of social ostracisation and cultural stigma in a highly homophobic society where same sex love is pathologised. However, it has to be hastily added that Kerala was one of the few states in India where the queer cult film Fire (Deepa Mehta, 1996), which initiated a rupture in the unproblematically heterosexual viewing pleasures of Indian popular cinema, was publicly screened for the first time, at the International Film Festival of Kerala. While Fire was banned and vitrioled in many other Indian states, it had a successful though controversial commercial release in the theatres of Kerala. On the social scenario, the 1990s in Kerala were also marked by a series of suicides and suicide pacts by same sex couples, not just from urban locations but rural hinterlands too, the immediate trigger often being the imposition of a heterosexual marriage on one of the partners (Tharayil, 2014, p. 73) ⁴ . It is in this context that Sancharam, made by an expatriate Malayali woman uses cinema as a radical weapon to alter women’s consciousness about themselves and the way compulsory heterosexuality maps their bodies on to the scopic terrains of objectification and fetishisation, preventing any possibility of the play of non-normative desires. However, what is disappointing is that the film was not released for public exhibition, and therefore, the circuits of its journey remain confined to festival exhibitions and film society screenings, raising crucial questions regarding the survival of independent women directors as precariats who dare critically examine the links between desire and image, probing new and alternate modes of politically constituting the feminine in the visual field and thus making possible a gendered cinematic resistance.

Revathy is a prolific actor whose films in South Indian languages have often become cult classics. Her directorial ventures have also keenly impacted many of the debates around gender in India. In 2002, Revathy directed Mitr: My Friend which bagged the National Award for the best feature film in English. This film came at a time when social media was gaining popularity and Revathy narrates the tale of a woman who gives up her career and dreams for her family but is finally left to fight for her self-respect and dignity as a woman, wife and mother. In 2004, she directed Phir Milenge, a movie with a female protagonist who discovers she has an HIV infection and goes on to fight a case when she is fired from work. In Malayalam, Revathy has a significant film, Makal (Daughter, 2009), which was part of an anthology film called Kerala Café (2009). Makal breaks open the boundaries of discourse of Malayalam cinema in which the trafficked girl child, unsafe in her home, unsafe in public spaces, comes to be represented as a historical subject in a state where, in 2009, the Crime Records Bureau recorded 235 rapes of children, 83 abductions and kidnapping and 14 procuration of minor girls (Crime Against Children, 2019). These figures are irritants as far as popular cinema is concerned and these subjects remain unrepresented within its discursive terrains.

Makal does not use the spatial ideologies or the narrative tropes of gendered victimhood. Instead it chooses to focus on the mother, her inability to access urban spaces and decode urban manners, thus unwittingly becoming the seller of her child. The railway station as a safe public space of potential female social and spatial emancipation gathers an ominous tone as one sees it complicit in strengthening social and gender hierarchies. Revathy foregrounds the figure of the girl child, initially blending into the background and later alienated from it by close ups, becoming a commodity in exchange. The last sequences of the film see the child completely silenced yet put into a circulation of goods, images and desires in the capitalist, pornographic medium that cinema often is. The spectators are unerringly aware that, as the little girl is carried out of the frames of this movie, she would become an alienated social subject within the pornographic and fetishistic practices of other cinemas that are made for men alone.

Postfeminist Politics of the Popular

In the last decade, we see a proliferation of women making commercially successful films in Kerala. Anjali Menon’s Happy Journey (2009), Manjadikuru (Lucky Red Seeds, 2012), Bangalore Days (2012) and Koode (Together, 2018), Revathy S. Varmha’s Maad Dad (2012), Sreebala K. Menon’s Love 24x7 (2015), Roshni Dinaker’s My Story (2018), Soumya Sadanandan’s Mangalyam Thanthunena (2018), are all films that are situated squarely within the interpellative consumer apparatus of mainstream popular cinema, socialising new women to function smoothly within reformulated patriarchies, both within the familial and the political economy. They often revolve around gender performances that buttress the social scripts through which such gendered identities are made meaningful. Though situated within the scopic and libidinal regimes of the popular, some of these films attempt occasional punches at its gendered storytelling practices, but largely conform to the rules of its commerce, performance, textual conventions and spectator relations. Having said that, many of these films have also tried, however, feebly, within these narrative schema, to critique those aspects of Kerala culture that seek to contain female desire, though taking recourse to a postfeminist politics to resolve the problematic of female desire and representation. As Tasker and Negra have pointed out

Postfeminist culture works in part to incorporate, assume, or naturalize aspects of feminism; crucially, it also works to commodify feminism via the figure of woman as empowered consumer. Thus, postfeminist culture emphasizes educational and professional opportunities for women and girls; freedom of choice with respect to work, domesticity, and parenting; and physical and particularly sexual empowerment….Postfeminist fictions frequently set aside both evident economic disparities and the fact that the majority of women approach paid labor as an economic necessity rather than a ‘choice’. (Tasker & Negra, 2007, p. 2)

Thus, featuring upper caste and middle class by default, these films are oriented towards using ‘consumption as a strategy’ and ‘leisure as a site’ for the production of new models of Malayali feminine selves.

The performances of femininity that come up through Anjali Menon’s films are intriguing in the manner in which they tap into the cultural conditions of media market models of gendering that foreground a female Bildungsroman which at its core cannot do away with the myth and mystique of conjugal heterosexuality, overhyped weddings and the visual economy of traditional pageantry. While Menon’s directorial debut in Malayalam, Manjadikkuru, received a lot of critical attention, it nevertheless abounds in stereotypes and clichés, especially those around women. All the three sisters in the story are caricatures rather than characters and this continues in Bangalore Days too, where other than the female leads most other women come out as crude stereotypes, garrulous and petty. An assiduous ambiguity towards feminist politics thus seems to haunt Menon’s films in spite of the fact that she remains a profound advocate of women’s rights, as can be reasonably surmised from her crusade alongside other women in the Women in Cinema Collective.

In all her films, especially Koode and Bangalore Days, freedom, both of men and women, seems to have a slant towards individualised notions around personal choices more than a deeper feminist transformative cause. As an example, it would be beneficial to look at the two female protagonists of Bangalore Days and Koode, both played by Nazriya whose star persona comes with a certain ideological baggage that is highly popular with Malayali patriarchy. She epitomises the classic feminine ideal of ‘the mandi pennu’ or ‘potti pennu’ (the naïve girl), groomed to perfection within the disciplinary regimes of patriarchal femininity, one who can never be too radical or overtly subversive or disruptive of dominant gender codes. Nazriya’s unthreatening ‘ordinary girl body’ is in utter contrast to Sheela’s desiring body in Yakshagaanam, Kamala Das’s subversive representation of her desiring woman body in her autobiographical writings, Anumol’s sexual body in Akam or Suhasini’s gender bending body that refuses binary codes in Sancharam. This ‘virginal body’ has been coded to measure virtues like purity, fidelity and loyalty along with apolitical posturing and a fair dose of fun and frolicking. This is the Malayali feminine ideal today, reflecting a cultural imaginary that seeks to peg down the anxieties engendered by the modern woman into a non-threatening uncomplicated site/sight where the feminine at once can be narrated through the semiotics of a liberal humanistic ideology while willingly subjugating itself to an overarching masculine logic and an overtly feminine ethic of care. Nazriya evokes a ‘neoliberal femininity’, ‘a new form of femininity that takes up elements of feminism, neoliberalism and traditional femininity’ (Sherman, 2011). This is perfectly suited for the contemporary cultural politics of Kerala, with its large-scale middle-classisation and gentrification of culture – a society in which ‘traditional middle class femininity enable[s] ‘success’ through marriage in the private sphere’, and the logic of neoliberal femininity ‘renders femininity as an asset in the public sphere as well as in the private’ (Sherman, 2011). In all these films, including Maad Dad, Nazriya’s character is ascribed with a ‘newness’ that makes her different from Malayali heroines from yesteryears. However, this newness is not linked to a greater sense of freedom but to the availability of more consumer choices that the market offers. In Bangalore Days, for example, the trope of the neglected wife is made palatable with track-suited walks in ‘classy’ locations replete with audio music, elite dining, popcorns, film shows, racing cars and cocktail parties. That a non-threatening conjugal desire can be alleviated by a neoliberal economy where one consumer item such as jewellery can be sold for another consumer good like education is a constant trope in Bangalore Days and Koode, though a genuine pursuit of knowledge or the desire to labour seems to be the last of women’s priorities. So, a neoliberal economy and a postfeminist politics of the market becomes a crucial marker of women’s power in many of these films.

Like Divya in Bangalore Days or Tara in My Story, the new Malayali woman imagined by these women directors are modern enough but align modernity onto tradition in the last run, without upsetting the golden goblet of patriarchy or tilting its ideological cart completely. However, the fashion is also to laugh at patriarchal mores but not to puncture them, almost bringing the manic pixie dream girl trope to Malayali contexts. The manic pixie was a term coined by Nathan Rabin in order to describe the film trope of a ‘bubbly, shallow, cinematic [female] creature that exists solely in the fevered imaginations of sensitive writer/directors to teach broodingly soulful young men to embrace life and its infinite mysteries and adventures’ (Ulaby, 2008). Rabin later apologised for coining the term, noting the sexist and misogynist labels it had accrued in larger pop culture over years and acknowledging that ‘in 2014 calling a character a Manic Pixie Dream Girl is nearly as much of a cliché as the Manic Pixie Dream Girl trope’ itself. (Rabin, 2014). Nevertheless, taken as the label for a stereotypical trope, the term remains useful for the critique it raises against the cultural sexism latent in patriarchal representational codes, which results in ‘reductive, condescending male fantasies of ideal women as realistic characters’ (Rabin, 2014). This trope seems to fit in with both the characters of Nazriya, in Bangalore Days and Koode. Her bubbly, free spirited, happy go lucky personae seems to exist with the sole purpose of breathing life into the rather insecure and fragile hero played by Fahad and Prithviraj, respectively ‘perpetuating the myth of women as muses and caregivers rather than independent entities with a life, dreams and ambitions of their own’ (Rodriguez, 2017, p. 169). In fact, Nazriya in Koode is just a figment of imagination, dead and gone but back to fulfil the purpose of her life, to help her brother regain a sense of masculinity. Jenny is a creature of Joshua’s imagination, his dream come true in order that the broken man be restored to patriarchal order by a feminine childish pixie. While these movies have a targeted female demographic and go against the entrenched misogyny of popular Malayalam cinema’s commonplace assumptions and stereotypes, they nevertheless tap into larger patriarchal structures of meaning. They seem to project what Angela McRobbie calls ‘the new female subject’, who, ‘despite her freedom, [is] called upon to be silent, to withhold critique, to count as a modern sophisticated girl, or indeed this withholding of critique is a condition of her freedom’ (McRobbie, 2007, p. 34)

There is a self-consciousness and parody that such films have brought into Malayalam cinema, as in the marriage scene in Bangalore Days where Divya asks for a puff from a cigarette her cousin is smoking to steady herself and accidentally exhales cigarette smoke at the time of the wedding. This could be an example of the classic stylistic device of the kind of subversion that these films bring to bear upon the patriarchal logos of Malayalam cinema. By seeking to focus primarily on the dreams and aspirations of privileged Malayali women from upper castes and classes, often these films allow for sophisticated and comfortable viewing positions. Together with popular spectacle, as in the wedding sequences in Bangalore Days or the shooting scenes in My Story, a beautiful mise en scène, overwhelming eliteness and class hierarchy, emotive language, well-choreographed songs, a fluid camera and competitive sound and editing in these movies seem to suggest that this vaguely liberal humanist but also postfeminist world hardly needs the polemic of feminism to tamper with its idyllic capital intensive aesthetic.

What these movies seem to foreground is the fact that Malayali women can be strong and free, but unlike what feminists in earlier popular imaginaries seem to have advocated, one need not eschew the freedom to be robustly feminine. These are women who seek to maintain the right distance to feminist politics and whip up a distaste towards victim feminism. Even the physically challenged Sara in Bangalore Days is not a victim but exudes confidence and agency. However, the fact that Arjun actually stalks her and the mystique built around the stalker of a physically challenged woman reveals a certain reluctance to take up the uneasy questions raised by earlier feminists regarding the politics of women’s representation in the context of male gaze and male desire. Scopophilic pleasures are available in plenty in Bangalore Days, My Story or Love 24x7. The portrayal of Aju’s friend Meenakshi (played by Isha Talwar) – a competent air hostess picturised in a completely misogynist light cast through blatant sexual stereotypes that border on a scheming hypersexual vamp – is unfair on the part of a woman director. Her put-on hyperfemininity and promiscuity form the butt of ridicule but seem dubious among a generation of women who grew up to say ‘no we are not feminists’. None of these films touch upon crucial questions like women’s representation, institutionalised gender inequalities or cultural gender biases. In Bangalore Days, the problems of patriarchy playing havoc in Divya’s life, her decision to marry early, to give up studies and change her name after the wedding are all mouthed by a well-meaning male subject, even as their import is shrugged off easily by the woman in question, reiterating that the blame is on women for reinforcing patriarchal norms. In one of the opening shots, Kunjunni says ‘Water, soil and women are best in Kerala’, exemplifying the easy essentialist readings that a capitalist patriarchy makes possible without any compunction. While apparently dealing with the travails of young female media interns, Love 24x7 is easily co-opted by the ‘super star’ image of Dileep, his celebrity machismo, infamous for its investments in popular misogyny, all of which leave the film sadly unable to question the institutional structures of patriarchy or address with sufficient justice the plight of hundreds of women journalists and media personnel suffocating under media glass ceilings.

Transitions

Malayalam cinema also has contemporary women directors who engage with an oppositional politics within its capitalist commoditised cultures of viewing. Shalini Usha Nair, Geetu Mohandas and Vidhu Vincent continue the lineage of a feminist optic initiated by earlier directors like Josson and Pullappally, placing women at the centre of their narration in order to reveal the manner in which the intersectional hegemonies of caste, class and gender unleash violence upon their lives, in the process seeking to right/write historic erasures while mounting discursive resistances to patriarchal discriminations. Thus, they contribute significantly to the poetics of feminist film making in Kerala.

Geetu Mohandas, another successful actor, displays a deepseated commitment to critiquing the gender blindness of Kerala’s modernity and to the gender politics in contemporary Kerala. She made her directorial debut with the short film Kelkkunnundo (Are You Listening? 2009) and chose to focus it on a little blind Muslim girl whose unseeing eyes make sense of the world around her and the developmental paradoxes amidst the tangle of human relationships. The protagonist is marginalised in manifold ways by virtue of her gender, religion, class and body. Mohandas inserts a critique of Kerala’s development paradigm through a gendered lens, all the while inserting a protagonist who cannot see, yet sees the world through the sounds she hears. However, the trope of the blind, passive and naïve protagonist is a familiar cliché, overdone to death in Malayalam Cinema. Mohandas uses her child heroine to subtly undermine the cultural metanarratives around blindness, femininity and desire, and their crucial linkages in the social semiotics of Kerala. The child protagonist’s visual disenfranchisement whips up an uncanny fear around the travails of the feminine in public spaces, the risks and dangers she encounters in low lit interiors of dingy habitations, her rising panic amidst slow grinding ominous sounds that threaten to drown her timorous screams. It is not what the film shows but what it does not show that gives vital clues to its specular epistemology, the dark threat of the unknown stalking every little girl child that forms the cultural logic of female containment. The spectatorial frisson that Mohandas engenders in Kelkkunnundo is continued to perfection in her next full-length feature film Liar’s Dice (2013), a road movie in Hindi, which was critically acclaimed worldwide ⁶ .

Vidhu Vincent’s Manhole (2016) is yet another film that pricks the bubble of both popular and postfeminist cinema’s invented social memories. The film focuses on a manual scavenger’s daughter, Shalini. It is her struggle for education, her fight against caste discrimination and her crusade for ensuring justice to her underprivileged and dehumanised community that forms the narrative thread of the story ⁷ . Rejecting the spectacular celebrations of market-oriented individualisations as the true spirit of sociality, Vincent takes on the emancipatory politics of a community-embedded life to address the need for representational inclusivity in cinema. She uses a feminist language in her film in order to engender a public dialogue on a social issue, in the process addressing a lacuna in liberal feminist film making, the failure of any call for gender equality without addressing other intersectional axes like caste and class. Despite an official ban, thousands of manual scavengers continue to work underground for the upkeep of human sanitation and dignity. Manhole pitches itself in opposition to mainstream formalistic and ideological codes, making one rethink the idea of women’s cinema as a gendered political critique of society that demystifies the aesthetics of mass fantasies and collective desires.

Writing about women, who are doubly bound to cinema as constituted in representations and as historical subjects who are also spectators complicit in the production of womanness, Teresa de Lauretis states:

Whether we think of cinema as the sum of one’s experiences as spectator in the socially determined situations of viewing, or as a series of relations linking the economics of film production to ideological and institutional reproduction, the dominant cinema specifies woman in a particular social and natural order, sets her up in certain positions of meaning, fixes her in a certain identification. Represented as the negative term of sexual differentiation, spectacle-fetish or specular image, in any case obscene, woman is constituted as the ground of representation, the looking-glass held up to man. But, as historical individual, the female viewer is also positioned in the films of classical cinema as spectator-subject; she is thus doubly bound to that very representation which calls on her directly, engages her desire, elicits her pleasure, frames her identification, and makes her complicit in the production of (her) woman-ness. On this crucial relation of woman as constituted in representation to women as historical subjects depend at once the development of a feminist critique and the possibility of a materialist, semiotic theory of culture. For the feminist critique is a critique of culture at once from within and from without, in the same way in which women are both in the cinema as representation and outside the cinema as subjects of practices. (Lauretis, 1984, p. 15)

The oeuvre of directors like Josson, Pullapally, Revathy, Shalini Usha Nair, Mohandas and Vincent offers such a feminist critique of culture by creating a frame of reference in which, as de Lauretis says, ‘the measure of desire is no longer just the male subject’ (Lauretis, 1984, p. 9). They dare question the set boundaries between women as historical subjects in Kerala/India and women as represented through the hegemonic discourses of cinema. Seeking to unpack the epistemological models that give meaning and currency to the semiotics of gender and the set of shared meanings they generate, many of the films of these directors are cultural resistances that destablilise and seek to radically alter such models. In most of these films, women emerge as a different social subject, putting themselves into new kinds of narratives, like Kiran and Delilah in Sancharam, Sarayu in Janmadinam or Kamala in Liar’s Dice. Thereby, they seek to resist modes of self-representation that map hegemonic imaginations onto female subjectivities, unbinding fantasy from its ideological moorings in patriarchal images and desires, helping it float free and, in the process, engendering new forms of subjectivity that rupture the pleasure links between look and identification. These are films that strive to represent women as symbolic subjects in a culture that on one hand pins them down with the male gaze simultaneously writing male powers on their bodies while systematically ‘othering’ them. Also, these films co-opt the spectator almost insinuating that the onus is as much on her/him to be an active spectator and to engage politically with the film. This engenders a transformation of the voyeuristic gaze into a reflective gaze, a gaze that, in its very formation, articulates a hitherto unarticulated woman, marginalised within traditional representational apparati.

Conclusion

Early women directors from Vijaya Nirmala and Sheela to contemporary icons like Anjali Menon seem to inhabit what this study analysed as the mode of the camera obscura. Karl Marx’s comparison of ideology to the camera obscura has offered valuable ways in reading how optical and libidinal inversions are crucially marked by dominant ideologies like hegemonic masculinity or the symbiotic dynamics of capitalist class oppression and women’s sexual oppression. The metaphor of the camera obscura and the necessity of inversion to the ideological process is compelling in the profound manner in which it states that the structures of power and their regimes of representation are crucial to the manner in which women perceive their own selves and make meanings of their lived conditions of social subjugation.

In contrast, the feminist women directors in Malayalam, with their oppositional cinematic languages, their discursive apparati through which they seek to produce meanings, continue to challenge phallic significations with their cinematic oeuvre. Where the signifiers come undone of this matrix, the spectator is forced to probe other cartographies for new semiologies and codes. The soothing fingers of a woman caressing another woman’s face in intense desire invokes new codes that the Malayali spectators were unfamiliar with, in the process toppling culturally assigned meanings. Here the camera dentata becomes operative, where culturally coded semantic fields become blurred, and in their stead emerges a more slippery process of signification. There are constant attempts to transpose, superimpose and juxtapose multiple discourses that only reveal unending motilities which characterise the creation of subjects. This kinesis of desire, this epiphanic revelations of the subject as inherently in motion, creates an alternative semantic and libidinal economy that rejects unifying positions and closures. Such films are hard to read, denying the spectator the comforts and pleasures they are used to. This semiotic chora, as Kristeva might put it, a dancing body in perpetual motion that constantly pushes meaning to heterogeneous possibilities, is the signifying logic of films like Janmadinam and Sancharam. They become cinematic practices of exploration and discovery of the multiple possibilities of language and the non-unitary nature of subjects. Invoking a return of everything repressed by the symbolic order of things, such films challenge the language of power and conformity.

A comparison between the wedding sequences in Sancharam and Bangalore Days illustrates the two modes. Bangalore Days’ wedding sequences are coded into the symbolic, in tune with the patriarchal functions in a market culture of hegemonic heterosexuality and heteronormativity. In contrast, the wedding scene in Sancharam topples the fixity of the subject, revealing her to be in process, coming undone to stare into the abyss of her own polyvalent, plural possibilities. In Bangalore Days, the wedding inserts Divya into the phallogocentric order of things, into its heterosexual social roles and its symbolic language. In a sense, this is also a bidding farewell to that which resists patriarchal ordering, systematisation and subjugation. In stark contrast, Josson or Pullappally harness images of forests, rioting green, unexpected paths and alleys, surprising little discoveries in trees and ponds, all deeply permeated by alternate modes of affect and desire that are difficult to classify, using such strategies for sketching libidinal landscapes tinted with polymorphous possibilities.

In Kerala, in the last few years, the zeitgeist itself has undergone radical transformations. It was in 2017 that the Malayalam cinema industry registered a radical rupture, the formation of the Women in Cinema Collective (WCC), the immediate trigger being the brutal molestation of a female actor in a moving vehicle on a public road. The collective raised a number of hitherto silenced questions haunting the male bastions of Malayalam cinema with regard to women’s security in cinematic workspaces, health care, maternity benefits and pay parity for women in the industry. It was pointed out that for the first time in the history of Malayalam cinema, there began ‘an insistence on the imperative to create a space and device a means of speaking as woman, to re-vision sexed subjectivities in cinema and to puncture its masculine language with feminine needs, desires and anxieties’ (Pillai, 2017, p. 58). It was a momentous step in re-imagining and addressing women as historical subjects in Kerala, in the process boldly inserting a critique of the masculinisation of feminine subject positions and attempting to write the feminine back into cinema. Soon the Government of Kerala took a radical step to allocate a sum of 3 crores in the budget for encouraging women filmmakers. This was declared by Kerala’s finance minister Dr Thomas Isaac, who termed the emergence of WCC ‘an important turning point in the struggle for gender equality in Malayalam film world’ and announced ‘a special scheme to financially support women filmmakers’ (Isaac, 2019; Koshy, 2019). This small step can be a giant leap in redressing the conditions of precarity under which the woman director forges a complicated relationship with a culture industry seeped in male desires, economic and libidinal, and negotiates with imagined women the specific conditions of history under which they become political and cultural subjects.