Crisis of capitalist patriarchy: renegotiating masculinity and the heteronormative family in Kumbalangi Nights

ABSTRACT

The Malayalam language film Kumbalangi Nights was released in 2019 and narrated the story of working-class people negotiating structures of capitalist patriarchy, encountered at moments of its crisis, which are also moments that indicate possibilities for social transformation. The trajectory of its narrative, the characters, and the tropes addressed in the film offer a new synthesis—both, of hegemonic masculinity and the kinship structure of the heteronormative family. Here, working-class lives are foregrounded in the contemporary crisis of patriarchy, accelerated by the crisis of social reproduction under neoliberal capitalism. Central to this crisis of masculinity and the bourgeois family form depicted in the film is the “crisis of care” that has been explained in recent scholarship on social reproduction. Nancy Fraser uses the expression to analyse the contradictory capitalist tendency to strain the conditions of social reproduction necessary for its own reproduction and stability. Through an analysis of the film, and the social realities of contemporary Kerala, this paper identifies the contours of this new synthesis. The film imagines a new mode of existence for subordinate masculinities, and challenges some of the ideologies of capitalist patriarchy, while continuing to valorise romantic love and its relationship to work.

KEYWORDS:

• Capitalism
• patriarchy
• heteronormative
• Malayalam cinema
• family

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. NSSO data from 2011-12 is cited in the paper showing that unemployment rate for women (14.1%) is higher than that of men (6.7%).

2. News reports periodically recognize the fact that even in a state that has high rates of literacy and ranks high in the Human Development Index, violence against women remains high (Preetu Nair 2018; A.S. Shan 2019).

3. Kerala’s HDI is 0.790, which is noticeable higher than the country’s 0.645.

4. Various regions of Kerala have more than a century old history of communist mobilization and after the formation of the state in 1956, CPI(M) emerged as a prominent party engaged in electoral politics to achieve socialist goals.

5. A detailed account can be found in Meena Pillai’s essay “The Many Misogynies of Malayalam Cinema” published in EPW (Pillai 2017).

6. An expression used to describe formulaic films that consistently had a combination of the popular actor Mammootty, presented as a happily married, well-employed man living with his wife and their young child in a nuclear family.

7. Women in Cinema collective is a group that emerged in 2017 in order to organize and represent the interests of women working in various fields of Malayalam cinema (Tara S. Nair 2017).

8. (Sowmya Sowmya Rajendran 2019; Bharadwaj Rangan 2019; G Pramod Kumar 2019).

9. Traditional Indian ornament worn by women on their forehead.

10. Similar patterns can be seen in The Great Indian Kitchen and Ramante Edanthottam, however, with some variations.

11. Shammi defines family values using a curious mix of patriarchal legitimacy, the legitimizing power of wage labour, and some ‘freedom’ which is not clearly defined but must be granted by him.

12. In her work on Colonization and Housewifization, Maria Mies charts out the rise of the bourgeois form of biological family. She points out the historical failure of socialist movements that sought to separate home and work, following a bourgeois conception of family (105-110).

13. The films are Hitler (1996) and The Truth (1998) – both deploy the protectionist discourse of patriarchy, embodied, and made heroic in the characters referenced above.

14. The city makes itself visible and central throughout the film. For instance, the waste accumulating on the island, the workplace (fish packaging unit) where Bobby briefly works, the tourists coming in from the city to take in the beauty of the backwaters.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Paul Mathew

Paul Mathew is currently Assistant Professor of English and Cultural Studies at Birla Institute of Science and Technology, Rajasthan, India. His primary field of research is popular culture, including cinema, graffiti and street art. While some of his work studies inter-medial linkages between visual and literary arts, he primarily researches visual culture through the lenses of ideology, class and social reproduction.