Things Fall Apart: The Cinematic Rendition of Agrarian Landscape in South India

Abstract

This article explores the transitional decade of the 1970s in the history of the southwestern state of Kerala, India, through the films and novels of M.T. Vasudevan Nair, arguably the most important litterateur in Kerala today. After the historic election of a Communist ministry to power in 1957, Kerala then stepped gingerly back from a radical politics and moved towards a restitution of an older masculine, agrarian order. By looking at the shifts in politics and the social order simultaneously with the progression of Vasudevan Nair's own filmic sensibility, the article raises the question of whether historical time and filmic time can be easily mapped on to each other.

Notes

Dilip M. Menon, Reader in Modern Indian History, University of Delhi, Delhi 110007, India. This article was written and first presented when I was a Fellow on the Programme in Agrarian Studies at Yale, April 2004. I would like to thank Jim Scott and my fellow Fellows for providing a stimulating and provocative audience, and Susan O'Donovan and Lara Jacob in particular for critical readings.

See Vasudevan Nair [2003: 248].

See Vasudevan Nair [1995: 235].

It would be a fundamental mistake to see these as ‘local’ cartoons teeming with the business of everyday life in Kerala alone. As M.T. points out in his introduction to the 1996 edition of Aravindan's cartoons, the justification provided for retailing the adventures of a lower middle class hero came as much from Kingsley Amis's Lucky Jim [1961] which was part of their literary imagination. It is also worth remembering that in one of the cartoons a friend tells Ramu, on the basis of his having taught in a local college, that he was a retired Professor of sorts. The schoolteacher retorts that (Federico Garcia) Lorca once remarked that a chameleon is a crocodile of sorts.

Aravindan [1996].

See Menon [1994].

See Damodaran [1984] and also Mallick [1994].

For a discussion of these issues see Menon [1998].

The first chapter of my book looks at this discursive process. An initial exploration was Menon [2000].

For the most incisive historical work on matriliny in Kerala see Arunima [2003].

Mathrubhumi, 11 May 1932.

See Panikkar [1931].

See Menon [2002].

See Herring [1983] and Baak [1997].

There is as yet no comprehensive study of this important period in the history of Kerala in which an alliance of forces came together to bring down the communist ministry in alliance with the central government. That this agitation called itself the vimocana samaram, or the freedom struggle, is rich in implication for a history of post-colonial India.

See Fic [1970] and Nossiter [1982].

See Frankel [1978] and Rudolph and Rudolph [1987] for excellent analytical overviews.

See Bannerjee [1984]. A cultural history of the Naxalite movement in India is yet to be written. This is a curious fact given that in almost all the regional languages of India, the engagement with Sartre and French existentialism dates to the Naxalite debacle and the retreat of the young intellectuals into the world of the ephemeral radical literary journals that mushroomed in the decades of the 1970s and 1980s.

See the essays in Parayil [2000].

See www.mtvasudevannair.com for a list of awards.

Rajadhyaksha and Willemen [1999].

Tudor [2003: 5] poses this problem well when he observes of the genre of ‘westerns’ that, ‘To take a genre such as a western, analyse it, and list its principal characteristics is to beg the question that we must first isolate the body of films that are westerns. But they can only be isolated on the basis of ‘principal characteristics’, which can only be discovered from the films themselves after they have been isolated.

Prasad [1998: Chapter 3] theorizes the ‘super genre’ of the Hindi film in his book. Of course, the idea of super genre is an example of having one's cake and eating it too: both genre and not-genre. For a similar idea of always ‘hybrid’ genres see Berry-Flint [2004]. For a reading of Hindi film as blurring genres, see Gopalan [2002].

I have benefited much from Noel Carroll's [1988] acerbic readings of the ambitions of certain kinds of film theory. His philosophical engagement with the movies is akin to the idea that god is in the details, a principle dear to the historian's heart.

See essays by Elsaesser [1973: 2–15] and Willemen [1993] for two characteristic readings in two different contexts.

See Metz [1978: 17].

See Vasudevan Nair [1998: 453].

Jameson [1986: 69].

Jameson [1986: 85–6].

See for instance the punning on imperso (nation) in Chakravarty [1993] and Virdi [2003].

Deleuze [1986: 106]. Deleuze's text as ever is dense and provocative and elliptical, and my use of his ideas is as yet a very tentative one.

Vasudevan Nair [1998: 459].

See Auerbach [1968: 11–12], who writes: ‘the externalisation of only so much of the phenomena as is necessary for the purpose of the narrative, all else is left in obscurity; the decisive points of the narrative alone are emphasized, what lies between is nonexistent; time and place are undefined and call for interpretation; thoughts and feelings remain unexpressed, are only suggested by the silence and fragmentary speeches.’

As of now, the jury is out on the question of polyandry under matriliny. While there was no formal institution of marriage prior to the Marriage Act of the late nineteenth century, and the Malayalam word sambandham was variously read as relationship and liaison, serial monogamy rather than polyandry may have been the norm. See Arunima [2003].

The cinephile could argue here that the reference to Rock Hudson is itself a gesture towards the Hollywood melodrama of Douglas Sirk who juxtaposed Hudson's wholesome masculine persona against themes of failure, impotency and blindness. In fact, there may be a parallel also in the fact that Sirk's films have been interpreted as ‘the history of the congealed disintegration of society’. See Halliday [1972] and also Klinger [1994].

MT observes in his essay on cinema that it is through references to what lies outside the film, but is within the realm of the viewer's imagination, that the writer contributes ‘a literary dimension and depth’. For instance he refers to Wajda's film Kanal (1957), set in the last days of the Warsaw uprising: ‘The cranky character who spouts lines from Dante in Kanal provides this literary dimension: it is Dante's Inferno that reminds is of the hell in which unfortunates are consigned to live’ [Vasudevan Nair, 1998: 459].

Gopalan [2002: 71]. Her book is the first to work with the structure of Hindi films and the conditions of their viewing rather than subject them to the theoretical conditions of viewing framed in much film theory. She proposes a cinema of interruptions in opposition to the idea of continuous viewing and consequent subject-formation; beloved in particular of what Carroll terms the ‘Althusserian-Lacanian paradigm’.

P. Bhaskaran (1924 – ) was associated with the radical cultural movement of the 1940s and the 1950s, and composed more than 3000 lyrics in the invented tradition of romantic agrarianism. M.S. Baburaj (1921 – ), the composer of the music for Olavum Theeravum, also came from the theatre movement, and was one of the first to introduce north Indian classical music into Malayalam film, incorporating a slower beat, minimal orchestration and a music that was more melody rather than rhythm based.

See Fig. 4 for the illustration by Namboodiri in Nalukettu.

See Fig. 5 for a ‘prototypical’ representation of the woman with the lamp. Sanil [2002: 70–81] argues that Namboodiri who has done the illustrations for most of MT's novels, revels in ‘prototypes’ as opposed to ‘stereotypes’, the former being more future oriented and open in their nature than the latter which are congealed forms of social perception.

See the dense, suggestive section in Deleuze [1986: 76–80] in which he discusses the significance of running water in the films of Renoir and the French school.

Vasudevan Nair [1998: 457].

See Menon [2004] and Kumar [forthcoming].

Vasudevan Nair [1999: 1].

Vasudevan Nair [1999: 189].

Exploring this paradox of a state where the physical well-being of women is far superior compared to other states in India while at the same time men dominate the public sphere in a strongly patriarchal mode of functioning is just beginning to be explored in recent studies. For the classic study of Kerala as a model for the equality of women, see Jeffrey [1992]. For the emerging new paradigm see Devika [1999] and the ongoing doctoral work by Ratheesh [2004].

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Notes on contributors

Dilip M Menon

Dilip M. Menon, Reader in Modern Indian History, University of Delhi, Delhi 110007, India. This article was written and first presented when I was a Fellow on the Programme in Agrarian Studies at Yale, April 2004. I would like to thank Jim Scott and my fellow Fellows for providing a stimulating and provocative audience, and Susan O'Donovan and Lara Jacob in particular for critical readings.