Movie Review: ‘Puzhu’ dissects the insidious worm of caste

Puzhu is the newest in a collection of Malayalam movies which have explored and elaborated on the methods through which caste hatred and violence works in Kerala’s physique politic and social life.

The OTT launch of Puzhu, a debut movie by director Ratheena P.T. starring Mammootty, has triggered discussions in regards to the brahminical mindset and its unholy potencies. It has additionally prompted one to probe into the numerous legacies of caste in Malayalam cinema.

Traditionally, casteism, like misogyny, has been ever current, each inside Malayalam movie narratives and within the movie business. It may be traced proper again to the primary Malayalam movie, Vigathakumaran (1928) directed by J.C. Daniel, and the traumatic expertise of its heroine, the Dalit actor P.Okay. Rosy. Rosy was hounded out of Thiruvananthapuram for daring to behave in a movie; the very sight of a low-caste girl on the silver display enraged the upper-caste viewers of the movie and society at giant. 

Down the a long time, this legacy of casteism continued in lots of subterranean kinds, modes, and hues. Within the Nineteen Fifties and Nineteen Sixties,when Malayalam cinema was coming into its personal, social realism was the aesthetic norm. The movie narratives of the time, largely based mostly on literary and theatrical works, frontally handled problems with social inequality, class divide, caste oppression, and untouchability. All the foremost movies of the Nineteen Fifties, similar to Jeevitanauka (“Boat of Life”, 1951) directed by Okay. Vembu, Neelakkuyil (“Blue Koel”, 1954) directed by P. Bhaskaran and Ramu Kariat, and Rarichan Enna Pauran (“Rarichan the Citizen”, 1956) directed by P. Bhaskaran, had caste on the core of their narratives. 

Carrying their progressiveness on their sleeves, these movies had been populated by characters who wore and bore caste marks. The humiliations and conflicts of Dalits had been enacted and elaborated not within the caste register however primarily as an financial and sophistication subject/situation. They usually had been all the time framed throughout the bigger narrative because the struggles of the citizen-to-be of the newly impartial nation or because the emergence of the brand new secular particular person of the fashionable age.

A still from Neelakkuyil (1954), one of the earliest Malayalam films with caste at the core of its narrative.

A nonetheless from Neelakkuyil (1954), one of many earliest Malayalam movies with caste on the core of its narrative.
| Picture Credit score: By Particular Association

In Neelakkuyil, the Dalit girl Neeli is betrayed by the upper-caste schoolmaster, socially ostracised, and eventually pushed to utter distress and suicide. However the movie ends with the reunion of a cheerful nuclear household, when the “reformed” schoolmaster, alongside along with his barren upper-caste spouse, lastly decides to welcome his son born of Neeli into their “household”. 

In some ways, the story of Malayalam cinema within the a long time that adopted originates from this guilt-ridden, sterile household that’s pressured to simply accept a Dalit boy born out of wedlock as their son. Love and betrayal, marriage and sterility, guilt and adoption—these are themes that underlie the “progressive” narrative of Neelakkuyil. It’s also notable that the movie is ambivalent in regards to the determine of the schoolmaster, conventionally an agent of modernity and progress within the narratives of the time. His repentance and eventual “adoption” of his out-of-wedlock son into his upper-caste household has extra to do with childlessness than regret about his betrayal.

On the centre of the literary discourse and aesthetic creativeness of the interval was the battle between the socialist-realist ethos that put class on the centre and the modernist-existentialist despair of the person. Problems with caste by no means simply jelled with both of those trajectories of creativeness and have become marginal or incidental. The aesthetic discourse and artworks of the interval gave one the sensation that Kerala was residing in a post-caste society. The movies of the time narrated the tales of secular, trendy people who pined for love and struggled to create a brand new, egalitarian world devoid of every kind of inequality and unfreedom.

Within the following a long time, that’s, the mid Nineteen Seventies to the Nineties—from Emergency to globalisation—express references to caste oppression and violence grew to become largely invisible and unstated. If in any respect it needed to be handled, it was solely hinted at subtly and not directly. The upper-caste milieu grew to become the house floor of Malayalam cinema and the Valluvanadan lingo popularised by the scripts of M.T. Vasudevan Nair, its official language. Characters from the lower-caste and minority communities both appeared on the margins or had been packaged into stereotypes. Even the practitioners of “artwork” cinema shunned the caste query, by no means inserting it on the narrative centre or confronting it as a core social subject 

A still from Perariyathavar (2015).

A nonetheless from Perariyathavar (2015).

The marginalisation of the caste query was additional entrenched with the rise of Hindutva politics within the nationwide horizon. Inside cinematic narratives, this took the type of macho celebrity heroes who flaunted their upper-caste insignia and heritage and harped immediately and not directly upon “benefit”.

Apparently, within the late Eighties and Nineties, two main actors—Sreenivasan and Kalabhavan Mani—introduced caste introduced again into mainstream narratives. Sreenivasan smuggled within the subject of caste, pores and skin color, and benefit by means of his scripts, and in a collection of movies through which he was paired with Mohanlal, Mani embodied and asserted Dalit id in all its dimensions: masculinity, voice, determine, and energy. There’s a scene in Mani’s first main movie look ( Sallapam, 1995), the place one of many villagers taunts a toddy tapper (performed by Mani) whose title is recommended as a singer for the upcoming village pageant: “A toddy tapper to sing? How good will that sound?” That remark voiced the loud and clear articulation of the Malayalam movie business’s mindset. However Mani defied all of the derision to carve an area for himself in well-liked cinema and music, appearing in additional than 200 movies in Malayalam, Telugu, and Tamil. Even on the peak of Mani’s profession, many main actresses refused to be paired with him. Each Sreenivasan and Mani symbolize an period dominated by superstars and upper-caste narratives, the place one needed to both discover devious methods to speak about caste or pay the value for it.

It’s within the new millennium, coinciding with the tip of the celebrity period, that caste made its reappearance. The explanations could possibly be many. For one, id politics was gaining momentum; Ambedkar was rising as an icon; and subaltern resistance was gathering momentum throughout the nation and in regional cinemas. The shift to digital expertise enabled many younger film-makers to experiment with new themes and codecs. They toppled the macho celebrity reign, introduced narratives all the way down to the human scale, and foregrounded hitherto marginalised milieus and lives. For the small and nimble Malayalam movie business, the pandemic and closure of theatres proved a blessing in disguise. Younger film-makers made a number of movies on subversive themes on shoestring budgets. Launched on OTT platforms, these movies obtained crucial acclaim and in addition industrial enchantment nationally and globally.

The truth is, over the past decade, it’s impartial movies similar to Perariyathavar by Dr Biju, Ozhivudivasathe Kali by Sanalkumar Sasidharan, Kari by Shanavas Nuranipuzha, Pathinonnam Sthalam by Ranjit Chittade, and Aaradi by Saji Palamel which have searingly explored and elaborated on the umpteen insidious methods through which caste works in Kerala, ripping asunder its “progressive” and “secular” facade. These movies narrate the delicate subterranean methods through which caste hatred and violence work by means of the sinews and nerves of Kerala’s physique politic and social life, displaying how cash, language, meals, group, neighbourhood ethics, and celebration affiliations are imbricated in it. Business movies, too, responded to the anti-caste, anti-patriarchy temper within the air. Puzhu is the most recent to emerge on this stream.

From Pathinonnam Sthalam (2017), directed by Ranjit Chittade.

Puzhu belongs to the “woke” technology and style the place well-liked parts are neatly mixed with politically right themes. The person on the centre of Puzhu is Kuttan (performed by Mammootty), who embodies all evil in society. He combines inside himself the darkest points of caste, state, and cash energy: He’s brahmin, a real-estate schemer, and a police officer. And now his life is suffering from the ghosts of the previous, arising each from his poisonous brahminical pleasure and his brutally corrupt profession. Puzhu’s narrative revolves round two contrasting households, one patriarchal-autocratic and the opposite secular-democratic: that of Kuttan and his adolescent son Kichu, and that of Kuttappan, a Dalit stage artist (performed by Appunni Sasi) and his spouse Bharati (performed by Parvathy Thiruvothu), who can be Kuttan’s sister. We get solely scant glimpses into their previous: we come to know that Kuttan’s spouse is not any extra, and that it’s Bharati’s second marriage. Kuttan’s inner conflicts and the stress between these households are aggravated when Bharati and her husband transfer into the residence advanced the place Kuttan stays.

Kuttan is a person whose world is devoid of the world; enclosed and insulated, with all hints of the opposite banished from it. Casteist to the core, he’s devastated when his sister marries Kuttappan. He supervises his son’s life in minute element, by means of ritualised on a regular basis routines: brushing tooth, consuming, on-line music classes, a every day report of occasions in school, homework, prayers, watching his mom on video, and going to mattress. From private hygiene to how you can cope with “outsiders”, Kuttan reigns over each facet of Kichu’s life. It’s by means of this obsession with routine that Kuttan fights the spectres from his violent previous.

In fixed worry of enemies stalking him, he hunts down a straightforward sufferer, Paul Varghese, an erstwhile confederate who was later betrayed by Kuttan himself. From his enterprise discussions, we perceive that Kuttan is concerned in shady actual property tasks. In impact, he’s a lethal mixture of worry, suspicion, cowardice, caste pleasure, vanity, and violence.

The one particular person he opens as much as is his mom, who’s bedridden and paralysed; in scenes harking back to Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho, Kuttan pours out his anguish, anger, and grief to her. With everybody else, he both instructions or negotiates. He drives Paul Varghese to suicide, by no means trusts his enterprise associate Jalal, recommends the dismissal of safety employees at his residence, dismisses the servants at his farmhouse on mere suspicion, and mercilessly gases the canine in his residence. At one level, he even manhandles his son. Within the title of the state, he places Kabir in jail on terrorism allegations; within the title of caste honour, he murders his personal sister and her husband. However the previous ultimately catches up with him within the type of Ameer, son of Kabir, who sneaks into his bastion just like the legendary Thakshaka to take revenge.

The narrative of the movie is framed by the mythological story of Thakshaka, the snake that finds its approach into King Parikshit’s hideout within the type of a worm to kill him. Within the movie, the parable seems as a play carried out by Kuttappan. We see three segments: the opening sequence the place the king is out searching within the forest; the episode the place the king humiliates the sage by garlanding him with a lifeless snake and is cursed to be killed by Thakshaka; and the ultimate scene of the confrontation between Kuttan and Ameer, the place the sage addresses the king: “That is transmigration to take revenge; for that, the forest will attain the ocean….”

Essentialising identities

In depicting Kuttan as monster; Bharati as girl caught between the anger, phobia, and beliefs of males; Kuttappan as Dalit evangelist; Kichu and Paul Varghese as cowering victims; and Ameer as missionary murderer, Puzhu essentialises identities. It additionally conflates historic injustice and systemic violence with psychic dysfunction. Within the course of, it forecloses all of the doorways to reflection, ambiguity, redemption, or transformation. The movie is greatest seen as a historic revenge towards all of the casteist, patriarchal upper-caste heroes and narratives which have dominated Malayalam cinema till now.

The caste issue additionally transforms into the forged. Ignoring the immanent energy of caste in Kerala society, the movie symbolically exorcises it by invoking within the star persona of Mammootty, who performs Kuttan, all of the evils one can think about: he’s an abusive father, a corrupt police officer, a brutal actual property operator, and, above all, a brahmin who will go to any size to guard caste honour. It’s the precise reversal of the umpteen macho-brahminical superman roles Mammootty has performed up to now. So, it’s a revenge inside and with out.

The issue with revenge narratives is that they solely cancel the opposite and annul all potentialities of transformation, which is what artwork, as towards sure types of political activism, is all about. Revenge settles scores however doesn’t pose any moral challenges to the unjust order or to hegemonies of any form: brahminical, patriarchal, or statist.

By closing in on itself, the narrative additionally forecloses any creativeness of potential futures, locking life and the world into an infinite cycle of revenge. Not one of the characters in Puzhu is reworked or liberated in any approach internally or externally: Kuttan is killed, leaving his murderer with no future; each Bharati, who crosses caste boundaries, and Kuttappan, the Dalit artist, are brutally murdered by Kuttan; Kichu faces an unsure future as an orphan who shall be introduced up by his now much more vengeful paternal brahmin household. What’s left on the finish is the pungent style of loss of life and the toxic vapours of revenge. How liberatory is a revenge narrative to cope with the advanced hierarchies and devious operations of caste? Even whereas sharing its anger and outrage, these are among the troubling questions that Puzhu leaves behind.

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