Divya Dwivedi on industrialised sexual exploitation, caste and Malayalam cinema

Recent weeks have shaken the conscience and the moral fabric of Kerala society and politics after the “Justice Hema Committee Report” on sexual exploitation and gender discrimination in Malayalam cinema was released. The committee was formed after the horrific organised sexual assault (and its video recording) of a leading actress of Malayalam cinema in 2017 on public road. One of the accused is the now dethroned super star named Dileep, who was vigorously defended by the film actors’ charitable society AMMA. The survivor bravely chose to fight the case legally, especially when the assault was meant to shame and silence her. Following this incident, the Women in Cinema Collective (WCC) was formed and registered, led by Parvathy Thiruvothu, Deedi Damodaran, Rima Kallingal, Padmapriya Janakiraman, Remya Nambeesan, and Beena Paul among others. The women of WCC had been raising voice against the culture of male dominance, sexual abuse and sexual exploitation of women. They have been facing extraordinary social media abuses, misreporting, trolling, and threats. As J. Reghu, a noted public intellectual in Kerala, remarked, these issues are stemming from the deeper, unchallenged casteist cultural history of Kerala.

In this circumstance many anti-caste intellectuals wanted to hear Prof Divya Dwivedi speak on these developments. Prof Dwivedi had intervened in the context of caste oppression and gender discrimination in Kerala in the past, such as pledging her support for the Dalit PhD scholar Deepa Mohanan of Mahatma Gandhi University in Kottayam; highlighting the upholding of Savarna patriarchal norms by the Kerala state in the case of Anupama S Chandran, who was denied access to her own child by the state; and supporting the students who protested and contested caste discrimination by the elites of cinema and of the K. R. Narayanan National Institute of Visual Science and Arts in Kottayam. Her statement was later published by Madhyamam titled “Reveal the Upper Caste Supremacism of Malayalam cinema”. Dwivedi has also received support from the anti-caste intellectual milieu of Kerala, when the rest of Indian Savarna ‘liberals’ and ‘left’ left her at the mercy of the trolls, social media abuses, horrific misattributions of  her words, and death threats. Her recent book (authored with Shaj Mohan and edited by Maël Montévil) Indian Philosophy, Indian Revolution: On Caste and Politics (Hurst Publishers, UK, 2024), reviewed by me, has two pathbreaking chapters which provide a theoretical basis through to understand what is happening to women and the lower caste people of Malayalam cinema.

Deepthy Krishna: Justice Hema Committee report was released (after suppressing several sections of the report) only recently. The publicly available contents of the report show that there is rampant sexual exploitation of women; there is a mafia like “power group” that is meant to perpetuate male dominance; and, that women often do not have acceptable working conditions. Since then, only some women—not many, possibly due to fear and lack of trust in the government and the legal process—have come out to tell their stories, which are horrific. Does it surprise you or shock you?

Divya Dwivedi: Some things did surprise me. The Hema committee report was submitted to the CPI-M led government in 2019. Why was it suppressed all this while? And why release only parts of it like a long trailer? Why were the movie stars with known histories of brutality towards women actors brought into this government? Why did the CPI-M propose a ‘conclave’ of the predators and the victims as a ‘grand solution’? Is it to show off the chief minister as the ‘double hearted’ (“iratta chankan”, epithet created by CPI-M in imitation of ‘56 inch chest’ of Modi) ‘captain’ of glamour? Beneath all this rankles the connection between the CPI-M and the RSS, revealed in the articles published in The Caravan. It causes concern because the “Communist” named parties had created, or have affiliations with, robust organisations for women’s rights. 

What did not surprise me were the revelations of the report. I had watched “Lekhayude Maranam Oru Flashback”, a film made in 1983, almost a documentary on sexual exploitation and destruction of women’s lives by men in all aspects of film making, including costumers, make up men, directors, actors. It was based on the life of a child actress named Shobha who enacted women’s roles—certainly genius—but committed suicide at the age of 17. It is disturbing to watch those films where she was sexualised in exploitative vulnerable scenes. I learnt recently that this was the case with Shobana too, that she was made to act in exploitative cinema when she was just 14, and she commented on it. We must urgently come to a jurisprudential and legal discussion in this matter and arrive at certain decisions about sexually exploitative cinema made with children.  

DK: Maël Montévil defines your concept of calypsology in the dictionary of concepts as “A system which deploys its means as its ends and repeats itself faithfully” (See “Glossary of Concepts” in Indian Philosophy,). Would it be incorrect to say that there is a “calypsology” at work in cinema? 

DD: A minority exploiting a majority and deflecting our attention away from the structure of exploitation is familiar to all Ambedkarites. Caste oppression and exploitation are masked through “class theory” and “religious conflicts” in politics. However, in Malayalam cinema there is not even a deflection. 

The structure of exploitation of women behind and in front of the camera is still upper caste supremacism, which is simultaneously justified and celebrated through the tropes and themes of popular cinema. This system of generating the upper caste male supremacist and feudal propaganda through cinema, in order to justify the denigration and domination of the very women who work in cinema, is analogous and homologous to India society. Most of these films—Kasaba (2016), Praja (2001)—show how women cannot hold positions of authority, and how an even lower ranking male officials can sexually harass them in public. Is it surprising that the brave actress was sexually assaulted in public? This system exists in all domains including the academia, just that its speciation is different in each location. The means of perpetuating abuse is the very end of this process; technically, it is calypsology.  

DK: What do you think should be demanded from the government by women in Kerala and the WCC?

DD: This can be the beginning of gender and caste sensitisation programs in all institutions, but these programs should be followed by legal measures. There should be relentless agitations and legal actions until the whole report is made public. I learnt that already the mafia organisations of Malayalam cinema have started discrediting and undermining this report using some women as their representatives. Further, legal protection should be demanded from the state for those women who testified to the commission. Action must be initiated on those complaints. And, if Kerala has to be honest with itself in this crisis, there should be urgent investigation on how this report was suppressed, who had access to it while it was held by the government, and who it is protecting.  

DK: Is there any solution to the problem of wage inequality that women face in cinema? I don’t know of any caste based statistics of cinema employment, and therefore can’t yet raise the issue caste based wage inequality. The usual argument given, even by some in the government, is that women should accept lesser pay as the market exists only for men. 

DD: Is this the CPI-M led government that we are talking about? It should be at the forefront of the fight for wage equality, at the very least? May be we will have to rename it as Communal Party of India (Market). But now seriously, there was never cinema without women, even when they were sexualised and objectified. Wage inequality, abusive working conditions (no toilets, changing rooms, safety or privacy) and sexual subjugation – these constitute an industrialized exploitation of women to generate profit from an industry that cannot exist without the talent as well as the glamour of women on the screen, in advertising and their ancillary activities. “Cléo de 5 à 7” by Agnès Varda depicts this in the French context. 

Was it not the case that the people went to the theatres to watch Urvashi, Shobana, and Silk Smitha? Doesn’t Nayanthara command more market than the geriatric superstars? And I know from J. Reghu that there is no market analysis to confirm whether the people go to the theatres to see only the old men. The majority of the hits of Malayalam cinema in the last two decades were made, it seems, by new film makers with often lesser known actors. Even the recent hits such as “Premalu”, “Manjummel Boys”, and “Ullozhukku” are without the geriatric superstars. 

Now, we do have solutions to this wage inequality: the classic Marxist tactic of strike and boycott. Women in cinema should organise strikes within any film unit that refuses to pay equal wage. Even more effective will be for the public to boycott all the films where the women are paid less than the men. So, investigating and revealing payment scale is the only work needed to bring this disgusting practice to an end. 

DK: The usual argument is that the hyper macho films made with very old men like Mohanlal and Mammootty, and also Prithviraj who is only comparatively younger, has a dedicated audience. But the cinematic ‘masculinity’ trope of these stars is used by them in the public. This toxic masculinity plays into the minds of young men who defend the male abusers in cinema. As you said before, it is a system of calypsology. How do you understand the specific toxic masculinity of Malayalam cinema?

DD: Any methodical conduct in public, when done right, is drag or costume play, otherwise it’s just comic. It is comic masculinity that we see around the world where men smoke cigars; get into cars they can’t drive; speak and growl loudly tearing their larynx. They might as well wear dildo hats! 

The fight scenes of the geriatric superstars say something about the psyche of their audience. During the fights the world becomes The Matrix and these frail old men become “Neos”. That is, the audience knows that only in a hyper-phantasy (please keep the spelling) can these men even move without crumbling. Even for their sake, their frailty worries me. Recently, I watched a bit of a film with a geriatric star playing a young man who loves to fight. Each of his movementswas cinematically constructed through orderless montages, almost in the style of Eisenstein’s propaganda film “October”, because this geriatric superstar would not have been able to complete full a turn or swing his arm all the way in a single shot. His voice was so weak,  I thought it really was cruelty to old men to make these kinds of films. 

But my sympathy was short-lived because his mother’s role was played by an actress young enough to be his daughter. With specific differences, this is the case also in Bollywood films and other cinema industries all over India. It is disturbing to see these geriatric stars trying to play younger roles and romancing children. In the film “Guruvayur Ambala Nadayil” it was not that different, the lead actresses could be the male lead’s daughters. All this comic masculinity and its idolatry have a specific upper caste supremacist logic which evolved through cinematic history, and the history of cinema.   

DK: Many will complain that this conversation is ‘bringing caste into this issue’. The caste denial of Kerala is very peculiar, because open caste segregation and ostracisation exists as a method of savarna control of culture even in schools, while the public discourse is denying the very casteism. This is a feature of what you and Shaj Mohan in your article “April Theses” had called “Savarna identity politics” which simultaneously calls itself ‘universal’ and ‘accuses’ all anti-caste movements of being “identity politics”. You had exposed the same tendency in “Savarna Marxism” also. Many of us believe that it is the most important Marxist text for anti-caste movements. How do we address this caste denial in Kerala? 

DD: Caste is at the very origin of Malayalam cinema, and it was studied and theorised by the cinema expert Manju Edachira, who should be closely read by all those who are interested in understanding and challenging upper caste supremacism in cinema. The very first heroine of Malayalam cinema was P. K. Rosy, a Dalit woman from the Pulaya caste group, in a film titled “Vigatha Kumaran”. Because upper castes still found performing arts to be of an untouchable space the actress had to be a Dalit. The stigma around women performing artists continues even now in cinema due to the lower caste associations in its history, including dance forms which were associated with temple prostitution and enslavement of lower caste women. 

“Vigatha Kumaran” was produced and directed by J. C. Daniel, a Nadar man (backward caste). The exhibition of this very first Malayalam film was disrupted by upper caste mobs, and the lead actress Rosy was chased by a mob. We know little about her life. She was certainly the very first victim of misogyny and caste oppression in Malayalam cinema. WCC should be named after her. I hope the WCC also takes this up. There should be, as I believe there already are, memorials for her, and she should be hailed as the mother of Malayalam cinema. 

Later the film “Neelakuyil” (1954), which won several awards, was about the sexual exploitation of an untouchable woman. It is not an innocent film. It demonstrates a typical feature of upper caste supremacist attitude towards Dalits, pity or pity turned into a method of psychological oppression (a mode of humiliation as studied by Yashpal Jogdand), pityism. Pityism should be recognised quickly, as it is one of the most dangerous terrains in politics. In conversations one has heard upper castes talking of Dalits “well, one has to do something for these people also”. Or, in literature and cinema when a Dalit is sexualised and destroyed, and presented only as the disaster of existence. We should also look at the position given to lower caste characters in literary works and cinema. Often, they are presented as serving the interests of, and protecting, an upper caste figure with whom they are portrayed in a pet-like friendship.  

DK: Why are these kinds of movies most common in Malayalam cinema? What can be opposed to it?

DD: This kind of savarna cinema is the norm all over India. It is in Tamil cinema that an anti-caste uprising is taking place. There is the cliché series that goes like this “you get the X you deserve”; for example, “you get the politician you deserve”. It is in fact false, especially in the arts. If it is really art then you must get the art that you don’t deserve. Art destroys the norms of society and therefore what Shaj Mohan calls “the orders of expectation”. This is also what Godard said about cinema, that it is hopeful because it is open, where anything is possible. Cinema where “anything is possible” still finds anti-caste cinema impossible! When that impossible takes place, it will be art. 

Let me elaborate: a society has regulatory norms, and for India’s societies it is just the caste order. These norms are not in any way “immanent” to the society but are always imposed on it and regulated by the powerful few. Savarna regulators are constantly at work in every institution of India—be it academic, theatric, cinematic, journalistic, or industrial—and this is handed to the next savarna generation as savarna capital, often through gatekeeping and exploitation. Any artworks “deserving” of, or in resonance with, these social norms, are at best propaganda. The cinema that propagates these savarna norms through feudal and misogynistic themes conveys both the fears of caste mixtures and the political ascension of the lower caste majority, and at the same time it seeks to induce fear in the lower caste majority that the savarna minority still holds all the instruments of oppression. I am waiting to see cinema undeserving of Kerala society—anti-caste cinema—which will be the fight for freedom. 

DK: Are there any recent films that you would suggest as art in the sense of “what society does not deserve”? So that there is an example or a measure?

DD: Technically and thematically, a film that moved me in recent years is “Karnan”. It confronted caste oppression and had elements of Ancient Greek theatre, myths, and silent cinema. In Malayalam cinema, two films struck me as the morning twilight, “Chaaver” (2023), written by the left activist and thinker Joy Mathew, which showed upper caste supremacism being masked through “class theory”. Its portrayal of caste oppression was subtle and disturbing. The other film was “Pada” (2022) which too was anti-caste, with the lingering shadow of “class theory”, and with direct reference to the protest hostage taking of the district collector of Palakkad by the organisation Ayyankali Pada (army of the Dalit politician Ayyankali (1863 — 1941)).  

DK: The discussions happening right now on the Hema committee report are silent on caste. Well before these developments, the great actor Thilakan (1935 — 2012), who was from the lower castes, conducted a one man rebellion against upper caste dominance of Malayalam cinema culture and its Savarna cult of superstars. The Hema committee report directly addresses the ostracisation of Thilakan by upper caste leaders of cinema. This is on par with the rest of society, which acts caste blind. CPI-M has also been one of the significant factors in this state of affairs, as it always mocked anti-caste politics either as identity politics or as inferior politics. The feudal cinemas that you mentioned earlier were made by the men who are the fellow travellers of CPI-M. How do we break this nexus between class theory and feudal misogyny of upper caste supremacism?

DD: The question is in some sense complicated, both due to its historicity and the format of a short interview. Let me start with a little bit of history. The Malayalam cinema and literature that I am familiar with move in parallel to the academic and political themes of postcolonial studies and decolonial studies. In the 1980s, the upper caste academics of India asserted that the modern constitutional order implemented by Dr Ambedkar, and the minimal provisions of reservations given for the lower caste majority people by the state had completed their fall from the caste based cultural and religious heights which began with colonial rule. The only difference between the so called ‘left’ and ‘liberal’ upper castes and the RSS family of organisations is that for the latter this process began with Mughal rule. 

In the 1980s, India saw OBC and Dalit assertions in national politics in the background of the Mandal commission reports. Malayalam cinema of this period began a certain process, which can be seen in Hindi cinema too. First, it showed the loss of prestige by some upper castes as profound tragedy, and created a new kind of victimhood. Adoor Gopalakrishnan’s film “Elippathayam” (The Rat Trap) is a better example, where a Nair head of declining feudal family oppresses the women at home, while helplessly watching the collapse. There are aesthetically interesting moments in it. Recently, this film was referenced in the far more casteist film “Bramayugam”.

Soon, there were commercial films with the same themes, with consistent anti-reservation rhetoric, but now the upper caste hero is able to strike back at the imaginary lower caste rivals. The worst of them all is disturbingly called “Aryan” (1988). The comic masculinity unique to Kerala and its superstars were created through such casteist misogynist cinema. As you said, the individuals who made these kinds of films are dear to the CPI-M and all the other political parties. 

DK: Feudal, casteist, anti-reservation, Islamophobic film makers have derived support due to fault lines in the CPI-M, which is still too difficult to understand for people outside Kerala.  Many intellectuals in Kerala speak of you and Shaj Mohan as communists. In what sense are you Marxist and Communist?

DD: You are right, the first CPI-M chief minister of Kerala was a Brahmin. The party supported the creamy layer policy and EWS reservation for upper caste which diluted the principle of reservation. Shaj Mohan and I wrote critically of the Congress frequently, and of the RSS family organisations all the time, but we have not yet written a sustained critique and criticism of the “communist” and “Marxist” named parties in India. We will. But we did write about many of these problem in the text you referred to, “April Theses”. For now, let us go towards it in a different way. The name of a thing has no relation to its meaning. A woman named “Angelique” can be leading a genocide. 

I am not a Marxist, certainly not in any of the common senses of this term. I believe that Marx made breakthroughs in the history of political theory and philosophy. Through rigorous arguments, he showed that societies are composed of regularities. These regularities are obtained through the oppression of a majority by a minority; the minority always enjoys their riches through the exploitation of the lives of the majority. The many regularities of each society are comprehended or gathered in thought at the level of ideas and theory. The comprehending level or the comprehending law is where a society transforms, for example, the shift from feudalism to capitalism involved extraordinary changes at the level of ideas. In Europe religion was displaced and entertainment and “culture” took its place. So, this tradition which studies history as the science of the appearance of new regularities based on material practices is something to which I belong. But that cannot be just Marxism, which in any case names too many things. Further, it does not explain the three millennia of caste oppression in India. 

I am, indeed, a communist, I believe, that an egalitarian world, that is, real democracy will be realised. So long as politics exists it will be guided by this goal, in spite of all the forms of anti-politics, such as theologisation of politics and fascism.

DK: I don’t know of any explicit anti-caste statements issued by the WCC. They appear to be taking the position of a struggle for “women in general”. They are very brave for standing up in this unprecedented way, and yet the silence on caste is disconcerting. Do you have any message for the WCC?

DD: I am only a philosopher! What message can I have for them?! But as an academic, I have to point out that one of the very first challenges to sexual exploitation of women within institutions took place in the academia. It was led by an immensely courageous young person called Raya Sarkar, who foregrounded the relation between caste oppression and sexual exploitation. From what I could learn, like Rosy, Raya was made to withdraw and disappear. And this fact only proves the courage of the women of WCC. I have never seen such a group of strong women at war in the mainstream in India! I read some of their texts and interviews. Thiruvothu is precise while being witty. Kallingal presents her arguments like a lawyer. They should speak about caste urgently and initiate a real struggle in cinema, and Kerala society. Because there is never a “woman in general”, and only this woman, this particular woman, who may be a Dalit woman working in the make-up section of cinema, or a Pasmanda Muslim woman travelling alone in a train, or an upper caste woman leered at by men in an office. I am sure that the WCC will, although it won’t be easy since anyone who takes anti-caste stance in politics is banished by the mainstream savarna media. I saw Padmapriya beginning to do that, by giving an interview sitting in front of a bookshelf with Dr Ambedkar’s books. However, without addressing the reality of caste oppression a ‘women’s struggle’ will not succeed. Today, it is impossible to proceed any further without anti-caste politics anywhere in India. 

DK: Is there a Malayalam filmmaker that you like to study?

DD: I am interested in the techniques in the arts, I study literature in this way seeking the origins and the sudden inflections of techniques. In this sense, I am intrigued by G. Aravindan, although I watched his films long ago as a student. Something remained with me, that silent cinema came to an abrupt end with the talkies, before being able to explore the intensities and extensions of their techniques, before completing the invention of techniques. Aravindan was doing precisely that within what is called talking cinema. There is a moment in the complex, almost anti-caste film “Vasthuhara”. A long shot where the Dalit homeless people in Bengal are shipped off to the Andaman Islands, we read the name of the ship, “Indian Progress”. Quite remarkable! Later I learnt that, like O. V. Vijayan, Aravindan too was a cartoonist first. I see this in many Malayalees, the abstract and satirical perspective of a cartoonist expressing itself in the exigencies of life. 

Divya Dwivedi is a philosopher based in the Subcontinent. She is the co-author of Gandhi and Philosophy: On Theological Anti-politics (Bloomsbury, 2019) and Indian Philosophy, Indian Revolution: On Caste and Politics (ed. Maël Montévil; Hurst, Westland: 2024) with Shaj Mohan.

Deepthy Krishna is a writer and research scholar, DEFL, CUSAT, Kochi. She writes both in Malayalam and English and is known for her social interventions through articles and poems in magazines, journals and online portals. Her first collection of poems, The Shadows of My Life, came out in 2020 under the pen name Krishnadeepthy. She has translated the biography of the subaltern renaissance leader Poikayil Appachan into English as Poikayil Sreekumaragurudevan (Unseen Letters: 2023). At present, she is engaged in research on cultural studies.