Sleepless fathers in Malayalam cinema: Unraveling the dynamics of caste and masculinity

Abstract

ABSTRACTThis paper explores the formations of masculinity and its links to the perceived vulnerability of young women’s sexualized bodies by focusing on popular Malayalam cinema from Kerala. I will specifically undertake a reading of Achanurangatha Veedu (A Home in which the Father Cannot Sleep, 2006) and deploy my analysis of Drishyam (Sight, 2013) as a point of contrast. In both these films the primary focus are on fathers who are compelled to act in order to protect their adolescent daughters from sexual violence. The marginalized Dalit Christian father in Achanurangatha Veedu is mired in humiliation and physical breakdown as his search for justice ends in failure. In Drishyam on the other hand the father, who belongs to an upper caste and middle class location, acquires heroic proportions as he launches a thrilling set of operations to safeguard the realm of domesticity. My analysis shows how in Achanurangatha Veedu the viewer is constantly buffeted between identification with the victimized father and a possibility of distancing where we step back and watch the spectacle of pathos. I argue that the film offers a possibility of critiquing social hierarchies in instances where we slip out of both of these modes of viewing and inhabit a more contingent and disorienting position. My focus is on the visual and aural transactions through which masculinity is reassembled in cinema and the practices of spectatorship it engenders.