Visual Perception and Cultural Memory: Typecast and Typecast(e)ing in Malayalam Cinema

Abstract

This paper will examine how collective unconscious memories play a dominant role in conceiving the subaltern or lower caste body and consciousness within the representational strategies which followed the mainstream Malayalam and South Indian Cinema. There is a flood of such images when it comes to the representation of subalterns (dalits/tribes). Those movies that take up the task of representing the marginalized, end up in redeploying the stereotypes cast aside as ‘uncultured’ and now, fundamentalist. Popular cinemas are often follows two kinds of visual or narrative strategies to redeploy the static image of social group. The first one is a visible and direct representation of the physiognomy of the character as subaltern [image from the margins], and the second way is through the deployment of an indirect and sometimes, invisible social and cultural signifier which indicate the subaltern identity (sometime as elite subaltern) of the character. This paper will analyse these visual icons/ of the subaltern that presented in South Indian films and how the spectator’s perception of viewing film is historically and culturally constituted, and I will argue that the film triggers memories-both oral and textual- of the collective spectator to recognize the social identity of the hero or actor on the screen.

It is in this context that, this paper attempts to contextualize one of the south Indian film actor Kalabhavan Mani, and argue that the mainstream visual perception foreground with a ‘subordinated inclusion’ of the referred social groups. The visual spaces have been unequally distributed with historical and social signs to identify the binaries of the subaltern/elite mentalities. Mani’s hero is performing within this subordinate space without encroaching upon the conceived and dominant spaces of elite. His characters are engaging in these generic spaces with his half naked body, mentally and physically differently enable situation, as well as with fight to survive, by creating scornful laugh and fatal cry to negotiate with historical conscious of the spectator and with their imaginary identification of ideal hero within the dominant spaces of visuality. it can be stated that the caste identification which works in Kalabhavan Manis and Malayalam (and south Indian )films has acquired distinctive sign languages, a sign which is practiced in a restricted social relations of pre modern time and refashioned by the modernity. However, I am not arguing that t caste signifiers are functioning according to the premodern social pretext rather it reworks as a reinsulated signifiers within cultural memory of shared context. Caste in cinema, therefore articulates in a series of ‘proliferation of signs on demand’ within the visual context of modernity which breaks the exclusiveness of signs’ enjoyed by the historical spaces.

The persistence of subordinate visual space, articulation of signs through physiognomy, bodily gestures, language and mimesis and then the spectator’s identification of indifference necessarily create a space for Mani to recognize him as a ‘dalit actor’ and also a subaltern citizen. His naked body and ‘ontological wounds’ on it becomes a commodity for spectacle. The humiliation, mental and moral pain become a pleasurable commodity to satisfy the viewers perception. These are the historical and altered signs which help to invoke the spectator’s unconscious memories where caste and its prosthetic memory function as sign to articulate marginality and dominance.