P. Muhammed Afzal
Assistant Professor, Department of Humanities and Social Sceinces, Birla Institute of Technology and Science, Pilani (BITS Pilani), Pilani, Rajasthan, India-333031. ORCID ID: 0000-0002-9989-6251. E-mail: muhammed.p@pilani.bits-pilani.ac.in
Volume 13, Number 1, 2021 I Full Text PDF
DOI: 10.21659/rupkatha.v13n1.30
Abstract
This paper treats the Malayalam film Mukhamukham and the debates it engendered in the Kerala public sphere about the history and legacy of communism as an archive of passions and disavowals that have shaped the political subjectivities in contemporary Kerala and explores how the film offers a critique of the Left popular in Kerala. Through a critique of the ascetic modality of the communist hero, Mukhamukham offers a critique of the representative strategies through which the communist hero was produced in the early Left political melodramas in Malayalam, which have been a significant part of the Left’s constitutive role in the construction of the domain of the popular in Kerala. The attempt in this paper is to read the film as one that, while marked by liberal prejudices, offers a critique of the Left popular and certain prevailing notions on the Left in Kerala. The paper explores how the film represents the figure of the revolutionary; and the shift from the melodramatic conventions of the construction of the revolutionary figure that Gopalakrishnan attempts in the film.
Keywords: melodrama, Left popular, Communist self-fashioning, Malayalam cinema, Kerala