Abstract
Mainstream Malayalam cinema of the south Indian state of Kerala has, for the most part, attempted to sidestep the significance of Gulf migration to the region’s development. Part of the reason for this historical neglect has been the prevalence of a particular hegemonic vantage point within the films that has centralized the narratives of the landed elites in Kerala, eliding the various historically marginalized communities within the state. This article engages with a recent development within the film industry. It examines how Gulf migration has shaped the affective dimensions and expanding territorial imagination of the New Malayalam Cinema, which has positioned labour migration as one of its central thematic concerns. It is argued that this shift was made possible by the displacement of the universalized territorial imagination of the landed elites in the state that dominated its film industry for most of its history. Subsequently, this article will closely study how director Zakariya places his debut film Sudani from Nigeria (2018) within this new cinematic category, and will demonstrate how he portrays the region of rural Malappuram in north Kerala as a nexus of various migrant experiences, crucially invoking an underlying older order of cosmopolitanism prevalent in the region, fuelled partly by the history of Gulf migration and partly by a tradition and history of migration and transnationalism that predates the formation of the Indian state.
In the 2015 Malayalam film Pathemari [Dhow], directed by Salim Ahamed, the protagonist Narayanan, who is in his mid-sixties, is sitting on a rock beside the coast in the seaside town of Khor Fakkan (located in the Gulf of Oman, United Arab Emirates) with his friend Moideen, contemplating their lives as Malayali migrants in the Arabian Gulf. It has now been 50 years since they arrived near the coast in a dhow along with others like them. Here they had to jump off and swim to a nearby rock that they called adayalappara [signal rock], which they clung to until nightfall so that they could swim towards the coast undetected, having travelled there undocumented, desperately seeking a means to alleviate the extreme poverty that had plagued their families back in Kerala. Narayanan (played by Mammootty) and Moideen (played by Sreenivasan) have come to the same coast to meet one last time before Moideen returns to Kerala after half a decade of labour in Dubai. Breathing in the ocean breeze, and with it the heft of having lived a life away from home, toiling for a family he could not spend time with, Narayanan asks Moideen: “Who do you think it was, the first Malayali to have set foot in this land?” Moideen responds: “Whoever it was, they surely must not have come here for sightseeing. Like us, they must also have had to endure starvation with their families, and would have had sisters of marriageable age” (Ahamed, 2015). 1
It is interesting that Moideen addresses the Malayali Gulf migrant as plural (“avar”/ they), as a community of people, whereas Narayanan’s question here was about the individual (“aaru”/who). For what haunts Narayanan is the possibility of having failed as an individual even after saving his entire family from poverty and in many ways contributing to the development of his village. Unlike several other migrants from Kerala that came with him, and after him to the Gulf, by sea or by air, legally or otherwise, Narayanan has neither accumulated wealth nor seen any significant improvements in his working conditions. And unlike Moideen, even in his mid-sixties, Narayanan is unable to retire from the life of a low skilled migrant worker in Dubai. Moideen returns home, and soon after this Narayanan dies in the very bunkbed he has been sleeping in for the past few decades. Narayanan never gets to spend even a single night in the house that he has been building back home in Kerala. Pathemari, through the protagonist Narayanan, tells the history of Gulf migration that has been central to the survival of the south Indian state of Kerala — which has arguably remained “a viable entity purely on the strength of remittances from across the ocean, given its lack of industrialization, high rates of unemployment, and extremely volatile coalitional politics” (Menon, 2005: 312). Through Narayanan, the film traces the development of his village, fuelled by remittances from Gulf migrants, while also showcasing the evolution of the practice of Gulf migration from the 1960s to the present day. The film is a long overdue mainstream cinematic exploration of the subject (Karinkurayil, 2022), since Malayalam cinema has, for the most part, attempted to sidestep the significance of Gulf migration to the development of the region and has “marginalise[d] the Gulf experience as constituting an underside of the otherwise clean history of modernity in Kerala” (Radhakrishnan, 2009: 230).
The present study engages with a recent development in Malayalam cinema, namely the advent of a new and popular category within the film industry — the “New Malayalam Cinema” — fuelled by a younger generation of writers, directors, and actors who have sought to move away from the formulaic, star oriented, big budget blockbusters. C. S. Venkiteswaran writes that the “formats and styles [of these films] are deeply influenced by the global and national trends, [and] their thematics […] firmly rooted in Malayali life and mindscape” (2013). New Malayalam Cinema initially announced its deviation from the established commercial format in 2011 through a series of low-budget films featuring multiple protagonists and intertwined narratives, and often experimenting with non-linear storytelling. These include Traffic (directed by Rajesh Pillai), Salt N’ Pepper (directed by Aashiq Abu), Chappa Kurishu [Head or Tail] (directed by Sameer Thahir), and City of God (directed by Lijo Jose Pellissery). 2 With an emphasis on establishing cinematic verisimilitude, many of the films have deployed realist aesthetics in varying degrees, popularized by Rajeev Ravi, Dileesh Pothan, B. Ajith Kumar, Geethu Mohandas, and Zakariya, among others. Accompanying this shift in form and tone, an expansion of the territorial imagination in Malayalam cinema led to the inclusion of new urban and rural spaces featuring the previously absent lower class labourers and migrant workers, thereby also providing a new way of looking at the history of Malayali migration to the Arabian Gulf.
This article examines the ways in which Gulf migration has shaped the affective dimensions and expanding territorial imagination of New Malayalam Cinema which has continued to position labour migration as one of its central thematic concerns. I will argue that this thematic shift was made possible by the displacement of the universalized vantage point of the landed elites in Kerala that dominated the film industry for most of its history. Subsequently, this article will closely study how director Zakariya places his debut film Sudani from Nigeria (2018) within this new cinematic category. It will demonstrate how he constructs the region of rural Malappuram in north Kerala as a nexus of various migrant experiences, crucially invoking an underlying older order of cosmopolitanism prevalent in the region, fuelled partly by the history of Gulf migration and partly by a tradition and history of migration and transnationalism that predates the formation of the Indian state.
The study is divided into three sections. The first section examines the history of the practice of centring the narratives of the landed elites within Malayalam cinema and how this practice and the cinematic imagination that it generated and sustained for decades led to the narratives on migration to the Arabian Gulf being disregarded. The second section explores the advent of New Malayalam Cinema in 2011 that attempted to displace the aforesaid cinematic imaginaire, and briefly examines how this cinema has centred the urban space of Kochi as a hub of working-class narratives, and has often presented the Malayali migration to the Arabian Gulf as a reference point. The third and final section of this article will be an analysis of Zakariya’s Sudani from Nigeria, a cinematic experiment made possible by the coming of the New Malayalam Cinema, which depicts the region of rural Malappuram as a cosmopolitan nexus of multitudinous migrant experiences.
Gulf migration and “Nair universalism”
Scholars have previously examined the different ways in which Malayalam cinema has prevailed as a realm of hegemony for the dominant caste communities in Kerala, most crucially that of the Nairs (a dominant Shudra caste of the region) from the mid-twentieth century. Jenny Rowena discusses the extent of control wielded by the Nair community over the Malayalam film industry, stating that “Malayalam cinema has been one of the foremost vehicles for establishing this Shudra community [Nairs] at the center of Kerala modernity” (2013: 9). Dilip Menon in his work uses the term “Nair universalism” to describe how the historically affluent Nair intelligentsia has claimed the conditions of the Nair community as a metaphor for the conditions of Kerala in its entirety (2005: 311). Within cinema, Menon traces this practice back to the 1960s, when due to certain prevalent anxieties pertaining to the influence of the neighbouring film industry of the Tamil region (on which the Malayalam film industry of the time depended for capital, studios, and distribution networks), Malayalam cinema had attempted to emphasize its Malayalam literary nature through its melodramas, thereby adapting the literary works of many of the canonical Malayalam writers like Thakazhi, Kesava Dev, and, most significantly, M. T. Vasudevan Nair (2020: 8). With this endeavour, Malayalam cinema was also imagining and establishing the territorial within the cinematic: What came to be seen as distinctly Malayali was the universalisation of the Nair condition that MT Vasudevan Nair managed so successfully with his depiction of crumbling households, disrupted loves, and the decay and degeneration of landed status and property. (Menon, 2020: 8)
It is important to note that the perception of the terrain through such a narrow lens also meant the systematic exclusion of the stories and narratives of the various historically marginalized communities within it. One of the most significant effects of this practice was the absence of the ocean within the cinematic imagination of Kerala. The prioritization of the narratives of Nair landed elites within cinema meant the strategic sidestepping of the various crucial maritime economies within a coastal state that was intensely dependent on the ocean. On the rare occasions when Malayalam cinema did mention the ocean, it was to elicit a sense of foreboding doom for the sanctity of the region, for the ocean brought in gold and illicit wealth (Menon, 2005: 322). It should be noted that these were also the very few instances where the concept of migration was invoked.
The first half of the 1970s bore witness to the beginning of the Gulf boom, when the sudden hike in oil prices in the Arabian Gulf generated immediate demand for labour on a massive scale. The Malayali community seized this opportunity and responded with an immense outflow of labour, a significant portion of which comprised Mappila Muslims of the Malabar region in north Kerala. Since then, Kerala as a state has depended heavily on the remittances returned by the migrant population labouring in the Gulf countries (Menon, 2005: 312). The impact of the Gulf boom and the migration wave were already starting to be reflected in the cinema of the 1970s, but it was the arthouse productions and not the commercial films that came to highlight this theme within its narratives. Even though the rapid changes in the economy and its purported corrupting influence were central to the narratives of many commercial films of the time, Gulf migration as a phenomenon was never directly invoked as the source of this (Radhakrishnan, 2009: 220). Ratheesh Radhakrishnan discusses how Adoor Gopalakrishnan’s debut film Swayamvaram (1972), considered to be the earliest arthouse production in Malayalam cinema (which brought the spirit of the Indian new wave cinema to Kerala), uses the character “Smuggler Vasu” to signal a sense of moral corrosion generated by the remittances coming into the region from the Gulf countries (2009: 225). More crucially, these films were also giving voice to many of the anxieties and insecurities of the Hindu uppercaste elites regarding these developments within the region. Menon discusses this when he writes about Nirmalyam (1974), Nair’s directorial debut and a story about a community living around a neglected temple and that of the temple oracle who is struggling to make ends meet for his family: In Nirmalyam, the experience of the Gulf boom, the formation of the Muslim majority district of Malappuram, and the visible impact of the Mappila nouveau riches is reflected but in a chilling image. The oracle returns home at dusk […] He knocks on the inner door and the Muslim moneylender, Maymunni, sidles out followed by the oracle’s wife. Driven by want and the fact that temple ceremonies no longer provide sustenance for the family, she has slept with the moneylender to pay off debts incurred for daily food. (Menon, 2005: 313)
The entrance of the Muslim money lender (a character that is absent in the original short story written by Nair in 1954) into the house of the temple oracle is a representation of the prevalent anxieties of the Hindu elites at the time. Here, it is to be noted that disapproval towards the nouveau riche had been a theme in Nair’s screenplays even prior to his directorial debut with Nirmalyam. In Iruttinte Atmavu (1967, directed by P. Bhaskaran) a character named Madhavan Nair is shown to have returned wealthy from Singapore and is portrayed as lacking respect for the sanctity of the traditional household. However, the returnee from the Arabian Gulf from the 1970s onwards is portrayed as a much more serious threat to the region, possessing a (supposedly illegitimate) desire for power over the region. As Menon discusses, the formation of the Muslim majority district of Malappuram in 1969 is also a factor that adds to these anxieties (2005: 313). 3 This article will return to the subject of Malappuram and its significance within the context of Gulf migration in its third section.
By the 1980s, Gulf migration and the significance of the remittances from across the ocean was an undeniable reality, whereby “the anxieties that this development generated were visible […] in the cultural marginalisation of what were called ‘Gulf aesthetics’ — including architecture, use of colours, fashion, etc.” (Radhakrishnan, 2009: 232). This is also the period famous for the advent of the middlebrow cinema that appropriated the realist aesthetics of arthouse films to target middle class spectators (Radhakrishnan, 2010: 29). Paul Mathew argues that the “newly emergent middle-brow taste originated in the remittances from the middle-east and the rise of a middle-income social life in Kerala” (2019: 326). The direct impact of the remittances from the Gulf was indeed visible within the Malayalam film industry during the period 1975 to 1988, which saw a spike in the number of films being produced, “from 241 films produced in 1970–75 to 465, 551 and 497 in 1975–80, 1980–85 and 1985–90, respectively” (Nair, qtd in Radhakrishnan, 2010: 219). But as K. P. Jayakumar and M. R. Rajesh discuss in their respective works, a significant proportion of this spectatorship comprised the Hindu upper-caste middle class, now newly employed in urban spaces. Crucially, their entry into the socio-political realm had informed the narrative and formal experiments that middlebrow cinema undertook, whereby these films were often vessels for this social group’s anxieties about sharing the middle class space with the more historically marginalized communities (Jayakumar, 2014: 42; Rajesh, 2012: 92). The Gulf returnee or the remittances from the Gulf were often visible images of this anxiety in these films. Mohamed Shafeeq Karinkurayil looks at the 1985 film Thinkalazcha Nalla Divasam [Monday, an Auspicious Day] (directed by P. Padmarajan) “as a particularly acute example of middlebrow cinema’s discomforts with the figure of the lower class/caste migrant” (2019: 39). In the film, the character Kunju (played by Achankunju) is from a Hindu lower-caste and is said to have become wealthy because of his two sons working in the Gulf. The prevalent fear is that of Kunju’s intention to buy the house of the Nair protagonists — the house that Kunju was not even allowed to enter because of his caste status. 4 This is a recurring trope that was carried forward to the 1990s in Malayalam cinema.
As I have discussed elsewhere, there has always been a clear demarcation of legitimacy and illegitimacy when it comes to the possession of wealth in Malayalam cinema. The recurring imagery of the declining Nair taravad (matrilineal joint family household) is posed as emblematic of a larger social and cultural decay. The same might be said of the crumbling Illam (traditional Namboothiri Brahmin households) in similar films (Yadukrishnan, 2020: 218). It was the historically affluent communities, who dominated the modern socio-political and cultural landscape in Kerala, that were considered the natural and deserving bearers of wealth and power within the Malayalam cinematic imaginary. Hence the delegitimization and demonization of the nouveau riche, especially the Gulf returnee. Radhakrishnan notes that in such films the “authentic culture of Kerala” is portrayed as that of the Nairs, and this is done by demonizing the Gulf returnee (almost always from a historically marginalized community) and the various objects that he adorns and has brought into the region (2009: 225). Similarly, Caroline Osella and Filippo Osella discuss how the Gulf migrant’s “taste for foreign-imported goods and styles is presented as corrupting the integrity of traditional cultural and moral values, making them agents of current processes of ‘neo-colonialism’ and cultural decay” (2006: 79): In popular films and plays, the returning gulfan is invariably portrayed as arriving by taxi from the airport, the car loaded with boxes and parcels. He wears a designer shirt, white trousers and the latest sports shoes. He smokes foreign cigarettes and wears branded sunglasses. On one wrist he has a gold bracelet, on the other a gold watch and around his neck a weighty gold chain. (Osella and Osella, 2006: 86)
The Muslim Gulf returnee Veerankutty (played by Pavithran) in the 1993 film Devasuram [God-Demon] (directed by I. V. Sasi) is a facsimile of this image. He shows interest in buying the ancestral property from the Nair protagonist Neelakandan (played by Mohanlal), whereby he is shunned and nearly attacked. Neelakandan is infuriated by the fact that Veerankutty, whose family was suffering from stark poverty prior to his migration to the Gulf, had the audacity to think that he could purchase Neelakandan’s ancestral property. He invokes the memory of how Veerankutty’s father was tied to a tree on Neelakandan’s property and lashed for attempting to steal from them. Neelakandan exclaims that the buyers should have “some qualification” (a coding for caste). 5 Devasuram, crucially, is representative of a larger shift that was happening in Malayalam cinema in the 1990s, when popular cinema, as it became more star-driven, also increasingly engaged in what A. Soman refers to as “feudal revivalism”, with its narratives nostalgically harkening back to an older and more rigidly hierarchical social order (2012: 239). Soman argues that this was emblematic of the larger ideological shifts in the cinematic terrain influenced heavily by the proliferation of Hindutva nationalism in the early 1990s (2012: 237). 6
The feudal revivalist films continued their progression towards the early 2000s in Kerala. By this time, however, parallel to this, one can trace an increase in the number of Gulf migration narratives in Malayalam cinema, with films such as Sharjah to Sharjah (2001, directed by Venugopan), Dubai (2001, directed by Joshiy), Mambazhakkalam [The Season of Mangoes] (2004, directed by Joshiy), Perumazhakkalam [The Season of Heavy Rains] (2004, directed by Kamal), and Arabikkatha [Arabian Tale] (2007, directed by Lal Jose), among others. Some of these films were sympathetic to the Gulf migrant, but there was no attempt at displacing the existing dominant framing of the region. Radhakrishnan writes that “the upper-caste hero does not exhibit the ‘obscenities’ of modernity as a Gulf returnee unlike the lower caste migrant… The desirability or the non-desirability of migration depends totally on the vantage point from where one looks across the seas” (2009: 237). This is crucial for it is this vantage point, that of the Hindu landed elites, that had remained unchanged over the decades along with the exclusionary territorial imagination that it had generated and sustained. The following section will explore a shift in this imagination that came to pass in the second decade of post-millennial Malayalam cinema.
New Malayalam cinema and labour migration
The year 2011 saw the release of a series of Malayalam films that attempted to carve out a new and popular category within the industry, moving away from the norm of star-centred blockbusters and instead investing in more grounded, low-budget ventures. If the middlebrow cinema of the 1980s was an appropriation of the realist aesthetics of the 1970s arthouse productions, repackaged for a broader audience, the New Malayalam Cinema of 2011 was influenced by national and global cinematic trends of which the everyday Malayali audience was increasingly becoming aware (Venkiteswaran, 2013). E. Dawson Varughese, when discussing the departure in form, genre, and voice of post-millennial Indian English fiction, notes similar changes in Indian cinema, specifically Hindi cinema; along with traditional Bollywood “masala films”, there are now films such as 3 Idiots (2008) and Delhi Belly (2011) that tell the tale of a “New India” (2013: 15). Neelam Sreedhar Wright also notes this shift and identifies 2001 as a significant year for the emergence of this new trend within the Hindi film industry, with the film Dil Chahta Hein [The Heart Desires] (2001, directed by Farhan Akthar) being a landmark moment (2015: 9). Although such cinematic trends, animated by similar global influences, were starting to be reflected in Malayalam cinema within the first decade of the 2000s, it was only in 2011, with films such as Traffic, City of God, Salt N’ Pepper, and Chappa Kurishu — all released within the space of few months — that a momentous shift in Malayalam cinema was announced. These films featured a younger generation of actors, writers, and directors, and significantly, for the first time in more than ten years, they provided a commercially viable alternative to the satellite rights-driven, fan culture-dependent, formulaic, star-centred format that was dominant at the time (featuring most prominently veteran actors like Mohanlal, Mammooty, and Dileep). These new films did not fall into any specific genre, although initially there was a preference for multinarrative hyperlink cinema. The period 2011–2021, however, saw a steady movement towards films that featured a combination of professional and non-professional actors, the use of sync sound, an emphasis on organic and realistic performances, and an insistence on maintaining cinematic verisimilitude. 7 Thematically, many of these films were invested in exploring the centrality of labour migration within the region, and crucially, for this, the affective dimensions of the Malayali migration to the Gulf were invoked within the narratives.
The urban space of Kochi (a major port city in the Ernakulam district in central Kerala) was a recurring presence in the New Malayalam Cinema, beginning in 2011. Traffic, City of God, as well as Chappa Kurishu, incorporate multiple intertwined narratives of different characters within the city of Kochi.
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These films establish Kochi as an important focal point for the New Malayalam Cinema and tell stories reflecting the disparity between the urban elite and the urban lower classes whose labour is imperative for the booming metropolis. It is to be noted that cinematic explorations of Kochi and the disparity between classes within the city predate the arrival of New Malayalam Cinema. Radhakrishnan writes about the series of low-budget gangster films released in the first decade of the 2000s, such as Stop Violence (2002, directed by A. K. Sajan), Ivar [They] (2003, directed by T. K. Rajeev Kumar), and most successfully Big B (2007, directed by Amal Neerad), all of which feature the urban space of Kochi and delve into the socio-cultural and political dynamics of the region (2017: 182). But, crucially, a key difference between the city space reimagined by New Malayalam Cinema in 2011 and that of the “Kochi films” of the early 2000s, is its establishment as a hub for poor and working class migrant labourers. For example, a big part of the narrative of City of God is concerned with the lives of Tamil labourers who have come to Kerala looking for work. In fact, after the opening credits, the film begins with the narration of a Tamil construction worker, Swarnavel (played by Indrajith Sukumaran). He is shown riding a bicycle through the rush of the city. He is confident on his simple bicycle amidst an ocean of cars, motorbikes, and giant trucks. There is a sense of contentment on his face as he rides enthusiastically to his workplace. He narrates in Tamil over this scene: Swarnavel: My native place is Nagarkovil. It has been four years since I came here. Now this is like my hometown. No no! Not “like” my hometown. This “is” my hometown. Don’t you people leave to Gulf and America seeking jobs? In my place, if one toils for a whole day, he gets 40–50 rupees. But for the same work here, one can get 400–500 rupees. For us, Kerala is Gulf and America. Kerala means — for me, it is just Kochi. It is this Kochi that gave me everything. A job, a place to sleep. Apart from that I have people like Lakshmi Akka and Andi Anna here who will scold me if I go around drinking too much. But there is one more reason why I like this place so much. Marathakam. It was here that I saw her for the first time. For the first time, I felt … Famous Tamil song ”Kadhal Vandhiruchu” plays on the mini radio from the shirt pocket of another worker and the camera zooms in on Marathakam. (Pellissery, 2011)
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First, it should be noted that this is a very rare instance where the character of a Tamil migrant worker directly addresses the Malayali audience. Kerala has a domestic migrant population that is almost proportional to its number of emigrants. Previously in Malayalam cinema, Tamil labourers have mostly been depicted as working in plantations and construction sites in more inward and rural areas. This is because from 1961 to 1991, it was these sites in Kerala that absorbed migrant workers from the neighbouring states of Tamil Nadu and Karnataka (Peter and Narendran, 2017: 16). The report God’s Own Workforce: Unravelling Labour Migration to Kerala, published by the Centre for Migration and Inclusive Development, discusses how “by 1990s Kochi, the construction hub and commercial capital of Kerala witnessed heavy migration of labourers from Tamil Nadu”, and observes that “in 2007, workers from 13 districts in Tamil Nadu, predominantly from Dindigul, Tiruchirappalli, Theni and Madurai were working in Kochi city” (Peter and Narendran, 2017: 16). This explains why Kochi stands in for Kerala in its entirety for Swarnavel, the Tamil migrant worker. More pertinently, the invocation of the Gulf in Swarnavel’s opening monologue is of immense importance because it not only translates the Tamil migrant experience into a familiar idiom for the Malayali audience but also places the historically othered Tamil migrant worker figure into the very centre of the urban cinematic landscape. His affection for the region that rewards his labour is an immediately relatable sentiment for the people of a state that was built upon the remittances of Gulf migrants. The scenes where Tamil migrants are shown transported as a large group to construction sites — standing within an inch of each other — is a familiar image associated with Gulf migration as well, for example in the film Arabikkatha (2007) which depicts the way labour supply businesses transport migrant workers to construction sites en masse. 10
Masala Republic (2014, directed by G. S. Vishakh) is another film that portrays the migrant worker experience in Kochi. It is a political satire that revolves around the ban on pan masala and every other form of chewing tobacco (as implemented in Kerala in 2011), and its impact on the migrant population within the state (specifically in Kochi). Instead of the Tamil migrant, it focuses on east Indian migrant workers in Kerala (referred to as Bengalis even when they are not from the state of West Bengal and do not speak Bengali). Similarly to City of God, Masala Republic contains the recurring image of migrant workers being transported en masse to sites of work, visually parallelling unskilled Malayali migrants in the Arabian Gulf. Within the plot, the history and practice of the movement of east Indian migrants to Kerala is depicted comically through the character referred to as “Bengali Babu” (played by Vinayakan), an influential sawmill owner who is also a supplier of migrant workers to construction sites. 11 Interestingly, Babu is always portrayed as wearing a distinct white headscarf with black stripes, while Arabic music is played whenever he enters the frame. These elements, along with his display of commanding power over the east Indian migrant community, evoke the image of Arab employers of Malayali migrants in the Gulf countries.
Since 2011, labour migration has become one of the chief thematic focuses of New Malayalam Cinema, with urban and rural spaces outside of Kochi and Kerala explored. Comrade in America (2017, directed by Amal Neerad) focuses on the migrant crisis at the US–Mexico border, while Take Off (2018, directed by Mahesh Narayanan) is based on the ordeals faced by Indian nurses held hostage in Iraq in 2014. Through its exploration of the various struggles that nurses from Kerala undergo upon migrating to Iraq, it shines a light on the pull and push factors that facilitate this migration. C U Soon (2020, directed by Mahesh Narayanan) tells the story of a Malayali woman who migrates to Dubai under a maid visa and is forced into prostitution. Crucially, these films also elucidate the different levels within migration and among migrants to the Gulf; for example, the highly educated and skilled elite migrant is juxtaposed with the poor and working class migrant worker. Narratives seriously engaging with the latter are a relatively recent phenomenon in Malayalam cinema. The following section will closely study a film that was made possible by these changes within the Malayalam film industry, one that explores the theme of labour migration, situated within the rural terrain of Malappuram, which is presented as a focal point of different migrant experiences.
A migrant in the land of emigrants
Set in a village in the north Kerala district of Malappuram, Sudani from Nigeria (2018) (Sudani, hereafter) tells the story of Majeed (played by Soubin Shahir), the manager of a Sevens football team named MYC Accode, and Samuel (played by Samuel Robinson), the star player of the team. Samuel is from Nigeria and has come to Malappuram to earn money by playing in Sevens football tournaments (a unique variation of football, popular in Malabar, to which this article will return). The plot revolves around the relationship between Samuel, Majeed, and Majeed’s family after Samuel is injured and has to undertake bed rest at Majeed’s house. In Sudani, one can trace the continuity and progression of New Malayalam Cinema discussed in this article through its deployment of realist aesthetics, its use of non-professional actors from the specific region in which the film is set, its minimal soundtrack and use of sync sound throughout, and its insistence on organic and realistic performances. 12 Sudani in many ways expands the territorial imagination of New Malayalam Cinema, encompassing for the first time the lush topography of rural Malappuram. 13 It is to be noted that Malappuram is the only Muslim majority district in Kerala and has consistently been “the highest [Gulf] migrant sending district” (Rajan and Zachariah, 2019: 30). Crucially, the district also has a history of being marginalized and misrepresented in Malayalam cinema. Zakariya’s cinematic exploration of the region, while expanding the formal and political dimensions of New Malayalam Cinema, also broadens the larger Malayalam cinematic imaginaire.
The opening credits of the film are overlaid with a series of recorded voice messages shared within a WhatsApp group of Sevens football enthusiasts, while in the background the various announcements and commentaries, as well as the cheers and commotions of a crowded local football stadium, can be heard. Sevens football is a regional variation of football popular in Malappuram and broadly in Malabar, which involves seven players in each team (as opposed to the standard 11) playing a faster game on a smaller ground. It is important to note that Sevens is “an unofficial format, not approved by the Fédération Internationale de Football Association (FIFA) or concurrently by the Kerala Football Association (KFA)” (Mani and Krishnamurthy, 2018: 12). Nevertheless, Sevens has been institutionalized efficiently and has become successful in not only expanding its reach further outside the Malabar region in Kerala but also heightening the enthusiasm surrounding the game, and legitimizing football as a career option within the state (Kannangara and Devarapalli, 2017: 120). Sudani opens with an aerial shot of the crowded football stadium at night with the floodlights on. Majeed is greeting his players before the game and we see four African players on his roster, three of whom are part of the starting seven, with one substitute player, for in today’s game, as heard in the WhatsApp conversations during the opening credits, up to three African players are allowed in each team (increased from two). It is important to note that the presence of African players (referred to as “Sudani” even when they are not from Sudan) is one of the biggest attractions of a Sevens football match. Nisar Kannangara and Jesurathnam Devarapalli discuss how many east Indian migrant labourers come to watch the game to see African footballers play professionally, depicting “the impact of globalization on the local entertainment culture in remote villages” (Kannangara and Devarapalli, 2017: 122). As mentioned above, the Malabar region, and specifically the district of Malappuram within it, owes its development and relative economic autonomy to a large extent to Gulf migration. K. M. Shafeeq writes that “football in Malappuram is locally sponsored […] itself based on an artificial economy that is caused by [Gulf] migration” (2013: 57). It is significant that in Sudani, Samuel the Nigerian migrant has come to earn money in a region that comprises a large number of Gulf returnees and descendants of migrants. Malappuram has “the maximum number of emigrant population with nearly one-fifth of the total population” (Rajan and Zachariah, 2019: 30). The football stadium in rural Malappuram is now a nexus of various migrant experiences. It is because of this that the region is capable of understanding and being sympathetic to Samuel and his cause.
Within the first 20 minutes of the film, Samuel has an unfortunate accident and is hospitalized. He is required to rest for a month as he recovers, and neither Samuel nor Majeed can afford the hospital charges. Since the accident did not happen during a game, even the association that governs the tournament is unable to provide them with any financial assistance. Majeed decides to bring Samuel to his home so that he can rest there until he recovers. Here Samuel meets Majeed’s elderly mother Jameela (played by Savithri Sreedharan) and her neighbour and best friend Beeyumma (played by Sarasa Balussery). Samuel soon realizes that Majeed is not on speaking terms with his mother, as he still resents her for marrying a second time after his father’s death. Her husband (played by the late K. T. C. Abdullah), though extremely weakened by old age, tries to stay away from the house and works as a security guard at night, for Majeed loathes his presence and always makes a point of avoiding him. None of these characters speaks English and they cannot communicate with Samuel in any language, but all of them understand his predicament, not just his injury but also that of having had to leave his homeland and loved ones.
Samuel soon becomes a beloved spectacle within the region as many come to visit and greet him. Majeed’s mother takes care of him like her own son (and even calls him mone, i.e. son) and laments to him that she cannot be as affectionate towards Majeed. Beeyumma also feels a great sense of kinship towards Samuel and talks to him about her son who is in Dubai. Midway through the film, Beeyumma asks her son to send a watch as a gift for Samuel. Crucially, Beeyumma’s son was sent to Dubai because he was obsessed with football in Malappuram and was not serious about anything else. Beeyumma tells Jameela and Kunjeli (another neighbour): Oh, the fate of the mothers! When these boys go out and play [football] when they are children, we are afraid that they will break their arms or legs in the field. Even after they grow up, it is the same. It is because of the same craze for football that I had to send my son to Dubai. (Zakariya, 2018)
Here, the Gulf is such an intimate and familiar territory that it is mentioned as if it were a space where parents send their children to instil in them a sense of responsibility — to rehabilitate them so that they might return as model citizens of the community. In the 2015 film Pathemari, similarly, the protagonist Narayanan is portrayed in 1965 as a passionate young football player in Kerala before deciding to travel to the Gulf to save his family from poverty. Pathemari consciously dampens its colour tone as the film progresses — that is, as Narayanan gets older — to convey the young Narayanan who played football in central Kerala in 1965 as enjoying the happiest time of his life, with the colour tone diminishing with each passing year of his exile in the Arabian Gulf. Beeyumma’s son, being part of a more recent generation of migrants, does not consider his life in Dubai as exile. He comes from a family of migrants, and a land of emigrants and returnees. By this time, the Gulf is a much more familiar space. When asked by his mother to send Samuel a watch from Dubai, he understands the significance of the gesture — how intimacy is coded in the long and seemingly impractical route the gift takes to get home, changing hands more than once among fellow migrants.
In the later parts of the film, Indian immigration officers go to Majeed’s house asking for Samuel’s passport. Beeyuma is most annoyed by this.
What a show off! What passport did my father have that he kept coming and going from Karachi to here back and forth — back and forth? Without any passport and with dignity, he lived and died. Do you know how many countries he has seen? (Zakariya, 2018)
Here, an older cosmopolitan order is being invoked by Beeyumma — a local cosmopolitanism of “previously existing forms of cooperation, coordination, diffusion and exchange” (Assche and Teampau, 2015: 3) that predates the 1990s globalization, or even the formation of the Indian nation state in 1947; a worldview that has only evolved with the recalibration of the region and the formation of a new middle class fuelled by Gulf migration, and with the departure of her own son to the Arabian Gulf. Santhosh Abraham, in his essay on the Keyi Mappila Muslim merchants, writes about the existence of “multiple examples of local cosmopolitanisms” within coastal Malabar during the colonial and pre-colonial periods (2017: 155; also see Devika, 2012: 132). Beeyumma’s annoyance at the immigration officers is also a response to how such subaltern migrations have been rendered difficult after “national boundaries hardened, national cultures rigidified, under hegemonic elite decolonizing nationalisms, new regulations limiting migration to newly independent states, the UN-centred nation-state system, and the Cold War” (Devika, 2012: 134). Such a perception of the world is part of the reason Beeyumma is able to understand Samuel and care for him as one of her own. This invocation of cosmopolitanism is crucial for the construction of rural Malappuram in Sudani, which is portrayed as not just a modern nexus of various migrant experiences post globalization, but also the site of a longstanding history of migration and transnationalism.
Towards the end of the film, it is revealed that Samuel’s passport (which goes missing at the time) is fake and that he is a refugee whose parents were killed during a civil war in Nigeria, leaving him to look after his young sisters. This is why he had to obtain a fake passport, which he worked tirelessly day and night to pay for, so that he could travel to India, play football, and send money home. Samuel is also still paying the remaining dues for the expensive fake passport, which is now missing. Samuel’s predicament, though starkly different and considerably more dire than what Majeed had expected, is narrated to him by Samuel in a register familiar to Majeed and the residents of the Malabar region, which until the Gulf boom had experienced rampant poverty. Samuel tells Majeed: “we kids played football as long as we wanted, because while playing we forgot we were hungry”. This resonates with the experience of Pathemari’s Narayanan who, very much like Samuel in Sudani, is forced to travel undocumented to a foreign land in the hope of achieving deliverance from poverty — and indeed with those of the vast majority of the early Gulf migrants who suffered poverty at the time of migration (Prakash, 1998: 3213). The cultural memory of this period is also part of the reason why Beeyumma and Jameela are immediately sympathetic to and understanding of Samuel’s cause, and it evidently cements a solidarity among them. Majeed, his family, and his friends decide to help Samuel in whatever way they can, and in portraying their enquiries about how to do this, Sudani also throws light on the immigration crises in South Asia and the inadequacy of the legal infrastructure and absence of political will in India to address many of these problems, despite it being the world’s largest recipient of international remittances (Batra, 2020: 72).
Conclusion
As has been discussed in this article, there has been an increase in the number of post-millennial Malayalam films featuring Gulf migration narratives of the Malayali community from the south Indian state of Kerala. In recent years, various studies have looked into the historical and sociocultural significance of Gulf migration narratives in Malayalam cinema; examples include the work of Radhakrishnan (2009; 2016), Menon and Sreekumar (2016), Karinkurayil (2019), and Nadukkandiyil (2020). Rather than analysing Malayalam films that feature Gulf migration narratives, this article has examined the different ways in which the Gulf–Kerala connection has shaped the affective dimensions and the expanding territorial imagination of New Malayalam Cinema as a category that has been growing since 2011 within the Malayalam film industry.
The first section of this study explored the historical neglect displayed by Malayalam cinema towards migration narratives, specifically concerning Gulf migration. Attention was paid to how this practice was the result of a particular hegemonic vantage point in Malayalam cinema that centralized the narratives of the landed elites in Kerala, which in turn led to a sidestepping of the narratives of various historically marginalized communities within the state. The subsequent section looked at how the New Malayalam Cinema displaced the hegemony of this vantage point and enabled a reimagination of the region within the cinematic, paving the way for more inclusive narratives and themes. It argued that labour migration has been one of the chief thematic focuses of the New Malayalam Cinema, with the Gulf–Kerala connection and the history of Malayali migration to the Arabian Gulf often invoked within its narratives. The final section closely studied a crucial entry within New Malayalam Cinema, Sudani from Nigeria (2018), and how its director, Zakariya, constructs the space of rural Malappuram within the film as a nexus of various local and transnational migration narratives, invoking an underlying cosmopolitanism that was prevalent in the region fuelled by the history of Gulf migration and an older tradition of migration practices.
