“If you have a daughter, you must watch this movie” is an appeal made by several films to pull audiences into theatres. Sudipto Sen’s The Kerala Story does the same while trying to cover up its myopic, no-nuance representation of religious radicalisation in Kerala by playing up the age-old patriarchal fear families have about their daughters whose bodies, they are taught to believe, are repositories of their collective dignity.
This trope of basing a film’s appeal on the anxiety of the parents and families of young women is not new. It is, in fact, one of the most tried and tested formulae of ensuring commercial success, given that it can easily rattle the insecurities of the movie-going middle class.
The Kerala Story has several scenes that use the parents of Shalini/Fathima and Geetanjali to build a gaze that emotionally exploits the viewer to fear the very fact that they have a daughter. The Drishyam films, which are among Malayalam’s most successful franchises, also employed the same strategy.
Drishyam part one, which introduced us to Georgekutty (Mohanlal) and his family, established how the two daughters are brought up. The family was initially reluctant to send their elder daughter on a school tour, where a classmate later films her while bathing. This clip then becomes the axis of the two-part Drishyam universe, whose protagonists go to extreme lengths to ensure that the girl’s ‘future’ (which resides in the ‘chastity’ of her body) remains intact.
The film appealed to the audience due to the struggles of Georgekutty – a common man, a father, on a journey to ‘save’ his family. That many young women in the real world choose death by suicide in the face of such cyber harassment did not push the makers of this film to counter the crime by empowering Georgekutty or his daughter to report the incident. Instead, the film dramatised the event by positioning the body of the girl as the sanctum sanctorum of the family’s dignity, to protect which any crime became acceptable. And, they got a blockbuster.
Drishyam 2, which was a direct OTT release, redeemed itself slightly, perhaps because the girl’s trauma was portrayed. But then again, the recurring theme was – Georgekutty’s crimes are ‘a father’s duty to protect his daughters and their dignity’.
The Kerala Story too has a scene where Geetanjali, a Hindu woman who refuses to convert to Islam, is threatened by her Muslim lover. He says he would publish nude pics of her if she refuses to oblige. Geetanjali consequently dies by suicide. Before passing away, she asks her Communist father why he did not teach her about religious faith, putting him in a parenting dilemma for being liberal enough to not control his daughter’s choices.
Cyber harassment is a crime. Yet, the shame falls on the survivor and her family, not the harasser. The messaging is always about how vulnerable female bodies are and how being a female itself should be a cause for concern. There is no conversation about how to emotionally help survivors or equip families to help women fight back.
Tamil cinema too cannot be absolved of this tendency. Paapanasam, which was a remake of Drishyam, delivered the same message as its original. Suriya’s recent Etharkkum Thuninthavan is about a vigilante lawyer whose revenge forms the crux of the story, which bases its conflict on the sexual assault of women. Ariyavan, another recent Tamil film, also speaks about sexual violence against women, loosely based on the Pollachi rape and extortion case.
A particular case in point is director Mohan G, whose films like Rudra Thaandavam and Draupathi, warn Hindu women of dominant castes against being lured by Dalit men by cautioning them about their ‘agendas’. Here again, this casteist narrative is foregrounded by locating the war on women’s bodies and appealing to families to keep their daughters safe.
When Pink was remade in Telugu as Vakeel Saab, the protagonist women were written as pious and temple-going, thereby also stressing why they had to be defended in the face of sexual violence, subtly drawing a distinction between women who deserve our empathy and women who were ‘asking for it’.
The Malayalam movie Achanurangatha Veedu (The house where the father never sleeps), released in 2006, was loosely based on the Sooryanelli rape case. In the film, Samuel (Salim Kumar) has three daughters, the youngest of whom is raped by multiple people, after being trapped by a man who pretends to fall in love with her. The narrative then focuses on the anxieties of the family, especially Samuel, who lost his wife years ago. His daughters and their bodies become such a source of fear that he never sleeps.
Interestingly, director Lal Jose’s focus is the father and he amplifies the sentiments of the family by titling the film. Women may be trapped, trafficked, raped, or abandoned, but it is the family’s sentiments that must be played up because that is how marketing works.
The Drisyham films have been remade in Hindi as well, with the messaging intact. As a response to the Nirbhaya case, rape revenge stories like Mom, Jazba, and the like have also been made. Though these films are slightly better in their messaging, the fundamental idea is still rooted in how ‘our girls must be watched over’. In almost every film with women at the centre of the narrative, there is some form of sexual violence because definitely this is a fear that can be capitalised on.
What all these films do is use the shame surrounding sexual violence to build on shock value and sentimentality. They play up the patriarchal idea that women’s lives are defined by what happens to their bodies and that they must always be guarded. There is no conversation about women’s agency or how this collective shaming can be countered.
They also draw a mould for what is expected of a woman, dividing them into morally respectable women who do not love, lust, or assert, and women who deserve violence because of their ‘transgressions’. This creates a collective imagery of which woman is an ‘ideal victim’ and which woman is not. It appeals to families to discipline their daughters lest their pride be impacted.
The packaging is so watertight that it is almost impossible to critique this ‘if you have a daughter, you must watch this film’ prototype without coming off as inhuman, or even siding with the perpetrators.
This is not to trivialise the impact on families when something happens to one of their female members. We live in a society where women are extremely vulnerable to violence. Nobody can dispute that. But a sagacious viewer must be able to separate a trope from earnest storytelling. And a genuine filmmaker must strive to offer counter-narratives and reflection, not just pry on the maddening insecurities of a population already bogged down by social, moral, and systemic inadequacies.
Films like The Kerala Story constrain the female identity and existence to the possibility of sexual assault and suggest to the large, vulnerable, movie-watching middle-class that they must lock up their girls. They normalise gendered restrictions on the lives of women by piggybacking on the general lack of safety women face in society.
Religious radicalisation is, of course, a reality, but is controlling women’s personal liberty the answer? Who will tell the anxious patriarch who decides to have his daughter endogamously married off to ensure guardianship instead of sending her to a faraway college that she must make her own choices?
In The Kerala Story, for instance, there is no discussion about the systemic factors that led the women to be easily radicalised at their college, or why such terror modules thrive in the state. The onus is entirely on the families to lock their girls up, instil them with ‘religious values’ and an acceptable fear of the world, and ensure that they do not explore their lives, desires, or emotions.
In a country where family is considered the most important social unit, bringing them to theatres is where all the money really lies. That is exactly why we see most superstars donning the ‘family man’ saviour hat on screen with ‘family-oriented films’. They efficiently package patriarchal morality in emotions and appeal to the viewer with shock value, building on their heroism through multiple acts of saviourship.
In The Kerala Story, the saviour though, is director Sudipto Sen himself. Families heave a sigh of relief in theatres and filmmakers mint money. It’s a win-win for patriarchy and propaganda.