How and where do we situate the “archival” when it comes to film historiography? In this article, Mydhily takes us through the significance of recognising and rethinking the politics of the archive for a feminist film historiography.
Mydhily M S
During the final schedule of my PhD fieldwork in 2021, while strolling through the aisle of magazines at the Appan Thampuran Memorial Library in Thrissur, a colour front page of an old magazine caught my attention. It stood out among an unsorted batch of only black-and-white magazines. Out of curiosity, I took it out of the pile to read–Nana1, vol.2, no. 4, published on 25 November 1973. Flipping through the pages, I found an article titled “Sheelayum Nazirum Onnichabhinayikunnu” (Sheela and Nazir are Acting Together).
Two of the most celebrated on-screen duos in film history, Sheela and Prem Nazir, hold the Guinness World Record for acting in the highest number of films (130 films) as hero and heroine. Knowing this, I wondered about the specific news value of this article. It was a gossip article2 aiming to attract readers’ attention with private information about the lives of stars and stories from the film industry. The article ‘reveals’ the sensational news that the two actors are acting together in a film3 again since Sheela’s unofficial break from acting alongside Nazir after their alleged split-up. However, what caught my attention in the writing was an interesting piece of information: Sheela was to be paid more than Nazir in this film, as she had demanded. Unlike gossip, the article cites Kunchako, the film’s director, as the source of this information. This was a crucial find because until then, it was commonsensical for me that there were no examples set like this for negotiating the wages of female stars, let alone female actors. The lack of proper documentation about the wages given to (female) stars and actors makes film research quite challenging. And I was surprised to find critical information in a gossip article.
Extra cinematic sites
As one of the predominant stars who can singlehandedly carry a film on her shoulders, Sheela had a unique market value which allowed her to negotiate with industrial practices4. Her stature as a star let her decide, fight for, and negotiate many practices, including wage disparity and the lack of proper credits. These engagements of the female star are registered and circulated through various scattered sources such as stories, memories, personal recollections, gossip, and rumours. The documentation about the remuneration of a female star and her place as the highest paid in the industry is pivotal as it opens new ways of reading and understanding gender debates in the contemporary.
It encourages us to think of how women’s histories are written. How do we study women’s contribution to cinema? What are the available sources? How are women’s investments documented? Does a gossip column hold historical evidence? The striking absence of serious scholarship on women’s film cultures, which includes female stardom, (female) audience, on-screen representations, and careers of female film professionals in Malayalam cinema, shows the gendered biases within historiographic practices. So, to inquire about women’s film cultures, one must constantly search for what is not ‘written’ or move beyond what is traditionally considered ‘standard’ in mainstream historiography.
Extra cinematic sites like gossip, scandal, rumour, and film journalistic discourses play an important role in the search for women’s film history in early cinema. Since the image of a female star/actor is enmeshed in the social history of the region, extra cinematic sites like film journalism, gossip, and stories articulate the anxieties, tensions, and fascinations produced through/by the star/actor persona. Feminist scholars like Neepa Majumdar and Debashree Mukherjee have explored new methodological frameworks that theorise networks of rumours, gossip, and scandalse5.
Gossip and rumours are considered sites that are ‘non-serious,’ ‘low brow,’ and ‘superfluous,’ hence not worthy of serious engagements. But if you look carefully, these extra cinematic discourses are repositories of information regarding cinematic practices, events, star systems, networks of production, private lives of film professionals, audiences, relationships between social histories and art, etc. Curiously, the politics of archiving is such that many libraries in Kerala do not have a collection of publications like Nana, Chithrakarthika, Aruna, Cineland, Chalachitram, Film, etc6. These magazines are generally seen as less scholarly. Given this scenario, studies on (women’s) film cultures depend highly on private collectors, fans, film enthusiasts, etc. I implore that when we think of historical evidence in feminist film historiography, unofficial knowledge and speculative narratives too form part of the picture.
Extra cinematic sites can provide insights into how cinema, as a cultural product, is interconnected with various gender imaginations. Let me briefly bring the discussion around the ‘respectability’ of actresses in cinema to illustrate the importance of extra cinematic discourses. In 1974, Sheela published her serialised autobiography, Njaanum Ente Nizhalukalum (Me and My Shadows), in Nana. Before coming to the film industry, Sheela had a brief career in theatre as she was part of a theatre group called SSR Naataka Mandram in Madras. The autobiography, which became widely popular, shares Sheela’s experiences as a theatre actress and her transition into Malayalam cinema when film production moved from Madras to Kerala. One of the crucial aspects the autobiography puts forth is an exploration of the idea of respectability in selecting (drama/film) acting as a career choice. In the initial chapters, Sheela discusses how her father was unwilling to let her act in drama because he thought that by becoming an actor, she would bring ‘disgrace’ to the family.
Many actresses who worked in early cinema and theatre have shared similar experiences. For example, in an interview, KPAC Leela, one of the early theatre actresses in Kerala, who was associated with the Kerala People’s Arts Club (KPAC)7, says that her whole family was looked down upon and ostracised both by her extended family and the church because she chose to act in dramas. People used to ask her, “inganeyano kudumbathil piranna pennungal?” (Is this what women born in respectable families do?8), suggesting that drama and cinema are ‘vulgar’ art forms meant for ‘loose women’. These experiences of female actresses show the anxieties and tensions regarding women’s public performances/visibility. The social taboo on acting can also be understood in terms of the binary order created between the ideal domestic woman and the public woman. Such extra cinematic discourses thus emerge as a potential field which informs these complex, interwoven histories of cinema, theatre, and gender in Kerala.
The Film Text as Archive
Thinking of historical reflections in film studies, it is fascinating to see how film texts become sites of archiving as well. Let us look at how popular cinema documents the literary tradition of painkili sahithyam (pulp fiction) and women’s cinema; a fascinating history yet to gain serious scholarly attention. Emerging in the late 1950s and 1960s, women’s cinema stands for a set of films that drew inspiration from the story and themes of the literary tradition of the painkili sahithyam. Published primarily as thudar/ neenda kadha (serialised fiction/ romances) in low-priced weeklies and fortnightlies, painkili novels are known for telling familiar plots structured in prolonged, convoluted, but exciting episodes9. Believed to be a genre catering specifically to women as a separate readership painkili novels “enthralled their readers with intimate stories about extra-marital affairs, adultery, romance, inter-caste/religion marriages, and a range of other sexual “‘transgressions’” (Arafath 2020, 144). As a style of writing that is immensely ‘janapriyam’ (popular), painkili writings are marked in dominant historiography in oppositional terms, categorised as ‘non-ideal,’ against the janakeeya literature of the Progressive writers and assumed to be of ‘low quality.’ One can see that the primary engagement with these novels is sensorial, producing sexual or romantic desires, tears, anger, anxiousness, and excitement.
The film Oru Thekkan Thallu Case (A Southern Fight Case) (Sreejith. N. 2022), set in the coastal village of Thiruvananthapuram in 1984, has an interesting scene where the two leading female characters, Rukmini (played by Padma Priya) and Vasanthi (played by Nimisha Sajayan), are reading a serialised novel in Manorajyam10 magazine (Figure 2).
The scene depicts the two women enjoying their leisure time reading a nail-biting scene from one of the instalments of a painkili novel in the magazine. Vasanthi reads the novel aloud, and both are shown wholly indulged in the world of the novel. When Rukmini’s husband, Ammini Pilla (played by Biju Menon), comes home, they suddenly stop reading. Expressing her disappointment, Vasanthi says, “Oh no, only little remains to be finished.”. The film uses these women’s habit of reading the (serialised) novel to show their strong bond and friendship, a symbol of their sisterhood.
Another Malayalam film, Georgootty C/O Georgootty (Haridas Kesavan 1991), also has a similar reference where the heroine Alice (played by Sunitha) is a fervent fan of serialised romantic novels. She fantasises about how her life will transform, just like the hand-drawn portraits of the beautiful men and women in the novel (Figure 3). She eagerly waits for the next instalment to be published so that she can know what happened to her favourite characters. In one instance, her husband George Kutty (played by Jayaram) tells her: “You know nothing darling; life is not like the stories you read.” According to other characters, Alice’s habit of reading ‘novels in the magazine’ appears to disconnect her from the realities of life, as if she consistently seeks refuge in a dreamlike world. All her decisions in this film, especially regarding her marriage to George Kutty, are deeply influenced by the novels she reads in the magazines.
The films discussed above do not fall into the category of women’s cinema. Instead they comment on the popularity of the genre painkili sahithyam, which further provokes us to think of the women’s film histories attached to it. In short, these films give cues to the close-knit histories of painkili sahithyam and women’s cinema. Similar references to the tradition of painkili sahithyam can be seen in other popular films such as Sandesam (1991), Vadakkunokkiyantram (1989), Azhakiya Ravanan (1996), Pokkiri Raja (2010), Anweshippin Kandethum (2024) etc. Film moments like these push us to think of the popularity of women’s cinema, one of the most under-researched fields in women’s film histories in Malayalam. Centred around the domestic, women’s cinema was mostly melodramas and romances that dealt with the subjects of dysfunctional families, unrequited love, social mobility, women’s suffering, revenge etc. These films “addressed the subjectivity of women in various forms, offering avenues of covert gratification of their desires and anxieties” (Joseph 2013, 51). The domestic women characters in women’s cinema explored the construction of both the ideal and the transgressive heroine figure, often blurring the strict boundaries between the two.
Film moments can emerge as potential historical sources that steer us toward nonlinear histories of gender and the unique ways of registering the same through Malayalam cinema. The self-reflexivity of the medium ensures certain openings that can constitute “an archive of the present, translating the past, while being in conversation with a projected future” (Sawhney 2015, 162). Self-reflexivity, the film text’s capacity to reflect on its own history through cinematic moments, narratives, images, dialogues, music, etc., shows how history is interwoven in cinema’s narrative and form.
My intention in discussing unconventional sources in understanding women’s film histories is to think through the absences in mainstream historiography. Studies on Malayalam cinema often approach gender representations as a sudden shift from invisibility to visibility and a smooth transition from regressive portrayals to progressive ones. Sometimes, taking clues from unconventional sources and methodologies can locate what is left out of history, especially on the axis of gender. It is significant for academic research to draw on innovative methodological perspectives and conceptual blueprints to inquire about women’s film culture. Reimagining the concept of archives and historical evidence involves recognizing that familiar sources like gossip and popular cinema can carry, reflect, and document untold histories. A random film magazine or a passing joke in a popular film can be a signpost to the absences in the dominant historiography.
References
Arafath, P. K Yasser. “Cassetted Emotions: Intimate Songs and Marital Conflicts in the Age of Pravasi (1970–1990).” In Cultural Histories of India, edited by Rita Banerjee, 135–148. London: Routledge, 2020.
Georgootty C/O Georgootty. Directed by Haridas Kesavan. 1991; Chandragiri Productions.
Joseph, Jenson. “Revisiting Neelakkuyil: On the Left’s Cultural Vision, Malayali Nationalism and the Questions of regional cinema.” In Thapasam: A Bilingual Journal of Historical and Cultural Studies of Kerala (April-September 2013): 26-57.
KPAC Leela, Pookkaalam, Part 1.” YouTube. April 8, 2023. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cxq1kBMvrAo .
Sawhney, Rashmi. “Revising the Colonial Past, Undoing National Histories: Women filmmakers in Kannada, Marathi and Bengali Cinemas.” In Doing Women’s Film History: Reframing Cinemas, Past and Future, edited by Dall’Asta, Monica et al., 151-165. University of Illinois Press, 2015.
Sheela. Njaanum Ente Nizhalukalum (Me and My Shadows), Nana, December 15, 1974.
“Sheelayum Nazirum Onnichabhinayikunnu.” Nana, November 25, 1973, 32.
Author bio:
Mydhily MS, is an independent researcher based in Hyderabad. Her doctoral project, from the Department of Cultural Studies at the English and Foreign Languages University, investigates female stardom in early Malayalam cinema. She is currently working as an Assistant Professor at KL University, Hyderabad. Her research interests include Malayalam cinema, feminist historiography, women’s writing, and popular culture. You can reach her on email at mydhilyms@gmail.com.
