From satirical humour to violent campus clashes, Malayalam cinema has engaged with youth dissent in various ways to capture what being young and political can look like in Kerala. In this essay, Malavika Ajikumar traces these representations- from Sandesam to Jana Gana Mana– to see how it has helped shape generations who believe in their political agency, and what these constructions risk leaving out.
Malavika Ajikumar
At a moment when a national wave of student protest is once again underway, much of the new-media commentary around it is preoccupied with sorting dissent into acceptable and unacceptable forms. The emphasis on non-violent versus violent, principled versus performative protests is happening without recognising the historicity of these concepts. Fashioning dissent is itself a representative act, and I want to trace a specific thread of that construction: Malayalam cinema, an industry that has for some time now doubled as a battleground of political activism, both on screen and off it. My claim is a rather simple one, that Malayalam cinema has not merely documented student politics in Kerala, but it has also helped establish youth political engagement as the expectant condition of being young in the state, rather than a deviation from it.
Cinema is worth this scrutiny partly because of its ordinary, well-documented power to shape perception, and partly because of something more specific to the present: at a moment when the camera’s claim to being neutral evidence is increasingly contested, the moving image’s power becomes both affective and propagandist at once, shaping political feeling as much as it records it (Rajadhyaksha, 2023).
I come to this from a fairly specific vantage point. As a Non-Resident Malayalee who had not yet developed much political awareness of my own, I grew up perceiving Kerala’s campuses as spaces defined by political activism, largely through cinema. One of the earliest examples that I can remember is from the 1991 film Sandesam (dir. Sathyan Anthikkad and written by Sreenivasan), where two brothers played by Sreenivasan and Jayaram, argue against each other’s political ideologies. The film gets real mileage out of the banality of two young men debating loka karyangal (world affairs) that seem to unfold nowhere near their actual lives. The result is a certain political youth who are articulate, ideologically inherited, untested by consequence, and a humour that softens ideological conflict while normalising the idea that competing political voices, especially of the young, simply coexist under one roof.
It is not just humour that Malayalam cinema has employed to represent youth politics. Films depicting violent clashes between student political outfits, which would show the injured and sometimes even the murders of college leaders, built a different, more anxious relationship to political expression for viewers like me, who firmly believed all Kerala educational campuses looked like these. Films like Classmates (dir. Lal Jose, 2006) and Oru Mexican Aparatha (dir. Tom Emmatty, 2017) pictured the disorder of recurrent strikes and hartals on campus, and it took me a long time to see what these films were actually collectively constructing beneath the anxiety they produced.
I would argue they were doing at least three things simultaneously. First, offering a fantasy of what student politics could mean. A fantasy that reads as appealing or frightening depending on the viewer’s own relationship to political life. It is not just narrative content but the visual grammar of representing student protests/campus strikes that makes it a desirable [or sometimes, non-desirable] fulfillment of student-identity. When the camera portrays the campus spaces filled with banners, hoardings, collectives, and choreographed scenes of actions, it creates a visual register that elevates the action as heroic and cinematic, thus, a creation of fantasy not at the narratorial level but at the cinematic level.
Second, shaping a generation that grew up having seen both faces of student politics, including its emancipatory potential and its capacity for violence. And third, supplying the privileged classes with a convenient narrative for avoiding a harder question about a student’s actual relationship to the system. Let me try and unpack this claim a bit. A film like 4 The People (dir. Jayaraj, 2004) shows students turning to extremity because the system left no other channel for reclaiming space to dissent, and in doing so it also naturalises the idea that Kerala’s higher education infrastructure is simply broken, a given condition rather than a policy failure. Films like Oru Vadakkan Selfie (dir. G. Prajith, 2015), Adi Kappiyare Koottamani (dir. John Varghese, 2015), and Aavesham (dir. Jithu Madhavan, 2024) extend this by implicitly showing how thin the state’s higher education infrastructure looks compared to what lies outside; a framing that sits alongside, and arguably reinforces, the fact that Kerala has one of the country’s highest rates of student outmigration for undergraduate and postgraduate study (George and Pious, 2023; Sebastian, 2024).
However, these and many other films have helped keep open a popular culture space where protesting for citizenship rights and standing in solidarity with survivors is treated as normal, at a time when national media narratives more broadly have often worked to cast youth protest as illegitimate or naïve (Vij, 2020). It is worth asking, then, why students just out of school protesting on the street reads as an anomaly to begin with, rather than as a predictable response from a generation the system keeps failing. Why is their demand for accountability treated as something to be explained away, rather than something to be answered? And how long can “just students” remain a neutral description, when that identity is the very thing being repeatedly instrumentalised by the system?
Malayalam cinema’s persistent visual coding of youth protest is evidence that Kerala’s public sphere does not treat youth apoliticism 1 as a norm to aspire to. Students are not scripted as citizens-in-waiting expected to defer their political voice until some more ‘appropriate’ life stage. This is not to say that exceptions and counter-narratives do not exist [as they should]. For instance, films like Left, Right, Left (dir. Arun Kumar Aravind, 2013) and Sakhaavu (dir. Sidhartha Siva, 2017), takes a more critical position toward student unions themselves, depicting leadership as self-serving and ultimately corrupted by the very structures it claims to resist. And viewed through gender, the picture fractures further with most filmic representations of campus politics constructing space as one of male political assertion with gender-minority issues treated as a cause for the political leaders to champion rather than a site of political agency in its own right. Jana Gana Mana (dir. Dijo Jose Antony, 2022) is a useful recent example of how issues of gender can become spectacle within fictionalised protest narrative, thus, complicating visibility through instrumentalising the cause.
If the fantasy generated by these films is one of empowered, consequential action, it’s worth asking who that fantasy is built for. Across much of this filmography, gendered or minority-coded harm tends to function less as a site of political agency in its own right and more as the occasion for someone else’s [usually male] reckoning. The survivor’s or the minority subject’s cause becomes the vehicle through which male political actors get to be heroic. Jana Gana Mana (dir. Dijo Jose Antony, 2022) makes this structure legible as the gendered violence at the film’s centre exists narratively to license institutional confrontation by lawyers, professors, and the mob, while the person harmed supplies the stakes without being granted the agency. The spectacle serves a fantasy of male moral and political assertion which has become the default pattern for campus political films in Malayalam.
None of this cancels the larger claim. Even accounting for its blind spots and its convenient fictions, Malayalam cinema has done significant work in shaping a generation that recognises youth political identity as legitimate, something that gains a renewed urgency in today’s political climate. It has paved the way for the creation of a generation that may join a protest site or share solidarity online, or in other ways possible, but is unlikely to treat the act of protesting, or the protesting student, as an aberration. Even when the effects have been uneven, it’s still a significant achievement in terms of the political quality of Malayalam cinema.
References
- George, Justine, and Tom Pious. “Disquieting Facts of Student Migration.” Economic & Political Weekly, Vol. 58, No. 3, 21 January 2023.
- Rajadhyaksha, Ashish. John, Ghatak, Tarkovsky: Citizens, Filmmakers, Hackers. Tulika Books, 2023.
- Sebastian, Cyril. “Not Just Studies and Jobs: Why Kerala’s Youth Choose to Migrate.” Centre for Public Policy Research, 20 February 2024.
- Vij, Shivam. “India’s Student Protests Have Broken Image of National Consensus.” ThePrint, 4 January 2020.
About the Author:
Malavika Ajikumar is a scholar of cinema, gender, and media studies affiliated with Vellore Institute of Technology, Vellore. Her doctoral thesis focuses on theorising contemporary women-centric aesthetics. She has written about female stardom and feminist film scholarship with a special focus on Malayalam cinema. Malavika is also a Doordarshan graded classical dancer.
