Populist Imaginations in Contemporary Malayalam Cinema

In recent years, there has been a considerable amount of scholarly interest concerning the populist imaginations of South Indian cinema, specifically those that were articulated post-1950s in Tamil Nadu, Karnataka, and Andhra Pradesh (split into Andhra Pradesh and Telangana in 2014) and the peculiar ways in which these cine-populist narratives had burst into electoral politics of the respective states. However, the South Indian state of Kerala, and its film industry have been unceremoniously absent from these discussions. Malayalam films of the 1980s and 90s, especially, have been marked by the presence of multifarious instances of political mobilization around conflicts surrounding gender, religion, class, and caste identities. These populist cine-narratives and their role in asserting and reinstating hegemonic feudal values through registers of working-class politics as well as colonial modernity are crucial in gaining a more comprehensive understanding of the socio-cultural composition of South India. In recent years, largely after 2010, there have been various attempts by a younger generation of Malayalam filmmakers to contrive different counter-narratives against the historically dominant populist imagination. This entry closely examines these emerging populist counter-narratives and their attempts to revisit and reimagine history from oppositional and often historically marginalized vantage points.