P.K. Rosy: India is yet to catch up with this brave Dalit woman who broke new ground in theatre and cinema

P.K. Rosy represented in the International Film Festival of Kerala 2024's video (Screengrabs courtesy: IFFK on Instagram)

“Ahankararoopini” (embodiment of arrogance) ... “sinner” ... “prostitute” ... “the despicable one who subverted the Manusmriti” ... “yakshi” – these epithets in the Malayalam poet Kureepuzha Sreekumar’s Nadiyude Rathri (The Night of the Actress) encapsulate the sentiments of casteist members of the audience towards Malayalam cinema’s first woman actor, P.K. Rosy, at the premiere of her only film about a century back.

 

Rosy, who was Dalit, was the heroine of the silent film Vigathakumaran (The Lost Child), produced and directed by J.C. Daniel. According to multiple accounts of Vigathakumaran’s premiere in November 1928 (a year disputed by some), in Thiruvananthapuram in the then princely state of Travancore, upper-caste viewers were so enraged at a Dalit  portraying a Nair woman in the story, that they vandalised the theatre, and chased Rosy and Daniel away. A murderous mob later burnt down Rosy’s house, forcing her to flee Thiruvananthapuram.  

  

Sreekumar’s poignant poem, released in 2003, is a retelling of the events that led to her disappearance from the public eye.  

 

Barring some basic information uncovered by historians and journalists over the years, most matters related to Rosy are a mystery. Google dedicated a doodle to her in February 2023, to mark what was purportedly her 120^th birth anniversary. The date was perhaps taken from Wikipedia. However, the article that the online encyclopedia cites – an archival profile of Rosy by the journalist Jose Kadavil in Mathrubhumi newspaper – in fact does not specify a date of birth and speculates that her year of birth was 1903.  

 

But as the writer Vinu Abraham, author of Nashtanayika (The Lost Heroine), a fictionalised account of her life, told me when I interviewed him for this article: “Rosy’s year of birth and death are not known. If you take an A4-sized sheet of paper, you would be able to fill only half of it with the concrete information available about her.” 

 

Even the photograph currently in circulation as Rosy’s is of questionable authenticity. There is no surviving copy of Vigathakumaran left, and only one known still from the film remains, but it does not feature Rosy. 

 

The little that has come to light about Rosy though is so dramatic, tragic, yet inspiring and illuminative, especially for those studying the intersectionalities of caste and gender in early 20th century India, that she has gradually risen to the stature of an icon of Malayalam cinema. 

 

Drawing on several sources, it can be concluded that Rosy was born approximately in the first decade of the 20th century into a family belonging to the Pulaya caste in Thiruvananthapuram. Pulayas were considered ‘untouchables’ by upper castes.  

 

Was her name originally Rajamma or Rosamma? Was the screen name Rosy derived from Rosamma, or did Daniel pull it out of thin air when he decided to give his heroine an Anglicised name? Was her family already Christian when she was born, or did her parents become Christian after her birth? Was she Christian at all? Did she ever return to the land of her birth after leaving due to the violence surrounding Vigathakumaran? Most of Rosy’s biographical details are debated by experts due to conflicting testimonies by those who knew her or claimed to know her. However, the following points are widely agreed upon by scholars: that she earned her living as a grass-cutter before Vigathakumaran, that she was an established stage artiste before she met Daniel, and that she was a practitioner of Kakkarassi Kali, a folk theatre form.  

In Kanjiramkulam Sanal’s 2011 documentary Ithu Rosiyude Katha (This Is Rosy’s Story), Kavalloor Krishnan, who identified himself as Rosy’s relative, said that when he met her years after she left Thiruvananthapuram, she told him her maternal uncle was the person who encouraged her artistic inclinations.  

 

Women were not permitted on the Kakkarassi stage, and female parts were enacted by men in women’s costume, according to an essay by the Malayalam playwright and director Kavalam Narayana Panikkar in The Oxford Companion to Indian Theatre. Rosy tore down that wall of discrimination, becoming the first woman to act in Kakkarassi plays, as reported by the aforementioned Mathrubhumi article that relies on the research of the historian Kunnukuzhi S. Mani, who is widely credited as the first person to dig up information on her.   

  

Rosy was spotted on stage by the actor Johnson who introduced her to Daniel, a wealthy fellow resident of Thiruvananthapuram. Mumbai and Chennai were already thriving film production centres by the time Vigathakumaran was released in 1928. But the caste-related aggression in Thiruvananthapuram followed by the film’s financial failure and Daniel’s continuing obsession with cinema ultimately ruined him. It would be many decades before he was resurrected from oblivion through the efforts of the late historian and journalist Chelangatt Gopalakrishnan who began writing about him from the 1960s onwards. Daniel died in 1975. A Kerala state government award was instituted in his name in 1992, and he is now acknowledged as the Father of Malayalam Cinema. 

 

Before Daniel passed away, Gopalakrishnan managed to locate him in Agastheeswaram, a town in present-day Tamil Nadu, and interviewed him. However, neither Gopalakrishnan nor any of the other journalists and historians who have written about Rosy in passing or in depth, got to meet or speak to her. While the available details about her are sketchy as a result, there appears to be a consensus among their sources – Daniel being one – that after Vigathakumaran’s opening night mayhem, she escaped to Nagercoil either that very night or just days later, in a passing truck driven by a man called Keshava Pillai, who she later married. She is said to have gone by the name Rajamma – or Rajammal, according to some accounts – ever since. 

 

A great irony of this saga is that Rosamma/Rosy/Rajamma/Rajammal’s husband was a Nair, and the couple did not disclose her caste identity to his community, thus enabling her, as his wife, to live the rest of her life as a Nair, the very caste whose members reportedly turned violent and refused to accept her even playing one of them on screen. She is believed to have passed away in the 1980s (this date too is disputed). 

 

Kunnukuzhi S. Mani began writing about Rosy in the 1970s. It is perhaps a measure of the persistence of caste oppression in contemporary India that Rosy’s two surviving children, Nagappan and Padma, deny any knowledge of their mother’s caste identity, her acting background or the circumstances that ended her career. A 2013 article on The Big Indian Picture by journalist Meryl Mary Sebastian quoted Mani as saying that he once spoke to Nagappan who “lives as a Nair so he doesn’t talk about this too much. I have talked with him on phone. Then he had agreed to everything. But now he won’t talk. Because he says it causes family problems.” 

 

The same article quoted Rosy’s nephew Kavalloor Madhu as saying that Nagappan “has married into a big Nair family from Alappuzha. If he says that his mother was a Dalit, then the marriage would be in trouble. That is why he won’t talk about this. He doesn’t want to have anything to do with this.” 

 

For a programme to mark 100 years of Indian cinema in 2013, Asianet tracked down Padma in Madurai. In contrast to her brother, she lives in poverty. Padma told the TV channel that she knew nothing of her mother’s past before her marriage. 

The P.K. Rosy Film Society’s logo (Courtesy: Women in Cinema Collective on Facebook)

Though pan-India awareness of Rosy is a long way away, there have been efforts in Kerala in the 21st century to highlight the wrong that was done to her and to give her her due. Vinu Abraham, for instance, first got to know about Rosy “one evening at the International Film Festival of Kerala 2005, when I was handed a protest leaflet issued by a Dalit writers’ collective demanding a redressal of the injustice done to The Mother of Malayalam Cinema, the first heroine of Malayalam cinema, P.K.  Rosy, since she was pushed into oblivion by the forces that be, erased from mainstream history and film history, and her name is nowhere to be found”. The leaflet featured Kureepuzha Sreekumar’s poem that had been printed two years earlier in Kala Kaumudi magazine. Vinu’s quest for more information birthed Nashtanayika, which came out in 2008.  

 

In 2013, director Kamal released the Malayalam film Celluloid starring Prithviraj Sukumaran as Daniel, Mamta Mohandas as his wife Janet Daniel, the newcomer Chandni Geetha as Rosy and Sreenivasan as Chelangatt Gopalakrishnan. Though the opening credits of Celluloid stated that it is “based on Nashta Nayika, a novel by Sri Vinu Abraham”, the film ended on the words “a tribute to Dr J.C. Daniel.” This dichotomy was also evident in the narrative. 

 

Kamal faced some criticism in Kerala for marginalising Rosy after a point in the film and for viewing her through an upper-caste lens. When I asked him about this, he said though he considers Celluloid “as much a biopic of P.K. Rosy as it is a biopic of J.C. Daniel”, he ended her part in the film at the point at which she leaves Thiruvananthapuram because everything that is known about her after that is unconfirmed, and he did not want to risk errors in his film. “Because in later years, in the absence of other information, people will take this as the truth – that’s the way it is with cinema and books, they become reference material. Then if at some point the real story comes out, ours will be proven wrong.” While this sounds reasonable, it does not explain the near-erasure of Rosy even from the conversation in Vigathakumaran after she exited Thiruvananthapuram. 

 

Besides, the film’s limitations extend also to the scripting of known aspects of Rosy’s life. For one, though Celluloid showed Rosy as a Kakkarassi performer before Vigathakumaran, it did not celebrate her feats in the way it celebrated Daniel’s vision and sacrifices. At no point did it capture the strength and questioning mind it would have taken to be the pioneer she already was by the time she was cast in a screen role. Celluloid depicted Rosy as a gifted but docile youngster who is uplifted, so to speak, by Daniel. Logic, however, suggests that she must have been assertive, since she had already rebelled against norms, demanding more than what social conventions permitted, and that in Daniel she would have found an ally, not a saviour. 

 

Its flawed politics notwithstanding, Celluloid’s artistic merit on various fronts, its star-laden credits, hit music, box-office success and slew of awards, makes it the most high-profile representation of Rosy till date. Kamal’s film sealed her place in Kerala’s popular discourse.  

 

In 2019, the Kerala-based Women in Cinema Collective (WCC) – a rights body formed after the sexual assault of a Malayalam star two years earlier – set up the P.K. Rosy Film Society to promote cinema by women and “streepaksha chalachitra soundaryashasthram” (feminist cinema aesthetics). The award-winning film editor Bina Paul, a founder member of WCC, explains that Rosy’s legacy is “mostly symbolic, because we don’t know very much about what happened to her, but symbolic in a very importantly intersectional way between caste and gender. So for us as a women’s organisation, she is an important sign of the kind of struggles we’re looking at, and symbolic of the many ways in which marginalisations work.” 

 

The signature video of the International Film Festival of Kerala, an annual state government-run fiesta, was a tribute to Rosy in 2024.  

 

In neighbouring Tamil Nadu, producer-director Pa Ranjith’s Neelam Cultural Centre organises an annual film festival named after Rosy to showcase the best of cinema about and by Dalits and other marginalised and oppressed communities. The P.K. Rosy Film Festival 2025 concludes today. 

 

Such recognition is important, but true reparation would be to ensure consistent representation of Dalits and women in films and in the filmmaking profession in Kerala and across India. As of now, the truth is, that Indian cinema with Dalit lead characters is uncommon in the country, and Dalit stars – or at least, stars whose Dalit identity is publicly known – are rare. This brings up the question: if P.K. Rosy were born today, that too as dark-skinned as she was shown to be in Celluloid, could she possibly thrive as a heroine, considering that casteism and colourism still prevail in India? Kamal admits that this is unlikely in Malayalam cinema, adding: “If Rosy was around in the present day, I imagine she would have been playing supporting roles. She’s unlikely to have been playing central characters.” 

 

He confirms that Geetha who played Rosy in Celluloid was non-Dalit.

 

Not that Rosy would have stood a better chance in the rest of India. Hindi cinema, for one, has more or less erased Dalits and Adivasis from scripts. Marathi and Tamil are the country’s only film industries routinely telling stories centered around Dalit individuals and communities, including in commercial formats yielding box-office blockbusters, but here too, Dalit-themed mainstream cinema tends to spotlight men. 

  

Almost a century after a brave Dalit woman called P.K. Rosy broke new ground in theatre and in cinema, India is yet to catch up with her. 

 

Visuals courtesy: 

(1)    Women In Cinema Collective’s Facebook page

(2)    The International Film Festival of Kerala’s Instagram page

 

RELATED LINK: Read my profile of P.K. Rosy on BBC Hindi, published on March 1, 2025

https://www.bbc.com/hindi/articles/c30mm0n1v0zo

Amar Singh Chamkila: Brave in its stand on religious despots, lazy when it clubs harassment with fun and equates censorship with all criticism (Review 800)

Release date:	April 12, 2024
Director:	Imtiaz Ali
Cast:	Diljit Dosanjh, Parineeti Chopra, Nisha Bano, Anuraag Arora, Anjum Batra
Language:	Hindi-Punjabi

When a song overlaying a film’s opening credits describes the hero in deliciously mischievous terms – as “sexeela, ttharkeela Chamkila” (sexy, horny Chamkila) – the promise of an unapologetic sense of humour with a distinctive earthy flavour is unmistakable.

 

This lively number lifts the curtain on director Imtiaz Ali’s Amar Singh Chamkila, an eponymous biopic of the iconic Dalit folk-pop singer from rural Punjab whose murder in 1988 was never solved. The film platforms career-defining performances by the actor-singer Diljit Dosanjh as Chamkila and Parineeti Chopra as his wife and singing partner, Amarjot Kaur, alongside a fabulous soundtrack combining A.R. Rahman originals and Chamkila’s works. 

 

Delightful though the musical prologue is in many ways, it also briefly signals a troubling element that recurs later in the narrative, by casually clubbing instances of harassment with the amusing albeit crude eroticism that runs through the film. Shots of men and boys watching bathing women without their consent and peeking into rooms where women are changing their clothes roll out on screen in a manner that suggests an equivalence between such male voyeurism and the consensual, clandestine sexual liaisons also depicted during that early audio-visual montage. 

 

This mindless, poorly developed take on Peeping Toms and consent diminishes an otherwise well-crafted, mostly thoughtful, entertaining film on a man whose raunchy music enraged religious bigots and terrorists in Punjab, until he was assassinated at the age of 27. 

 

Too many biopics by filmmakers worldwide are PR exercises for their subjects. Amar Singh Chamkila is not one of those. Imtiaz Ali and his co-writer Sajid Ali along with their editor Aarti Bajaj present Chamkila as an enterprising, canny, courageous, yet sometimes dubious man.

 

Chamkila in this narrative stands up to caste chauvinism, strives hard to rise above his poverty, calls out the hypocrisy of conservatives when confronted about his no-holds-barred compositions, and in the long run, snubs his nose at censorious religious fundamentalists and extremists. The same Chamkila also lies, deceives more than one woman, and rationalises his lies. 

 

Sometimes writers gloss over such discomfiting aspects of a protagonist’s personality or journey in a bid to further a political agenda or to safeguard their financial interests, sometimes they do it to pander to fans or extra-Constitutional censors, very often they do so because it is simply too challenging to write a script that neither canonises nor vilifies an icon but portrays them as is. What sets Amar Singh Chamkila apart from most biopics is that the Alis don’t bury or sidestep the leading man’s flaws. It is what it is. 

 

This is a risk and one that ends up giving the film its layers and credibility. 

 

The script also risks spotlighting pro-Khalistan violence. Hindi films set in 1980s Punjab tend to confine themselves to police atrocities against Sikh civilians, Operation Bluestar and the pogrom that followed Indira Gandhi’s assassination in Delhi. This partial picture ultimately does a disservice to the minority group that it seeks to protect. 

 

As I wrote recently in my column in The Economic Times about liberal filmmakers largely avoiding a scrutiny of members of oppressed communities: “The fear is not only that one might be misunderstood, cause offence and hurt, but also that irrespective of the chronicler’s intentions, such stories could be misused by hate-mongers to further demonise an already beleaguered people.” However, “The counter to demonisation is not deification, or whitewashing. The counter is normalisation and unprejudiced truth-telling.” Amar Singh Chamkila provides a much-needed illustration of how this can be done – it recounts a passage from actual history in which members of the Sikh community themselves suffered at the hands of the enemy within, while doing so it does not stereotype Sikhs, it does not over-stress or de-emphasise any character’s religious identity, and it does not tar the entire community with one brush.

 

This, to my mind, is the film’s most noteworthy achievement.  

 

It is because of the gutsy, quality writing in these areas that the Alis’ take on Chamkila’s lyrics is disappointing. The bulk of the songs he’s shown singing with successive women collaborators and, finally, Amarjot, are hilarious in-your-face accounts of sexual encounters in conservative societies. There are endless stories of men lusting after their brothers’ wives and those wives surreptitiously hooking up with their brothers-in-law. I had a good laugh listening to them because of their frankness, their impish tone, the articulation of women’s sexual desires, and the way they blow the lid off the pretence and propriety that our country values above the truth. However, the film also fleetingly refers to songs humourising voyeuristic men. The former are fun, the latter are creepy – if this is indeed Chamkila’s body of work in its entirety, then well, it should not be brushed under the carpet. The issue is that the Alis’ own confused gaze enters the picture here.

 

In the film’s weakest portions, the script conflates Chamkila’s funny, audacious material with lyrics about intrusive, non-consensual, criminal male conduct. Women in rural Punjab are shown celebrating Chamkila through the joyously wicked number Naram Kaalja complete with sexually assertive lyrics and suggestive dance moves. That they would endorse his songs about covert, consensual sex in a society that demands coyness from women is believable, but the script does not stop to ask if they also approve of him making light of unwanted men peering into women’s bedrooms and bathrooms, nor do they touch upon legitimate concerns about such works. 

 

Instead, that task is left to an English-speaking woman journalist in Western clothing, the conceptualisation of whom indicates the writers’ disdainful, uninformed, clichéd definition of feminism. It is even implied that this stereotypical character was an instrument of Chamkila’s jealous rivals.

 

There’s a technique that storytellers employ when they wish to feign neutrality while taking a stand: they depict a confrontation between two people, ensure that the one they are batting for is a sympathetic character, and write more convincing arguments for this person in debates unfolding on screen. The American sitcom Last Man Standing is one of the wiliest examples of this cinematic device. Actor Tim Allen on the show plays a conservative who upholds Republican Party values that his wife (Nancy Travis) opposes. Each time they clash, the writers write weak political arguments into her lines that make his views – and conservatives at large – come off as smarter and more credible than progressives, as exemplified by her woolliness. Last Man Standing does this while appearing to give both of them equal room and strength. It is no coincidence that Allen, who is one of the show’s executive producers, is a Republican Party supporter in real life. 

 

The charmless, confrontational, joyless, jeans-wearing feminist with fuzzy logic using big words like “objectify” in a conversation with a guileless, rustic singer is Amar Singh Chamkila’s Nancy Travis. Chamkila himself is the film’s Tim Allen.  

 

Chamkila and his oeuvre are undoubtedly complicated. By simplistically positing feminists, terrorists and Sikh conservatives on one side, ranged against him, the script loses the opportunity to address certain questions that struck me while watching his female admirers in this film. Did the religious establishment target Chamkila because he wrote of women as sexual beings with wants and needs? Was the patriarchal clergy rattled by his popularity among women and afraid it could spark a female sexual Rennaissance in rural Punjab? 

 

Caste too is not examined with any depth here. Amar Singh Chamkila assumes significance as a rare Hindi film with a Dalit protagonist, but the script does not even look into the possibility that at least some of the resentment towards Chamkila may have come from members of oppressor castes unable to digest the rise of a Dalit. 

 

Multimedia packaging is used throughout to remind us that Chamkila and Amarjot were living breathing creatures who once walked this earth. Scenes with Dosanjh and Chopra sometimes turn grainy, and sometimes transition into or share space with footage of the real Chamkila and Amarjot, interspersed with watercolours, animation, old newspaper clippings, graphic-novel-like illustrations, photos of the actual couple and stills of the stars playing them. This mosaic of images adds to the period feel and gives the film the air of a docudrama. They complement Sylvester Fonseca’s restrained camerawork and production designer Suman Roy Mahapatra’s recreation of 1980s Punjab to make Amar Singh Chamkila a rich and varied visual experience. 

 

Two components of this mix are superfluous. English transliterations – sometimes of Punjabi lyrics, sometimes of Hindi translations of Punjabi lyrics – repeatedly flash on screen. They are terribly distracting. I had to force myself to ignore them so as to catch the English subtitles. And the captions that pop up at regular intervals serve no purpose at all. 

 

Chamkila and Amarjot dominate the plot, but satellite figures too are meticulously characterised. One of my favourite scenes involves Surinder Sonia, the artiste with whom Chamkila performs his first duet. The attitude she throws as a star of the stage in rural Punjab, her contempt for this unknown man, the high ground she takes about his lyrics, and the lightning-speed change of heart when the audience reacts positively to him are captured impeccably by the lovely Nisha Bano. 

 

I wish this film had been as much about Amarjot as it is about Chamkila, but given that she is a supporting character, Chopra invests her everything in the diffident young woman who blossomed on stage. In her hands, Amarjot exudes shyness belying a steely will and an occasional roguish grin. Chopra adapts her body and body language to the role. Most astonishingly, she has also sung for Amarjot in the film, holding her own against her co-star who is a superstar singer. 

 

Dosanjh was born to play Chamkila. He displays incredible range and immaculate timing here. He knows he is likeable and releases that charm in measured doses to jostle with his character’s lowest ebbs, even as he embodies the determination, desperation and savvy that made Chamkila a legend. 

 

Imtiaz Ali’s film, like the man it seeks to immortalise on screen, is a melange of black, white and grey: brave in its stand on religious despots, lazy when it clubs harassment with fun and equates censorship with all criticism. It is also beautifully acted and uses music in the best way a film can, making it a memorable tribute to a folk hero who had so much more to give the world. 

 

Rating (out of 5 stars): 3.5   

 

Running time:

146 minutes

 

Visual courtesy: IMDB 

 

RELATED LINK: Read my column in The Economic Times on minority representation in cinema published on April 13, 2024

https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/opinion/et-commentary/challenging-stereotypes-a-fresh-perspective-on-minority-representation-in-film/articleshow/109274630.cms