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

REVIEW 796: FAMILY

Release date:	Festival: January 2023 Theatrical: February 22, 2024
Director:	Don Palathara
Cast:	Vinay Forrt, Divya Prabha, Mathew Thomas, Nilja K. Baby, Abhija Sivakala, Jolly Chirayath, Prathapan K.S., Jitin Puthanchery, Sajitha Madathil
Language:	Malayalam

 

(This review was written and first published in February 2023 right after Family had its world premiere at the International Film Festival of Rotterdam)

 

In the higher reaches of the mountains of Idukki, in a village thick with verdure and hypocrisy, a man called Sony makes everyone’s business his own. This magnificent, densely forested region with its contemplative atmosphere is ideal for a story in which a lot transpires below the surface but an entire community noiselessly conspires to sweep its skeletons under a carpet.

 

Sony (Vinay Forrt) is the heart of the local populace. It would not be accurate to describe him as a busybody since the people rely on his help. He is always around in good times and in bad – attending weddings and funerals, chipping in with household chores, counselling the youth, drawing them into community service, supporting a bereaved family, volunteering when the parish priest asks – which is all so great that it’s hard to pin down the reason why it is so acutely discomfiting right from the start to watch this man roam among them.

 

When Sony sees a pregnant woman (Divya Prabha) executing a physical task in her courtyard, he rushes over to take over from her. When another woman (Abhija Sivakala) needs to pluck the fruit off a tree on her grounds, she does not hire workers – Sony does the job. If your kid is struggling at school, who do you turn to for tuitions? Answer: Sony. If you suffer a tragedy, who walks an extra mile for you? Sony. Genial, solicitous Sony whose actions go above and beyond the community spirit that is the norm here.

 

A gnawing suspicion soon arises though. Is Sony helpful because he is genuinely kind-hearted? Or are there other possibilities? Perhaps his concern and consideration are excuses to gain proximity to you. Perhaps he is that guy who strategically earns your trust so that you won’t notice when you glimpse questionable conduct, but if you do, you will be bullied into shutting up by those who prefer to look the other way. Family is not, however, about him alone.

 

Written by Don Palathara and Sherin Catherine, directed and edited by Don, Family in its entirety is a portrait of a repressed, conservative society. The location, blanketed with thick greenery and a resounding quiet, is in itself a metaphor for the silences that blanket uncomfortable truths. The film also engages with the very different reactions to a man and a woman who are deemed to have brought shame on the kutumbam. It is purportedly about one place at a certain time, but it’s really about Everyplace Everytime, whenever and wherever in the world folks have colluded to keep the secrets they are ashamed of “in the family”.

 

In the very first scene, an important character tells a boy that a leopard won’t attack a person unless threatened. The wild feline in the forest instinctively follows a code that Homo sapiens themselves do not. Family spotlights a very human penchant for attacking to oppress rather than for nourishment or self-defence, and a community’s willingness to provide camouflage even if it means endangering its own by letting the predator run free. 

 

Family’s writer-director team choose to mirror their characters’ mindset and behaviour by leaving most things unsaid and unseen. Renganaath Ravee’s sound design and Basil C.J’s music exemplify their vision. When the latter’s score initially floats in, it takes a minute to distinguish it from the sounds of nature that dominate most of the film.

 

The poetry in its minimalism and unbelievably perceptive observations make Family a breath-taking experience.

 

Given one of the most beautiful locations on Earth, DoP Jaleel Badusha mines it for maximum effect even while employing a subdued palette. The exquisite shots emerging from his explorations of the area (in addition to an unexpected scene boasting of some rather impressive CGI) elevate Family to a meditational experience.

 

The spare narrative caused me some confusion in the opening half as I tried to figure out who is who and related how to whom among the smaller roles. In those moments, I wished the camera had spent just a bit more time with each one and had looked squarely at them – instead of the angles from which they were shot – so that their faces were imprinted on my memory, but even through those passages, my sense of disquiet about the bigger picture remained.

 

The camera in the film gives off a vibe of being both an aloof bystander and a knowing insider. It rarely moves close to an individual and some of the most horrific acts in the storyline occur off screen, but what happens in the viewer’s line of sight consistently serves as a warning bell. Note the vantage point in a scene in which a man is shown in conversation with another. There is a certain type of man every woman has met: the fellow who invades your space without actually touching you, his hands hovering too close to the area around your chest or thighs as he speaks, all the while maintaining a pretence that he is unaware of your unease and hyper-alertness. As a woman, it chilled me to the bone that I was witnessing the exact same scenario on screen here, with one crucial difference: in place of a woman was a boy.

 

It is clear from Don’s filmography that he is fascinated by and immensely knowledgeable about both Christianity and his native Idukki. Christian rituals, customs and imagery are everywhere in Family. The film’s  account of local Malayali Christian practices is as educational as it is entertaining. Of particular interest is a pre-wedding function that features an older man on stage play-acting dressing up the young husband-to-be. At one such event I recently attended in Kerala, the groom’s uncle was such a lively, funny guy who kept us, his audience, in splits, that the moroseness of the guests at the ceremony in Family seems hilarious in contrast.

 

In his most prominent film roles so far, Vinay Forrt has played characters whose shortcomings were tempered by a layer of innocence bordering on naiveté. Vimal Sir in Premam, Sreenivasan Masha in Thamaasha and David Christudas in Malik were all flawed, not terrible. In Kismath, on the other hand, his character aimed an aggressive nastiness at the hapless leads. Vinay’s challenge in Family is to steer clear of both these spaces. Sony masks his worst side in a package of affability and thoughtfulness, although no one can be sure that that is what he does. Vinay is pitch perfect in giving Sony a barely discernible unsettling presence without being in-your-face repulsive. This is a deeply involved actor acing his most difficult role yet.   

 

Divya Prabha is just emerging from a year in which she won all-round acclaim playing the beleaguered Reshmi in Ariyippu (Declaration) that was premiered at Locarno. She joins an ensemble cast of wonderfully naturalistic artistes to play the conflicted and hesitant Rani who is yet brave enough to articulate a prickly question that no one has asked so far in Family. 

 

Don Palathara has built his career on making films on his own terms, giving mainstream clichés a wide berth yet not fitting entirely into the middle-of-the-road nature of the new Malayalam New Wave. His Santhoshathinte Onnam Rahasyam a.k.a. The Joyful Mystery has been his most high-profile work among Indian film-goers so far. In terms of cinematic idiom, Family more closely resembles his fable-like 1956, Madhyathiruvithamkoor (1956, Central Travancore). Along with his co-writer, he gives this film a lived-in feel, an air of: we have been here, met these people and know what they hide in their closeted minds. The director is present in this village, making mental notes, enabling viewers to drink it all in, not as outsiders staring at a screen but as co-travellers standing beside him and seeing through his eyes. He is not looking in on alien beings to tell an exotic tale in Family. He is not othering the minority community whose story he chronicles, he is normalising them, using the specifics of their culture and conservatism to drive home a universal point.

 

Family does not follow the revved-up beats conventionally demanded by commercial cinema, it follows the rhythms of life. And it’s a masterpiece.

 

Rating (out of 5 stars): 4.5   

 

Running time:

111 minutes

 

Visual courtesy: IMDB 

 

This review was originally published under the headline “Poetic minimalism brilliantly used to capture a society sweeping its skeletons under a carpet” on Firstpost in February 2023

 

REVIEW 795: BRAMAYUGAM

Release date:	February 15, 2024
Director:	Rahul Sadasivan
Cast:	Mammootty, Sidharth Bharathan, Arjun Ashokan, Amalda Liz, Manikandan R. Achari
Language:	Malayalam

 

Rahul Sadasivan’s Bramayugam comes to theatres two years after Bhoothakaalam in which he deftly wove themes of mental health, care giving, substance abuse and other pressing concerns into a supernatural/psychological horror drama. Bhoothakaalam starring Revathy and Shane Nigam was terrifying and thoughtful in equal measure, but the burden of expectations is not the reason why Bramayugam does not match up to it. The reasons are simpler.

 

Behind the gloss and beyond an in-form Mammootty, Bramayugam is not scary despite its promising atmospherics. It is also flimsy for a considerable stretch of time until it begins to lay out its caste politics. The film’s allegorical take on caste proves to be muddled and insensitive.

 

Bramayugam (The Age of Madness) is set in 17^th century Malabar where Thevan (Arjun Ashokan), a starving folk singer, chances upon a decrepit mansion belonging to a Brahmin family. The grouchy caretaker (Sidharth Bharathan) is unwelcoming. Both are placed low on the ladder of the caste system, and the elderly master of the house Kodumon Potti (Mammootty) belittles the latter for being disdainful towards the visitor, welcoming the young man warmly instead. 

 

Kodumon Potti rarely has guests. This could be because his home is in what appears to be a land far far away. Or perhaps not. Thevan soon realises that all is not as it seems in this decaying homestead where mysterious sounds are heard from areas declared off limits for him. It is not long before we learn that he is a pawn in a game in which the dice is controlled by an unexplained force. 

 

Sadasivan gets Bramayugam off to a good start by creating a sense of mystery in the forest where we meet Thevan. This tone is sustained till the end with the aid of Shehnad Jalal’s camerawork, Jothish Shankar’s art direction and Jayadevan Chakkadath’s low-key sound design. 

 

Bramayugam is defined by its magnificence, ranging from scenes of desolate natural beauty to the eerie innards of Kodumon Potti’s home. Even shots of a man cooking in a darkened kitchen look ominous here, as are close-ups of the handful of characters in this saga. The decision to make this a black-and-white film further enriches the imagery and adds to its folklorish feel. 

 

Giant landscapes are framed in Bramayugam in such a manner as to dwarf the people in the story and intimidate the viewer, in a style I’ve come to love in recent years in chilling Scandinavian thrillers. The resemblance is confined to the look. Bramayugam threatens to turn frightening, but never actually does. After a while, the spectacle is window dressing for a thin story that picks elements from Indian mythology– a yakshi here, a chaathan there – without saying anything novel until it reveals its flawed hand in the matter of caste. 

 

Initially, Sadasivan makes an insightful point when he shows Kodumon Potti luring Thevan with a pretence of egalitarianism before entrapping him. However, with this episode of truth telling, the film is being as deceptive as Kodumon Potti himself, because Sadasivan’s larger point turns out to be that dominant communities are no more power hungry than those they’ve historically oppressed, and the sole difference between them is that one lot hold the reins in a social system while the others are its victims for now. This is an uninformed blanket statement. On the one hand, it’s true we’re currently witnessing the outcome of a once-oppressed people transforming into oppressors – read: the genocide in Gaza being committed by Israel, the country formed in the 1940s as a homeland for white European Jews after the Holocaust. It is just as true though that this has not been the journey of all persecuted communities. Notice how countries formerly colonised by Europeans have not run around the world colonising other countries since they themselves got Independence. Notice that post-apartheid South Africa is vocally advocating for Palestinians. Notice the scores of white Jewish people, including Holocaust survivors, protesting against the genocide. Know too that Israel’s conduct is a result of numerous factors including but not confined to white racism that prompted post World War II Europe to consider the brown people of Palestine dispensable, and Europe and North America’s oil interests in the Middle East. 

 

Bramayugam’s script does not explore the theme of oppression with depth. Instead it chooses to whitewash oppressors. The writing also betrays a troubling upper-caste view of caste on two fronts. 

 

(Spoiler alert) The earliest clue that a certain character is not the Brahmin individual he claims to be comes from his food habits. It’s not that this person eats meat, but the savagery with which he eats it that is supposed to be a hint. Portraying meat-eaters as crude, equating meat-eating with animalism and associating unsophisticated meat consumption with Muslims and ‘the other’ has become a hallmark of the right-wing ecosystem and right-wing Hindi cinema in the Modi era (Padmaavat, Panipat, Tanhaji, Adipurush, Animal). Bramayugam employs the same symbolism in the context of caste in the Malayalam language. 

 

Bramayugam’s thesis seems to be that Europeans were able to colonise India due to power struggles among Indians. While disunity in the subcontinent did help Europeans, the problem with Bramayugam is that it implies an equivalence between Brahmins and Dalits in this regard, and trains its accusatory finger primarily – metaphorically – at the downtrodden. For a metaphor to work, it must work all the way, but in Bramayugam what we are shown, literally, is white intruders taking advantage of  a ‘half caste’ and a lower caste person being at loggerheads after escaping a demonic tyranny, while the first victim of the battle among Indians in the narrative was a Brahmin. More to the point, a Brahmin we don’t meet at all, as a result of which we don’t get to determine whether he was good, bad or evil, while we get to see the evil in the rest of the social order. 

 

It’s also strange that in the almost-all-male world that Sadasivan builds in Bramayugam, the only female presence is a beautiful, blood-sucking seductress.

 

Amalda Liz as the yakshi is just an eye-catching body and face on display. Manikandan R. Achari gets similar dismissive treatment in the opening scenes. This is the second film in three weeks to reduce this gifted actor to a prop. The other was Malaikottai Vaaliban. Women are objectified in cinema worldwide, Malayalam cinema is objectifying this man probably because most writers are unable or unwilling to envision a black-skinned actor as anything but exotica. 

 

Only three roles count in Bramayugam. Mammootty and Sidharth Bharathan deserve as much credit for the film’s menacing air as its visual landscape does. In the Indian arena, it takes courage for a star as big as Mammootty to take on a role that is meant to be as repugnant as this character is, but he does it with evident relish. Both actors also benefit immensely from the embrace of Shehnad Jalal’s camera. Arjun Ashokan’s performance is not quite as immersive as theirs here, but he does a fair job. 

 

Bramayugam is a great-looking film based on a script that quickly runs out of steam, until it revs itself up to take a terribly skewed stand on caste and colonialism.

 

Rating (out of 5 stars): 1.5   

 

Running time:

139 minutes

 

Poster courtesy: IMDB