Political change and police representations in malayalam cinema

Abstract

The police are considered the state’s most powerful and significant arm, entrusted with duties such as being the guardians of the rule of law, custodians of the social order, endowed with the power to act on any dissent against the state. Cinema is an ideological and political medium, and the images and meanings it produces are rich in connotations and subtexts. This study is an attempt to understand the representation of the police in Malayalam cinema, and it aims to examine the portrayal of police in Malayalam films, focusing on the post-independence socio- political scenario. Malayalam cinema has been a reckonable cultural force over Kerala’s social modernity and has reflected the currents of Indian political reality in a significant manner. Emphasising these aspects, this thesis plans to critically analyse how the police are portrayed in Malayalam cinema. The study observes cinema and socio-political scenarios simultaneously to form specific hypotheses based on the influence of the latter on the former, resting on the premise that cinema as cultural industry is fed by and reacts to historical realities. The thesis traces the shifting regimes of authority and the diverse cinematic reflections of it across the years in Kerala. The first phase of analysis is from the early stages of Malayalam cinema to the 1990s, the next phase is from the 1990s to the 2010s, and the last phase is from 2010 onwards to the present. It closely monitors the manifestation of power to reveal the patterns of police portrayal and analyses a few cinematic narratives to argue that some landmark political junctures in Indian history have impacted cinematic representations. Theoretical concepts of Michel Foucault, Giorgio Agamben, Louis Althusser, et al. are used in the study. The hypothesis formed as part of the study indicates to, and explains the ideologies that constituted important trends in Malayalam cinema.