Kerala's Women’s Cinema & Self Praxis

Preface

On the basis of B. Schulze's insights into women's subjective experiences of their lives in Kerala, into the ‘how-women-feel-living-in-Kerala’, the researcher wants to initiate a critical reassessment of the 'Kerala Development Model'; she thus puts on test bed its stated qualities as a provider of an appropriate and positive environment to women – those in particular, who are struggling for surviving on the ever growing margins of mainstream societies’ ‘development’.

Kerala's Women’s Cinema & Self Praxis takes a positive, meaning a constructive, stand towards the strength and skills which the marginalised women mobilise in their survival strategies.
Here we focus as much on the fact that the ‘Kerala Development Model’ is based on the exploitation of women’s productive labour and work, and that most of the people in Kerala actually live of it. That it is due to their – not only underpaid, but unpaid – knowledge, their wisdom, and their creative energies (srishti), due to their mostly self-negating dedication that many children and families in Kerala are cared for, and not, as often claimed, due to “welfare state politics”.
Actually, srishti is forced to consume itself in uneven struggles against the established politics, in the context of the extremely unfavourable, inhuman ‘conditions’ which determine people’s existence here.

Kerala’s Women’s Cinema & Self Praxis states that marginalised women like the ones with whom we were in touch, are not at any rate to be seen as persons who are ‘lacking’ in their knowledge, experience, insights, physical stature etc.; their major problems aren’t neither caused by any major ‘deficiency’ in the women.
To the contrary: we are making visible, audible, understandable these women’s creative ‘energy flows’/ srishti which have no medium in the mainstream society, because, here, as in the political sphere srishti is systematically and constantly blocked, or it is literally sucked out of these women.
According to their wishes the website pays attention to the anonymity of any woman whose picture, voice, srishti etc. forms part of the body of our cinema and self praxis ...

Life and communication strategies ‘on the move’ ...

Our understanding and perspective on the marginalised creative energies/ srishti necessitate appropriate ‘tools’ of communication also on our side to evenly re-present and positively re-enforce these energies. We do not want to ‘freeze’ these moving energies into terms/ concepts/ modes of representation that would add to the dominant stagnation, exploitation, or ‘utilitarism’, but we strive for communication forms which should support emancipative moves ...
Because of this we chose terms/ units which – as we hope – have the potential to reflect and resound in our ‘readers’ our conviction that the marginalised srishti’s philosophy is one which communicates to all human senses and sensitivities, that its essential characteristics are mutuality, dialogue, symbiosis, and that it is about touching and being touched, of deeper emotional echoes, and of a respectful and humorous way of dealing with the fellow beings living in societies and in the wider nature:

Inter-Facing: is twofold. It relates to our phenomenological approach and documents the neglected marginalised subjective perspectives by means of our participatory action research, and then relates these in a discursive, reflective and dynamic manner to other perspectives of other communicators (eg. press, cinema).
As part of the Content Protocols of our AV-Materials which can be accessed in the ‘Media Centre’ Schulze provides a column called ‘inter-facing’ in which she provides the reader with an informed comment connecting the views, voices etc. in the films to other views, voices, to issues of the marginal and the mainstream which in the course of the project were condensed into ‘keywords’.

Inter-Views: Provides protocols of meetings and talks when women who are marginalised but have empowered themselves in different spheres of life – and one male ayurvedic doctor – shared their views with Brigitte Schulze who actively involved herself into this dialogue.

Com-Passions: is a field which will in a later state be showing examples from the marginalised lives on their strong orientation towards a compassionate co-existence.

Self-Other Ethics: is a field where a reflection about manifold layers of ‘love’, and the marginalised women’s strong feeling against ‘injustice’ – as part of srishti – finds its place.


The ‘Kerala Development Model’ put into a life- and srishti-oriented perspective

Kerala was made into an Indian Federal State nine years after India's independence. In 1956, in the wake of the Indian Republic's reorganisation of regions into states, Kerala was created by merging three erstwhile separate political entities where the common majority language was Malayalam.

In the eyes of the researcher, Brigitte Schulze, who had regularly been to Kerala's inspiring film festivals since 1997, and who guest-lectured there on 'New approaches in film and women studies' in 1999/ 2000, the local popular Malayalam cinema's representation of men-and-women featured a 'mood' / Befindlichkeit/ raag that showed great affinity to what Schulze had already identified as the extremely contradictory and tension rich life-worlds of women and men in their constructions of gender and political/ regional identities with a strange 'feminine', traumatised and ‘split identity’ touch.

In the sphere of the popular cinema we experience that overall raag/ mood of tragic entanglement when ‘man’ can’t but destroy ‘woman’. ‘She’ (mostly a woman, but also an adivasi, dalit ...) is represented as the avatar of ‘nature’/ ‘earth’ bearing all the ‘male’ aberrations. ‘He’ has undergone even more dramatic changes than ‘she’: before the 1990s, ‘man’ and ‘woman’ had more depth, a psychological and an emotional site to their characters; then ‘he’ was more of the Othello-like type of a tragic hero. Today ‘he’ mutated into the ‘angry hero’ who has but a stand based on his own muscles, or the power of certain ‘patrons’, and other mafia-like support networks in the ‘politics’/ ‘underworld’.

Actually, to the researcher it was astounding to understand the unique way in which the marginalised women who cooperated with the project by going to see and discuss popular Malayalam films during the festive Onam season 2001 (August-September), uncovered cinema’s mechanisms without falling prey to its ideologies. The marginalised women are clearly aware that the cinema forms part of the mainstream society’s consumerism, casteism, their dreams and nightmares, and distance themselves from it.

However, the violence that forms an integral part in the people of Kerala’s reality, which can be felt in its cinema, the undercurrent, more psychological features of violence (as in Kerala’s high rate in domestic violence, alcoholism, suicides, aggressiveness and growing competition etc.), and its virulent outer appearances in the economic and political spheres, creates in the marginalised (women, dalits, adivasis, etc.) a state of fear.

It is this fear which one has to understand, if one has seen and heard the wisdom of the marginalised – as for instance in their srishti –, their strong ethics of ‘love’ and their moral feeling against ‘injustice’, and their silences, if it comes to concrete situations in which they could take a stand.
This particular fear is fused with an age-old attitude of loyalty to one’s community, to the caste-defined acceptance of a ‘master’/ ‘patron’/ ‘husband’, and with the women’s strong love towards their children.

Strongly contrasting these ‘facts’ and daily perpetuated ‘feelings’ vis-a-vis violence, and violence blocs the official Kerala state and institution's history became - and still is taken as - synonymous with an unusual and singular 'success story' of a very particular type of 'welfare state'. Greatly appreciated in India and abroad by sociologists, professors of economics (Amartiya Sen), and of political sciences (Jeffrey 1992), one specifically highlights women’s good education, longer life expectation, higher life standard etc. and correlates it all to an alleged achievement in a generally high state of women’s “well-being” associated with a greater democratic freedom that Malayali women are said to enjoy. Statistics and 'welfare indicators' speak this same language about Kerala women's 'happy lives'.

However, even before Kerala's welfare state transformed itself in the wake of the international trend to start a new 'global revolution' from above putting profit over people's and nature's needs, local research revealed the highly ambiguous nature of the mystified 'Kerala Development Model' (KDM).

The research project was designed in such a way that the women’s perspectives on the KDM, their concrete daily experiences are taken as the basis of our inquiry. It is thus a decided venture into the emotional dimension of how Kerala women feel as human beings in Kerala, how their 'life-worlds’ (Husserl) of Self conceptions and of 'femininity' are experienced, reflected and acted upon in the context of Kerala's ambiguous economic and regional 'identity politics' .

The video camera was the medium to document these subjective life-worlds, their interfacing with the public space of the popular cinema, and then the creation of their own (video-)films: the marginal women’s world - views.

We focussed on processes: of how women’s ideas and feelings of self were blending, or contrasting, how their thinking combined with learning, how they subjectively experienced their gain in awareness, and which were the ways they made, or did not make use of this new awareness and knowledge, how they created new forms of communication, a new vernacular of Self-and-Other, and why they decided to interrupt its flow.

These dynamics of re-presenting a cinema & Self praxis were 'translated' / ‘uplifted’ onto a theorical plane which combines the following major aspects:
1. documentation of the views, voices and visions on ‘Self’ by the cooperating marginalised women, and the ‘extraction’ of their main themes and images while remaining as close as possible to these women’s subjective own terms,
2. creation of spaces where these women’s ‘life-worlds’ could get in touch, or overlap with Other’s ‘life-worlds’, like those of other women facing marginalisation for other reasons than caste discrimination (poor women, ‘single women’, politically or artistically active women etc.), this is what is an important aspect of Schulze’ s method of inter-facing,
3. comparison of the essential themes, ‘moods’ and emotions of marginal women’s ‘life-worlds’ with the represenation of ‘the world’ and ‘news items/ issues’ in the dominant information media like the Malayalam and English press; identifying the similarities, or the contrasts beween the marginal ‘life-worlds’ on topics of identity etc. and the hegemonic and dominant ‘world-views’, and
4. identification of blockages which result from these latter ‘world-views’, economic conditions and identity politics and deter for political, material and psychological-emotional reasons the marginal life-worlds’ visions to materialise.

Generally, in our theorisation a high level of transparency is strived for, so that for instance, any of our abstractions and concepts can be put down to the concrete plane of the marginal persons’ lives.
The researcher wants her theories be tightly knit to practical actions resulting from her insights and knowledge, and thus to be relevant to the women whose life-worlds were in the focus of the research project: the Marginalised women in Kerala.
It is their Self-conceived vision of freedom, their utopia of ‘mobility’ which should be enhanced.

The creation of www.femCineCult-Kerala.uni-trier.de and of 'MarginaLifeUtopias ...: Archive & Forum might therefore be that space of inter-active learning and communication entertained by Schulze at the Media Studies/ Trier University, in co-ordination with some of the Marginal women in Kerala, and result into strengthening more and new initiatives on dialogues from below to become global and also motivate a praxis: between the Marginalised, media scholars/ students, and media/ culture activists.