Cinema, as a medium of entertainment, has the power to reinforce certain problematic stereotypes. Several movies portray marginalised communities by picking up certain elements just to “exoticise” or show them as “desirable”. I’ve come across many Malayalam mainstream movies that have constructed and propagated certain stereotypes around Muslims and Dalits. One such movie is Thattathin Marayathu which added to the popular stereotype of Muslims as people with repressed sexual desires, terrorist lineages, money-minded and food-crazy.
You might also like: Manichitrathazhu Is Amazing, But Did It Explore Female Friendships?
Thattathin Marayathu was promoted with the tagline “the story of a Nair man who loved a Muslim (Ummachi) woman”, and is rife with exotification of the Muslim woman Aisha by Vinod who belongs to the upper caste Nair community. The film captures a voyeuristic curiosity, particularly among upper-caste Hindu men, about what lies beneath a Muslim woman’s veil; evident from “the thattam (veil) has become a weakness for Malayalis” that appeared in the promotional posters of the movie. Post the success of the movie, the thattam became a trend among youngsters. Something that was up till that point considered regressive and oppressive, suddenly became a style statement.
One could argue that Vinod’s affection is directed more toward the exoticised image of Aisha than toward Aisha as a real person. This comes across, particularly in scenes where Vinod asks Aisha to wear her thattam, and you see him pleased with the sight of her in the thattam.
Throughout the movie, we can see silent casteism and racism hiding under this “secularist and humanistic” story. For example, we hear Vinod brag about how he belongs to the Nair community. There are also instances where he boasts to his friends about how he is going to make ‘Aisha Rahman’ into ‘Aisha Vinod’.
In her 2008 book Casting Out: The Eviction of Muslims from Western Law and Politics, Sherene Razack exposes three prominent figures who have come to symbolise the world after 9/11: the ‘dangerous’ Muslim man; the ‘imperilled‘ Muslim woman; and the ‘civilised’ European. In Thattathin Marayathu, we can see the dangerous Muslim man as Abdul Khader (Aisha’s uncle). The civilised Nair man Vinod trying to save Aisha from her ”conservative” environment. The message is that an ‘ummachi’ girl’s dream can be materialised only beyond her religion and with the intervention of an upper caste man.
You might also like: Dalit Renaissance In Kerala’s Movie Industry A Myth?
The movie ends with Aisha’s dad accepting her love and letting her go by saying, “It’s the woman’s purity that is to be protected by the black veil, not her dreams”; re-enforcing all the stereotypes that were thrown at them by the ‘civilised’. Also, there is this tendency that’s seen in mainstream movies to portray Muslim communities in a certain way that satisfies the stereotype hunger of the upper caste Hindu majority. This pattern of stereotyping, where an entire community is flattened to satisfy the cultural fantasies of the dominant group, is rarely applied with such persistence to other communities in Malayalam cinema.
