6 - Tit for Tat: Avenging Women and Self-fashioning Femininity in Malayalam Cinema

Summary

INTRODUCTION

Crime film is one of the most popular and persuasive genres in the world. With various sub-genres like cop films, court dramas, investigative thrillers and heist films, it generally portrays a crime-oriented plot where interactions between savior protagonists and criminal antagonists define the structural template of the film. Crime narratives usually revolve around the valiance of the traditional ‘hero’ who displays exhilarating masculine pride either through physical strength or intelligence. The construction of heroic masculinity varies with actors; for example, from Pierce Brosnan to Liam Neeson and Will Smith to Morgan Freeman, implications of masculinity – in terms of physical appearance and intellectual activity – construct multiple versions of masculine pride. In the context of Indian cinema, onscreen masculinity follows similar structures. From the ‘Angry Young Man’ image of Amitabh Bachchan in the 1970s to the latest gangster films of Bollywood, Indian crime cinema strove to perpetuate the patriarchal ideology ingrained in the heroic image. In other words, when male heroes are given the agency to control the narrative of a crime film, female characters are often portrayed as victims who need saving or glamorous objects that act as distractions to heroic gallantry. However, there have been some meagre attempts to portray women in unconventional gangster roles where femininity is equated with vigor, fervor and muscularity as seen in films like Bandit Queen (1994) and Gulab Gang (2014). In this rare context, this chapter looks at Malayalam cinema, a regional film industry of India, where a few films in the crime genre have tried to portray women as both victims and avenging survivors, thereby thwarting the idea of machismo as a heroic element in crime thrillers. Here, ‘she’ is the victim, survivor, avenger and the punisher. The films taken for this study fall under the sub-category of female revenge drama, where heroic elements are not only detached from masculinity but confined to the feminine traits of the protagonist. This study analyses the construction of female action heroes and avenging women in Indian national cinema and identifies and differentiates these female characterisations in the emerging context of new women-orientated (or feminised) versions of crime fiction in Malayalam regional cinema.