Papers by Navaneetha Mokkil
Community development journal, Apr 6, 2024
From factories to hostels, homes to neighbourhoods, how do embodied practices in stratified space... more From factories to hostels, homes to neighbourhoods, how do embodied practices in stratified spaces shape the contemporary terrains of queerness in India? In this article, I analyse two recent cultural texts from India, Neeraj Ghaywan's Geeli Pucchi (Sloppy Kisses, 2021) and Hansda Sowvender Shekhar's (2018) novel My Father's Garden, Speaking Tiger Books, Delhi, to engage with the fraught dynamics of relationality and queerness. My analysis contests any easy celebration of communityby foregrounding the movements of dispossessed protagonists who do not fit into the paradigm of the privileged subject of queer politics. Yet these texts capture the fleeting possibilities of reaching towards one another in spaces carved through the operations of exclusion and discrimination. I bring together two texts in which the direct references to sexual identities formed via governmental or non-governmental networks are largely absent; rather, they ask fundamental questions about the in-between terrain of the relational. The dynamics of distance and connection is opened up in complex ways in these cinematic and literary texts as they create imaginative idioms to explore the brittleness of queer bonds formed through the hierarchized operations of class, caste and ethnicity. Through an analysis of the formal aspects of these texts, and the practices of spectatorship and readership they facilitate, I seek to underline how formations of sexuality in India can be unpacked only through a close engagement with the critical discourse on gender, caste and ethnicity.
Community Development Journal, 2024
From factories to hostels, homes to neighbourhoods, how do embodied practices in stratified space... more From factories to hostels, homes to neighbourhoods, how do embodied practices in stratified spaces shape the contemporary terrains of queerness in India? In this article, I analyse two recent cultural texts from India, Neeraj Ghaywan's Geeli Pucchi (Sloppy Kisses, 2021) and Hansda Sowvender Shekhar's (2018) novel My Father's Garden, Speaking Tiger Books, Delhi, to engage with the fraught dynamics of relationality and queerness. My analysis contests any easy celebration of communityby foregrounding the movements of dispossessed protagonists who do not fit into the paradigm of the privileged subject of queer politics. Yet these texts capture the fleeting possibilities of reaching towards one another in spaces carved through the operations of exclusion and discrimination. I bring together two texts in which the direct references to sexual identities formed via governmental or non-governmental networks are largely absent; rather, they ask fundamental questions about the in-between terrain of the relational. The dynamics of distance and connection is opened up in complex ways in these cinematic and literary texts as they create imaginative idioms to explore the brittleness of queer bonds formed through the hierarchized operations of class, caste and ethnicity. Through an analysis of the formal aspects of these texts, and the practices of spectatorship and readership they facilitate, I seek to underline how formations of sexuality in India can be unpacked only through a close engagement with the critical discourse on gender, caste and ethnicity.
South Asian History and Culture
Vernacular English: Reading the Anglophone in Postcolonial India is a notable addition to existin... more Vernacular English: Reading the Anglophone in Postcolonial India is a notable addition to existing historical, cultural, and literary scholarship that problematises the singularity of the English language and pays attention to the blurriness between the local and the global. Through this book, Saxena joins the conversation with scholars such as Simon Gikandi, Srinivas Aravamudan, Jonathan Arac, Gaurav Desai, Rey Chow, and Rashmi Sadana who have emphasised that in the context of the Commonwealth, English can no longer be seen only as the language of the coloniser. Though Saxena sheds light on postcolonial India's strained relationship with English, she does not accomplish it by thinking about it as a unidimensional language. Her intervention is far more fascinating in that she argues that in the postcolonial Indian context, 'English is already provincial' (15). For her, as a translational and transnational vernacular, English is a politically charged tool that acts as a neutral force and bridges the gap between various languages, cultures, and communities. In this light, Vernacular English comes very close to Rebecca L. Walkowitz's 2015 book Born Translated: The Contemporary Novel in an Age of World Literature which also problematises the notion of linguistic authenticity and originality. In the preface to her book, the author points out an intriguing contrast between Rohith Vemula, a Dalit student leader who experienced institutional injustice and died by suicide in 2016, and Narendra Modi, the fourteenth and current prime minister of India. She notes that whereas Vemula saw English as an anti-caste language that promises dignity, equality, and liberty, Modi swings between Hindi and English to suit his Hindu nationalist political party's neoliberal interests. She writes: 'while [Modi] favours Hindi as a political gesture, [he] instrumentalises English for its metonymic association with global capitalism' (xv). To emphasise English's multivalent affective, cultural, and socioeconomic characteristics, Saxena proposes the term 'vernacular English' (xvii). By knitting together two seemingly contrasting ideas, she notes that from the standpoint of twentyfirst-century globalised India, to see English as only hegemonic and colonial is to imagine language erroneously and restrictively. Saxena's chapter titles-law, touch, text, sound, and sight-are provocative in that they attune us to different affective and sensory characteristics of English in postcolonial India. Given the turbulent history of colonialism, postcolonialism, and neocolonialism in the Indian subcontinent, it is only reasonable then that the book begins by exploring how and why English emerged as the official language of the postcolonial Indian state. For the author, English did not become the language of democracy and communicability despite its foreignness but because of its foreignness. In the postindependence years, English questioned the supremacy of Hindi without completely dismissing it and stood in for other Indian languages. She also makes an interesting point about the association of English with the affect of shame-the shame of not knowing the language, the shame of speaking the colonial language, or the shame of knowing English but not knowing other Indian languages. To drive home this point, she highlights the contrast between two kinds of postcolonial Indian writings: first, the petitions such as India Demands English (1960) that imagined English as the language of democracy, scientific modernity, and development, and second, the satirical novels such as Srilal Sukla's Raag Darbari (1968) and Upamanyu Chatterjee's English, August (1988) and The Mammaries of the Welfare State (2004) that treat English as an object of satire in order to shed light on its alienating quality.
<jats:p>Kamala Das, one of the best-known bilingual writers from India in the twentieth cen... more <jats:p>Kamala Das, one of the best-known bilingual writers from India in the twentieth century, consistently pushed the boundaries of what could be represented in literature through her poetry in English, autobiographical writings and novellas in English and Malayalam, and a large body of short stories in Malayalam. Through the conscious deployment of the confessional voice in her poetry and life writings and the intricate entanglement of the public and the private in her fictional worlds, Das carved a space for the explorations of the affective realm and physicality in modern Indian literature.</jats:p> <jats:p>Kamala Das's exposure to books and literary production came at an early age through her mother, Nalappat Balamaniyamma, a prolific poet, and her maternal uncle, Nalappat Narayana Menon, a prominent writer and translator.</jats:p>
Routledge Handbook of Gender in South Asia, 2021
This chapter demonstrates that literary and visual forms from Kerala, that meld together psycholo... more This chapter demonstrates that literary and visual forms from Kerala, that meld together psychological realism, romance, and fantasy, provide a rich site to analyse the crisis-ridden process of the making of the modern subject. The chapter explores how literary and filmic forms of excess produce narrative and cinematic worlds that disturb the foundational architecture of the reproductive family and contained models of masculinity and femininity. The texts I focus on are populated by uncanny bodies that slip out of the paradigms of the ‘human’. Moving away from the dominant framework of Kerala as a ‘progressive’ region invested in science, rationality, and the corresponding narrative form of realism, I speculate on how and why sensational and fantastic texts become the feverish bedrock of Kerala’s modernity. The chapter opens with a reading of a short story by Kamala Surayya titled Stree (Woman 1947), followed by a detailed analysis of Malayattoor Ramakrishnan’s novel Yakshi (1967). ...
Inter-Asia Cultural Studies
This paper focuses on the life narrative of C K Janu, a prominent Adivasi activist from Kerala, a... more This paper focuses on the life narrative of C K Janu, a prominent Adivasi activist from Kerala, a state in Southern India, written by the artist Bara Bhaskaran in 2002. I read the visual and verbal composition of Janu's life narrative in relation to Bhaskaran's aesthetic practices. I foreground the process through which a visual artist's mediation shapes this book rather than presuming direct access to the narrator's voice. The unfinished strokes of Bhaskaran's sketches become a compelling entry-point to reflect on the exchanges through which life narratives acquire a public form. Thus, I argue that this narrative revises conceptions of authorship and subjectivity by bringing to the fore the constitutive relation between the subject and her surroundings, the narrator and her interlocutor. This paper demonstrates that in order to produce perceptive accounts of multiple forms of life narratives, which we encounter as readers today, it is important to turn our attention to the material practices of representation. The linkages between political subjects and narrative forms can be studied only if we reflect on the intermedial exchanges through which cultural texts are assembled. This paper aims to intervene in the debates on life narratives and marginality by moving away from the frameworks of veracity, authenticity and direct access. It opens up for analysis the political stakes of practices of book making that brings together visual and verbal mediums.
South Asian Popular Culture
This paper explores the formations of masculinity and its links to the perceived vulnerability of... more This paper explores the formations of masculinity and its links to the perceived vulnerability of young women's sexualized bodies by focusing on popular Malayalam cinema from Kerala. I will specifically undertake a reading of Achanurangatha Veedu (A Home in which the Father Cannot Sleep, 2006) and deploy my analysis of Drishyam (Sight, 2013) as a point of contrast. In both these films the primary focus are on fathers who are compelled to act in order to protect their adolescent daughters from sexual violence. The marginalized Dalit Christian father in Achanurangatha Veedu is mired in humiliation and physical breakdown as his search for justice ends in failure. In Drishyam on the other hand the father, who belongs to an upper caste and middle class location, acquires heroic proportions as he launches a thrilling set of operations to safeguard the realm of domesticity. My analysis shows how in Achanurangatha Veedu the viewer is constantly buffeted between identification with the victimized father and a possibility of distancing where we step back and watch the spectacle of pathos. I argue that the film offers a possibility of critiquing social hierarchies in instances where we slip out of both of these modes of viewing and inhabit a more contingent and disorienting position. My focus is on the visual and aural transactions through which masculinity is reassembled in cinema and the practices of spectatorship it engenders.
BioScope 9(2) 1–19, 2019
This article analyses the super-hit Malayalam film Drishyam (Sight) in relation to the modalities... more This article analyses the super-hit Malayalam film Drishyam (Sight) in relation to the modalities of protest in the Chumbanasamaram (Kiss of Love [KoL] campaign) in 2014 in Kerala in which the kiss was deployed as a form of public protest. It brings together a popular thriller and a political protest that made waves in the entire nation in order to explore how shifting media technologies choreograph performative modes of doing politics. Drishyam stages the convergence of different media forms and legitimises the conventions of older forms such as cinema that hinges on the spectacle of women's bodies and sexual acts on screen. At the same time, digital technology and the modes of circulation and reception it facilitates function as a node of heightened anxiety. Although Drishyam precedes the KoL campaign, this film can be seen as a response to precisely the (hyper) visibility of bodies and sexuality in the public domain through the workings of new media technologies. The film is driven by an overwhelming concern about the public performance of intimacy-contiguous with the secret filming and the threat of circulation of the naked woman's body that is the cause of crisis in the film. Thus, I argue that the energies that drive Drishyam and finds a resonance with a national audience, in fact, anticipates KoL-type display of sexuality which is at once unauthorised and out of place but also mediated by unruly technologies.
This paper analyzes the unfolding of a protest in the form of a night-vigil in India in which bod... more This paper analyzes the unfolding of a protest in the form of a night-vigil in India in which bodies and acts are rendered sensational through the workings of media technologies. This paper moves away from a national frame and demonstrates that the regional can open up new ways to conceptualize the body and the affective formations of the public. It explores the key question of the public and the political as they are formed in the interstices of visual regimes. By drawing on a wide range of vernacular print and visual culture materials, it analyzes the manner in which bodies and acts caught in the mesh of visual technologies complicate one of the central conceptions of feminism: visibility as intertwined with claiming agency in the public sphere. The intersections of caste, gender, and organized party politics in the sensory regimes of the night-vigil gesture toward the precariousness of publics not as a threat but as a productive possibility. It puts forward the conception of the body as a porous and unstable site and allows for an engagement with scenography of protests in which resistance and embodiment is imagined anew. Keywords: feminism in India, affect, visual technologies, embodiment, political protests, regional publics March 7, 2008. A group of activists organized a night-vigil outside the secretariat, the headquarters of government administration in Trivandrum, the capital of Kerala, a state in southern India. The night-vigil was in support for the Chengara land struggle, in which landless people, especially Dalits 1 and Adivasis in Kerala, demanded ownership of cultivatable land. 2 After the formal speeches were over, the participants in the vigil settled down to spend the night in the protest space. A group of men and women
This paper offers a sensual history of queer spectatorship in India by bringing together the circ... more This paper offers a sensual history of queer spectatorship in India by bringing together the circulation of European art cinema in India, prior to the 1990s, and the space of queer film festivals that emerges in the last two decades in India. Through a synthesis of ethnographic accounts that reconstruct film viewing experiences and historical investigations of film festival archives I demonstrate that in the long history of mainstream film festivals in India 'world cinema, ' mediated by European art-house cinema, has functioned as a repository of queer sexuality. This paper juxtaposes the embodied histories of cinematic encounters in India and more recent accounts of curating queer film festivals to disrupt the conception of cinema as a tool to consolidate sexual identities. It explores the non-cohesive subjectivities engendered through practices of film viewing to argue that queer film festivals have a generative power when they disturb, play with and shake the sensorium of the spectator. Thus, the paper draws on encounters between world cinema and its many publics and between the embodied spectator and the screen to open up the very conception of queer cinema as remaking rather than consolidating identities. This paper is one of the first attempts to explore the transnational cultural circuits that embed queer film festivals in South Asia.
South Asian Popular Culture, 2011
This paper analyzes the debates around the regional language film Avalude Ravukal (Her Nights, d.... more This paper analyzes the debates around the regional language film Avalude Ravukal (Her Nights, d. I.V. Sasi, 1978), a controversial film produced by the Kerala film industry credited as being responsible for launching soft-porn cinema as a genre in India. This paper tracks the shifting circuits of Avalude Ravukal and its fractured aesthetic codes to analyze the role of cultural production in configuring the regional public sphere. The intertextual network of Avalude Ravukal and its reception, functions as a live archive of popular memory through which I can track the mutually constitutive relationship between the ‘excesses’ of cinema and moral anxieties within regional publics, especially around the figure of the prostitute. The paper demonstrates that in order to map the non-linear histories of Indian cinema, it is necessary to examine how this medium is enmeshed in vernacular socialities within the heterogeneous space of the nation.
Inter-asia Cultural Studies, 2009
... In order to perform this dichotomous relationship, the film posits a traditional Nair home an... more ... In order to perform this dichotomous relationship, the film posits a traditional Nair home and a picture-perfect rural Kerala as the backdrop for its &amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;#x27;love story&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;#x27;. There is a need to construct a calm river for a counter cultural stone to create its ripples. ...
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Papers by Navaneetha Mokkil