18/01/2016
Films are important cultural texts and echo the secret desires and fantasies, and the dominant ideologies and abiding passions that shape a society. But sometimes they also reveal the underlying hypocrisies, the deeply engrained passions that a land and its people celebrate on the surface, but will never abide by in their real lives.
The film Ennu Ninte Moideen is a case in point. Based on a real life story, it narrates the love of a Muslim man and a Hindu woman, one that was never consummated, but, nevertheless, stood the test of time and triumphed even over death. Love stories are always popular, and the greatest stories of the world have been woven around this motif of eternal love, whether it be Laila or Majnu, or Romeo and Juliet.
But Malayalee and love? In a land where love marriages have become anathema, what does the runaway success of Moideen point to? As hordes of Malayalee men and women continue to throng the cinema halls, many of who shed copious tears over Kanchanamala’s tryst with destiny and her chaste love that mourns the death of a man who made her a widow without ever tying the nuptial knot, one is left wondering, what does the film really celebrate? An interreligious marriage that never takes place on screen and is conveniently thwarted by death? Or the chaste, monandrous ideal love, that is the mark of the modern Malayalee woman who has so successfully shed the remnants of a matrilineal polyandrous past?
Irrespective of the secular, egalitarian values that Malayalees seem to be so vociferous about, it is indeed very rarely that one comes across marriages that dare to destabilize caste or religion today. Each community marries into their own community and all the nuances of caste and creed are strictly maintained and adhered to, as steadfastly as possible, so much so that caste is getting more and more entrenched and fortified by the very same individuals who speak of a casteless society.
Marriages are an acid test as to what a society really believes in and what its dominant ideologies are. In reproducing class structures and caste hierarchies, Malayalees, through social and religious endogamy, seek to check social mobility and keep individuals in their proper and respective spaces. As young and dynamic Malayalee boys and girls put themselves up for sale on the marriage market, advertising their presence in Nair Matrimony, Ezhava Matrimony, Christian Matrimony and Muslim Matrimony, our Renaissance dreams and hopes that education would lead our youth to exogamous marriages and thus help them question the entrenched power systems of class and caste have finally breathed their last.
The film thus stands as a symbol of Malayalees’ hypocrisy in celebrating a love that believes in no barriers. The very same men and women who have made the film a resounding success come back to homes that marginalize the love and desires of their children, moulding them into the tight casts of caste identities and undemocratic patriarchal value systems.