The Missing People:

A Critique of Dalit Representations in Films

A.C. Sreehari

[Abstract: Malayalam films which narrate Dalit experience, directly or indirectly,

have a dominant male as the protagonist, overpowering ordinary lives and everyday

occurrences and resistances. Untouchability arising from caste, gender and other

infirmities have been romanticised and aestheticised in such films. The availability of

an international market post 1990s has facilitated such misrepresentations to a large

extent. Obsessions of films to romanticize the ‘untouchables’ have led to erasing their

histories of resistance. On the contrary discriminations against them are highlighted,

leading to the construction of liberal narratives of victimhood. Film as a

cultural/ideological entity necessitates a critique of liberal humanist construction of

visual texts. Selected films made in and around the region Payyanur are elaborated to

argue how the issue of untouchability is appropriated by casteist Malayalam film to

suit the oriental gaze of an international audience.]

Availability of international markets for indigenous cultures, post 1990s, encourage

film makers to produce films on regional cultures, both art and popular, to increasingly

cater to a global gaze. These films revive interest in the cultures of the formerly

colonized communities; they “(re)inhabit the imaginary geographies and remoulded

desires of the Occident” (Muraleedharan 32). In other words, the ‘uncivilized’ cultures

of the East are restored as exotic spectacles in international film festivals. The

construction of Dalit identity in films validates historicization in such a context. The

term Daliti is used to refer to those communities rendered untouchable due to their

lower caste status. Most of such issue based films, made also in anticipation of

international screenings, construct aestheticized or exoticized images of

‘untouchability.’ Untouchability is however not limited to caste identity but extends to

practices of discrimination based on gender, religion and other cultural constructs of

normativity.ii Films have been produced in and around the region Payyanur, in North

Kerala, on various forms of untouchability arising from caste, gender, and other

infirmities. Based on selected films related to the cultural geography of Payyanur, I

attempt to describe how the appropriation of untouchability through its aestheticization

becomes pivotal for the success of mainstream patriarchal films in international

circuits.

Aestheticization of untouchability erases the political impact of films, making them

part of a majoritarian discourse of power, forsaking their capacity for ‘becoming

minor.’iii

Deleuze connects the theme of minority that he elaborated with Félix Guattari

with his thoughts on cinema in order to set art the task of "contributing to the invention

of a people." But, this cannot be an isolated act. It is thoroughly political and

collective. Rather than being based on a unified or unifying discourse, minority cinema

must produce collective utterances whose paradoxical property is to address a people

who are missing, and in so doing, urge them towards becoming. However, in films

under discussion, the acts of resistance and survival by various communities are quite

often erased, while imposing and sustaining eternal victimhood and lack of agency on

the part of the ‘untouchables.’

Cast(e) as ‘Victims:’ From Documentary to Feature Film.

In Kerala today, there is a strong tendency to regard “dalit discourse as a mere

appendix” (Baburaj 371) to the history of modernity. The main cause of this is a form

of hegemonic politics that drowns subaltern discourse through silence and

misinterpretation. Its mode of functioning is to banish Otherness from the intellectual

field and to institute the traditional unity of the elite as the standard. The emerging

voices of Dalits get silenced by appropriating their agency and transforming them as

passive victims of casteist patriarchy. A politicised Dalit is a figure that cannot be

afforded by casteist historiography, leading to either a patronizing or a victimisation

of Dalits onscreen. Similarly, contemporaenity of caste is a lie according to casteist

discourses. The ‘reality of caste’ is something that is attributed to the past and as an

evil that has already been eradicated. This attitude that doesn’t want to address the

reality of caste in the present may be seen prevalent in films.

The region Payyanur has been a centre for various political movements since 1928.

This includes organized movements against British colonization and feudalism on the

one hand and other protests against casteism, environmental destruction etc by

individuals and micro groups on the other. Civil disobedience movements in and

around Payyanur, organized peasant revolts in Kayyur, Karivellur etc., questioned the

oppressive measures of the landlords and the colonial regime. The preservation of

mangrove forests by Dalits like Pokkudan, protest against verbal and physical abuses

by Dalit women like Chithralekha etc. recently sought to interrogate the unaddressed

casteism of the earlier anti-colonist and anti-feudalist movements. Films that address

and are addressed by the region Payyanur in various ways, however, in their attempts

to have global reach, appropriate the Dalit resistances and contestation with the

casteist, patriarchal society, while constructing the Dalit as a subject position of

eternal victimhood.

The feature film Papilio Buddha (2013) was inspired by various atrocities towards

various Dalit communities in Kerala, as well as their fights of resistance. Dalit

protests demanding liveable land in Chengara and Muthanga, and protests for right to

access in work spaces like auto stands, apart from other countless instances of

protests, served ground for a film as Papilio Buddha. The female character of the

film, an autorikshaw driver, was provoked by Chitralekha, a Dalit woman

autorikshaw driver of Edat, Payyanur, who had to face the brunt of caste violence

from the neighbourhood. Chithralekha, was one of the first woman auto drivers to

enter the respective workplace which was dominated by men largely from backward

castes. Her small, unfinished house stands at the very end of a long road dotted with

huge houses belonging to people who are sustained by Gulf money. Chitralekha and

her family are the Dalit ‘others’ of this region.iv

In a Thiyya dominant region,

Chitralekha’s marriage to a Thiyya man inflamed the scenario. Apart from the

physical assault, cultural casting off was initiated; her grandmother was branded

insane, her mother called a local ‘prostitute’ and she herself was labelled as

unwomanly, aggressive and one with a ‘loose’ morale.

However, the casteist violence that Chitralekha had to face was not a narrative of

victimisation. She is generally considered by many as a symbol and sign of the voice

of resistance of Dalits in modern Kerala. Chitralekha has been quite articulate about

her political rights to land as well as her right to work and earn a living. Her life has

been one of constant struggle and protest against the casteist public that constantly

denied her rights to job and a decent living. This narrative of Dalit woman resistance,

which is an important document of politicisation of Dalits, is however subverted in

the film Papilio Buddha which also draws on the experience of an assaulted Dalit

woman autorickshaw driver.

Chitralekha’s protests against the so called modern, secular, progressive and high

culture doesn’t qualify as material enough for a film supposedly addressing issues of

Dalit identity. The film tends to construct Dalits as eternal victims, and

romanticizes/eroticizes the character of the auto driver. The eroticization of the female

body through graphic depiction of rape and nudity facilitates a male gaze as in any

other Malayalam mainstream commercial film.

Arundhathi Roy describes the depiction of rape in Shekar Kapur’s Bandit Queen

(1994) as a re-creation of violence on Phoolan Devi, her degradation and humiliation

for public consumption. Phoolan herself was reluctant of recounting the violence on

her. Brilliantly staged rapes, are exploitative in that they satisfy the gaze of a middle

class, casteist patriarchy that delights in stripping ‘fallen’ women while taking extra

care to worship the(ir) women at home. The eroticized rape in Papilio Buddha serves

a similar purpose. The Dalits in the film, on the other hand, are constructed as a group

of isolated people who desire little connections, cultural or political, with other

communities. The role of Chitralekha was played by Saritha, an alumnus of Payyanur

College, who bagged special jury mention for her performance at the 2012 Kerala

State Film Awards. While the Dalit environmentalist Kallen Pokkudan was cast as a

similar character in the film, Chitralekha was cast(e) off from the frames of the film.

It is a challenge for any film maker to develop a form or a cinematic language to

speak about caste. Ajithkumar A.S. is skeptical of the portrayal of caste in the pro-

Dalit film Don’t Be Our Fathers (2013) by Rupesh Kumar, himself a Dalit director

and critic, also an alumnus of Payyanur college. It also tries to place caste as

something of the past, which is highlighted; while no instances of caste violence of

the present is shown. A realistic narrative is often used to portray the caste

experiences of the past like using exotic music which only helps to anthropologise the

people of Peringeel, near Payyanur. The film also fails in highlighting Dalits as

agential while the engagement of the people of Peringeel is shown as an isolated

community having nothing whatsoever to do with the rest of the society.

Discredited Goddesses and Appropriated Communities

Another means by which lower castes are cast onscreen is through the highly

exoticised narratives of Theyyam. Theyyam, a ritualistic performance, largely by

people belonging to lower caste community is appropriated by the visual media to

perpetuate a casteist myth of patriarchal hegemony. Of all the ritual art forms that are

practiced in Kerala, Theyyam is perhaps one of the most awe inspiring rituals and

provides a real treat for a cultural enthusiast. The colonial view which ascribed the

origin of Theyyam to Devil dance has now been discredited. This ritual art was

performed and known only in the northern districts of Kerala has now become a

symbol representing the cultural heritage of Kerala with the intervention of the

Tourism Promotion Council.v From the discussion made above one could see two

important aspects. First, Theyyam predominantly was a ritual that places women at the

centre, both as the divinity to be worshipped and the devotee who must cater to the

ritual system. Secondly, in recent past Theyyam has moved out of its ‘sacred space’ in

north Malabar to spaces created by modernity across Kerala and thus became a cultural

heritage of Kerala, instead of north Malabar (Vadakkiniyil 185).

Though there are more than 400 Theyyams, different forms of Bhagavathi dominates

in number. The predominance of Bhagavathi - Mother Goddess - is not accidental. It

illustrates the nature of pre-modern North Malabar, where women were not a ‘second

sex’. Instead, the matrilineal family system tracing the lineage through the woman is

the key in her socio-cultural formation. Most films on Theyyam cater to the patriarchal

taste and an orientalist gaze leading to an inferiorising of the indigenous cultures, when

it gets translated into the diegetic space. So do documentaries. A re-view of these

would reveal that the colonial eye/identity still remain as the source and force behind

any representation even in the so-called post colonial resistant era. In films, one finds

that Theyyam is removed off its regional dimensions. Film being a white, male

dominated industry is not able to fairly depict the female and minorities. It does the

same thing with the low cast(e) men/dalits who perform Theyyam. Theyyams are noted

for their pro–female, subaltern stance. But this gets reversed in films.

The two feature films are Kaliyattam (The Play of God, 1997) and Pulijanmam (Tiger

God, 2006) and the documentaries are Gothrasmrithi (The First Culture, 1992) and

Devanarthakan (The Divine Dancer, 2001), which are about the ritualistic Theyyam

performance in North Kerala. In the film Kaliyattam by one of the most popular

directors of Malayalam film industry, Jayaraj, the heroine is smothered to death by the

protagonist for her alleged infidelity. But the male in the film and his act of killing

himself out of the unbearable remorse are portrayed with heroic proportions as in

Greek tragedies. The logic of practice within the Theyyam to celebrate divinity of the

mother who met an unnatural death is reversed to celebrate the masculine world in

films. The film Pulijanmam directed by Priyanandanan, that won the National Award

for the Best Feature Film in 2006 narrates the myth of Kaari Gurukkal, a young Pulaya

sorcerer, who was deceived by the king and turned as a tiger and lost his human

existence. Unable to take back the human form, Kaari enters the forest to continue the

rest of his life as a beast. In the film, Prakasan the protagonist who is cast in the role of

Kaari, is portrayed as a self-made man, capable of standing alone, resisting the centres

of power, he is deserted by his close associates, including his lady love, during the

crucial moments of life.

In Pulijanmam, the potential of the woman celebrated in the myth is silenced. In the

myth, it was a woman who taught Kaari the lessons of ‘Kalari’ and sorcery. This made

him a complete man with the potential to challenge the existing order. But when comes

to the film, this womanly part of the creation of Kaari is sidelined. Second aspect is

that, in the myth, Kaari’s would-be-wife was not the culprit in pushing Kaari to forest;

rather, it was the envy and the deception of the King and his retinue. The myth does

not belittle the Dalit woman. But the film that receives wider attention and awards

confines the charge of his exile within the woman (his would-be-wife). It is her

withdrawal from supporting Prakashan in his attempt to challenge the existing evils of

the society (specifically, communalism and become part of the new social movements)

that leaves him alone and forces him to go on exile. Further, Pulijanmam produces

Prakashan as a man who is perfectly individualized and as one who stands alone with

his unrefined potential.

Chayilyam (Shades of Red, 2013) by Manoj Kana who hails from Payyanur, traces the

story of a widow who is forced to don the Theyyam costume by a society which

makes a goddess out of her. The film that was screened in several International Film

Festivals has the motif of ‘red’ established through depictions of her anger, menstrual

blood, red of the Theyyam costume and undertones of the radical Left movement. A

widow recovering from the ‘shock’ of her husband’s death is finally saved by two

male figures as though she cannot resist without the support of men, as in mainstream

Malayalam films. Theyyam performed by a woman, in actual practice, doesn’t have to

bear this shame. Byari (2012) is a film by Suveeran on the ethnic Muslim

community, ‘trapped’ in their own faiths and beliefs, having its own traditions and

distinct cultural identity. The film is about conditioning women sexuality in the

community, and it underscores the normativity of monogamy with men as protectors.

Gothrasmruthi (The First Culture, 1992) by M.A. Rahman, a documentary film on

Theyyam performance of the region, focuses upon the mutuality of the male and the

reassertion of virulent masculinity, a project he continued in his most acclaimed

documentaries later on. Devanarthakan (The Divine Dancer, 2001), a documentary

film by Sudhish Gopalakrishnan on the life and artistic career of Kannan Peruvannan,

the Theyyam artist, is cast in the premises of the upper caste Brahmins, rather than that

of the natural habitat of Theyyams, i.e., the Sacred forests of North Kerala. The whole

story of his dispossessed life and the anti-brahmanical practices of Theyyam worship

in general are sidelined when it comes to the film. The director cast the life of the

Theyyam artist Kannan Peruvannan in the mould of Kathakali, a highly stylized art

form where the performers are mostly men of dominant castes.

The Patronized Other: Engendering Transgenders

Transexuality is inherent to everyday gender practices, but mostly gets concealed

through a heterosexual societal grooming. It is pathologized as an abnormal state of

existence that requires treatment and medication. The concept of the transsexual as

‘other’ gender or the third gender is also a result of rigid compartmentalization of men

and women into masculine and feminine identities. Masculinity and femininity are

fluid categories that constantly cross into each other.

In 2015 Kalki Subrahmanyam inaugurated a national seminar on transgenderism in

C.A.S. Collge, Madayi, near Payyanur, which discussed in detail the discourses of the

margins. Among others, the documentary Aan Poov (Male Flower, 1996) by P. Balan,

one of the earliest onscreen adaptations of transgenderism which discusses the

transformation from a female to a male, was screened. The paper presentations and

questions that were raised as part of making transgender as a category worth reckoning

in academic space, however gets co-opted when organizations like Payyanur Mid-

Town Rotary Club vi

invite Kalki Subramanyam, a transgender activist, as chief guest

to their program. Through such endeavors, such organizations attempt to conform to

neo liberal, statist agendas of making the ‘untouchable’ third gender visible, offering

them a cultural space to celebrate their selves as ‘others’ rather than as part of the ‘high

culture’ of Payyanur.

Of Age and Infirmities: Endangered Masculinities

Films have a veritable role in formulating and perpetuating masculinity like

femininity as a social construct. The males in films are never the manifestations of

heterogenous variants of men available in the everyday, ordinary life. Those men are

reproductions of the hegemonic vein by appropriating the variants using the

possibilities of visual media. Such hegemonic engenderings pressurize the ordinary

males of everyday to cope with the models of normativity, defined and put in place by

a colonial patriarchal ideology which was actually reforming the ‘barbaric’ life of the

Malayalis. Man has been given the role of the sovereign subject, one who carries the

look, as the sole agent of the change. He has to go out in search of material goods and

come back to look after his family. In this section, I would elaborate on three films,

Ekantham (The Solitary, 2006) by Madhu Kaithapram, Kaliyorukkam (The

Groundwork, 2007) by S. Sunil Kumar and Adimadhyantham (The Beginning, Middle

and The End, 2011) by Sherry, three directors in and around Payyanur, where, the

issue of age is discussed in relation to masculinity. While the first film discusses the

loneliness of upper caste males, the other two discusses how patriarchal, casteist

masculinity is instilled in boys when they are quite young.

Ekantham (The Solitary, 2006), which bagged the national award for the debut

director, portrays two male figures weak in their old age and who longs for company

and assistance. However, this otherwise alternative realm of infirm masculinity is

loaded with the cultural capital specific to an assertive upper caste community. The

Dalit peasant working in their paddy field doesn’t get a space in the melodramatic

portrayal of old age males and their extended familial relations. The recent film

Pedithondan (The Coward, 2014) directed by Pradeep Chokli, in Kannur, treats the

subject in the same way as in the popular/commercial films by normalising the

impotent male towards the end of the film. Casting off his coward fits, he is cast-e as

the potent Man.

Children are always excluded from mainstream texts, both visual and literary. Many

classic ‘children's’ tales were originally created for adults and later adapted for a

younger audience. Similarly many children’s films talk about adult issues and

concerns and fail to address the problems of children. S. Sunil Kumar’s Kaliyorukkam

(The Groundwork, 2007), a rural initiative of Kannapuram Grama Panchayath in

Kannur that won the best children’s film award of the year, tells the story of a group

of children who realize that they don't have a playground to play during the summer

vacations as it has been acquired for a commercial purpose. Undaunted, the children

prepare a playground, which they eventually lose to their village elders who

appropriate it for themselves - again for games. The girls and boys of all castes and

colours in the film are sidelined by the grownups but the positioning of the boy as the

leader of the teaming children is what mars the politics of the film according to the

‘fair-skinned’ boy actor, Sreerag, again, an alumnus of Payyanur College. He was

unwilling to screen the film in the college as it was not ‘politically correct’.

Adimadhyantham (The Beginning, Middle and The End, 2011), written and directed

by debutant Sherrey from Taliparamba in Kannur, which won a special mention

award at the 59th National Film Awards, attempts to depict the lives of children of the

region in particular who are marginal to the discourses of the grownups.

Adimadhyantham tells the story of a deaf Dalit boy from northern Kerala named

Ekalavyan, who has to follow and perform tribal rituals to carry forward his family

tradition in Theyyam and traditional beliefs. The fears of the speech-and hearing-

impaired boy, about death and loneliness, form the main narrative of the film. The

boy experiences days and nights differently and has nightmares about death.

However, both the films imagine a potent boy at the centre of affairs. Patriarchal

engendering is facilitated largely through the so called children’s films. Boys and girls

in these films follow an already manufactured pattern of femininity and masculinity.

The heterosexual, nuclear family and the gender-specific duties of the mother and

father provide suitable backgrounds to children’s films, making it nothing but an

imitation of an adult patriarchal world.

Environmental Films and Anthropocentric Aestheticism

In the film, A Pestering Journey (2011), the director, K.R. Manoj, narrates the lives of

Endosulfan victims in Kasaragod district, won National Film Awards of 2010 of the

Best Investigative Film and Best Audiography. The short film was elemental in

bringing up the issue to the notice of the international viewers which along with the

photographs of Madhuraj, a Payyanur based photographer, in Mathrubhumi Weekly,

sensitized people in the Stockholm Convention and effected a ban of the use of

Endosulfan. The film has been widely received and won awards, primarily because of

aestheticising the pestering issues of Kerala. Madhuraj’s photography also

foregrounds a similar perspective, where individual infirmity is highlighted and

aestheticized over the collective resistances of the community. The voice expected

from such alternative films becomes part of the major discourse and a product that is

acceptable for awards. The people who suffer are treated as objects and their voice

muffled. The condition of the sufferers has been generalized. While K.R. Manoj’s

Pestering Journey aestheticised the burning issue of the people of Kasaragod, Amoeba

(2016) by Manoj Kana, another film on the same issue, attempts to approach the

sensitive issue through a romanticization of the institution of family.

Environmental films that are supposed to generate a new language that will challenge

the statist developmental projects, through a critique of the destruction of nature and

resultant crisis, tend to romanticize the issue and the victims further. Babu Kambrath,

a documentary film director from Payyanur, in his Kaippad (The Backwater Paddy

and Fish Field, 2010), attempts to address the issue of nature in North Kerala, getting

crippled by men who are at the centre of developmental affairs from an eco-political

perspective. In the ‘Film on Environmental Issues’ section of the 2010, IFFI, the

‘Vasudha Award’ went to Kaippad which attempts to caution the crisis of exploitation

of nature. The film discusses the association between people and nature, ‘kaippad’

being a backwater marshy land behind an estuary, where the river joins the sea, the

director charts out the ecological changes and association between people and the

environment through different seasons. The film Kaippad being basically an

anthropocentric environmental monologue, objectifies and exoticises a habitat, rather

than problematise the pestering issues of the silent Dalit wo/men labourers in water.

A critique of film as a cultural/ideological entity suggests an understanding of the

media’s confrontations with humanist power structures embedded in gender, caste and

regional identities. Liberal humanist ideology forces everyone to conform to a

homogenous cultural unity, threatening distinct identities of minority groups, so that it

is not everybody but only the minorities and the disadvantaged who are forced to

forego their cultural identities. Although issues of untouchability are raised and

addressed in films, there is an attempt to romanticize and exoticize them, making such

films part of the mainstream, majoritarian discourse of power. Films appropriate

untouchability arising from caste, gender and other cultural constructs of normativity.

The critique of various forms of untouchability in films is to be a significant step ahead

in historicizing Dalit as a politicized and contemporary identity.

Works Cited

Ajithkumar A.S. Dalitizing Cinema: A Critique of Rupesh Kumar’s Don’t be Our

Fathers.http://roundtableindia.co.in/index.php?option=com_content&view=arti

cle&id=6888. Web. 11.09. 2013.

Babu Raj, K.K. “Subjectivity, Otherness and Language.” Trans. Dilip M. Menon. No

Alphabet in Sight. Eds. Susie Tharu and K. Satyanarayana. Delhi: Penguin

Books, 2011. Print.

Deleuze, Gilles. Cinema II: The Time-Image. Minneosta: Minneosta Uty Press, 1989.

Print.

Muraleedharan, T. “Shakespearing the Orient: Western Gaze and the Technology of

Otherness in Jayaraj Films.” Deep Focus (March 2002): 31-38. Print.

Roy, Arundhathi. “The Great Indian Rape Trick I-II.”

http://www.sawnet.org/books/writing/roy_bq1.html. Web. 12/12/2015.

Vadakkiniyil, Dinesan. Teyyam: The Poiesis of Rite and God in Malabar, South India.

Norway: University of Bergen, 2009. Print.

Film Cited

Balan, P., dir. Aan Poov. [The Male Flower], 1996. Documentary.

Cheriyan, Jayan, dir. Papilio Buddha. Kayal Films, 2013. Film.

Chokli, Pradeep, dir. Pedithondan [The Coward], 2014. Film.

Gopalakrishnan, Sudhish, dir. Devanarthakan [The Divine Dancer]. 2001.

Documentary.

Kana, Manoj, dir. Amoeba, Neru Films, 2015. Film.

---, dir. Chayilyam [Shades of Red]. Neru Films, 2013. Film.

Kaithapram, Madhu, dir. Ekantham [The Solitary]. Rubens Mediya, 2006. Film.

Kambrath, Babu, dir. Kaippad [The Backwater Paddy and Fish Field]. 2009.

Documentary.

Kapur, Shekar, dir. Bandit Queen. Kaleidoscope Entertainment, 1994. Film.

Manoj, K.R., dir. A Pestering Journey. Tropical Cinema, 2011. Film.

Priyanandanan, dir. Pulijanmam [Tiger God]. 2006. Film.

Rahman, M.A., dir. Gothrasmruthi [The First Culture]. 1992. Documentary.

Sherrey, dir. Adimadhyantham [The Beginning, Middle and The End]. , 2011. Film.

Sunil, S., dir. Kaliyorukkam [The Groundwork]. 2007. Film.

End Notes i“Dalit” was used in 1930as a translation of “Depressed Classes,” the term the British used for what is

now called the scheduled caste. Dr Ambedkar chose the term “Broken man” as English translation of

Dalits in his paper- “The Untouchables” in 1948.http://ijaprr.com/download/1440420598.pdf. Web.

12/01/2016.

ii Priyanka Dasgupta reports the nature of discrimination that a transgender had to face after his surgery

that realigned him to a woman. She was treated like an untouchable after the surgery;

http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/city/kolkata/I-am-treated-like-an-untouchable-Transgender-

teacher/articleshow/50789504.cms. Web. 15/01/2016. iii

"The moment the master, or the colonizer proclaims 'there have never been people here,' the missing

people are a becoming, they invent themselves, in shanty towns and camps, or in ghettos, in new

conditions of struggle to which a necessarily political art must contribute." http://www.contempaesthetics.org/newvolume/pages/article.php?articleID=509. Web. 15/01/2016. iv See the final report of a solidarity mission that was invited by Feminists Kerala Network to visit

Payyanur and attempt to ascertain the facts around an incident of violence involving Chithralekha, a

Dalit woman auto driver, on January 20, 2010: “Living outside the Track,” A Woman Worker’s

Struggle against Caste and Patriarchy in Kerala: Background on the History of Violence against

Chithralekha and on the Decision to set up a Fact-finding Team by Carmel Christy and Jenny Rowena,

Feminists Kerala Network. http://kafila.org/2010/02/25/living-outside-the-track-a-woman-worker-

struggle-against-caste-and-patriarchy-in-kerala/. Also see the documentary - Chitralekha: A victim of

Kerala CPM's Goon Raj – YouTube Video for chitralekha auto driver 31:33

https://www.youtube.com/watch? v=1UQaIxgg4NE Apr 20, 2012 - Dalitcamera Ambedkar. Web.

15/01/2016. vKannur is introduced by DTPC as the region famous for its dazzling ritual performance called

Theyyam. http://www.dtpckannur.com/. Web. 13/05/2013. vi Rotary club of Payyanur Midtown is one of the most prominent clubs in the district- 3202.

http://rotarypayyanurmidtown.blogspot.in/. Web. 08/07/2015.

Chitralekha: A victim of Kerala CPM's Goon Raj - YouTube

Video for chitralekha auto driver▶ 31:33

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1UQaIxgg4NE

Apr 20, 2012 - Dalitcamera Ambedkar