The Representation of Disability in Malayalam Cinema

Abstract

Cinema is a powerful medium that reaches a mass audience. As the film industry focuses more on entertainment than social awareness, it hardly prefers reality over fantasy. But Malayalam cinema has been prudent and responsible with its realistic representation of social concerns at least through parallel cinema. Malayalam Cinema is one of the most appreciated South Indian film industries with hundreds of releases per year. Disability is a very underrated/misinterpreted issue in society as it deals with a marginalized community. Society has a lot of prejudices in connection with disability and films play a major role in newlineforming/breaking these stereotypes. The representation of disability in Malayalam cinema in five decades is relevant as the representation is better and more inclusive in comparison with Bollywood (Hindi cinema). From Kavyamela (1965) to Margamkali (2019), Malayalam cinema has witnessed a lot of changes in the representation of disability. Disability has been a source of pity and sympathy or a piece of comic intrusion for years in Indian cinema and Malayalam cinema was no exclusion. The film reflects society. The primary objective of the study is to analyse the influence of film representations on the disabled communities in the society. For that, films have been identified and categorized according to the types of disability. newlineIndian RPWD (Right to Persons with Disabilities) Act of 2016 is chosen for classifying the disabilities as disability is multidimensional and no single definition can cover all the aspects. From the PWD (Equal Opportunities, Protection of Rights, and Full Participation) Act of 1995 to the RPWD Act of 2016, the number of disabilities has increased from seven to twenty-one. The identified films are analyzed using three different theories (Nelson s stereotypes, Marxian concepts, and Harlan Hahn s approach) to understand the various aspects of disability representation. In-depth interviews of the subject matter experts contributed to the understanding of the shift in disability