the missing people: a critique of dalit representations in films … · 2019-12-27 · theyyam, a...
TRANSCRIPT
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