LANGUAGE IN INDIA

Strength for Today and Bright Hope for Tomorrow

Volume 13:8 August 2013
ISSN 1930-2940

Managing Editor: M. S. Thirumalai, Ph.D.
Editors: B. Mallikarjun, Ph.D.
         Sam Mohanlal, Ph.D.
         B. A. Sharada, Ph.D.
         A. R. Fatihi, Ph.D.
         Lakhan Gusain, Ph.D.
         Jennifer Marie Bayer, Ph.D.
         S. M. Ravichandran, Ph.D.
         G. Baskaran, Ph.D.
         L. Ramamoorthy, Ph.D.
Assistant Managing Editor: Swarna Thirumalai, M.A.

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Masculinizing Radha: The Politics of Representation
in Chandupottu

Roshni Prabhakaran, M.A. and Nithya Thomas Poovathingal

Abstract

Malayalam cinema, from its inception, was strongly rooted in the contemporary social reality. Social realism at the level of thematic and stereotyping at the level of characterization is a peculiar brew for a cinema to adopt.

Cinema has become an important tool in the study of identities and sexualities today because of its ubiquitous presence as a popular medium and a powerful ideological apparatus negotiating with subjectivities and pleasures. Chandupottu is a typical Malayalam cinema that apparently has everything that constitutes a typical mainstream film in the Indian context. It also openly proclaims that it is different for its characterisation of the protagonist as a transvestite.

This paper aims to analyze how such a movie failed to acknowledge the effeminateness of the male. It tries to highlight how instead the movie brought forth traditional machismo of the male hero and defined an unsophisticated masculinity.

Keywords: Identity, Social realism, Transvestite, Masculinity.

Representation of an Effeminate Male

Chandupottu is one of the most successful Malayalam films of 2005. The film was also conspicuously different from mainstream cinema in its representation of an ‘effeminate male’ as the central character. The film tried to undermine one of the strongly established conventions of mainstream Malayalam cinema – the machismo of the male hero. This paper examines how far this is true. It analyses how Chandupottu, the movie, did not acknowledge the possibility of effeminate male, and how, instead, the movie complied with the crudest form of masculinity.

This is only the beginning part of the article. PLEASE CLICK HERE TO READ THE ENTIRE ARTICLE IN PRINTER-FRIENDLY VERSION.

Roshni Prabhakaran, M.A., NET
Assistant Professor (ad-hoc)
Malabar Christian College
Calicut- 673005
Kerala
India
roshni.prabhakaran@gmail.com

Nithya Thomas Poovathingal
The South Indian Bank
Aristo Shopping Complex
Main Road
Mahe 673310
Pondicherry
India
nithyatp88@gmail.com
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