The Visual Culture of Mass Grief in Kerala: Juxta-political Formations of Melodrama in Cinema, Celebrity Funerals and Political violence

(2020-2025)

Abstract

This thesis examines the visual culture of public mourning in Kerala through the affective intensities of distinct mourning publics visa- a- vis their conflicts with the public sphere of the state. In contrast to mourning within familial or private circles, it specifically addresses public forms of grieving, mediated through mass public attendance, collective rituals and media spectacles. Such mourning publics may manifest through melodramatic displays of mass grief, where emotional responses to death are materialised as political or cultural expressions of public affect and are often amplified into loci of mass mobilisations. In particular, the thesis analyses the affective publics across three vital sites of mass grieving in Kerala: (1) the performative spectacles of public affect at celebrity funerals, (2) the affective solidarities in mourning in contemporary Malayalam cinema (3) and the discursive construction of ‘martyrdom’ in public mourning/commemorations of slain Communist party workers. Grappling with the transformations of emotional outpouring to death into political theatres of mass grief, sites of subversive solidarities and mechanisms of ideological consolidations, as elaborated respectively in the thesis chapters, I analyse how spectacles of their melodramatic excess contest Kerala’s self-fashioning as an exceptional paradigm of rational modernity. This narrative of exceptionalism, based on its claim to have cultivated a distinctive rational public culture that transcends affective populist discourses from its mass cultural politics, is undermined by visceral displays of melodramatic transgressions of the mourning publics in the state. Melodrama is, therefore, foregrounded as a key cultural, political and aesthetic force that ruptures the privileging of realism as the dominant mode of public address, legitimised through the trajectory of the state’s public sphere upon print mediated rational deliberations. My research, subsequently, offers an affective reading of Kerala modernity by grappling with the emotional undercurrents in mass participation that manifest as juxta political formations of melodrama that operate beside formal politics.

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