On the Edge: Media imaginaries of Lakshadweep
by Bindu Menon
The coral archipelago of Lakshadweep, a small group of 36 islands in the Indian Ocean, has always been a complex contact zone of languages, food, religious and cultural practices. The proposed administrative measures by the current Lakshadweep administrator, appointed by the Central Government of India, not only threaten the cultural and religious autonomy of the islands, but also suggest an extractive capitalism and neoliberal governance at work that could lead to the displacement of the island population. These interventions seem to be comparable to a global Necropolitics, particularly in the context of post-Covid vulnerabilities of local communities coerced into disciplining and regimentation.¹
The history of Lakshadweep’s colonial and post-colonial administration, on the other hand, points to consultative and deliberative processes involving local representatives in major reforms, thus bringing into consideration the multi-layered cultural and ecological aspects of the island group.² A Muslim majority Union Territory, the island communities are also classified as scheduled tribes, bestowing layers of identities. While a palpable disregard for cultural and religious practices of the island population is evident in the many measures that are underway, they also include land reforms that pose threats to the rich ecology of the archipelago. The proposed land reforms provide relaxed rules to enable extraction of natural resources of threatening proportions that could lead to the displacement of island communities. Besides, a petition filed in the Kerala High court points out that the new land regulations seek to introduce sweeping changes to land use patterns in the islands and provide the administration powers to confiscate at will the small holdings of property owned by the islanders. Another significant move is one which aims at severing the ties of the archipelago with mainland Kerala, through the shifting of freight service from the Beypore port to Mangalore.³
To the evolving crisis, the archipelago has responded primarily through the Save Lakshadweep campaign on social media and through trans-local networks. In the unfolding of this crisis, the singular archives of social media image cultures emerged as the most important sites to read and gauge the established linkages to broader spatial, social, and political realms. How do we trace the genealogies of the new image cultures that has emerged in Lakshadweep? More importantly, how do we tell a story of media isolation, from both state and commercial neglect, as well as the story of emerging media connections? How might we map the connectivity among littoral societies to screen imaginaries, desires, and exposure? What tropes, idioms and aesthetic elements continue, and what gets reconstituted, reimagined, and ruptured? This process of mapping will take us through key moments in the fragmented history of media in and on Lakshadweep.
An illuminative, small moment appears in Dweepu (Ramu Kariat, 1977), an Indian, Malayalam language film, where the childlike, pure, and innocent Bakru asks his family members to get him an elephant, a bus and a train when they return from their visit to mainland India, in this case Kerala. All three objects, absent in the island life are a source of wonderment for not just Bakru, but for all the islanders as we learn from the sense of rejoice evidently displayed by his family members during their visit when boarding a bus, spotting a train and an elephant. This dynamic, of a pristine, ‘underdeveloped’ dweepu/island and the ‘advanced’ mainland forms the grid for the handful of screen imaginaries of Lakshadweep.
Dispensing with the tropes of a straight realist melodrama, the film instead leans into documentary mode, induced by the circumscribing voice over, resembling the God’s voice of Indian Films Division documentaries. The film is intriguing in its desire to undertake a journey to the archipelago through the ocean. Dweepu also had an impeccable set of creative talents such a Salil Chowdhury, Hrishikesh Mukherjee, Ramachandrababu and M.S. Baburaj, among others.
When approaching screen imaginaries of Lakshadweep, we are quickly led to a vast site of absences and voids. The very few that imagine Lakshadweep as a place and space are spread across a period of fifty years. From disparate time points these texts offer a discourse and critique of complex systems, metaphors and relations that has come to define the islands. Lakshadweep’s Islandness becomes the textual device to construct the specificity of these films and a site of confluences of purity, backwardness and singularity.
The title cards of Dweepu begin with the globe spinning and transitions to a sequence of the Indian ocean map that glides over the rim of the ocean, zooms down to a map of the Lakshadweep islands and slides to the rural landscape of Kerala — an aerial play of sorts with limited technological means. In the absence of an aerial overview of the island territory, these cartographic devices strive to provide us with a coherent structure that is significantly contrasted by the experience on the ground.
In Dweepu, the narrative is propelled by the premise of its orientation, to see “with a cartographer’s eye.” In conceiving of his spontaneous journey, the protagonist relies upon a latent spatial awareness, on maps and charts, a place that could be sensed only through maps until then. This contrast between the relatively static order of the maps, viewed from above, and the mobility and temporality of lives in motion to the island, reminds us of the many dualities that underlies life in mainland Kerala.
The protagonist Chandran and his friends, college educated, belonging largely to dominant caste families are distressed by the large-scale unemployment and corruption of the post-emergency era. Frustrated, they socialise in the local arts & sports clubs and start wondering about corruption, unemployment, and the immanent revolution. Chandran starts working as accountant in the factory owned by the corrupt local bourgeoisie, but soon finds the business practices unethical and quits. His family battles various struggles as well. Chandran gets a government job as a schoolteacher at Minicoy Island and travels to the island in search of a better future. The job would fetch more salary than he would for a similar job in mainland India. As Chandran starts his exploration of the islands, the narrative shifts to quite a different kind of aesthetic, from the melodramatic realism of the earlier frames to a documentary realism. Living among a conclave of government employees from mainland Kerala, he is informed about the loving nature of the islanders.
Chandran pens his first letter home addressed to his father, explaining the loneliness of his initial days and the transition to the warm camaraderie of the islanders. As he starts explaining the life in the island, the camera starts capturing aerial shots of the houses, beaches, sea, coconut groves and fish. Switching to a voice-over mode that grazes over these shots, Chandran says, “8 kilometres long and 600 metres wide, this island has a population that is less than 6000. The islanders are 100 percent believers in Islam…more than half of the island is uninhabited… people here are calm and peace loving… there are no dogs here, neither wild animals nor poisonous snakes. One of the tallest lighthouses in Asia, stands here directing the ships… What we see here is Tunadhipatyam/Tuna dominated economy… men here struggle with the challenges of the ocean… they make good profit from fishing… the tuna products have a huge market in foreign market. The islanders create beautiful handicraft products… the lagoons that lay close to the land are splendid. The coconut palm is their favourite tree as well. Lakshadweep is famous for its high breed of coconut palms…”.
The plot moves where Chandran forms a close bond with his student Ayesha and her family, and in turn they start treating him as one of their own. Chandran invites them to join him on his visit home. The visit to the mainland is presented as an enchanting one, an encounter with objects and creatures hitherto unknown to most islanders. Implicit in the visit is an encounter with a way of life, aspirational modernity, landscape, and geography, that are in stark opposition to the wildness of the island, its peculiar geography and its yet-to-be modern society. Despite the romantic overtures of a local youth, Ayesha’s sister remains devoted to Chandran, who eventually coaxes her into a marriage with the local suitor, before he returns home to the mainland upon fulfilling his mission. In his first encounter with the uneducated Bakru, who expressed his desire to learn, Chandran proclaims that his mission is to educate every individual in the island. Literacy, a key indicator of social development, has received focal attention as early as 19th century in parts of Kerala, such as the Princely states of Travancore. Driven by Missionary interventions, courtly initiatives and propelled by social reform movements in the early 20th century, literacy plays an important part in the social imaginary of Kerala.⁴ The Total Literacy Program (TLP), launched in 1990, was termed “Saksharatha Yajnam” in Malayalam with overwhelming tone of a ritual. The census of 2011 lists Lakshadweep as the second highest in literacy rate among Indian states and Union territories. Reading Chandran’s missionary zeal to ‘educate the islanders’ along with a decade long history of Lakshadweep school system that has employed teachers from mainland Kerala, helps us see the concerted act of mainland imagination at work.
Dweepu’s director Ramu Kariat’s proffer is revelatory in nature insofar as it brought onto screen the colonial gaze that mainland Kerala hesitates to acknowledge. It lays the trope of the pristine, yet to modernise, yet to be civilised island population — a trope that is sustained over many decades. Lakshadweep, as we will see, proved to be essential to mainland fantasies, generating new tropes as their contours keep shifting. If the early film imaginaries such as Dweepu dwelled in fantasies of the ‘other’ who is to be civilised, the imaginaries have shifted to new tropes. Lakshadweep as a trans-peripheral space has been important to its constitution as an archipelagic territory — a national outpost. The constituent elements of such fantasies, as evident in the new screen imaginaries, are getting increasingly tethered to discourses of national integrity and autonomy.
The much-acclaimed web series by Amazon Prime The Family Man represents an apposite manifestation of this ideology. The series, centred around the theme of national security and an intelligence expert’s struggle to keep his domestic life going, begins with the capture of two suspected members of ISIS (Moosa and Asif) from Lakshadweep.
Lakshadweep as a potential hide-out of ISIS members of Kerala origin is a thread repeated over the series. It certainly picks up a common-sense thread of Islamophobic reporting tradition generated across national and local media and supported by the various government agencies such as the National Intelligence Agency (NIA.) Lakshadweep’s connections with Kerala and the pliability of the island community unfolds together in these references. The recent OTT platform release, Malik (Mahesh Narayanan, 2021), establishes a congenial touch with this reference of the archipelago as harbouring Malayalee extremist Islamicist forces. A film drawn from a real incident of violent shootout in Beemapalli in the fringes of Trivandrum, the capital city of Kerala, Malik twists and turns to create composite characters from historical events and figures. Pulling in elements from the biography of Muslim social political leader Abdul Nasar Madani, charged under the draconian law of UAPA since 2005, the central character in the film, Malik, is part hero and part villain. At a crucial moment of the film, following the assassination of an extremist Hindu right-wing leader, Malik and his fiancée escape to Minicoy Island, get married and make the island their hideout. (https://youtu.be/18cpx0zI6SY) The song, set to Dolpattu lyrics in its opening notes, weaves in a narrative of the beautiful coral reefs as a paradise and escape. Later in the film, a confrontation between the coastguard and Malik and his team is staged near the waters of Minicoy Island.
Sinjar (Sandeep Pampally, 2018), the first Jeseri language film that also received a national award (the Indira Gandhi national award for best debut director), marks another moment in recent screen narratives that repeat the trope of the archipelago and its community as linked with international terrorism. Drawing from the Sinjar massacre of 2014, in which thousands of Yazidi men and women were besieged by the Islamic State terrorist group in the homonymous Iraqi district, the film takes a fictional leap and focuses on the struggles of two women who escape from Sinjar and return to their homeland of Lakshadweep.⁵
Such fictional liberties in mainstream filmmaking, with every small manoeuvre, anecdotes, and mis-en-scene, fully inhabit the chosen medium, effectively translating the nationalist ideology and state discourse to tangible politics for the masses. Contributing to the mediation of nationalist fantasies of a pristine island territory that is under the grip of the Islamic terrorists from mainland Kerala, these recent narratives evince the materialist force of ideology. In this intriguing nexus of mainstream media, economic exchange, and nationalist imagination, what kind of media ecology has developed in the Lakshadweep archipelago?
Until the arrival of video technology in the archipelago, cinema exhibitions consisted of Films Division of India (FDI) documentaries and screenings of Malayalam and Hindi language films. Utilising government machinery and mobilising nodes of non-theatrical exhibition circuits, Films Division has joined the Integrated publicity programme of the Indian government in crafting the new citizen since the 1950s. Conceived as programs targeting the ‘simple’ and ‘backward’, rural audiences, FDI film programming included documentaries on themes of development, five-year plans, agriculture, industry, and similar themes of ‘progress’.⁶ It would only be in the 1990s that video technologies took hold of the imagination of the islanders, with supplies of Malayalam VHS cassettes and the opening of a Doordarshan television station in the Kavaratti island in 1998. Radio, on the other hand, seems to have caught up in the islands much earlier, in the 1960s. The British short-wave listener Goeff Watts seems to have linked to radio activity in the Lakshadweep archipelago.⁷ The spatial processes involved in connecting through airwaves in translocal ways and with the larger radio technology elsewhere is a history waiting to be written.
Standing in high relief against this background are the range of media work that emerges from the archipelago, almost as vehicles of surprise. The digital turn has enabled the archipelago to propel into cyberspace. In the diversity of themes, style and platform multiplicity, the borders of water seem to be up for grabs in hitherto unimaginable ways. The political and technological advances of digital video-making is by now well documented. Video as a specific format allowed images to be embedded as hyper-texts and be carried over to diverse social media platforms. This mutability of digital video is exploited to a great advantage in the last decade for a peripheral space like the Lakshadweep archipelago. Comprised of music videos, staged performances, short films, documentaries, and vlogs, most of these videos (available as Youtube clips, Instagram reels and TikToks) create vernacular archives that illuminate the everyday life of the archipelago. YouTube offers a collection of videos on the Lakshadweep song tradition of Dolpattu, documentaries on coir manufacturing, fishing trips and unique features like the global surfing locations of Murambu.
Many short films, like Numma Nattakku Banna Halla in Jeseri language, share a documentary impulse that goes much beyond the desire to represent, but engender a shared life of lack and the brutality of infrastructures. The upcoming film by the first woman filmmaker in Lakshadweep, Ayesha Sulthana’s Flush, explores the failure of health infrastructure of the archipelago.⁸ Stylistically the films provide a heterogenous mix of travel videos, Malayalam new wave cinema and music videos.
The well-crafted documentary Swells of Murambu, shot in Mahal language, centred around the theme of the magnificent surfing tides in Minicoy and on surfing as a way of life for a few islanders, embraces stylistic elements, high-quality camera work of tidal ebbs and flows, recorded music and ethnographic bytes emulating National Geographic documentaries. The highly acclaimed short film Appalaum Malanjiyum dwells on a conflict between two rural youths in the carnivalesque backdrop of a football match, drawing up on the textual idioms of Malayalam new wave cinema. Often subtitled in Malayalam or English, these short films and documentaries complicate the relationships in the complex contact zones of language. The multi-layered spatio-textual dimensions of many of these films transpires within a matrix of spatial relationships and natural phenomena of wind, sea, coral reefs, lagoon, coconut grooves, fish, and other creatures. These multiple registers and the exchanges between them draw out attention towards the diffused politics of the media field in Lakshadweep.
The layered, entangled societies that ensue on the archipelago are presented as establishing themselves and their place in
the world by setting themselves in relief against those of the mainland. Alongside their attendant discourses, the videos provoke questions about internationalization, dependence, and autonomy. Together, they illustrate the border-crossing operations that underpin this set of films and unpack some of the discourses surrounding them. Through the production and circulation of video material, Lakshadweep vloggers also create an island public culture that has emerged as the most important voice of the islands during the recent Save Lakshadweep campaign on social media that registers the power of enumerative publicness.⁹ The corpus of videos that make up island media in Lakshadweep is clearly formed outside the state media networks and circuits, and raises important questions about social imaginaries and politics that are subnational in the modes in which they are produced. Collectively they envisage modes of existence and seek to maintain and enhance the networks of power and possibility that the islands encounter and reveal. The Lakshadweep Islands media ecology guides us towards a recognition of peripheral spaces and how they think, embody, sense, and create form and content.
Notes
[1] A section of the islanders arguing that the spread of Covid19 in the territory was a consequence of the lifting of protocols by the administrator reflects the necropolitical concerns of the local population. See Sreekumar T.T., Realizing the Republic: Farmers’ Resistance and Necropolitics, Flame Books, Thrissur, 2021. See also the sedition charges against the Lakshadweep film maker Ayesha Sultana for the ‘bio-weapon’ remark against the Lakshadweep administration measures, online: https://www.indiatoday.in/india/story/sedition-case-lakshadweep-filmmaker-aysha-sulthana-bio-weapon-remark-1813567-2021-06-11.
[2] Mumthas, Mariyam, “Lakshadweep and the Land Question: Historicising the Present Crisis,” Economic and Political Weekly, 56.26–27 (2021).
[3] https://www.thenewsminute.com/article/assault-culture-and-nature-why-lakshadweep-against-administrator-patel-149467.
[4] Mathew, E. T., “Growth of literacy in Kerala: State intervention, missionary initiatives and social movements,” Economic and Political Weekly (1999): 2811–2820.
[5] https://scroll.in/reel/875648/meet-the-man-who-put-lakshadweep-on-the-map-with-the-national-film-award-winning-sinjar.
[6] Sutoris, Peter, Visions of Development. Films Division of India and the Imagination of Progress, 1948–75, Hurst & Company, London, 2016.
[7] https://rsgb.org/main/operating/amateur-radio-awards/iota-programme/.
[8] https://nanaonline.in/news-feeds/aisha-sulthana-new-movie-flush-first-look-poster/.
[9] In the context of the Telengana movement, S.V. Srinivas notes the power of an “enumerative publicness” that emerged on Youtube. See Srinivas, S. V., “Politics in the Age of YouTube: Degraded Images and Small-Screen Revolutions,” Asian Video Cultures, Duke University Press, 2017, pp. 217–239.
Bindu Menon Mannil teaches Media Studies at Azim Premji University Bangalore. Her scholarship and research is thematically located in the history of the early 20th century and cinema publics in South India, sound studies, histories of media and migration, and Oceanic Humanities. Her essays appeared in several peer-reviewed journals and edited volumes, and her co-authored monograph on the Home Cinema movement of Malabar is forthcoming in 2022. She is currently working on a manuscript titled “Forgotten Futures: Cinema, Publics and Senses in the Princely State (Travancore 1900–1950)”.
Email: bindu.menon@apu.edu.in
