Youth, Sartorial Style, and Cultural Signification in Contemporary Kerala

Home , Bhadran (director), Neram, Thattathin Marayathu

APARNA NANDAKUMAR Youth, Sartorial Style, and Cultural Signification in Contemporary Kerala

1. Introduction The history of the cultural study of 'youth' as a discursively formed category is intertwined with the history of British Cultural Studies. The Birmingham Centre's deployment of concepts like 'counter-school culture,' 'subculture,' and 'style' gave rise to a redefinition of youth as agents of resistance and social transformation, in opposition to earlier sociological and psychological studies that analysed youth as vulnerable to social evils. Later, the valorisation of youth subcultures as sites of pure resistance was problematised by cultural theorists such as Angela McRobbie. In postcolonial societies like India, attempts at studying youth as a cultural category also have to grapple with the peculiar relationship between youth, modernity, and colonialism. In such a context, I would like to examine how 'youth' functions as a signifier in contemporary times, a signifier that is constantly reinvented, reinvested with new meanings, and re-deployed in new contexts of political self-formation. For this purpose, I focus on two recent developments in the sphere of popular culture in Kerala1 that show the ways in which youth participate in cultural meaning-making through the appropriation of existing sartorial trends for new purposes. In the first instance, I analyse a recent music video, "Native Bapa" (dir. Muhsin Parari, 2012), produced and circulated by the self-defined music movement Mappila Lahala on social media websites and online media-sharing platforms. I look at how this video, with its fusion of hip-hop and the colloquial Mappila Malayalam dialect as well as its appropriation of traditional Mappila attire and accessories, imagines a new mode of figuring/signifying youth – one that is cosmopolitan in outlook, yet rooted in the social and political culture of the region. In the second instance, I examine how young people refashion the traditional sartorial code of shirt and mundu associated with hegemonic masculinity in Kerala, as a result of the popularisation of this style in the popular Malayalam film Premam (dir. Alphonse Puthren, 2015). I choose these two instances from a range of creative youth cultural practices in the region, mostly expressed through digital platforms, since both exemplify spectacular ways of resignifying existing sartorial conventions. Discussing these two cases, I try to tease out the ways in which youth redefines itself in the contemporary moment, the cultural resonances they draw on, and their continuing engagement with the public sphere. Central to the analyses in this paper are the engagements of young people with sartorial styles in an attempt to refashion themselves in relation to established notions

1 Kerala is a state in southern India, bordered by Tamil Nadu on the east and south, Karnataka on the north, and the Arabian sea on the west. The dominant language in this region is Malayalam and the demonym for its inhabitants is 'Malayali' or, less frequently, 'Keralite.'

Anglistik: International Journal of English Studies 31.3 (Winter 2020): 187-203.

of both tradition and modernity. Style, according to Dick Hebdige (1979), has always been a prominent mode through which youth subcultures have expressed their identities. Hebdige studies youth subcultural styles as symbolic means of articulating their difference from and dissent to the dominant culture. Hebdige sees style as "intentional communication" (1979, 100): the obviously fabricated nature of the codes of subcultural style reveals the fabricated nature of all societal norms and codes which were hitherto considered obvious or natural. Hebdige also examines the multiple functions of style: as "bricolage" (1979, 102), by appropriating certain symbols and placing them in very different positions within the same symbolic order to erase or subvert their original meanings; "in revolt" (1979, 106), whereby mundane or profane objects are recovered and used as fashion accessories; as "homology" (1979, 113), a thoroughly ordered way of signifying chaos in which the objects chosen or adapted for signifying subcultural style are chosen precisely because they are "intrinsically or in their adapted forms homologous with the focal concerns, activities, group structure and collective self-image of the subculture" (1979, 114), and as a "signifying practice" (1979, 117) or a process by which an individual does not try to master language (or signs) but rather examines how language works to undo him/her. The culture industry played a great role in shaping sartorial trends, and itself borrowed liberally from youth cultural styles. Thomas Frank, in a study of the Winter Journals American business economy of the 1960s, argues that consumer capitalism in the form of advertising has contributed to the very formation of the American counterculture by encouraging consumers, especially the youth, to engage in various leisure activities, Powered by TCPDF (www.tcpdf.org) even those that might be considered rebellious (Frank 1997). In his study of the counterculture, Christopher Gair agrees with Frank's analysis by arguing that

for personal use only / no unauthorized distribution […] countercultural calls to expand individual and communal horizons replicate the demands of a successful American consumer capitalist economy – that is, the perpetual generation of new desires, and a refusal to stick with outmoded goods or ideologies. (2007, 7) However, Gair also argues that corporate culture did not always have control over how subcultural groups receive and interpret signifiers which the former has appropriated from the latter. Though he does not subscribe to the myth of a 'pure' or 'innocent' counterculture that is always already in opposition to consumer capitalism, he acknowledges that bourgeois society perceives youth subcultures and countercultures as a real threat to the establishment (Gair 2007, 4-5). Drawing on these observations, I focus on the process of cultural resignification through sartorial style and the rise of a bourgeois 'moral panic' around such youthful practices in the two instances studied in this paper. The existing studies on youth can be divided into two broad trajectories: sociological or ethnographic studies concerned with the empirical study of young people, mostly in terms of their social roles and relationships, and cultural studies of youth as a discursively shaped category, through self-presentations and representations of youth, through analyses of the various cultural meanings and attributes associated with the concept of youth. This second trajectory can be traced back to the early studies on youth subcultures, resistance, style, and cultural production by the Centre for

Contemporary Cultural Studies, Birmingham, dating from the mid-1960s onwards, and therefore to the very early days of (British) Cultural Studies itself. Thus, the cultural study of youth can be seen as intertwined with the development of Cultural Studies as an interdisciplinary or multidisciplinary space of enquiry, and its evolving theoretical frameworks, methods, and objects. The cultural study of youth as a discursive category is therefore highly relevant for an appraisal of Cultural Studies itself. Studies on youth subcultural identity and practices in India have been few and have often tended to focus on urban life in metropolitan centres. For instance, Vamsee Juluri (2002) examines the process by which Indian music television audiences construct a sense of generational, national, and global identity and Arun Saldanha (2002) analyses youth culture among the upper class in Bangalore, with a focus on the reception of Western pop music, as an instance of how modernity is experienced and produced in the postcolonial world. Studies of youth behaviour in rural contexts, on the other hand, have tended to be more sociological or anthropological in scope. Examples include Leena Abraham's (2002) study of romantic and sexual relationships among lower middle-class and working-class (also lower caste) students in a metropolitan college in Maharashtra; Martyn Rogers's (2008) examination of caste and gender relations in a mostly Hindu government-run college campus in Tamil Nadu; Filippo and Caroline Osella's study (1998) of caste-inflected masculinities in male friendship groups in Kerala; and Craig Jeffrey's investigation (2010) of how unemployment affects young men's relationship to time and space in northern India. Even Ritty Lukose's (2010) insightful analysis of the myriad, differential ways in which young people evolve their selves in relation to their consumption practices is less concerned with how globalisation and consumer capitalism contribute to the rise of a new discursive figure of youth. The two instances of cultural re-signification that I study in this paper rise from the small towns of Kerala, and exemplify the different ways in which youth engage with the symbols and codes propagated by the cultural industry – the first one as an oppositional countercultural movement with a clear ideological agenda, and the second one as a more diffuse expression of popular enthusiasm that eludes easy ideological explanations.

2. Reimagining the Rebel: Of Native Fathers and Cosmopolitan Sons The role of the youth as cultural producers, and not merely consumers, has become much more visible after the digital revolution and the spurt in the use of social media. Young people have been using digital technology to create short films, music videos, etc. and to upload them on media-sharing platforms like YouTube. Among these, one such product widely circulated on these online platforms was the Malayalam hip-hop music video "Native Bapa" by the band Mappila Lahala, which recorded 70,000 views in the initial three days after its release on YouTube in December 2012 (Anima 2013). The release of this music video, and its subsequent circulation on social networking sites and in mainstream media, marks the intersection of various aspects of socio- cultural significance – (i) a paradigm shift in the history of alternative (non-film) popular music in Kerala, (ii) the contribution of social networking and media-sharing internet platforms towards this emergence, (iii) the political and cultural potential of

the figure of the 'rebel' youth, (iv) the cultural production of style, and (v) a cosmopolitanism centred around the 'native' or the 'local.' I take this video as an entry point in order to trace the circumstances that made a particular kind of socially conscious and politically invested cultural production by the youth possible in the contemporary moment. The video of the song "Native Bapa" (Mappila Lahala 2012) follows an elderly Muslim father on a short journey, beginning from his arrival at a boat jetty, meandering through the streets, roads, and beaches of the coastal city of Kozhikode and ending at his home in the suburbs, all along telling the story of his son, who was accused of being a terrorist and killed by the police. 'Bapa' is the word commonly used for 'father' by Mappila Muslims in Kerala, and here, the father – the Bapa – becomes a figure representing the community and thus playing a significatory function, rather than a mere individual. The major portion of the song is in the form of a monologue by the Bapa in a specifically local dialect used predominantly by the Mappila Muslim community of northern Kerala, liberally peppered with Arabic words and phrases. This is interrupted by English rap portions performed by Haris Saleem, a member of the self- professed underground hip-hop band Street Academics and known by his stage name "Maapla." The Bapa's monologue is subtitled in English, suggesting a cosmopolitan audience as well. While the Bapa's monologue tells the private and intensely personal story of one Muslim family hounded by accusations of terrorism, the rap portions in English express a larger, universal angst shared by Muslim youth across the world in the post-9/11 age. The resonances assembled in this video draw on sources as varied as commercial Malayalam cinema, global Islamic sartorial culture, and the histories of subaltern movements in Kerala, India, and the world. The Bapa, played by the well-known veteran comedy actor Mamukkoya, is introduced approaching a seaside pier in a small boat. From the pier, he is joined by the rapper, Haris, and a group of Kuffiyah-draped2 young men, who accompany him on his journey. In sharp contrast to the appearance of the Bapa that is constructed as 'native,' these young urban men wear jeans and T-shirts or hoodies, accessorising them with Kuffiyah and green belts. Inter-cut with sequences of the Bapa's journey – which takes him through bridges, old city lanes, and seaside tea-stalls beside a beach where jeans-clad boys play football – are shots of the young musicians posing in front of graffitied walls bearing prominently a famous quote by the American singer and folk musician Woodie Guthrie, "This machine kills fascists" beside the painting of a guitar, and of the main rapper, Haris, performing with the background of a wall plastered with posters saying "Uphold Human Rights," with photographs of B.R. Ambedkar, the iconic leader of the Dalit movement in India; of Abdul Nasser Maudany, the Muslim political leader from Kerala who has been jailed repeatedly with inconclusive evidence for alleged terrorist activities; of Malcolm X, the leader of the Black Panther movement in 1960s America; of Soni Sori, the tribal woman from Chhattisgarh who was arrested under suspicion of Maoist links and underwent gruesome custodial rape and torture; and similar icons of resistance. Also prominently

2 Kuffiyah or Keffiyeh: a square-shaped scarf traditionally draped around the head by Arab men, usually cotton and sometimes bearing a chequered pattern.

displayed is a motorbike against which Haris leans, the registration number of which is "KL 10 AD 1921" – where KL 10 is the vehicle registration code for the district of Malappuram, a Muslim-majority district in Kerala associated with the Mappila community and culture, and AD 1921 is a reference to the year of the historically controversial Mappila Revolt or "Mappila Lahala," from which the band takes its name.3 The band of young Muslim boys rebelliously flaunt the markers of their community, in contrast to the tired resignation of the Bapa. They shadow him throughout the video as a haunting presence, locking angry, accusing stares with the viewer. Like their music, their elaborately foregrounded style is a fusion of the local and the global: paired with jeans, sneakers and branded T-shirts that are associated with youth in today's consumer culture, the Kuffiyah and the thick green Mappila belt usually worn on top of a casual coloured lungi become cool and trendy. Their politics is also cosmopolitan in outlook and allegiances, as the references to Malcolm X and other international icons convey. The red-and-white Kuffiyah, an international symbol of solidarity to the Palestinian cause, is used by all the actors in a long scene (while the Bapa narrates the tale of the shawl he gave his son as a present) where its draping and tying in different styles are elaborately picturised. In the background is inscribed "Al Kufiya Arabiya," the title of a song by the Palestinian rapper and singer Shadia Mansour, another means by which the band declares their affiliations with world music and global Islamic resistance movements. It is their politics and music that frames the Bapa's narrative, both literally and figuratively. They tell us in the very beginning that he is a "reluctant secularist," a spin on Mohsin Hamid's novel The Reluctant Fundamentalist, so that there is no room for confusion regarding his feelings about the accusations against his son. Literally, too, the first and last frames of the video are of the rappers, while the Bapa's narrative is encapsulated within. What the video addresses directly is the widespread image of young Muslim men as terrorists, circulated in the media and absorbed into public consciousness: It was in October 2008 [that] four Muslim youths from Kerala were allegedly gunned down by security forces in Kupwara district of Jammu and Kashmir. It was soon after this that one among the mothers of these youths from the Kannur district of Kerala stated [under intense pressure from the police and the media] that – 'she doesn't want to see her son's body as he is a traitor.' The statement was since then widely celebrated by media and political parties in Kerala and in no time she turned into an icon of Kerala Muslim mothers. (Basith 2013) It is this incident that sparked the interest of the young entrepreneurs behind this music video. Muhsin Parari, the director of this video, initially penned a poem titled "Native Bapa" on the same theme, which the band later developed into the music video.

3 The Mappila Revolt, also known as the Malabar Rebellion, was an armed uprising against British rule in 1921 by the Mappila Muslim peasants of Malabar, a region in Northern Kerala that was under the Madras Presidency. While nationalist historians earlier considered it akin to a communal riot fuelled by religious fanaticism and therefore not authentically part of the anti-colonial struggle, more recent scholarship has come to appreciate it as a popular agrarian movement against feudal and colonial authority.

Countering the governmental stereotype of young Muslim men as potential terrorists, "Native Bapa" draws upon the cultural signifiers and energies of youth itself. According to a news report, The young men behind "Native Bapa" say blending hip-hop, Mamu Koya and the story of a regular Muslim family was deliberate. To the motley band made of men from different fields, "Native Bapa" is an attempt to revive cultural elements de-glamourised by time and society. Their mission begins with the title of the song – 'Bapa', a fond, colloquial term for father […]. (Anima 2013) The thick, wide green waist-belt often used in mainstream representations of a middle- aged or elderly rural Malabar Muslim and the Kuffiyah associated with stereotypes of Islamic societies are reinvented and reinvested with meaning when they are paired with jeans, T-shirts, or hoodies, sneakers and rap music. The video builds a bridge between a traditionally acceptable image of a rural Mappila Muslim, complete with the markings of dress and dialect, and a more cosmopolitan image of the modern Muslim youth who can negotiate between a wide range of political and cultural influences. Here, youthfulness itself, with all its sedimented cultural attributes and associations, becomes the means by which a community's identity becomes reinvented. This kind of a stylistic or sartorial re-signification of youthfulness is not precisely new, but its appropriation by marginalised sections of the population has been traced back to the liberalisation of the Indian economy in the 1990s by many commentators. For instance, Osella and Osella talk about the "hyper fashion" of lower-caste Pulaya boys who emulate Western street fashion including "the baggiest baggies, African cuts (Apache Indian style) in their hair, and extravagant shirt designs" (F. Osella and C. Osella 2000, 120). In their discussion on the politics of re-signification in the Tamil film Kaadalan ('Lover', dir. Shankar, 1994), Vivek Dhareshwar and Tejaswini Niranjana (2000) study the subaltern body of the actor Prabhudeva as a site of re- signification: "the body is embedded in the modalities of class and caste, caught in and engaging with the different forms of violence" (Dhareshwar and Niranjana 2000, 193), primarily state violence as depicted in the film. The film seems to mark the moment in the post-Mandal4 period when subaltern youth started to appropriate sartorial symbols like blue jeans, which had hitherto been "a marker of Westernised modernity and a privilege of upper-caste youth" (Dhareshwar and Niranjana 2000, 200). The figure of Prabhudeva is probably one of the early sites through which South Indian youth started to consume the fashion and break-dancing style associated with urban hip-hop. Along with that of Michael Jackson, this figure inspired an entire generation of youth to refashion themselves, both literally and symbolically, in the age of liberalisation, privatisation, and globalisation. Similarly, the choice of hip-hop music and fashion places the makers of "Native Bapa" simultaneously on two planes – the cosmopolitan horizons transcending the bounds of the national/regional that has characterised 'youth'

4 The Mandal Commission, headed by parliamentarian B.P. Mandal, was formed in 1979 to identify socially backward communities. Its report recommended 'affirmative action' in the form of reservation policies in educational institutions to socially disadvantaged castes. The attempt to implement these policies sparked off a wave of protests by upper-caste students in colleges across the country who argued that reservations would result in the death of merit.

from the time of its encounter with modernity, and the specificities of the regional histories of subaltern appropriations of such cosmopolitan symbols and objects made visible by the forces of the liberalisation of the Indian economy. In an article on the influence of hip-hop on the musical soundscape of Kerala, Bindu Menon (2013) traces the evolution of hip-hop in Kerala to the distribution and consumption of pirated CDs and DVDs in the region. By studying about 50 Facebook pages devoted to "hip-hop fashion," she delineates the evolution of a sartorial style based on the mixing of various elements – "a style based on referentiality and reflexivity, [that] thrives on appropriation and redefinition" (Menon 2013, 234). Menon studies hip-hop music and (to a lesser extent) fashion as articulating political anxieties and challenges to the mainstream culture of the region from the part of a youth made agential by its immersion in a globalised consumer culture. Style and music, for Menon, are thus direct signifiers of the ideological content of youth cultural products like "Native Bapa." However, I would suggest that there is another semiotic level at which the "content" of youthfulness generated through style and music, in its fusion of the native and the cosmopolitan, itself takes on a representative function. In addition to the cultural reclamation made possible by the infusion of youthfulness and therefore cosmopolitanism into the culturally specific symbols of a regional community, an interesting aspect we see in this video is how youth (re)presents itself as agents capable of passing moral judgement on the contemporary political scenario – regional, national, and international. It is important that, in "Native Bapa," the narrative of the cosmopolitan youth with its English lyrics and hip-hop music frames the 'native' narrative of the Bapa in a local dialect. By formally placing the Bapa's story within a larger frame, the latter becomes a meta-narrative or a meta-language capable of representing the Bapa. M. Madhava Prasad (2014), in a study of sartorial modernity in the time of the nationalist movement, describes how the figure of the 19th-century Bengali mystic Ramakrishna Paramahamsa is represented to the newly emerging Bengali middle class by the philosopher and social reformer Keshab Chandra Sen in an orientalist manner, as if presenting some curiously exotic object. Prasad compares the framing of Paramahamsa's figure by Sen's narrative to the techniques used in classical realist fiction: just as the standard language of the narration of realist fiction places its objects within quotation marks and thus assumes a position in the hierarchy of the text's discourses, which allow it to represent the object within quotation marks to a middle-class readership, this framing enables Sen to place the figure of the Hindu saint within quotation marks and to represent him to the Bengali middle class in a meta-language familiar to them. Similarly, we can see that the hip- hop portion of the video places the Bapa's narrative in quotation marks and represents it to a cosmopolitan audience. The most significant aspect that emerges here is the fact that the cosmopolitan youth have come to share a meta-language with the middle class of the region (and probably the world, as their English address and use of digital media- sharing platforms indicate) and have attained the ability to represent the region to itself. In other words, the region embodied in the figure of the 'native' Mappila father, with all its historically accumulated cultural attributes of 'innocence,' 'authenticity,' and socio- economic 'backwardness,' has to be represented to the actual region. The fusion of the local and the cosmopolitan in their music, sartorial style, and ideology allows the young

hip-hoppers to assume a privileged position in the hierarchy of these discourses and to speak on behalf of the 'native' in a 'universal' language.5 "Native Bapa" has been hailed as a highly radical political articulation from the side of the youth; in this sense, it resonates with the image of youth arising in the post- liberalisation era as the leaders of the new nation. However, all attempts at cultural re- signification by the youth need not fit so neatly into progressive ideological frameworks. A case in point is the adoption of a sartorial trend by young men and women in Kerala, drawing inspiration from a recent Malayalam blockbuster film.

3. Style, Masculinity, and Moral Panic In late August of 2015, during the season of the harvest festival Onam, a wave of black shirts pervaded the public spaces of Kerala. The newspapers were flooded with reports and images from college campuses across the region, where groups of young men and women appeared in black shirt and white mundu,6 accessorised with black sunglasses, to participate in the festivities, a trend that continued on other occasions like college day celebrations, elections, etc. These young men and women were not simply emulating the traditional sartorial code for the Onam festivities (and other festive occasions in Kerala), that of shirt and mundu. For three months, following the release of the blockbuster Malayalam film Premam ('Love', dir. Alphonse Puthren, 2015), the black shirt, white mundu, and sunglasses (and even hipster beards) had become the staple of a sartorial repertoire for young men and women trying to evoke playfully the breezy nonchalant masculinity portrayed by its lead actor Nivin Pauly. Premam is the second film of the director-actor duo, Alphonse Puthren and Nivin Pauly, the first being the bilingual film Neram ('Time', 2013). Episodic in structure, Premam is the coming-of-age story of George (Pauly), travelling through three different romantic relationships at three different stages of his life. One of the highlights

5 More than three years after "Native Bapa," Mappila Lahala made a sequel to it in association with Bodhi Silent Scape. The sequel, "Funeral of a Native Son," is a tribute to Rohith Vemula, the Dalit research scholar from the University of Hyderabad who hanged himself after being expelled from the university following his involvement in a political event questioning the awarding of capital punishment to terror suspects. A more detailed analysis of this video in comparison with "Native Bapa" is beyond the scope of this paper. Suffice it to say that the cosmopolitan youth take on the function of representing this 'ideal' nation to the actual nation by re-signifying Vemula's figure as the youthful protagonist of a nation that is not yet in existence, which must come into existence, and which is desired into existence. 6 Mundu: a traditional garment, usually white, worn draped around the waist by men in South India. It is similar to the white dhoti used in North India, apart from the manner of draping, and to the more informal, colourful lungi. A different version of the mundu, paired with a blouse and another white piece of cloth called the neriyathu draped over the upper part of the body, is considered the traditional garment of (particularly upper-caste) women in Kerala. Here, it is significant that young women are also wearing shirts and mundus in the style that men usually wear. Though women have been wearing jeans, trousers, and other items of Western apparel once considered masculine, it is not a familiar sight to encounter women dressed in shirts and mundus. The exception might be women working as labourers, especially in construction.

of the film's reception was its lead actor Nivin Pauly's makeover. Although the film portrays Pauly with three different appearances for the three sections to show three different stages of his life, it was the bearded machismo and the shirt-and-mundu dress code in the second section that went on to set a sartorial trend among young men. Of course, this was not the first time that young people started a sartorial trend by emulating movie stars. One can think of innumerable examples in the past couple of decades alone – from the hairstyle adopted by Leonardo DiCaprio in Titanic that became a rage in the late 1990s to the baggy pants, jeans, hats or caps, and coats from hip-hop fashion popularised by fans of the Tamil actor and dancing sensation Prabhudeva, to the bellbottoms worn as part of the retrospective fandom around the 1970s action star Jayan in the mid-2000s, to the Boxers, Bermudas, and low-waist jeans associated with the so-called 'new generation cinema' in Malayalam. In these and many other cases, the practice of emulation has been mostly predictable, sometimes incomprehensible, and often subject to moral censure. The body language, gestures, and dialogues of stars like Mohanlal, Mammootty, Suresh Gopi, or Rajnikanth were also mimicked, as were the appearance of martial arts maestros Bruce Lee and Jackie Chan, and the hairstyle and dance moves of the international pop sensation Michael Jackson. In that sense, there is indeed nothing new in the adoption of the Premam-style black shirts and mundus. Yet what marks out the Premam phenomenon is precisely the intensity of moral panic it generated among the middle class of Kerala. Sometimes, the moral panic triggered by youth subcultural styles indicates broader anxieties in society than the actual incident warrants. For instance, in a comic scene where they have kidnapped and are beating up George's final love interest Celine's arrogant fiancé, the lead characters of Premam ask, "So you'll increase the price of petrol? So you'll arrest us if we wear Bob Marley T-shirts?" Within the narrative of the film, this is merely a humorous scene to help the young men pretend they kidnapped the man by mistake. However, the questions they ask are actually posed to the government. The second question especially refers to the moral and literal policing unleashed on young people wearing T-shirts with Bob Marley's image in various cities of Kerala in early 2014 under suspicion of drug trafficking and abuse. Much of the controversy around Marley can be traced back to the Bob Marley cultural festivals held annually in Fort Kochi since 2009 on 11 May, the anniversary of Marley's death, by a group of youngsters named the Bob Marley Cultural Collective (Polanki 2009; Preetha 2013). Apart from youngsters who flaunted Bob Marley memorabilia, even shopkeepers selling such memorabilia were arrested under the Young Persons (Harmful Publication) Act 1956.7 A news article quotes the policemen involved in such raids and arrests: "We have caught around 200 students for using ganja. Most of them had Bob Marley songs on their cellphones, and stickers of marijuana leaves on their bikes. These children

7 An act of the Indian Parliament to prevent the dissemination of publications considered harmful to children and young persons, such as books, magazines, leaflets, newspapers, etc. which are likely to corrupt a young person, defined here as under the age of twenty years. For more details, see [accessed 10 December 2019].

are attracted to drugs by Bob Marley songs," says a straight-faced N.G. Suhruth Kumar, a civil police officer who is heading the mission in Thrissur to 'free' teenagers of drugs. (Shahina 2014) Here we see that Bob Marley, the Jamaican reggae singer/musician, becomes a different kind of signifier for Kerala society. His place in cultural and political history as an artist who sang of black pride is erased and he signifies only a lifestyle immersed in the consumption of marijuana. However, this erasure and re-signification is not one actively performed by the state and its policing mechanisms. Instead, it is precisely the mass production, distribution, and consumption of Bob Marley memorabilia (including T-shirts, mugs, calendars, etc.) as part of a liberal consumer culture that, in some respects, also involves the consumption of drugs, that produces this conundrum. We have seen the Bolivian revolutionary Ernesto 'Che' Guevara's image being mass-produced and consumed in a similar manner, typified in the advertisement of T- shirts which display Che Guevara's face with the logo "This T-shirt brought to you by Capitalism." This is a self-consciously ironic indication of how Guevara's image on T- shirts becomes associated with a notion of 'coolness' that characterises the relationship between youth and politics in the age of consumerism, in which the expression of politics through sartorial style, as identified and discussed by Hebdige (1979), gives way to a situation in which political content itself is replaced by a lifestyle emphasising consumption. Michael Casey (2009), in his study of the lineages of the ubiquitous photograph of Guevara by Alberto Korda, observes how the image is commodified and yet simultaneously assumes the function of signifying different things for different people across the world, ranging from anti-imperialism in Latin America and the Middle East, to anti-authoritarianism in Beijing, to demands for inclusion by immigrants to America. Again, Dipesh Chakrabarty (2002), while analysing the prevalence of khadi (homespun cotton cloth) as a sartorial code for Indian politicians, sees the persistence of Indian democratic values in the very 'empty' act of wearing it even when such values have been rendered almost void by the onslaught of consumer capitalism and globalisation. Thus, the youngsters sporting Bob Marley memorabilia may be simultaneously indulging in consumerism and in rebellion against consumer capitalism. Another instance of sartorial style triggering moral panic can be seen in the case of the media representations of a militant Dalit organisation that came up in Dalit colonies in Kerala, named the Dalit Human Rights Movement (henceforth DHRM). On 17 September 2009, members of the DHRM were arrested in Varkala, Kerala, over their alleged involvement in the murder of an elderly man. In much of the discussion around this incident, in which the 'militant' nature of the organisation was emphasised, as was the uniform of its members – blue jeans and a black T-shirt with an image of Dalit icon B.R. Ambedkar's face printed on it. T-shirts with Che Guevara's or Bob Marley's images are highly popular in contemporary Kerala, as in other parts of the world. While the latter are seamlessly integrated into the narratives of corporate capitalism and national development, the pairing of Ambedkar's image on T-shirts with blue jeans is taken to indicate a tendency towards disruption and anarchy, as far as mainstream media is concerned. This incident shows that symbols of 'youthfulness,' when grounded in socially discomforting locations of caste and community, attain a terrifying

dimension by which other, less controversial expressions of youthfulness are not characterised. So, did Guevara's and Marley's icons become acceptable precisely because of their distance from the immediate social contexts of Kerala, both spatially and temporally? Furthermore, it is precisely the 'youthful' energies of movements like the DHRM, expressed as much in its sartorial code as in its ideology, which evoke fear in mainstream society and fracture its accepted ways of negotiating with the Dalit movement. The Premam-inspired black shirts too triggered a wave of moral panic in the state, at least in part because there were other aspects of the content of the film that invited censure from a middle-class section of the audience. Though the film projects itself as a lighthearted coming-of-age film, the protagonist George is shown in the central episode of the film to be a rough and ready college student who indulges in violent fights on the campus, who waltzes into his classes drinking alcohol from a flask, and who pursues and develops a romantic relationship with a female lecturer. Comparisons were drawn to the fandom around the actor Mohanlal in the mid- 2000s, helped no doubt by the conscious references made to the Mohanlal-starrer Sphadikam (dir. Bhadran, 1995) by the young men themselves and by their grouping themselves together much as fan clubs used to do in the mid-2000s. Mainstream media started seeing the Premam wave as bringing back the unruliness associated with fan clubs and other cultural expressions of popular enthusiasm. However, the criticisms were not unanimous, and stem from various ideological positions. The filmmaker and Dalit cultural critic Rupesh Kumar (2015) undertakes a textual analysis of the film that sees the shirt-mundu-and-moustache trend popularised by Pauly's character as emblematic of the resurgence of an upper-caste masculine subjectivity in Malayalam cinema and the resultant violence on women and subaltern figures; yet this criticism does not take into account the differential ways in which young people appropriated the dress style. Ron Bastian (2015), on the contrary, argues that the popularity of Pauly's masculine style is unrelated to any actual masculine content in his character's actions and is instead indicative of young college students' frustration with the increasingly draconian restrictions imposed by the administrators of colleges, universities, and other educational institutions across the country. Shirts and white mundus are considered traditional attire in Kerala, associated with the region's cultural heritage, used especially for formal occasions, and were commonly worn until recently by young men in many schools and colleges. Suddenly, they were transformed into markers of a macho youth subcultural style. Instead of the traditional coloured shirts and gold-bordered white mundus, however, this sartorial trend was marked by a preponderance of black – black shirts were worn with black-bordered white mundus or coloured mundus, coloured shirts were worn with black mundus, and all these were often accessorised with black sunglasses ("This is Surely a Black Onam" 2015; Ananthakrishnan 2015). Young women started adopting the same attire in women's colleges like St. Teresa's College, Ernakulam, and Providence Women's College, Kozhikode – though these were spectacles reserved for special occasions like Onam celebrations or college union elections ("Onam Season" 2015). As Onam celebrations started across the state, other reports started surfacing. In one college, a large group of students arrived in a lorry wearing such attire, after having put up a name

board for the lorry with the word Chekuthan ('Satan') painted on it – the name of the lorry driven by the superstar Mohanlal in the cult Malayalam film Sphadikam. In another college, students arrived cavorting in a JCB. In yet another, a hundred young men clad in black shirts and mundus arrived in an illegally hired fire engine and sprayed water around with the fire hose. A fire force employee was suspended and an enquiry instituted regarding the illegal leasing out of the fire engine ("CET Model Onam Celebrations" 2015). The use of heavy vehicles normally used in the construction industry, like lorries and JCBs, is noteworthy for their association with hard physical labour and therefore a working-class masculinity; these are the same attributes associated with Aadu Thoma, the character played by Mohanlal in Sphadikam, with the added glamour of star charisma. The young male students mentioned above draw on all these resonances. The culmination of the news reports was the accidental death of a young female engineering student, Thanzi Basheer, in the College of Engineering, Trivandrum (CET), after being hit by a speeding jeep driven by male students inside the college campus (James 2015; Philip 2015). The incomprehensible euphoria around Premam seemed to sober down quickly, and the state government started discussing ways to impose stricter control over celebrations and festivities in colleges. By then, Premam had been playing to (mostly) full houses for more than three months. Its lead actor Nivin Pauly, though considered a youth sensation even earlier for his lighthearted romantic comedies like Thattathin Marayathu, Bangalore Days, and Oru Vadakkan Selfie, was now hailed as a new star. Though the shows were attended by a heterogeneous audience including families, the theatres were filled with the audible bonhomie of young people (mostly college-age young men from across the caste-class spectrum) who were returning for their third or fourth viewing and who shouted out dialogues in advance and laughed loudly before jokes were cracked on screen, often drowning out the dialogues completely. A theatre in Kozhikode was vandalised by the audience when a screening of Premam had to be stopped, following a technical glitch ("'Apsara' Theatre Vandalized" 2015). In Thiruvananthapuram, the police organised a campaign code-named Operation Gurukulam to prevent college students from bunking classes and watching the film (Ananthakrishnan 2015). And yet, the Premam wave seems to have a larger-than-life quality to it, a sense of unreality and incomprehensibility, leaving social commentators unable to completely explain the energy generated and circulated around the film. One of the aspects that evoked moral panic was the spectacular evocation of an excess of masculinity. The fetishisation of a masculinity premised on physical violence, hard drinking, and machismo – one usually associated with working-class or subaltern notions of masculinity – is yet another interruption in the narrative of youth. Here, the rootedness of the mundu and the moustache, instead of signifying the accepted, hegemonic notion of masculinity in the region, begins to signify an excess characterising its bearer. Though bearing formal similarities to the fan club activities of superstars prevalent in southern India which have been studied as instances of "subaltern sovereignty" (Prasad 2009, 69) whereby the disenfranchised fan chooses the film star as his symbolic representative over the duly elected political representative (Prasad 2009; Radhakrishnan 2010; Srinivas 2009), the 'fandom' aspect associated with Premam does not imbue the star with any such political significance. Instead, the

Premam wave, though initiated by the film and its protagonist's star charisma, spirals out of its influence quickly and soon draws on its own energies, each instance of its expression inspiring and being replenished by the next. To borrow a term from the internet culture in which the film and its adherents are located, the wave 'went viral.' While it is tempting to argue that the black or coloured mundus and black shirts signified the resurgence of a subaltern masculinity in the age of consumerism, the overwhelming enthusiasm shown by young women towards the same style complicates the discussion. These young women's public performance of masculinity results in a double appropriation of the shirt-mundu style – first, from traditional upper-caste culture to a more diverse, commodified male youth culture, and further, from the latter to a gender-neutral space in the cultural imagination of the region that is being claimed by these young women. While it could be merely yet another indication of the masculinisation of youth cultural spaces, and the need for young women to masculinise themselves in order to enter and traverse those spaces, there could be another side to the story. This deliberate performance of masculinity by dressing up in drag could also be a (possibly unconscious) indication of the performative nature of gender itself, as Judith Butler (1990) has argued. Another aspect of the film that invited derision was the final segment of the film which positioned itself unambiguously on the side of the new, urban youth with the use of contemporary Malayalam slang, as evident in the song "Scene Contra." The refrain of the song relies on a repetition of the words "scene contra," a colloquial Malayalam term popularly used by contemporary youth to refer to an unfavourable or difficult situation, drawn from the title of a shoot-'em-up video game, Contra. The Urban Dictionary8 defines "scene contra" as an expression "derived from 'scene' which means problem in mallu [Malayalam] street slang and Contra – video game from the late 1980's about a warrior chasing down villains to rescue the love of his life" (Urban Dictionary, s.v. "scene contra"). Earlier Malayalam films like Oru Vadakkan Selfie ('A Northern Selfie', dir. G. Prajith, 2015) also used colloquial expressions like "kola mass" and "marana mass" (literally, 'death mass,' meaning 'amazing') in song lyrics. In Neram (dir. Alphonse Puthren, 2013), the song "Pistah suma kira" which went 'viral' through its circulation on media-sharing platforms, made use of nonsense-lyrics. This usage of slang and unconventional language in the lyrics of a song was seen by many as shallow and superficial, and film journalists started classifying the film as part of a new category of films called 'new generation cinema.'9

8 Wikipedia defines the Urban Dictionary as "a crowd-sourced online dictionary for slang words and phrases" (Wikipedia, s.v. "Urban Dictionary"). 9 A term that evolved in Malayalam film journalism sometime in the 2010s, and was first widely used in connection with the film Chappa Kurish ('Head or Tails', dir. Sameer Thahir, 2011), but was extended to all sorts of new films. The boundaries of the term are not clear, but in general, it is used to refer to films depicting the life of contemporary urban youth in/of Kerala, oftentimes set in Kochi or sometimes in Bangalore, characterised by violence, amorality, and a frankness regarding sex, abusive language, and intoxication hitherto considered out of place in mainstream Malayalam cinema. The origin of the term could have

Thus, Premam becomes a site from which different strands of youth engagement with the culture industry can be articulated – while young entrepreneurs like Puthren make use of existing cultural symbols (references to the Mohanlal-starrer Sphadikam, Bob Marley, and the like in the film) and creative marketing techniques to come up with successful cultural products, the young consumers of Premam appropriate symbolic attributes like the black shirt and mundu dress code from the film and refashion those by the very act of appropriation, much like the young women in Angela McRobbie's (1994) study, whose eclectic taste, financial constraints, and entrepreneurial abilities led to the formation of second-hand style by mixing and matching unconventional combinations of attire from the rag-market. Another instance of appropriation through cultural production can be seen in the parody of the song "Scene Contra" sung by some anonymous young women and circulated on WhatsApp, reversing the misogyny of the original lyrics. The original lyrics, penned and sung by Shabareesh Varma, start out thus: Aval vendrra, ival vendrra, ee kaanunna avalmaaronnum vendrra, love vendrra, namukku vendrra, ividallelum scene motham contra. ('We don't need that girl, this girl, any of these girls, We don't need love, here the scene's anyway contra.') Whereas the girls' version goes like this: Avan vendree ivan vendree, ee kaanunna ivanmaaronnum vendree, love vendree, namukku vendree, ividallelum scene motham Jockey. ('We don't need that guy, this guy, any of these guys, We don't need love, here the scene's anyway Jockey.')10 The reference to the international underwear brand Jockey is a sly dig at the 'new generation' dress style of young men who like to call themselves freakans (a vernacular version of 'freaks') which includes wearing low-waist jeans and trousers that reveal one's underwear, Jockey being one of the most popular of those brands. The girls register their dissatisfaction with style-obsessed freakans and their notion of love. Still, the responses to such symbols are not necessarily resistant. There are also videos in which the audio track of the song "Scene Contra" is creatively mixed with videos from the Tom & Jerry cartoons to narrate the love story of Tom, who is being dissuaded from pursuing an ill-fated romance by Jerry (Nijith 2015). Such attempts affirm the pleasure of indulging in creativity, the enthusiasm towards cultural production for the sake of self-satisfaction, and increasing visibility through sharing, even as they may also indicate tendencies towards narcissism. Thus, an analysis of the Premam wave reveals that, while at first glance the adoption of the black shirt and mundu dress code might seem apolitical or even regressive, its

come from the field of technology, which uses the term 'generation' in a new manner, for instance, 'next generation technology' to refer to what is considered cutting-edge technology. These films do indeed experiment with technology and form, and many of the filmmakers associated with this set of films have a technical background in cinematography, editing, etc. 10 The reference for this version of the song is unfortunately unavailable, as it was circulated anonymously through the messaging application WhatsApp.

political or transformative potential can be seen precisely in the excessive nature of the moral panic it evoked. Moreover, there are political resonances lightly threaded into the narrative, such as the invocation of Bob Marley in a seemingly innocuous scene, which can however highlight the iniquities of state repression faced by young urban people as I demonstrated in the case of the Bob Marley festival. As opposed to the notion of individual political agency posited by "Native Bapa," the Premam wave locates agency in the enthusiastic cultural transactions that give it its nebulous form.

4. Conclusion A comparative analysis of two instances of sartorial resignification by young people from Kerala provides two different manifestations of youth subcultural activities. On the one hand, the fusion of native Muslim and hip-hop styles in "Native Bapa" functions as a powerful political articulation of resistance by marginalised youth towards the hegemony of majoritarian nationalism, but simultaneously contributes to privileging Western, liberal, individualistic signifiers of youthful rebellion. Conversely, the enthusiastic appropriation of the mundu, a symbol of hegemonic masculinity in the region, by the young fans of the film Premam throws open the possibilities for a more diffuse enunciation of resistance, the energies of which both derive from and are challenged by its own unconstrained spirit and acentric nature. Rather than designating one as 'political' and the other as 'apolitical,' it would be more productive to argue that it is precisely the diffuse, freewheeling nature of youth enthusiasm – whether mainstream or subcultural – that imbues it with both promise and danger.

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