Savari adivasi bahujan and dalit women conversing http://www.dalitweb.org Locating P K Rosy: Can A Dalit Woman Play a Nair Role in Malayalam Cinema Today? Jenny Rowena I think this Rosy Memorial Lecture is a historically significant move for two important reasons. First of all it gives us a chance to remember and commemorate P K Rosy, the Dalit Chrisitan woman, who was the first heroine of the first film in Malayalam, Vigathakumaran, which was made and released by J C Daniel in 1928 in Trivandrum. This lecture series in her memorial will surely help us pay our tribute to this pioneering woman who came forward to act in cinema at a time when untouchable communities could not even walk on the road and enter other public spaces. This is even more important in the context of Dalit groups struggling to gain recognition for Rosy and in the context of the Chief Minister of Kerala promising to install an award in her name and going back on his word about it. However, we must also remember that Rosy's pioneering step was met with instant violence from Nair caste lords. On the very first day on which her film was released, men from the uppercaste Nair community tore the screen and broke up the show, unable to bear the sight of a Dalit woman in the role of a Nair woman acting out love scenes with another man. After this they started attacking Rosy. J C Daniel who made the film, tried to get her protection from the King, but the Nair landlords came in large numbers and burned down her hut and chased her out of 1 / 12 Savari adivasi bahujan and dalit women conversing http://www.dalitweb.org the village. She was forced to run away from Kerala, never to return to the field of cinema. The film, Vigathakumaran itself was shelved and J C Daniel its lower caste Nadar chrisitan film maker who was trying to recreate himself as a Nair through his film, was thwarted in his move and he too had to leave the film field incurring huge losses and plunging him into poverty. Rosy it is said made a new life afterwards, after she got married to an upper caste lorry driver and it is said that she spend the rest of her life working in a towel factory. Other accounts tell us that she committed suicide while trying to escape the Nairs. The theater where Daniel first showed his film and where the Nairs tore the screen. Given this history, it is really significant that we are remembering this woman who was violently denied entry into the public sphere of Kerala. Today I hope we recognize the magnitude of the violence meted out to her, which attempted not only to drive her out of Kerala and its public sphere but also out of its own social and cinematic history itself. We must also refuse the mainstream method of seeing all this as an aspect of our pre-modern past and look around and recognize and remember the violence against Dalit women and women from other marginalized communities, which is still a reality of contemporary Kerala both in its culture and in its cinema, in spite of all its claims to development and progress. We must also remember that we are able to do this only because of the efforts of Dalit intellectuals like Kunnukuzhi S Mani who pursued the case of P K Rosy going after the sources and even finding and interviewing J C Daniel to get information about her by s peaking to Daniel who was then living away from the public eye, in utter poverty. Though today more people know about other mainstream intellectuals like Chelangatt Gopalakrishnan who has written the history of J C Daniel and 2 / 12 Savari adivasi bahujan and dalit women conversing http://www.dalitweb.org Vinu Abraham who wrote a book on Rosy, it was the sustained efforts of Kunnukuzhi S Mani and Dalit groups associated with him, that actually helped bring back Rosy from where she was left to be forgotten forever and ever. It is because of the continuing efforts of such intellectuals and activists that P K Rosy was added to the history of Malayalam cinema. Here we also must remember the P K Rosy Smarka Committee in Kerala, under E P Karthikeyan, which conducted a P K Rosy Memorial Lecture in Nov 2012, which was delivered by the prominent Dalit intellectual and film critic K K Baburaj. In this lecture K K Baburaj spoke about the subaltern woman, especially the Dalit woman who was denied entry into the public sphere when the Upper castes attacked P K Rosy and chased her out of Kerala. He also argued that it was Kerala progressiveness, which never questioned such happenings and has continued to support and promote such violence through their 'progressive' uppercaste culture, which makes subaltern women absent in all ways. The only surviving still from Vigathakumaran Secondly, it is important that we are having this memorial lecture, because it is a way in which we are able to insert the question of caste and gender into the Malayalam film festival circuit, 3 / 12 Savari adivasi bahujan and dalit women conversing http://www.dalitweb.org which has always kept away from engaging with such issues. In fact, be it in films, film festivals, in academic discussions or in journalistic accounts, issues of caste and gender are systematically avoided both in Kerala and outside. So I hope that this space will be used to think about these issues and to keep alive a discussion on it which would also be the best way to keep alive P K Rosy's memory. I really hope this space is not taken away from us and that in the coming years a Dalit woman or a Dalit Christian woman would come here to do this lecture. And I also hope other lower caste women and Muslim women from all castes and regions in Kerala will be able to come here to talk about their own specific engagement with cinema. For the time being I will try to do some justice to this space from within the limitations of my own lower caste OBC location. I have titled my lecture as – Locating Rosy: Can a Dalit woman play a Nair role in Malayalam cinema? This is to challenge the sickening way in which P K Rosy and the violence that she had to face and live with is being discussed in the current Malayalam scene, especially after the release of the film Celluloid by the director Kamal, who hides his Muslim identity and name Kamaluddin Mohammed Majeed within the short form of Kamal. All the present discussions about P K Rosy takes her out from history as some kind of a museum piece and displays the story of how she was violently attacked by the uppercastes- as a sign of our gory and violent casteist past. This is in direct contrast to the way in which Dalit groups commemorate Rosy. Mainstream discourses on the other hand, enhance the progressiveness and castelessness of their present with this new and attractive museum piece called P K Rosy. For example, the documentary, Story of Rosy (K SANAL) in spite of its immense usefulness in bringing alive Rosy's story is also somewhere structured along this "violent past- wonderful present" format. For instance look at the way the past is described here as: an age when caste domination prevailed (jaathi medhavitham nila ninna kaalaghattam) This is surely a way to talk about the present as being casteless and situate the violence that happened to Rosy as something belonging to an early era. Such a narrative, only works to add to Kerala's caste-blind claims to progressiveness and enhances the present as being completely devoid of such caste violences which would oust women from both cinema and other public spaces in Kerala. However, if only we open our eyes and look around, we can say loudly that this is so untrue. Take for example, the case of Chithralekha, which didn't happen in 1930s, but 75 years later, that is in 2005. She was a Dalit woman who wanted to drive an autorickshaw but who was similarly harassed by OBC men belonging to the trade union of the CPM. They burned her auto which was her sole livelihood and just like Rosy, Chithralakeha was also driven out of her village and had to live outside it in another village, in a rented place, in great secrecy, afraid of being killed or hurt and she had to struggle for a long time before getting back to her village and driving her auto again. Even now Chithralekha has constant clashes with the CITU men in her 4 / 12 Savari adivasi bahujan and dalit women conversing http://www.dalitweb.org village and for her, every day is a struggle, with none of those who attacked her and burned her auto getting punished because the legal case, which she is still fighting, is getting dragged on and on. In Kannur, there are many other Dalit women whose autos were similarly burned, Dalit Christian, OBC and muslim women, who committed suicide and who have stopped driving autos after being attacked. I am speaking of this as some of us studied this area a few years ago; but in every field and in every sphere you will hear many such stories of discrimination, extreme violence, trauma and abuse. Living in such a Kerala, where even today we have not been able to install basic dignity to Dalit and Adivasi women, to provide any legitimacy or space to Muslim women in the public sphere and to stop the economic and sexual exploitation of Bahujan women – it is really maddening to hear about P K Rosy without any attempt to draw parallels to the contemporary.