The visual culture of mass grief in kerala: juxtapolitical formations of melodrama in cinema, celebrity funerals and political violence

Abstract

This thesis examines the tension between melodrama and rationality in Kerala through the affective intensities of distinct mourning publics vis-à-vis their conflicts with the public sphere of the state. It is analysed through the visual cultures of three distinct cultural practices of mass grieving. 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. In particular, I analyse the melodramatic mobilisations of affective publics across three vital sites of mass grieving in Kerala: (1) the performative spectacles of public affect at celebrity funerals, (2) the cinematic mediations of affective solidarities in mourning in contemporary Malayalam cinema, and (3) the discursive construction of ‘martyrdom’ in public mourning/ commemorations of slain Communist Party workers. Grappling with the transformations of emotional outpouring in response to death into political theatres of mass grief, sites of subversive solidarities and mechanisms of ideological reproduction as elaborated respectively in the thesis chapters, I analyse how spectacles of their melodramatic excess, that rupture the performative topography of mourning, contest Kerala’s self-fashioning as an exceptional paradigm of rational modernity.