“One More Dirham”: Migration, Emotional Politics and Religion in the Home Films of Kerala

Abstract

<p>This article explores the Islamic home-film movement in Kerala, India, a video film movement by amateur filmmakers of the Muslim Community. These films circulate in VCD and DVD format in retail outlets in both Kerala and the Gulf Council Countries (GCC). These films are important for their supporting group, Jamaat-e-islami, one of the most powerful Islamist groups in the South Asian countries of India, Pakistan and Bangladesh, as they try to gain hegemony among Kerala’s Sunni Muslims through an alternative Islamic public culture. Home-films now circulate beyond their original audience of Muslim women in Kerala, among Keralite migrants in the Arab Gulf, who organize public screenings in social gatherings and labour camps. Indeed, the large-scale migration of labor to the GCC has led to a re-imagination of the moral geography of Kerala Muslim households to account for changing gender norms and family structures. The films, concerned with social reform among the Muslim Community of Kerala, also refract the experience of migration to the GCC, particularly in narrating an emotional landscape characterized by precarious conditions of labour, racialised hierarchy and the kafala (the specific employment system in many GCCs, that is a combination of a contract and patronage) through specific tropes of precarity and philosophy of risk in these films.</p>

FM radio and the Malayali diaspora in Qatar: at home overseas

“…This yearning for political engagement in media rhetoric can be and is, however, also satisfied via other media. For example, vernacular radio's apolitical-ness stands in stark contrast with the socially, politically, and oftentimes religiously fuelled home-films from Kerala that are commonly screened in Malayali households and across labour camps in the Gulf (Menon and Sreekumar 2016). While a home-video movement, these films address concerns over labour precarity to attract lower income Malayali migrant viewers in particular (Menon and Sreekumar 2016).…”

“…For example, vernacular radio's apolitical-ness stands in stark contrast with the socially, politically, and oftentimes religiously fuelled home-films from Kerala that are commonly screened in Malayali households and across labour camps in the Gulf (Menon and Sreekumar 2016). While a home-video movement, these films address concerns over labour precarity to attract lower income Malayali migrant viewers in particular (Menon and Sreekumar 2016). While circulating in the Gulf, however, these films remain tightly bound to the private sphere given issues of censorship that might arise if distributed without discretion.…”

The Islamic Subject of Home Cinema of Kerala

“…These films are certified by the Central Board of Film Certification. The audience for these movies is estimated variously, as much as 500,000 people (Menon & Sreekumar, 2016, p. 6), and three million by another account (Abraham, 2009, p. 30). The audience for these films are both in the Gulf as well as their households in Kerala.…”

“…These studies also point out how the local film practice gestures towards the dominant regional films as well as Bollywood but evolve a new idiom out of ‘creative fabrication’ (Prasad, 2011). Menon and Sreekumar (2016), in their study of the Home Cinema phenomenon under discussion in this article, proceed to examine some of these films for their depiction of the precarious living conditions in the Gulf and argue that regardless of their exposé on the exploitative conditions of labour in the GCC countries, they are nevertheless unable to put forward a frontal critique of it because these are muted in favour of an Islamic resolution which irons out the class and racial hierarchies towards a ‘pious’ resolution. I argue that this piety should be situated within the cinematic project that Home Cinema self-declaredly sets out to do, which is to provide an alternate language of Islamic cinema.…”

“…11.Menon and Sreekumar (2016) identify Home Cinema with the ideology of Jamaat-e-Islami. Empirically, Jamaat-e-Islami would be the first Muslim organisation which would have supported Home Cinema, as opposed to other factions who still looked upon cinema with skepticism if not outright hostility.…”