Dependencies of Discourse: Disability in Malayalam Film Narratives

Abstract

Representations of corporeal differences and anomalies can be identified throughout the history of literary narratives. Though these ‘disabilities’ in people as identified by the society fall into many categories, the stigmatizing attitude of the society towards these differences cannot be overlooked. Given the immense potential of films to captivate the attention of the widest possible public and their enormous power to depict social reality, they prove to be a substantial tool to study how disability is imagined, experienced, and lived in a social environment. Despite the fact that there are ample representations of disabled images, most people are unaware of this pervasive nature of disabled identities in literary narratives. Working within the theoretical framework of Narrative Prosthesis, this paper intends to study how the disabled characters are used as a prosthetic in Malayalam Cinema and to further explore the shift in their representation with the coming of New Generation Films in the early 2010s. This paper also attempts to raise a set of crucial questions as to why disability is overlooked and to study the significant role that these films played in including/excluding the differently-abled.