In 2016 or 2017, I was visiting Kerala with my family when something happened that my teenage mind found difficult to understand. While we were staying with a relative, we had a spontaneous plan to visit a shopping center in Kochi with one of her daughters. She was in her early twenties at the time and had lived in the state her entire life.
Before we set off, I watched my aunt take her aside and ask her to take her brother with her too. This “brother” wasn’t actually a brother at all, but a young neighbor who had grown up as her unofficial brother figure. She was the younger of the family’s two daughters, and this man, who was probably only a few years older than her, had made it his mission to be her “protector.” During my stay, I watched him take them to college and the market, pick them up and drop them off as if he were delivering freight.
When I watched Amma Ariyaan a few days ago, that was all I could think about.
A film that embodies revolution
Amma Ariyaan is a 1986 Malayalam film directed by John Abraham as part of the Odessa Collective. It was the last film he made before his untimely death in 1987. Widely considered his magnum opus, it distills his ideas about left-wing politics, class struggle, collective activism and institutional resistance into a single work made by the people, for the people and by the people.
Furthermore, the film was not only produced by the people but also distributed directly to them. Instead of relying on distributors or showing it in cinema halls, John returned to the streets, taking the finished film from village to village and showing it to the very people who had helped finance its production.
Amma Ariyaan was a truly revolutionary film, not just for its content but also for its craft. It is one of the earliest examples of crowdfunding in Indian cinema. Decades before Kickstarter and GoFundMe, Abraham raised the funds needed to produce the film by taking a 16mm projector and copies of some well-known films from village to village and hosting independent screenings. Anyone who wanted to contribute could do so; Those who couldn’t do that could just watch the films and walk away.
Furthermore, the film was not only produced by the people but also distributed directly to them. Instead of relying on distributors or showing it in cinema halls, John returned to the streets, taking the finished film from village to village and showing it to the very people who had helped finance its production.
A scene from Now Aryan. Image source: Odessa Collective
Today the film has been restored by the Film Heritage Foundation and screened at the Cannes Film Festival this year. When I sat down to watch the film, what struck me was not the profound loneliness of Purushan (played by Joy Mathew) walking alone on the street with the travel bag in his hand, but the forlorn, longing look on the face of his mother (played by Kunhulakshmi Amma) before he left.
The women of Now Aryan
The film’s cinematography is unique for its time. Rather than relying on traditional camerawork, it consists of wide, wide shots with the camera constantly moving alongside the characters. There are only two moments in which the camera holds still a single subject: the first is Hari (played by Harinarayan), the tabla player whose death is the catalyst for the film’s plot; the second is the wives of Amma Ariyaan.
There are only two moments in which the camera holds still a single subject: the first is Hari (played by Harinarayan), the tabla player whose death is the catalyst for the film’s plot; the second is the wives of Amma Ariyaan.
The camera lets you see her pain. Mothers, wives and sisters stay in their homes and watch their husbands, sons and brothers go out into the world. They watch as these men are brutalized by the police, the state, the factories and the very institutions that claim to protect them. And they pick up the pieces, tend to the wounds, feed the hungry, and sometimes lose themselves in the process.
The protagonist of the film is Purushan. The name literally means “man” in Malayalam and is fitting since the protagonist of this film could only ever be a man. No woman living in Kerala at that time would have been able to abandon her domestic role and venture into the world in search of revolution and self-discovery. The painful proof of this is Hari’s mother – the woman whom Purushan began to search for. The film’s titular mother.
When she learns of her son’s death, she asks if he died by suicide. This woman, this mother, knew her son’s desperation. She knew how disenfranchised he felt. She understood his anger and rebellion. And yet there was nothing she could do to save him. She had to watch her son’s life from the sidelines, a spectator, unable to intervene, unable to act because of the position her role put her in.
A scene from Now Aryan. Image source: Odessa Collective
Hari’s father, on the other hand, openly disowns his son and calls him and his friends scoundrels and “good-for-nothings” who run around wasting their time in the name of the revolution. It can be assumed that Hari did not have a good relationship with his father. However, his mother chose to stay by her husband’s side and isolate her son even further because that’s exactly what respectable women did. “Good women” back then didn’t abandon their husbands, no matter what they did.
The Women of Kerala
The English translation of the title Amma Ariyaan is “Report to the Mother,” and the title is apt because, in the simplest sense, the film is indeed a report: an account given by a son to his mother about the things he sees on the road as he travels from the highlands of Wayanad to the docks of Kochi. The film begins and ends with the image of the mother – a simple, frail woman emotionally attached to her son and waiting for him to write to her. This image of the mother touched me deeply because it is so familiar. It’s my mother.
A scene from Now Aryan. Image source: Odessa Collective
My mother grew up in a Kerala not very different from the one depicted in the film. I grew up hearing stories from her childhood, collecting vicarious rubber juice and running through rice fields with her words. She often told me: “When someone came to pick up my father, all of us girls were quickly ushered inside, into the kitchen or into one of the interior rooms.”
So many young women of her generation grew up like her, shielded from society for their supposed “protection” but in reality relegated to the only sphere that even “progressive” Malay men considered appropriate for women: the home. This tradition is not just in Kerala. Across the world, in all regimes with different structures and ideologies, the way women are viewed and treated is a constant. Our roles as mothers, caregivers, healers, and educators are so deeply rooted that these qualities are often viewed as synonymous with our gender itself. The director understood that too.
Women in progressive societies
This was not uncommon in Marxist and post-Marxist societies. It is most notably seen in Soviet Russia. The promise of the Bolshevik Revolution to Russian women was to free them from their domestic shackles. Vladimir Lenin and his party sought to reinvent the family unit itself, aiming to create a more egalitarian model in which children were raised together in the neighborhood, thus reducing the burden of domestic duties on Russian women.
Instead of creating a class of Russian women equal to men, an entirely new standard was created for women – one where they were expected to work and contribute to the economy while maintaining the domestic sphere, bearing and raising children.
However, the reality of how this played out, particularly under Lenin’s successor Stalin, is almost tragic. Instead of creating a class of Russian women equal to men, an entirely new standard was created for women – one where they were expected to work and contribute to the economy while maintaining the domestic sphere, bearing and raising children. Unfortunately, Kerala too has evolved in the same way since the film’s release.
According to the 2011 census, Kerala has almost the highest female literacy rate in the country 92 percent. However, according to the Regular Labor Force Survey 2025, the labor force participation rate for women in Kerala is only 31 percentwhich is below the national average of 33.8 percent. In addition, society still expects women to marry and settle into everyday life at home.
This highlights that for most women in Kerala, education may be a necessity, but employment is not. In addition, marriage and the birth of children remain expectations for women who need or want to enter the workforce. Without it, they will always be seen as anomalies in need of “correction.”
This highlights that for most women in Kerala, education may be a necessity, but employment is not. In addition, marriage and the birth of children remain expectations for women who need or want to enter the workforce. Without it, they will always be seen as anomalies in need of “correction.” Perhaps this is the greatest tragedy of being a woman: that even those who fight for progressiveness and equality in other areas will not fight for gender equality, at least not until we force them to.
Jay (she/her) is a writer and filmmaker whose work focuses primarily on the intersection of feminism and queerness. Over the past eight years, her work has spanned various genres and forms, including short stories, poems, novels, short films, screenplays and feature-length articles. They are currently working on building BlueMoon Films, a creator-focused media company and film community with the goal of platforming diverse voices in cinema.
