ThePrint recently ran an opinion piece headlined “In a sea of moustaches and macho men, Naslen is Malayalam cinema’s chocolate boy”. Its writer, Harsh Tiwari, sets out a history, based on his peripheral knowledge.
Malayalam heroes, he says, were thick moustaches, pot bellies, white mundus and angry stares, and he names Mammootty, Mohanlal and Jayaram. Fahadh Faasil and Nivin Pauly, he adds, broke that mould. Now Naslen, 26, arrives as something new, and the older stars should “give their moustaches a rest”.
Read the headline again. More than four decades of Malayalam cinema, from Njan Gandarvan to Bethlehem Kudumba Unit, and what Tiwari saw was a sea of moustaches. Reduce a whole region’s films to how its men look, and you are no longer writing about cinema. You are writing about Malayali faces. Done to any other group, on the basis of how they look, that would be called racism. ThePrint called it a POV piece.
Almost every step of Tiwari’s narration is wrong, and anyone who has watched Malayalam films for more than five years could have said so.
Start with the chocolate hero. In 1980, Fazil’s Manjil Virinja Pookkal ran for 250 days and made Shankar the industry’s romantic star. The villain in that film was a newcomer called Mohanlal. In 1983, P. Padmarajan cast Rahman, then a schoolboy in Ooty, as the lead in Koodevide. Rahman won a state award at 16 and spent the decade as Kerala’s teen idol. In 1997, Fazil launched Kunchacko Boban in Aniyathipravu, and the “chocolate boy” tag followed him for years. The label in ThePrint’s headline is Kerala’s own, and it is decades old.
Fahadh himself started there. His first film, Kaiyethum Doorath in 2002, was a romance directed by Fazil. It failed, and he stayed away from acting for seven years. The Fahadh whom Tiwari credits with breaking the mould came back in 2009, long after the mould had been broken many times over.
Next, the “natural” acting the piece credits to Fahadh and Nivin. Malayalam’s middle cinema of the 1970s and 1980s was built on it. Adoor Gopalakrishnan, K.G. George, Bharathan and Padmarajan made films about clerks, drivers, lovers and failures, played without heroics. Mohanlal was the lovesick lead in Padmarajan’s Thoovanathumbikal in 1987. Jayaram, one of the piece’s macho examples, built his career on family comedies.
ThePrint piece’s new insight amounts to a caricature of the industry’s past, credit to one actor for what a generation built, and a label Kerala has used for decades. None of it would surprise a Malayali reader. It is new only to the writer.
By the way, the two moustaches Tiwari names did some of their finest work without one. Mohanlal went clean-shaven in Rangam in 1985, in Mani Ratnam’s Iruvar in 1997 as a film star modelled on MGR, and in Shaji N. Karun’s Vanaprastham in 1999 as a Kathakali artist broken by drink and poverty. Vanaprastham went to Cannes and won him the National Award for Best Actor. Mammootty shaved off his moustache to play B.R. Ambedkar in Jabbar Patel’s Dr. Babasaheb Ambedkar and won the National Award for Best Actor. The life of the man who wrote India’s Constitution was told to the country in English by an actor from Kerala. ThePrint remembers his moustache. Would Tiwari also insist that they will win awards only if they go off moustaches?
This kind of caricaturing has a pedigree. Hindi cinema sold the South to north Indian audiences for decades as a costume: the lungi, the moustache, the paunch, the comic accent. Mehmood’s Master Pillai in Padosan in 1968 and the Tamil village of Chennai Express in 2013 drew from the same narrative biases. To much of the north, everyone below the Vindhyas is still a “Madrasi”. ThePrint’s mundus, pot bellies and angry stares are the same costume, dressed up as film criticism.
ThePrint should know better. Shekhar Gupta founded it in 2017 to be the kind of argumentative, independent outlet that calls out lazy thinking in others. It publishes sharp pieces on caste, communalism and the way India’s majority talks about its minorities. Yet an editor in Delhi read a description of Kerala’s biggest stars as moustaches and pot bellies and passed it without question. The same prejudice aimed at skin colour would be called racism, and the paper would be first to say so. Aimed at the South, it passes as a light Friday read. Oh, it is just his opinion. Would Tiwari do the same about Bollywood?
The rest of the article follows from that. Many writers outside Kerala found Malayalam cinema on streaming platforms during the pandemic, and Fahadh, through Kumbalangi Nights, Joji and Pushpa, became the one name they knew. Every new actor is now measured against him, and everything before him is reduced to the costume. Even Naslen gets explained through a Hindi actor, Ranbir Kapoor in Wake Up Sid.
Look closely at Naslen, the clean-cut exception ThePrint is celebrating, and he wears a thin moustache too. The trope does not survive a close look at its own hero. Delhi’s media has been counting South Indian moustaches for decades, and this column continues to do so – because that is what lazy, ‘smart alec’ writing does.
Tiwari built his column on a stereotype and called it a discovery. Take out the moustaches, the pot bellies and the angry stares, and almost nothing of his argument is left. Columbus set out to find India, landed somewhere else and insisted he had found it. Tiwari set out to find Malayalam cinema and landed in a sea of moustaches.
