ABSTRACT
Drawing on Achille Mbembe’s concept of necropolitics, the chapter engages with the death politics (thanatopolitics) of caste in Malayalam cinema (MC). Although caste is apparently seen as ‘a grotesque life regulating socio-political reality in India’, it has been functioning as an agent of violence and killing of the Dalits and other caste subalterns who occupy the vulnerable margins or the outer veneers of caste hierarchy as a strangely abject population marked for death. By problematising the exclusive notion of caste merely as a grotesque life regulating socio-political reality and arguing how the ideology of death politics is inherent in the notion of caste especially in the context of the ongoing killings of the Dalits in India as a result of the rise of ultranationalist Hindutva forces in India, the chapter explores the precariousness of the Dalit body in the power structures of MC and analyses Sanal Kumar Sasidharan’s award winning film Ozhivudivasathe Kali [trans. An Off-day Game] (2015) to explicate how a Dalit is catapulted both ideologically and physically into liminality of existence. While exploring the regimes of caste in MC, the genealogy of death politics in its discursive space is also interrogated to enunciate how caste as a sordid reality dictates the lives and deaths of the Dalits even in its on-/off-screen spaces.
