Things Fall Apart: The Cinematic Rendition of Agrarian Landscape in South India

This article explores the transitional decade of the 1970s in the history of the southwestern state of Kerala, India, through the films and novels of M.T. Vasudevan Nair, arguably the most important litterateur in Kerala today. After the historic election of a Communist ministry to power in 1957, Kerala then stepped gingerly back from a radical politics and moved towards a restitution of an older masculine, agrarian order. By looking at the shifts in politics and the social order simultaneously with the progression of Vasudevan Nair's own filmic sensibility, the article raises the question of whether historical time and filmic time can be easily mapped on to each other.