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If one had to pick a single sequence that defines the politics of Asif Ali’s Aabhyanthara Kuttavaali, it would be a family court scene. Asif’s character, Sahadevan, falsely on trial for cruelty towards his wife, is arguing his own case. During an elaborate speech on how men are ‘victimised’ by laws intended to protect women, he looks into the screen, right at the audience and takes a jibe, “You should not react, because it is a man who has died.”
At this point, it is hard not to wonder what Sahadevan’s problem is: that his wife slapped a fabricated case of cruelty against him, or that this country has laws to protect women from marital cruelty.
It takes more than a moment to tune out of the exaggerated pathos in the background music and put a finger on where the film is going with this.
Sahadevan argues that Section 498A of the Indian Penal Code (now Sections 85, 86 of the BNS), which protects a woman against domestic violence and cruelty from her husband or his relatives, allows those like his wife, Nayana, to trap innocent men. To further emphasise how men are ‘easy targets’, we are also shown the lives of two others whom Sahadevan meets in court: a middle-aged man whose wife is fighting him for custody of their daughter, and a senior citizen whose daughter-in-law is fighting him for property after the death of his son.
To sum it up, in the world of Aabhyanthara Kuttavaali, written and directed by debutant Sethunath Padmakumar, all men are victims, and Sahadevan becomes their champion. However, the film is not a cinematic anomaly. In fact, it seems to be a well-thought-out addition to a concerning, fairly recent, sub-genre of films about men’s rights activism.
What is interesting is how films in this category often feature characters who are either black or white, with the latter invariably being men.
Let’s consider Soubin Shahir’s Machante Malakha, another film that belongs to this universe. Written by Ajeesh P Thomas and directed by Boban Samuel, all the male characters in the movie, including Soubin, are well-meaning and submissive. The women, on the other hand, are manipulative, insensitive, and dominating. Here also, like in Aabhyanthara Kuttavaali, the wife levels false allegations of cruelty and abuse against the husband.
It must be pointed out here that such filmmaking does not happen in a vacuum.
Kerala has recently seen considerable lobbying for a Men’s Commission, led by activist Rahul Easwar. Even before that, an organisation named the All Kerala Men’s Association (AKMA) came to prominence and has been infamous for celebrating men accused of sexual offences, including Pulsar Suni, the main accused in the 2017 actor assault case. The president of the AKMA even called Savad, a man arrested for masturbating in a bus, an ‘innocent victim of honey trapping’.
Men’s Rights Activists (MRAs), who claim to work for the representation of men’s issues, commonly say that they are oppressed by laws of marriage and domestic violence. Rahul Easwar, who has been supporting prominent men accused of sexual harassment, including actor Dileep, praised Aabhyanthara Kuttavaali, calling it Malayalam’s first ‘purushapaksha chithram’ (film speaking from a male’s perspective). Actor Bala, accused by his former wife, singer Amrutha Suresh, of harassment, also endorsed the film, saying ‘such realities’ must be shown.
This narrative peddles the idea that so far everything has been working unduly in favour of women–a claim that can be instantly negated if you take a cursory glance at the statistics on domestic violence, marital cruelty, and other forms of violence against women.
But the sensory impact of cinema outlasts that of reading up data.
Films like Aabhyanthara Kuttavaali play to the power of the cinematic medium to position men’s rights as a new political awakening, a launchpad to counter-attack feminist groups.
Asif’s Sahadevan even equates dowry with alimony, claiming that women who are against dowry unduly demand maintenance or alimony upon divorce. It is arduous to keep explaining why the law extends the protection of alimony to women and how that is diametrically opposite to dowry, a transactional payment before marriage, over which more than 6,000 women died in India in 2022, according to the National Crime Records Bureau.
All of this, after Sahadevan realises that his wife refused to be sexually intimate with him because of the trauma of childhood sexual abuse. During the one month of their marriage when Sahadevan and Nayana live together, Sahadevan does not initiate a conversation about her reluctance to be intimate; instead, he discusses his ‘frustrations’ with his male friends.
The men in the worlds of Abhyanthara Kuttavaali, Machante Malakha, or the severely queer-phobic Oru Jaathi Jaathakam only believe in placing the blame on women without introspecting about their own ways. By the time Sahadevan’s wife is allowed to explain herself, the stage is already set against her.
Besides, the claim that there have been no films from the male perspective until now is baffling, considering how film industries across the world have historically been dominated by dominant race/caste men, and cinema as an enterprise continues to cater to the fantasies of the male imagination. (So much that even the concept of the female gaze had to be introduced by film theorist Laura Mulvey.)
However, the problem is not that a certain set of films wants to address the vulnerabilities of men and how they are entrapped by vicious women. The problem is how most of these films are painfully regressive, universalise individual experiences, and attack the law for extending protection to women in a country with a high incidence of gender-based violence.
If such filmmakers intend to highlight how men are lesser-discussed victims of violence, they should be going after patriarchy and its reinforcement of toxic masculinity, not women or gender-sensitive laws.
Additionally, their worlds only factor in conflicts in the marital sphere, dismissing other problems men and young boys face, like bullying, substance addiction, inability to express emotions, the influence of internet phenomena like Andrew Tate, the pressure to be the provider, and so on.
In Machante Malakha, the climax scene is a street-side meeting of AKMA where Dhyan Sreenivasan asks why harassment of men is not considered harassment at all. But soon, a woman comes and pulls her husband off the dais, showing how men are so ‘dominated by women’ that they cannot even agitate on the streets.
It almost seems as if those making such films would be happy if all of us just agreed that men suffer more, whether or not that is true.
Most of all, what reflects very poorly on the foundational ideology of men’s rights activism in such films is the cry for male victimhood to be placed above women’s rights. A comment under the trailer of Aabhyanthara Kuttavaali says the film drew flak, the kind that was not invited by Jaya Jaya Jaya Hey, which showcased marital violence leading to divorce.
One can sense a palpable, seething rage in the male characters in these films, as well as in the men who endorse them, against films that highlight women’s issues. Sadly and concerningly, they appear to be just one quarrel away from losing it on women for being more oppressed!
Views expressed are the author’s own.