The Image-Regime of Cinema in Postmodern Malayalam Literary Fiction

Abstract

Scholars have hitherto examined the twentieth century as a period strongly influenced by the cultural and aesthetic impact of cinema. This cultural influence has spread across the globe, through colonial empires and then through globalization. In the south Indian state of Kerala, the influence of this cinematic image-regime is evident in the postmodern fiction that achieves a niche readership in the late 1990s. Postmodern culture in Kerala receives some popular interest in the 1990s, through the pervasiveness of technological culture and ubiquitous access to television and cinema. Through a theoretical and textual engagement with the fiction of Maythil Radhakrishnan, this paper seeks to show that in Kerala, this new mode of writing is made possible and intelligible under the image-regime of cinema. Maythil’s oeuvre expresses its postmodern aesthetics through a new process of articulating thought, space, time and affect1 – a new kind of articulation made possible in the age of cinema.