Melancholic Vision and Utopian Imagination: Amma Ariyan and Left-wing Culture in Kerala in the 1970s

Abstract

Situating the Malayalam film Amma Ariyan in the context of radical Left politics in Kerala during the “long 1970s”, this paper argues that Left-wing cultural productions during the period offered a melancholic vision of history that sustained a utopian imagination. In popular discussions, the 1970s is seen as a period of “misguided adventurism” and defeat, and the nostalgia for the period is treated as a paralyzing, backward looking attitude. Drawing on contemporary scholarship on Left melancholy, nostalgia, and utopia, this paper looks back at the 1970s from a perspective where melancholia is a stance that offers a critical vision of the past as well as the future. This paper argues that the “failed heroes” in Left-wing cultural productions in the 1970s refused to “resign themselves to … the inevitable and ‘natural’ character of the most monstrous inequalities”. This “refusal to be realistic” has been very central to the sustaining of a utopian imagination which acquires more significance in the context of the perceived reactivation of “communist desire” in the contemporary times.