What’s this Kerala Story business?

A still from the film ‘The Kerala Story’

There is a man and a woman, following separate faiths, seemingly in love. As it turns out, the guy, with a deeply religious bent, has brainwashed the woman into marrying him.

Soon after this wedding, the woman finds herself deeply entrapped, and delinked from the rest of her family - before she goes missing altogether!

Is that The Kerala Story? No. It's the riveting story of a fine, true-crime, fully fact-checked documentary series, Dancing on the Grave (that recently dropped on Amazon Prime Video).

The man concerned is a Hindu, wannabe religious figure, ‘Swami Shraddhanand'. The woman was a Muslim aristocrat, Shekereh Khaleeli. The alleged motive behind her isolation and murder was money.

Given that this was also an inter-religious couple, why is Dancing on the Grave not being deemed a propaganda series, on politico-religious lines - as Sudipto Sen's film The Kerala Story? Okay, then listen to that story!

There's a Hindu, Mallu, college-girl, Shruti Unnikrishnan (Adah Sharma), whose preferred language, even when she's abroad, is Hindi. At the hostel, a Muslim roommate introduces the girl to her Muslim cousins. They meet at a restaurant, where they also start dancing!

The Amazon Prime documentary ‘Dancing on the grave'

When she's in the mall, a bunch of gundas attack her. This is when she takes up the hijab, upon being told that "those in hijab never get molested or raped"!

How's she further drawn into Islam, by the boyfriend, who rolls cocaine and marijuana into the same joint? He feeds her recreational drugs, captagon, amphetamine. The conversion is complete.

This is when she literally spits on her father, because he "followed a videshi (foreign) ideology, communism, but didn't teach enough about religion!" She's also ashamed of calling herself Hindu.

The brainwashers tell her about Hindu Gods: "There is Krishna, who goes around falling in love with every girl; Ram, who couldn't even rescue his wife, Sita, from Raavan…."

At which point, at Gaiety-Galaxy, in Bandra, Mumbai, where my friend watched The Kerala Story, the audience in the hall let out a war-like cry, ‘Jai Shri Ram!' He felt frightened. He's Hindu.

It's stuff like this that evidently makes some wonder if the line for free speech must be drawn where it's likely to actively incite hate towards an entire community as a bulk.

No such kerfuffle in the quiet Le Reve theatre in the same neighbourhood, where I watched The Kerala Story - about the Muslim-convert girl and the Muslim guy, who go off to Syria to serve as Islamic State (IS) terrorists, and she gets holed up in Afghanistan.

Millions have watched this film too - making it among the most commercially successful, lately. Which tells you what about the audience? No different from what you observe on social media, blindly endorsing/advocating hate for Muslims, almost deriving their identity from it?

Wholly unmindful - like the movie itself, that has zero counterpoint - that there are indeed many kinds of Islam. And if 1.8 billion Muslims were the same blood-thirsty, gun-toting fanatics - wouldn't the world have been annihilated by now, anyway? Even frickin' IS and Taliban don't get along!

If anything, as lay readers, we've in fact grown up on how India's Muslims (third largest in the world) were the least radicalised in the global map of Islamic terrorism. This is statistically true - making many pontificate on its possible causes (India as an inherently secular/pluralistic collective being one of them).

By the look/feel of The Kerala Story, it would appear that people there must be fighting over whose God's own country it is! Which is obviously not the case.

As the rabbit hole of the Internet I slipped into - learning viewpoints of those I may not agree with - scare-mongering over Kerala as "a ticking time-bomb" (that's also a line in the movie).

It's evidently an affront to India's best state, on health, education, and human development indicators - and in this context, in the quality of movies too! I doubt too many Malayalis would be interested in The Kerala Story. Although it's not the first terribly-made movie to do well in theatres, nationally. It won't be the last.

Box-office figures get aimed as consumer reviews. Knowing that so many people have watched a film - you step in as well, wondering what the fuss is about. That's why I did. As did my friend. The ticket sold doesn't denote either of us liked it. Both felt totally turned off.

Yet, the answer to a film is ideally another film! Or at a more hyper-local level, a critique, or product reviews, such as think pieces, and popular YouTube videos (by Dhanya Rajendran, Dhruv Rathee).

What're they effectively arguing with plain facts? What the Kerala High Court also struck down - the filmmakers' claim that it reflects a larger story of 32,000 women converted and turned into sex-slaves and terrorists from Kerala.

Dig deeper, even discounting heavy fictionalization, over ‘love-jehad' zombie attack, etc - at best The Kerala Story resembles a widely reported one from over half a decade ago, that involved six women, of which merely one was a Hindu converted to Islam!

Conflating it into an epidemic would be like the documentary series, Dancing on the Grave, implying that Hindu ‘swamis' are targeting rich Muslim women for the money. Or are they? Let's throw in some contextless quotes/stats, too!

Mayank Shekhar attempts to make sense of mass culture. He tweets @mayankw14
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