Michel Foucault, the ‘historian of the present’, as he described his own work vis-a-vis laying down a historicist genealogy of "technologies” of power and the particular dynamic it shares with other conceptual categories such as knowledge or discourse, throughout his philosophical formulations, privileges the ‘body’ and how it has been made to enter political relations through his project of enunciating “the genealogy of the modern subject” (Rabinow). To such an end, he defines power as a force that trickles down from the disciplinary institutions of antiquity to the level of the banal, behavioral aspects of individuals (or the ‘subject’ that foregrounds Western consciousness post-Enlightenment) and their relationships with each other as well as larger players in the political field, namely the state and its various apparatuses. This resulted in Foucault’s appreciation for the medium of cinema and what he observed it to be uniquely capable of achieving – i.e. its propensity to illustrate through its formal interventions the hypothesis that Foucault espoused through his 'archaeological’ investigations into the nature of the historical “event.” As structural change, the historical event consists of a mutation of a range of previous eras and rifts in history that make up a kind of “virtual orb” (Maniglier) as opposed to a linear progression and clean recombination without residue or link to the past. This “eventalization” of history is accomplished through the works of certain filmmakers that Foucault explicitly admired such as Resnais, Duras, or Schroeter who could adequately stress the image as always inhabiting a lateral relation to what remains off-camera. In other words, the historical contingencies at play in any milieu dictate the dynamic interplays between what becomes part of the diegesis and what it continues from (the off-screen space). Such methods make possible the arrival at micro-histories and the registering of spectral contingencies as virtual possibilities co-existent with material (actual) realities that the screen is capable of reflecting.

The aim of this piece shall be to look beyond the examples from the ‘Second Cinema’ of the West (Western Europe specifically) to the (destined to be perceived as) obscure and foreign space of the hyperlocal in the filmic world of John Abraham, an exceptionally iconoclastic director from the Southern Indian state of Kerala, whose 1986 film titled ‘Amma Ariyan’ (Tr: Report To Mother) will be closely analyzed as a fertile field for locating impulses for the micro-historical as prioritized in the event through the politico-aesthetic choices of this rebellious Marxist artist, relegated to the margins of cultural-political history even in the larger cinematic discourses of the Global South. The attempt hence shall be to make relevant the revolutionary politics of 1970s Kerala, radicalized by far-left peasant and student uprisings, and translated into counter-cultural practices in the works of several filmmakers including Abraham. Additionally, the piece is an exercise in acknowledging the limitations one is bound to encounter while reading such films through the philosophical/conceptual frameworks afforded by the currents of Western intellectual history and theory—films deeply inflected at multiple levels (narrative as well as formal) by the philosophical traditions and mythological allusions of its place of origin/emergence. 

Amma Ariyan and the archetype of the Great Mother: Messianic Materialism and its recovery of memory for politicizing history

The past carries with it a temporal index by which it is referred to redemption. There is a secret agreement between past generations and the present one.  Our coming was expected on earth.  Like every generation that preceded us, we have been endowed with a weak Messianic power, a power to which the past has a claim.  That claim cannot be settled cheaply…. even the dead will not be safe from the enemy if he triumphs. (Walter Benjamin, Theses on The Philosophy Of History, pp. 253-254)

As the above excerpt demonstrates, Walter Benjamin’s anticipation of renewal and liberation in the wake of fascism, then casting a long shadow over contemporary world politics (1942), was predicated upon his confidence in the faculty of melancholy as a positive force constituted within a greater urgency to remember the past in the face of widespread historical revisionism and absolute distortion. Melancholy, and indeed memory, then are viewed not as leading to resignation but rather as potent forces that can work against the status quo harboring a utopian impulse vis-a-vis battling the totalizing threats of fascism. Memory aids in the people striving to realize the destiny of prior generations that Benjamin believed to be always open-ended if in need of resolution. Such a prescient outlook is fathomable considering the rapid rise of fascism which kept gaining solid ground in Western Europe at the time and the resolution of which required massive re-politicization and remobilization of the working class aligned with Benjamin’s politics of radical hope. The language of such revolutionary fervor and determination would arise not solely from the standard Communist Manifestoes but rather from more intimate discursive traditions such as those found in spiritual texts and precepts.  Benjamin’s subjection of history to radical readings of the Talmud and liturgical sources coupled with its re-integration in contemporary critical frameworks and political theory, did not just open new hermeneutic possibilities at the level of discourse but also seemingly paved the way for the radical re-imagining of Marxism itself. His peculiar Marxism inflected with a particularly “anarchistic charge” (Traverso) constituted his profound self-identification as Jewish which led to his faith in the “spiritual and religious strength” of Judaism (and by extension any other religious philosophy) as “a fundamental and irreplaceable source for the revolutionary transformation of the world” - a belief which as contradictory as it might seem for a historical materialist to harbor, seems to have found its share of proponents widely in Marxist circles of the Global South (despite its detractors outweighing their numbers by far). Within such a context of contrary Marxism which has been regarded as ‘Messianic Materialism’, one can now approach the work of the Malayali auteur from Kerala, John Abraham, and his endearing legacy in the alternative cult-histories of Indian cinema which have received little attention. The “mythical power of return” (Biswas) that we find ample evidence of in Benjamin, can be significantly allocated also in the philosophical ethos of Ritwik Ghatak’s film-world, Abraham’s predecessor both literally as his teacher in FTII (Film and Television Institute of India) as well as in terms of his political and artistic vision. Both filmmakers were not satisfied with a filmic form that merely enacts the historical flow as we find in the parallel cinema proponents of the Ray school (social realism) but rather “sought to turn history itself into an object of investigation” (Biswas). To such an end, in Amma Ariyan, Abraham borrows the mythical archetype of the Great Mother from Ghatak not to question modes of modernity from a traditionalist stance—such as its central protagonist, Purushan’s initial prerogative to leave home for the national capital of Delhi for further studies—but rather to search for Brecht’s “fighting conception of the modern” through the structuring paradigm of a mythic trope that resonates most deeply with the people’s collective imaginary.

Amma Ariyan is set in 1970s Kerala in the wake of what Radio Peking termed The Spring Thunder, known otherwise as the Naxal movement –the Marxist-Leninist-Maoist armed revolutionary movement that attempted to dismantle the quasi-feudal Indian social structure and the corrupted state machinery that still followed colonial administrative policies. The movement was essentially a culmination of several preceding revolutionary peasant movements and erupted from North Bengal in 1967 and quickly spread across certain pockets in the country – including metropolitan cities by the 1970s, which they declared the decade of liberation. The film at its core remains “enmeshed within cycles of becoming and then unbecoming” (Malhotra) - following the journey of Purushan who at the outset is seen taking leave from his mother to set out for Delhi. Purushan’s becoming, as in his self- having come into being - is thus announced through a foray onto the path geared towards fulfilling his individual destiny. What sets the stage for Abraham’s prophetic vision of revolutionary politics is, however, his abrupt unbecoming – the subsummation of his initial mission predicated upon the individual into the larger collective that slowly takes shapes around him and the central event that completely re-orients both his destination as well as the film’s. The name Purushan itself means self or consciousness – again pointing to his employment of mythic archetypes – Purushan is a stand-in for everybeing or for the rebelling youth in 70s India who found themselves perpetually torn between two contradictory poles of total revolution and political compromise due to immediate socio-economic circumstances requiring them to seek employment. 

On the course of his journey towards becoming, he unexpectedly chances upon the tragic suicide of a young tabla [2]-player, Hari – whose death overcasts the entire fabric of the film with many implications: the most pertinent one as to its cause. Suicide was the official state narrative. The film, however, problematizes and deconstructs this simple explanation, exploring many disparate narrative-flashes concerning Hari from a bandwagon of characters Purushan encounters during his revised mission to inform Hari’s mother of her son’s tragic death. Significantly, none of these characters, who hail from diverse backgrounds and join Purushan in his protracted journey to discover the identity of Hari knew the entirety of the latter’s circumstances – the film crafts out in real-time, an alternative account of the seemingly unrelated (non-causal) events not only around Hari’s death but also his life. The refusal to allow death’s pernicious influence to singularly color the viewer’s consideration of Hari’s life-scape demonstrate the disregard for state (historical) narratives that view the death (extra-judicial execution posited as suicide) of such Naxalite martyrs as justified for securing the sanctity of the state and its apparatuses. Moreover, the killing of such figures is often meant to be exemplary as pointed out by the voice that is overlaid onto the scene where Purushan discovers the commotion around the body of the deceased: “How many violent deaths...this is how spirits break, this is how skulls are split open.” This voice cannot be readily identified as Purushan’s inner monologue – rather there appears to be one of Hari’s friends, who is then more aligned with the axis of the camera and seems to carry on with the voice’s contemplative streak: “What do we get in return...I don't know; I don't know.” This is where the scene abruptly concludes without any emotional resolution or resolve: “The anxious intensity that lies at the beginning of the scene is reduced to a mere mumble by its end – a gross, existential fluctuation that will permeate the entire film.” (Malhotra) 

The enactment of such a model of resistance that is marked initially by some amount of vigor, only to be ultimately subsumed by the immense totalizing oppression of state institutions hovering around and above the dissenters, can be understood as the repeating-archetype of the ‘failed revolutionary’ that appears in different contexts in Abraham’s entire filmography – probably reaching its pinnacle in the figure of Hari in Amma Ariyan whose death triggers the creation of an entire collective – one that is born in mourning rather than in revolutionary anger. Here, we see the recurrence of the Benjaminian faith in the provision of nostalgia which is elementally constituted within the process of mourning. Hari - the archetype of the failed (or imperfect) revolutionary whose yearning for political liberation found it's material grounding through his persistent love and practice of music – in equal measures for American rock as with the tabla – embraced his death not because he was a perfect martyr who welcomed it owing to his political convictions, but rather because the hands, through which the artist practices, on his particular path to liberation were smashed by the state. Even Purushan’s admission towards the end of the film to his mother through the floating voiceover that he too longed to be a Naxalite rebel – but he feared he didn’t have the capacity– remind one of the possibility that Abraham is refusing to provide a uniform, stereotypical, historically-sanctioned picture of the revolutionary as a stationary figure devoid of all historicity and complex maneuvers e.g. – he is either this or that – a revolutionary or a counterrevolutionary – for or against the revolution – an agit-prop practitioner or a bourgeois artist. Rather, throughout the film, all the characters that we encounter who all provide diverse, anecdotal accounts effecting the resurrection of Hari’s myth – signify a deliberate obfuscation on the part of the filmmaker, all of whose characters exist “as a fossil of imagined truths; a colony of ciphers.”^[3] The characters in Abraham’s cinema are heavily coded (ciphers) - not with world-historical registers but rather with very local, folk registers of perception which have their origin in a mythic imagination. The mythic (itihasa) reconstruction would constitute the witnessing of characters in all their perplexities, in their variegated processes of becoming(s) and unbecoming(s) - without having to comprehend their selves, and hence their actions, as immutable and fixed subjects. The film operates with a recursive cyclical posture at multiple levels – thematically as well as through the interplay of character and situational archetypes that permeate its diegesis. Then again, the central event of the gradual formation of the collective mirrors the non-diegetic collective whose monetary contributions directly enabled the film’s becoming. 

Abraham was one of the founders of the Odessa Film Collective that aimed to democratize film production and distribution by incorporating the viewers within the production process by taking them along through the journey of the film’s making. In 1986 Abraham took an unconventional route to gather funds for what would turn out to be his final production - travelling with a group from village to village, playing drums, performing skits and short plays and screening films, they collected people’s contributions ranging between Re 1 to Rs 500 in a bucket which they later availed for making Amma Ariyan. John’s biopic writer, Deedi Damodaran describes one of the many myths behind the director’s militant-prophetic motivation - “John brought in a fundamental change in the concept of raising capital for a film. He made what he called people’s cinema. Everyone was a producer.” (George) Hence, the last shot of the film features the camera unceremoniously turned towards its spectators who, as they disperse, must reckon with who the film was really made for – it was never slated for a theatrical release and instead was screened by Odessa at informal gatherings throughout the country. Another anecdotal myth regarding the central premise of the film involves the story of how the film was made around a real crowd travelling from Wayanad in north Kerala to Kochi in the south to inform Hari’s mother of the demise of her rebel son, which brings us to the mythic archetype of the great mother that the original title of the film in Malayalam alludes to –Amma meaning mother. The film is interspersed with the ritualistic, recurring appearances of multiple mother-son pairs all of whom repeat the same exercise of informing and being informed of Hari’s death and the seeking of permission for undertaking the long journey leading to Hari’s mother. The structuring format of the film is epistolary where Purushan continues to report to his own mother, who waits for his return like all the other mothers in the film, through “a collection of intimations, reflections, confessions” - an instance of privileging the oral form of communication over the written since these belong entirely to the innermost realms of Purushan (meaning consciousness itself) and could be assigned equally to any other person within the narrative and even beyond it – orature making it possible to override the modernist requirement of ascribing thoughts to a self – an author –which in turn, aids the state in enlisting its dissidents. The mother-figure that was overwhelmingly popular in mainstream Indian cinematic narratives as a fixed, immutable icon representing India, is significantly revised by Abraham in the lines of Ghatak’s persistent belief in this central archetype having penetrated the deepest pores of our society – Abraham “allows her to emerge as an abstract, developing subconscious, which resides within the characters...not autonomous of them, but resident within their being.” (Malhotra) 

This motif points to the persistence of the memory of the past of a community – akin to Foucault’s emphasis on popular memory—from which the present can derive the optics of modernity by creatively transforming the orthodox modes of resistance and mobilization into ones befitting the particulars of the people they were meant to emancipate. Foucault’s observation about what he phrased as an “interesting battle for and around history” (Foucault 117) taking place in 1970s France vis-à-vis the counter-revolutionary encoding in films which aimed to suppress any memory of the legacy of a long-protracted series of popular struggles is especially relevant in this regard. To Foucault, films such as Lacombe, Lucien (Louis Malle 1974) can be seen to impose a conservative, almost revisionist framework to interpret the present and color the people’s collective past – akin to such parallels in the Indian context that upheld the Nehruvian vision of nation-building such as the works of Adoor Gopalakrishnan – a much-renowned Malayali auteur and Abraham’s contemporary. Through his decision to drastically displace conditions of sole auteur-ship in favor of people establishing their own “internal archives” (Foucault 119), Abraham demonstrates how one must be directly cognizant of such ideological distortions of history in order to avoid them. Instead, internal archives constitute the very body of the film and are developed through the actual journey undertaken by real people (the proletariats) that result in the harnessing of the very impetus of the film: to be made (in its exact forms) from the very people whose experiences are the basis for the events of history. Through an inflection with mythic registers, Abraham’s cinematic methods achieve the deliberate recasting of history—transforming it into a people’s history—and models a way to arrive at alternative methodologies for comprehending counter-historical traces in the various regional cinemas of the Global South.

Works Cited 

1. Abraham, John, director. Amma Ariyan (Report to Mother). Odessa Collective, 1986, https://youtu.be/bpsY0J010uc?si=fnjDrgH61kRi0bDr. Accessed 3 Feb. 2025. 
2. Benjamin, Walter. “Theses On The Philosophy Of History.” Illuminations: Essays and Reflections. United Kingdom, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 1968. 
3. Ghatak, Ritwik and Moinak Biswas. "Human Society, Our Tradition, Filmmaking, and My Efforts." Cinema Journal, vol. 54 no. 3, 2015, p. 13-17. Project MUSE, https://dx.doi.org/10.1353/cj.2015.0035.
4. Malhotra, Anuj. “A Colony of Ciphers.” Photogénie, 11 Feb. 2021, photogenie.be/a-colony-of-ciphers/. 
5. Maniglier, Patrice, et al. “VERSIONS OF THE PRESENT: Foucault’s Metaphysics of the Event Illuminated by Cinema.” Foucault at the Movies, Columbia University Press, 2018, pp. 35–100. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.7312/fouc16706.6.
6. Traverso, Enzo. “The Messianic Materialism of Walter Benjamin.” The Jewish Question: History of a Marxist Debate. Translated by Bernard Gibbons, Brill, 2019. 
7. Foucault, Michel. The Foucault Reader. Edited by Paul Rabinow, First edition, Pantheon Books, 1984.
8. George, Anubha. “Biopic ‘John’ resurrects one of Malayalam cinema’s most revered filmmakers.” Scroll.in, 19 June. 2018, https://scroll.in/reel/883001/biopic-john-resurrects-one-of-malayalam-cinemas-most-revered-filmmakers.