The Kerala Story Another insidious film to malign Islam and Muslims

Arshad Shaikh writes on the growing trend in Hollywood and Bollywood (the film industries in the US and India) to deliberately portray Islam and Muslims negatively with the express intent of creating misinformation and hatred. Under the guise of creating fictitious plots and characters, the image of Muslims that gets reinforced after watching such films…

Written by

Arshad Shaikh

Published on

Arshad Shaikh writes on the growing trend in Hollywood and Bollywood (the film industries in the US and India) to deliberately portray Islam and Muslims negatively with the express intent of creating misinformation and hatred. Under the guise of creating fictitious plots and characters, the image of Muslims that gets reinforced after watching such films is that they are prone to terrorism, their nationalism is suspect, they lust after women belonging to other faiths, they have many children, and ready to commit acts of violence in the name of their religion. Another addition to this trend of making Islamophobic films is the newly released film, “The Kerala Story”. While attempts to stop the film’s release did not succeed, it managed to polarise public opinion and bring the issue of Islamophobia, freedom of expression, censorship, creative licence, and “art versus reality” into the national spotlight.

 

The Kerala Story is a controversial Bollywood film that was released on 05 May 2023. The film produced by Vipul Shah and directed by Sudipto Sen is facing a storm of opposition for peddling fiction for truth and lending a bad name to the state of Kerala. The film shows a bunch of Hindu and Christian girls from Kerala being radicalised and converted to Islam, lured by Muslim boys into marriage and then taken to the Middle East to serve a terrorist organisation (the ISIS). The film claimed it was “uncovering the truth that was kept hidden.”

The movie was earlier described as the – “heartbreaking and gut-wrenching stories of 32,000 females in Kerala.” After the robust opposition to the release of the film, the description now reads – “The Kerala Story is a compilation of the true stories of three young girls from different parts of Kerala”.

This film joins the long list of films that appear to have been made with the sole intention of surreptitiously maligning Muslims and Islam through the guise of narrating stories about radicalisation and terrorism. These films reinforce the common refrain that “All Muslims are not terrorists but all terrorists are Muslims.”

 

A POLARISING FILM

No less than the Chief Minister of Kerala, Pinarayi Vijayan said of the film in a Facebook post – “A glance at the trailer gives the impression that the movie was deliberately produced with the aim of communal polarisation and spreading hate propaganda against Kerala. By placing Kerala, the land of secularism, as the centre of religious extremism, it is repeating the Sangh Parivar’s propaganda. Propaganda films and the othering of Muslims should be viewed in the context of various efforts made by the Sangh Parivar to gain an advantage in electoral politics in Kerala.”

Opposition to the film grew steadily with many trying to stall the release of the film. However, the Supreme Court refused to intervene and the High Court found nothing wrong in the film. A division bench of Justice N Nagaresh and Justice Mohammed Nias CP remarked –“Nothing will happen just because the film is screened. The teaser of the film was released in November. What was offensive in the film? What is wrong in saying that Allah is the only God? The country gives the citizen the right to believe in their religion and God and spread it. What was offensive in the trailer? So many movies have already come out about such organisations. There have been references against Hindu monks and Christian priests in many films before. Did you see all this in the way of fiction? What is so special now? How does this movie create sectarianism and conflict in the society?”

 

PROPAGANDA OF LOVE JIHAD

The background commentary in the trailer introduces the main character as Shalini Unnikrishnan, a Hindu from Kerala. The trailer then shows her being interrogated by Indian authorities after she was found and brought back from an Afghan jail. She is asked, “When exactly you joined ISIS?” She replies that it is important to understand why and how she joined ISIS.

The trailer then shows a Muslim girl (wearing a headscarf) talking to her non-Muslim friends saying, “Only Allah rules this world. Only Allah.” The trailer then shows two Muslim middle-aged men (who work for ISIS and are shown with typical Muslim headgear and long beards) talking to the Muslim girl (an ISIS recruiter), saying, “Get them closer to you. Isolate them from their families. Develop physical relations with them. If required make them pregnant. And hand them over for the next mission as soon as possible.”

The trailer then shows these girls (including Shalini) being fraudulently molested in a mall and then told, “A girl who wears a hijab is neither molested nor raped. Because only Allah protects us.”

Shalini converts to Islam and is now Fathima Ba. She marries a Muslim boy. She is shown traveling to a country in the Middle East to join ISIS. There are scenes of torture and other atrocities committed on these girls from Kerala with chants of “Allah u Akbar”.

The trailer narrates via text, “Witness the lives of innocent girls trapped, transformed, and trafficked for terror.” Shalini concludes, and is shown crying and regretting saying, “I am not alone in this game there are thousands of girls like me who have fled their homes only to be buried in this desert.”

 

GROWING TREND OF ISLAMOPHOBIC FILMS

It cannot be denied that after the collapse of the Soviet Union and the demise of communism, Islam was portrayed as the next global threat to the West. This portrayal received a fillip after 9/11 and the spate of blasts, killings, beheadings and shootings allegedly carried out by radicalised Muslim youth. The media and the state machinery of many countries was deployed to peddle the narrative of “radical-Islam” and “Islamic terror”.

Filmmakers were enticed to make films that reinforced the narrative of Muslims being terrorists, anti-national, avid proselytisers, and eager to embrace violence in the hope of gaining martyrdom and paradise. The rise of the right wing and Hindutva politics in India after the mid-1980s had its own impact on the films being made in India. Experts point out that since the 1990s, Bollywood films became increasingly Islamophobic.

Some recent films that can be specifically identified as problematic are Kashmir Files, Sooryavanshi, Tanhaji, Padmaavat and Lipstick Under My Burkha. In an interview to NDTV, renowned actor Naseeruddin Shah pointed out that filmmakers were encouraged by the government to make pro-government films just as filmmakers were “rounded up and asked to make films propagating the Nazi philosophy” in Germany. The actor went on to say, “The kind of big-budget films that are coming. The big ones – cannot disguise their jingoistic agenda.”

The forces of hate and communal disharmony appear to be firmly in control of all media platforms that can be utilised to mould public opinion. Using a quote by Malcom X to paraphrase the predicament of our times – “If you’re not careful, the newspapers (it applies to films as well) will have you hating the people who are being oppressed, and loving the people who are doing the oppressing.”

The story about “The Kerala Story” is a textbook case about how if you – “Make the lie big, make it simple, keep saying it”, then people will believe it.