“Desecrated Bodies”: The Male Body as Frontier for New Realism in Contemporary Malayalam Cinema

The proposed study will probe how certain emerging patterns of presenting the male body in contemporary Indian new wave cinema could be a response to the limits of a realism fixated on the outer/public space – a limit brought to sharp focus by the new media ecology that has transformed borders of public and private in fundamental ways. This formulation invokes a range of categories and frameworks which need elaboration, and the links between them demonstrated.