If Mammooty is not macho, is he still Mammootty?

Illustration: Suneesh Kalarickal

Men in Kerala are perhaps locked into a fictional competition from the moment they are born. There is the lot of us who are dark-skinned, short, pot-bellied, bald-headed, politically straddling, and highly indulgent in everything consumable, and with an unlimited supply of alcohol at a hand’s distance away.

Then there is Mammooty — the exotic other against whom many Malayali men define and differentiate themselves for at least three generations.

So when Mammooty turned 70 on September 7, it looked natural that he has forged everybody in Kerala to agree to something — that he represents the manliest of men.

From his earliest incarnations, Mammooty has been a pressure on other men.

Like the other Malayalam superstar Mohanlal, he positioned and popularised the expected norms of macho manhood as shaped by the culture industry in his prime. He was established as hip — according to Joshiy who directed most Mammooty movies as the manly man who pummelled the bad guys, rescued the girl child and carried the suitcase.

He was the man bearing the paternal burden in those movies, providing and holding together the family. He was uneasy with strong, successful women. He was also the virtuous man-in-power, solving crimes and fighting corruption. At the very least, he looked sharp.

The movies were a hit because society somehow felt them as justified. To his credit, Mammooty was intense so that they were not seen as overacting.

By extension, those movies ended up reinforcing a whole bunch of regressive ideas about what it means to be a real man. They were men overbearing on women, refusing to share anything seen as womanly, like domestic tasks, and demanding to be taken care of. The anti-feminine nature of those movies were seen as good natured, harmless, or even inevitable.

Hardly any of this was the actor’s fault, says CS Venkiteshwaran, a critic who wrote a book on Mammooty. “He was acting in 35 films a year. I don’t think anybody has time to think what kind of movies they want to do. Whole time he is in front of the camera. And it was the director’s decade, not the actor’s, in any case,” he said.

In contrast, modern Malayalam movies are like an elegy to the masculinity embodied by Mammooty. It is reflection of contemporary Kerala perhaps. “A whole lot of social-economic changes have happened in Kerala,” said Venkiteshwaran, like increased female literacy and expanded individual choices for women. “The men have lost all masculine control over women. All kinds of anxiety are out there. Politically and economically, there is uncertainty in their lives."

Indeed, the new age heroes, especially Fahad Fasil, represents men who are not conventionally handsome, fragile, timid, and vulnerable, plagued with a wide variety of anxiety, illnesses, and awkward personality quirks.

Even Dulquer Salmaan, Mammooty’s son and an actor, in his breakthrough movie ‘Ustad Hotel’ appeared as someone terrified of his father, tending to the needs of others, providing protective support to women and spurning the spotlight.

Meanwhile, there is a rise of rebel women stars who take bad guys to the task, especially Manju Warrier, Parvathy Thiruvothu and Rima Kallingal, who subvert the notion that masculinity is exclusive of the male body.

With Malayalam movies seem reformed, the question now is whether there’s space for a less macho version of Mammooty.

To an extent, he has found ways to do that already. It shows that Keralites, and their shared masculinity, are fluid. They are malleable and flexible.

Even in the 1980s, Mammootty consciously took upon roles by auteur creators such as KG George, MT Vasudevan Nair, Adoor Gopalakrishnan, Bharatan, TV Chandran, Shaji N Karun, and bowed his head to art cinema and multiple languages. They were roles that tend not to be boxed in horrible stereotypes. They exceeded his dramatic scope, and the ability to express subtleties.

Venkiteshwaran said this was partly because he wanted to do different kind of roles, given the peer pressure from people such as Amitabh Bachchan. Also, he added, because the Malayalam stars wanted to be eternal now, leave something for the ages.

In the post-2000s, Mammooty made another fundamental change in his career. Using the star capital, he retooled his masculine persona without the trappings of the past. In movies like Pokkiriraja or Rajadhiraja or Masterpiece, he is still the object of the gaze. The look, the demeanour, and the swagger are all still important. But it is shown as a strategy of getting back control of lives or to attain a moral virtue.

The more profound change he has done is the final way he defended his career: by abandoning himself.

In the post-2000s, he found another layer to his dramatic universe that were seen as his vulnerabilities before. The man dancing in Rajamanikyam, the man doing comedy in Mayavi, the man-in-trouble in Peranbu, strike all the more interesting because it is done by Mammooty.

He was shown to the viewer without much of these before, so even the slightest change feels like an earthquake. At 70, he is playing the movie in our heads.

Nidheesh MK is a journalist and analyst based in Kerala. Views are personal and do not represent the stand of this publication.