Paper short abstract:

The paper tries to understand the multiple intersections of the new technology of cinema with the social and how it became crucial sites and technologies in reordering caste end gendered bodies by examining a series of violence events against the first Malayalam film Vigatakumaran and the dalit actress Rosy in 1929.

Paper long abstract:

This paper is an attempt to understand a series of violence around the first screening of the first malayalam film Vigatakumaran(1929), in Thrivuananthapuram, South India, whch was particularly targeted at the heroine of the film- the dalit actress P .K.Rosy, setting off a series of violent incidents and finally leadng to the exile of Rosy from Trivandrum . Rosy's story have been excavated from the discursive layer's of history and re told in popular journals, novellete , poetry and in the memorials organised by Dalit organisations and visits the contemporary, with political and moral stakes, for a range of constituencies.. While remaining indebted to discourses on caste and gendered bodies as historically constituted, this work is equally interested in the early female body in cinema and its multiple interactions with the social .Early cinema in its first decade in the region offers an especially forceful impetus to think about the body apart from traditional categories because over a hundred years ago, as a developing new visual technology with its own complex conventions of intelligibility in the midst of an uneven, nonlinear, and hesitant process of emergence cinema becomes a crucial site for reordering the gendered body.The paper further sets out to explore the affective experience of exhilaration and phantasmagoria with caste and gendered bodies in the context of new technologies like cinema and argues that the presence of a dalit woman on screen challenges the political and ontological assumptions of the times intimates what could be called an 'unthinkable' in Bourdieu's terms.