Is Netflix’s Akka Truly the Radical Political Reimagining We Were Waiting For?

Netflix’s Akka takes viewers to Pernuru, a fictional queendom ruled by three women known as the Akkas. The matriarchal order originates around eight centuries before the main story, after the king and the men of Pernuru perish in a war in the Deccan. In their absence, the women assumed administrative control, with the king’s sisters ascending the throne.

Since then, three women from the ruling clans have governed the different regions of Pernuru, with succession passing through the female lineage. The series draws inspiration from Sambandham, a customary form of conjugal relationship historically practised among the Nairs of Kerala, and from marumakkathayam, the matrilineal system of descent and inheritance traditionally followed by sections of the community.

Interestingly, this matriarchy faced its first major challenge when the Indian government sought to integrate Pernuru into the Indian Union in 1947. The Akkas negotiate the protection of their sovereign state, promising to pay the government a tax in return for non-interference in Pernuru’s internal affairs.

This bloodless accession is almost surreal, even for a work of fiction, particularly when one considers that India’s integration of princely states was not always a peaceful affair. The integration of Hyderabad through military intervention in 1948, for instance, was followed by extensive violence, directed primarily against Muslims during and after the Police Action. Given that, independent India’s ruling elite had at its disposal a heavily armed military, chose to allow Pernuru’s ruling elite to retain its power and privileges, there is little explanation as to why or how such an arrangement came about.

But I suppose all the wishful thinking is welcome in fiction if it takes us directly into a matriarchal and matrilineal world.

For generations, the Akkas have ruled as ruthless leaders, much like mafia bosses in Indian cinema. Ruthlessness in Indian cinema is never a feature of power; it is portrayed as a strategy through which power is exercised. The Akkas are no exception. There is a subtle pressure on all women born into the royal clan to bear girl children. It is almost as though opposition to this system comes exclusively from men, who are disgruntled by the lack of social standing accorded to them and their male offspring. As though women’s autonomy over their own wombs becomes an irrelevant question when women themselves are the enforcers of the social expectation to reproduce.

The primary storyline is set in 1985, when Bhavani, one of the Akkas’ daughters, is handling the administration and the family business of producing and selling local alcohol. Enter the villain, Rudra, who is introduced as an underworld gangster. She wants to bring down the Akkas and restore patriarchy, only to use the men as pawns in her own games, particularly those disgruntled men who either leave Pernuru or remain in the shadows, having accepted that they are no match for the Akkas.

It turns out that Rudra is the daughter of Padmanna, the brother of one of the Akkas, Mutthakka. Padmanna died by suicide after Mutthakka refused to let him marry Kusuma, a woman from the Yeruma community, a marginalised fictional tribal community living in the hills surrounding Pernuru. Pregnant with Padmanna’s child, Kusuma fled Pernuru to escape Mutthakka’s wrath. Rudra, born in exile, returns to exact revenge by bringing an end to the lineage of matriarchs.

Who is Rudra, and what turns her into the ruthless political player we see on screen? What experiences in Mumbai, the city where she grew up, contribute to her resentment towards the Akkas? Apart from a few dialogues, the series tells us very little about her past. We are expected to understand her thirst for revenge without being shown the circumstances that shaped it.

Rudra’s story rests on the familiar portrayal of poverty-stricken masses as living in a dog-eat-dog environment, where survival means outmanoeuvring others, and making it to the top requires ruthless ambition, opportunism and a willingness to do whatever it takes.

Is survival in the slums and chawls of Mumbai not shaped by sisterhood, solidarity, power struggles and hostilities, as it is everywhere else? Devoid of such a backstory, Rudra is ultimately reduced to the very image of the dictatorial matriarchs she seeks to overthrow. She allies herself with the equally feudal male members of the Akka family and capitalises on the Akkas’ oppression of marginalised castes to bring about their annihilation.

Cornered by Rudra, Bhavani is forced to seek support from the warrior women of the Kathawa community. She discovers that Mutthakka had once claimed land that the Kathawa considered sacred to their Goddess. When the community’s leader challenged her, Mutthakka questioned their loyalty, stripped them of the weapons she had once given them and banished them. Bhavani promises to make amends by restoring their place in Pernuru. The Kathawa women agree to fight alongside her.

The series ends with Bhavani negotiating an alliance with the Yeruma and Kathawa communities and redrawing Pernuru’s boundaries. As though this is supposed to bring an end to casteism. As though smug, fascist governments have not repeatedly attempted to ride the wave of recognition without effecting material change, incorporating members of oppressed communities into existing structures of power.

Throughout the story, the screen time given to the Kathawa and Yeruma communities is organised around the central plot of the Akkas. Viewers are never shown subplots in which these communities discuss, deliberate or organise around their own concerns and strategies for survival. Their lives and struggles remain peripheral to the story, surfacing primarily when they intersect with the Akkas’ political interests.

If Akka is meant to be a radical, anti-caste feminist reimagining of our times, we must be willing to critique supposedly alternative political imaginations as much as popular ones. While fictional Pernuru, set in the 1980s, witnesses a clash between the wounded and oppressed femme fatale and the feudal matriarchal order, the wider Deccan region was witnessing struggles that imagined political change very differently.

Needless to say, the struggle for social justice germinated in the very spaces that the series claims made Rudra who she is. We need not look any further than the Dalita Sangharsha Samiti in Karnataka and the Dalit Mahasabha in Andhra Pradesh. The Boosa controversy of 1973 helped galvanise Dalit assertion and organising in Karnataka, contributing to the emergence of the Dalita Sangharsha Samiti in 1977. In Andhra Pradesh, the Karamchedu massacre of 1985 became the catalyst for the emergence of the Dalit Mahasabha. Both movements were sustained by grassroots organising, protests, meetings and networks of solidarity. Nor need we look beyond the women who participated in the Telangana armed peasant struggle, many of whom later raised their voices against landlord violence and the patriarchal hierarchies embedded within revolutionary movements themselves.

The history of social justice in the Deccan has never been one of archetypal heroes fighting archetypal villains, irrespective of how many times the motif is reproduced in South Indian films. Rather, it is a history of organic, community-led grassroots social movements. If South Indian cinema chooses to reimagine the social order, there might be a lesson or two in our own history.