As someone with an unconventionally Christian upbringing— a child of Syrian Catholic parents who later became non-denominational Pentecostals— I have found the identitarian quandaries around the Kerala Nasrani fascinating. Who is the Nasrani, fundamentally? What kind of cultural and political capital does one have to possess to inhabit the Nasrani identity? And through what markers does one recognise oneself—and offer oneself to be recognised—as a Nasrani?
During my college years, I turned to cinema, a medium that has historically been met with suspicion by Kerala’s Pentecostal community. Through it, I began to recognise how the iconography of the Nasrani is woven into the public imagination of Christian identity in the state. In what follows, I examine a set of popular films to flesh out this identity, focusing on the role of cinema in constructing the Nasrani as a particular kind of political subject.
Lineage and Legitimacy
In his seminal work, “Mythologies”, Roland Barthes spoke of “myths”— “the decorative display of what-goes-without-saying”—as the collection of tropes through which we make sense of our cultural worlds. Cinema, as we now know, is not merely entertainment. It is a vehicle of constructing and reinforcing myths—ideas that are accepted in any milieu as unquestionable, self-evident common sense.
What, then, is the myth of the Nasrani that cinema dresses up as “natural reality”? How are assumptions about the Syrian Christian world coded into, or perhaps even dismantled by, Malayalam filmic texts? While answering these questions might require an intricate spadework into the labyrinths of Malayalam cinema, one could begin the groundwork with a handful of key texts.
Consider P. Padmarajan’s 1986 film Namukku Parkkan Munthiri Thoppukal, a film that is widely seen as a prototype of Malayalam middle-cinema. The film tells the story of Solomon—a wealthy Christian planter who is hopelessly in love with his indigent, sexually wronged neighbour. The motifs here are unmistakably biblical. Yet, the film dulls into background the material realities that makes Solomon capable of this great defiance. Like his namesake—the biblical King Solomon who received his great wealth through divine providence—the film never questions the relationship between subversive masculinity of the Nasrani subject and the wealth he seems to have amassed.
While there are many films that indulge in the grandiloquent portrayal of Syrian Christian bourgeois lifestyle, none subvert the feudal nostalgia associated with it more cunningly than Joshiy’s 1997 film Lelam. The film’s liquor baron, Eappachan, is a Christian patriarch par excellence. He is principled and pious, commanding and rich. He has all the conventional markings of the Nasrani.
While the film consistently foregrounds the opulence of the Anakattil family, a moment of narrative dissonance arises in a key scene. In a mediation meeting convened to discuss liquor licensing, Eappachan defies the bishop. As the meeting progresses, the bishop ascribes Eappachan’s characteristic “irreverence” to a deficiency in his familial lineage—his kudumba parambaryam. In the bishop’s view, Eappachan is simply not “born right” to show the deference his authority demands.
The film is quick to extinguish any doubts one might have about what this means. Eappachan’s father is a figure of working-class virtue, a man who was willing to kill the white man who attempted to dishonour his wife. However, following his death, the church and the clergy refuse to recognise him as a Christian. Eappachan is compelled to inter his father in the themmadikuzhi—literally, the “pit of scoundrels”—rather than in the consecrated church cemetery. In this moment, the film textually reinstates Eappachan’s identity as a Nasrani through a narrative of marginalization.
Kudumba parambaryam, or the condition of being born into a family of recognized prestige, constitutes a central element of Nasrani identity. This notion of inherited status stands in tension with Christianity’s conventional self-understanding as a universal and missionary faith, drawing a clear line between simply being a Christian and being a Nasrani. Whereas one may enter the Christian fold through the ecclesiastical mechanism of conversion, to be a Nasrani is to assert a specific and often fiercely guarded genealogical claim. In many instances, Nasrani identity is constructed explicitly in contrast to that of so-called “lesser Christians”— those whose families converted more recently and are therefore seen as lacking the same historical or social standing within the community.
There is perhaps no other film that so incisively indicts the excesses of Nasrani life as K.G. George’s 1985 classic Irakal. The story centres on the Palakunnel household, a wealthy Christian family that has amassed its fortune through rubber cultivation. Its patriarch, Mathukutty, is singularly obsessed with expanding his estate. While his eldest son, Koshy, inherits this ruthless drive, the rest of the family pursue their own self-interests in quieter but equally corrosive ways. The narrative, however, focuses on the youngest son, Baby.
Baby is a psychopath. He is visibly disturbed by the hypocrisies that saturate his family and turns to drugs and violence to cope with it. The film is scathing in its portrayal of familial dysfunction and the perversions its repression occasions. The Christian reglementary system attempts to intervene at various points to reign in the excesses of the family, chiefly in the form of Mathukutty’s brother-in-law, Bishop Stephen.
This film presents a somewhat contrasting picture of the Nasrani world. While untethering the excesses of the Palakunnel family from any real genealogy of the Kerala Nasrani, it tells you about their unique history. This appears most poignantly in the figure of Papi, Mathukutty’s bedridden father, who becomes a sedimented archive of the family’s past. In one scene, Papi recalls inheriting a gun from the white man who had taught him to shoot. But unlike his son, he used the gun only to scare wild animals. Mathukutty, he complains, indiscriminately killed the animals and cut the trees, building a vast rubber plantation in the place of the razed forest. The sounds of his victims are no longer heard.
In this scene, Irakal becomes clear in absolving the Nasrani world in making of a psychopath. While the film does not exonerate the Palakunnel family from their Nasrani-ness, neither does it fully anchor their violence in the broader historical structures of Nasrani power. In this way, the film effaces traces of Nasrani power from the surface of the narrative, displacing structural critique into a story of familial psychodrama. What we are left with are individuals—victims and perpetrators—trapped in a closed circuit of dysfunction.
The Pit of Scoundrels
Bharathan’s 1985 film Kathodu Kaathoram also paints a picture of how the Nasrani identity comes to be defined and policed by Christian social institutions. The film tells the story of Marykutty and Louis—a couple who is not married to each other but is compelled by circumstances to live together. Even though Marykutty is otherwise trapped in an abusive marriage, the church is largely indifferent to her plight. It is only when Marykutty attempts to transcend the socially demarcated conjugal lines that the church begins to take interest in her as a subject.
Intriguing notions about the ‘private’ and the ‘public’ emerge here. The marriage between two people is essentially viewed by the church as a private affair. The conflicts in the marriage between Marykutty and her husband is of no interest to the congregation. Even though the relationship violates all doctrinal principles regarding the conjugal duties between a husband and a wife, the church refuses to intervene in it. Yet, when Marykutty decides to live together with Louis—in a relationship that fulfills the biblical ideal of a marriage—the congregation demands that Marykutty and Louis are excommunicated from the church and are buried in the “pit of scoundrels”.
This is the moment in which we see the true character of the Church as a regulatory system. Its pressure valves, we see, are calibrated to flush out only the excesses of social disorder. As long as an abusive husband is not a threat to the patriarchal status quo, the church does not find it necessary to discipline him. However, a threat to the marriage that has been solemnized by the Church marks a crisis that needs to be addressed immediately.
The “pit of scoundrels” (themmadikuzhi) functions as a compelling motif in the film. On one level, it represents a form of theological limbo—a space reserved for those who are neither fully Christian nor fully heathen. The individuals buried here are not condemned outright like non-Christians, yet they are denied the redemption that marks full inclusion within the Church. It is within this liminal space that boundaries blur: between virtue and sin, between caste privilege and caste marginality. The themmadikuzhi thus becomes a site of inclusive exclusion, where one is acknowledged only to be cast out.
At another level, it serves as a socially demarcated space designed to maintain the prevailing social order. The Church, in this framing, appears less as a provider of spiritual salvation and more as an institution that regulates social belonging. Through the perlocutionary act of baptism, the Christian subject is incorporated into the social world of the Church and, ideally, exits that world with the honor of a dignified Christian funeral. This trajectory marks one’s social legitimacy in life and in death.
In this context, the themmadikuzhi operates as a disciplinary mechanism. To be interred there is to suffer a dual exclusion: it brings social disgrace not only upon the deceased but also upon their surviving kin, and it symbolically forecloses entry into eternal salvation. The threat of this posthumous punishment—the sealing of heaven’s gates—acts as a powerful deterrent, ensuring that Christian subjects remain compliant within the Church’s social hierarchy. In this way, the disciplinary function of the themmadikuzhi traverses the boundary between the social and the metaphysical, reinforcing control across both domains.
Failures of a Reglementary System
Dileesh Pothan’s Joji presents us with the failures of the Christian reglementary system in governing the moral order of a Nasrani family. The film tells the story of the wealthy Panachel family. Its patriarch, Kuttapan, is a man defined by his largeness. His imposing figure complements his capacity to run a tight ship. He controls the reins of the family’s massive financial and real-estate assets, compelling his three sons to respond to his largeness in bizarre ways. The eldest, Jomon, capitulates fully to it, becoming an obedient son to his father and an alcoholic husband to his wife. The second son, Jaison, conspires with his wife to find ways of escaping his father’s stranglehold over their life. The third son, Joji, broadens his capacity for duplicity.
Soon after his father begins recovering from a stroke, Joji decides to take matters into his own hands. He pleads to his abusive father to loosen his grip over the family estate. When he fails to listen, Joji switches his father’s medication, effectively orchestrating his murder under the guise of a natural death. Partition of the family estate ensues, setting off a chain of events in which Joji’s mind unravels slowly.
The family’s relationship with the church, we soon see, is entirely transactional. For Jomon, the institution holds no moral weight—he claims to be guided solely by his conscience. He openly defies the priest and the authority of the church he represents. For Jaison and his wife, the Church is an extension of their inherited capital—an enterprise that protects the family’s business interests. They must maintain a relationship with it in order to safeguard their social standing. For Joji, however, it is a cover for his fractured identity. He pretends to renew his faith in Christ to obscure his role in his brother’s death. None of them are Christians in any meaningful sense of the term.
Another interesting figure in Joji is that of the priest. The young Father shows great loyalty to the rituals around faith, which is rarely ever linked to any greater doctrinal concern. At many points in the film, he attempts to discipline Jomon who is openly defiant of his authority. Yet, he is oblivious to the locus of the real moral decay. His authority is neither redemptive nor disruptive—as greed and murder unfold, his interventions are impotent, lost amidst the ceremonial performance of faith. The church exists in Joji not as a site of salvation, but as a fragile institution overwhelmed by the very forces—capital, violence, patriarchal control—it fails to confront.
Pastoral Authority
Pastoral authority takes on more complex dimensions in other Malayalam films. The priest in the Manchadikunnu parish—where Kathodu Kathoram is set—is sympathetic to Marykutty and Louis. Convinced that justice is on the side of the nonconforming subjects, the Father attempts to trespass the rules of the church to protect the couple. While conceding that marriage is a sacred covenant that could not be undone by man, he maintains that the incompatibility between Marykutty and her legally wedded husband is a human error that needs to be rectified.
We find the fundamental paradox of the Christian pastorate in this revolutionary act. As Michel Foucault’s incisive analysis of the Christian pastorate has shown, the problem of pastoral power lies in reconciling care for individual sheep with the needs of the flock. What we encounter in Kathodu Kaathoram, and a number of other films—Kottayam Kunjachan (1990), Priyam (2000), Praja (2001), Nasrani (2007)—are priests, who under different circumstances, bend and break the Christian law in their own ways to deliver what they perceive as justice.
Read against the political circumstances in Kerala, the authority of the priest is an issue with many stakes. The moments of crises in these films underline the force and complexity of the moral moorings that bind the shepherd to each member of his flock, revealing the tensions between the generality of the Christian law as a mechanism of preserving social order and the singularity of the pastoral responsibility that constitutes the biblical role of the priest.
Nasrani Masculinity
Questions around Nasrani masculinity are vividly explored in P. Padmarajan’s 1983 drama Koodevide. The film centers on Captain Thomas, a chauvinistic army officer, who is enamored with his friend’s sister, Alice. Alice, a convent school teacher, encourages his advances while maintaining a close friendship with her student, Ravi Puthooran. Thomas, however, grows deeply suspicious and threatened by this relationship.
What makes Koodevide especially compelling is how Captain Thomas repeatedly invokes his Syrian Christian identity whenever Alice defends her friendship with Ravi. He insists that he is a “Kanjirapallikaran Christiany”—a Christian from Kanjirapally—as a justification for his controlling behavior. Here, Kanjirapally is not simply a geographic marker. It operates as a symbol of socio-economic status and entrenched patriarchy. Known as the gateway to Kerala’s Malanad region, Kanjirapally historically hosts affluent Syrian Christian families whose wealth and dominance stem from plantation agriculture.
Though Thomas never explicitly claims the title of Nasrani, his assertion as a “Kanjirapallikaran Christiany” carries precisely those implications. By drawing on this identity, he enacts the patriarchal expectations deeply embedded in Syrian Christian culture—chief among them, the man’s right to control “his” woman. This portrayal echoes the proprietary family model seen in Kathodu Kaathoram: the man as patriarch and owner of his household. Failure to exercise control over one’s family is depicted as a betrayal of the ideal Sathyachristyani, or “true Christian” identity.
The cultural reach of this portrayal extends beyond the film, as evidenced by a humorous print advertisement released after Koodevide (see appendix). Presented as a telephone conversation between two women, the ad highlights the film’s impact on popular perceptions of Nasrani identity. One woman recounts how her husband, influenced by Captain Thomas’s character, quotes the phrase “Kanjirapallikaran Christiany” and feels entitled to police her behavior accordingly—insisting that a “real Christian” man must keep his wife strictly within prescribed boundaries.
Although fictional, this anecdote exposes a key ideological thread within the film. By constructing Captain Thomas as a figure who wields his Christian identity to justify patriarchal control, Koodevide lays bare the intimate relationship between Nasrani identity and the maintenance of gendered authority.
Conclusion
Across the films discussed here, the construction and policing of Nasrani identity emerge as a process that is deeply entwined with both theological doctrine and social hierarchy. The concept of kudumba parambaryam—birth into a prestigious lineage—underscores a boundary that distinguishes Nasranis from other Christians, highlighting how inherited status challenges Christianity’s universalist claims. The motif of the themmadikuzhi, or “pit of scoundrels,” further illustrates this intersection of social exclusion and spiritual limbo, where the Church’s disciplinary power enforces conformity through both social stigma and metaphysical threat. What is yet to be discovered, then, is how cinema reflects the paradigm shifts shaping the formation of the Nasrani identity in Kerala today.
A lucid and grounded analysis