Each morning while I was on Fulbright, I arrived at Kerala Kalamandalam around 5AM, when daylight was just dawning and coconut palms were swaying in the half-light. I would enter the Koothambalam, a huge performance space, and take my place among the vast number of girls dressed in green and orange saris for exercises. From my vantage, at the back of the Koothambalam, the students looked like a field of orange and green tropical flowers opening in to the morning light. During the first few months, my dance uniform (a half-length sari)
was never tied correctly. Usually my friends would take pity on me and would patiently refold my pleats and re-pin the pallu (the end that goes over one's left shoulder).
With my sari tied properly, I would then join the students in the Koothamabalam and begin the arduous morning exercise routine- a combination of calisthenics, yoga contortions, and subtle isolations. We performed deep lunges and knee bends, hand mudras, arm and shoulder movements, and balances, alternating between vigorous and aerobic repetitive movement done in unison with the whole group and hand exercises done individually. After we finished the exercises, we would perform the Namaskaram, a sequence of movements to pay respect to the earth.
During my first week at Kalamandalam, after the morning exercises, some girls invited me back to their room for some breakfast. We sat in a dark, slightly musty room on a communal wooden bed that also served as a table. We drank milky-sweet chai tea and ate idilis (a food made from fermented rice). The girls put red sindur in my hair, a declaration of my married status, put a bindi on my forehead, and comforted me about my childlessness.
One young woman asked me, “What is your favorite movie?” I thought for a bit and responded
that I did not really have a favorite movie, though I do have a distinct fondness for the Merchant-Ivory production "A Room with a View." The students had never heard of the film.
I returned the question to the students, “What is your favorite film?”
Nearly in unison, they all responded, “Titanic!”
James Cameron’s Oscar winning film was produced in 1997, so in 2003 the film’s popularity was a bit surprising.
“Please sing an American song for us!,” the girls asked.
I conceded and sang a verse from “You are My Sunshine.”
The girls chatted a bit in Malayalam, “Was it a folk song?”
I said that it was.
“We didn’t like it very much,” said one, “sing another song.”
My repertoire of songs is limited, and I was beginning to feel agitated. The climate was very hot and I was dripping with sweat leftover from dance class. I missed my husband, who had not yet arrived in Kerala and what I really wanted was a shower and a nap.
“Sing The Titanic Song!” cried one of the girls.
“The Titanic Song?” I asked incredulously.
“Celine Dion!” they replied, demonstrating more knowledge than I have about “American” pop-culture. I had no idea what "The Titanic Song" even sounded like. I had seen Titanic several years back in a movie theater in Mendocino, California with my family. It was an epic film, pure Hollywood eye-candy. But the soundtrack? The title song? I didn’t have a clue…. I was going to get one.
Five Keralite girls all burst into song around me, giggling and slightly swaying with Bollywood-style hip movements. The melody of the song had been influenced by their Carnatic and Sopana vocal music training, and the English was a bit garbled, but there was no doubt about it, in rural Kerala Titanic had made a titanic impact. I found myself in doubt, I came to rural India to experience some kind of Indian-ness - and I get… Titanic?
Some of my best friends and informants in Kerala are a pair of brothers named Shaheem and Shafiq. The brothers live walking distance from the Kalamandalam School where their family owns an Ayurvedic pharmacy. Their father is reputed to be the first Muslim Ayurvedic doctor in Kerala. Both brothers are unmarried because neither has been able to obtain enough money to build a new “Middle Eastern-style” house near the main road; a crucial bargaining chip on the Kerala marriage market.
Shaheem, the younger brother, is, as he has told me on numerous occasions, "crazy for everything Western." He dresses in "executive-style" (heavy wool trousers, long sleeve button-up polyester shirts and leather dress shoes) despite the hot humid weather of Kerala. His brother Shafiq, has little interest in the West, is a devout Muslim and always dresses in Kerala-style traditional dhotis. Shafiq practices medicine under their father but because of excessive fees, has not been able to pursue official certification as an Ayurvedic doctor. The polar attitudes of these two brothers represent two ways of dealing with the crises of globalization and westernization: cautious resistance and bold embrace.
During my 2003-2004 research, Shaheem was studying English with my husband Grady, and he often acted as a translator for us. I posed the question to Shaheem and Shafiq:
“What is your favorite movie?”
They responded without hestitation, “Titanic, of course!”
As if there were any other answer!
I queried Shaheem, “What about Malayalam films?”
The Malayalam film industry churns out hundreds of films each year.
“We love Malayalam films,” the brothers told me. “But really, our favorite film, above all else, is Titanic.” This was not the answer I expected from two young men who live in rural Kerala. Maybe it was a passing phase?
I returned to Kerala in the summer of 2005 to formally study in a Malayalam language intensive and continue my training in Mohiniyattam. I was based in the capital of Kerala- the booming metropolis of Tiruvananathapuram. Titanic was still floating. My host “uncle,” a senior manager at the Kerala State Bank told me that it was his favorite movie, as did my Malayalam language teachers, my dance teachers and all my friends. In fact, everyone who I asked seemed to still love Titanic, perhaps even more than when I had last conducted fieldwork in Kerala.
Returning to Cheruthuruthy (a ruraltown near the Kalamandalam school), I met with Shaheem whose love of Titanic remained unfaltering.
“Actually” he told me, “ I have seen Titanic over thirty-five times! I just love Titanic. All people here love Titanic; grandmothers, young women, boys, girls, and men.”
Shaheem now runs an English Academy in Cheruthuruthy. I was lucky enough to be a guest teacher in the Academy for a few days last summer. I initiated a conversation about films. The conversation topic was deliberate, (I am an anthropologist, after all), and I wanted more evidence that Titanic was as important as I suspected.
During the course of two days I spoke with over one-hundred students from the ages of fifteen to fifty; men and women, boys and girls, Muslims, Hindus and Christians. Almost every student with whom I spoke identified Titanic as his or her favorite movie. Later, watching television with Shaheem, he turned the channel to a public access station so we could see his advertisement for “Speak Up! Speak Out! Academy of English.” Much to my glee, advertisement after advertisement had “The Titanic Song” playing in the background.
So why does the Titanic have such a lasting and intense resonance with Keralites? Of course, the movie must have a variety of meanings for each viewer, yet the seemingly uniform love of the movie, (as opposed to any other American, Mollywood, Tallywood, or Bollywood film), demands some sort of explanation. Certainly the entirety of the film is epic, in the tradition of Bollywood films, yet I do not believe that this, alone, accounts for the popularity of Titanic in Kerala.
It is tempting to interpret the widespread love of Titanic as cultural imperialism in its most blatant form. Through this lens, the culture industry of the West is engaged in ideological imperialism resulting in worldwide cultural homogenization. Yet, it must be taken into consideration that people in Kerala really enjoy Titanic. Keralites with whom I spoke about the movie never saw it as a negative import of Westernization. This imperialist designation is generally reserved for Kerala's large Coca Cola plant that appropriates ground water resources and pollutes the land, affecting tribals, dalits, and small farmers nearby the factory in the Palakhad region.
So why is Titanic so popular in Kerala? And has its popularity waned since I was there in 2005? My husband and I are headed back to Kerala this August (2007) for another year to find out and I suspect that Titanic hasn't sunk in Kerala just yet.
