31. Mini Babu
Shifting Borders
and Shifting Psyche: The Diasporic Focus in Madhupal’s Ozhimuri
Abstract
In the
contemporary global scenario where borders become significant and meaningless
at the same time, the master cartographers who engage themselves in the game of
drawing and redrawing of borders decline the multiple lacerations affecting the
“living Psyche”, who are forced to shift their points of adherences between
states. Madhupal’s Ozhimuri becomes
the voice of dissent where a group of people experience the diasporic angst and
frustration without the actual process of migration. It is ironic to note that
the spaces inhabited by these people do not change, their neighbourhoods do not
change and the people around them do not change. The inherent shift takes place
in the dominant political ideology of statehood and language where the borders
are reconfigured shifting this “human lot” from Kerala to Tamil Nadu and the
subsequent shift in language from Malayalam to Tamil. It depicts the changes on
Malayalis living in Kanyakumari district, when the region, once an intrinsic
part of Kerala became a part of Tamil Nadu.
Madhupal’s Ozhimuri, based on Jeyamohan’s Uravidangal, portray the diasporic
situation where the actual migration takes place between the virtual concepts
of borders. The film is the “lived experience” of the writer, a sort of
life-writing, claiming that life would have been positively different if not
for this dynamic shift of borders. My paper proposes to study the film as the
voice of dissent - the resentment from the borders, the angst of the spaceless
and to what extent the depiction is authentic. The paper also looks into the existential
concept of owning a space for oneself and whether every individual owns his
unique personal space and this study is done within the framework of diasporic
theories.
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