when someone is complaining about how certain aspects of their writing are continuously rummaged through with a very pointy bad faith fine toothed comb (ie ‘how come only the vicar’s family are explicitly homophobic in prayers, are u saying muslims are all queer positive and doesn’t that just evidence your bias?’ when the entire setting of the story, including the personality of the beloved protagonist, is clearly also a pretty obvious gesture towards repression and conservatism within the muslim community! this man self-flagellates in the mosque!) from both left and right
and about how it gets extremely exhausting at times to navigate the ‘subtle’ commentary about how i must be biased and that i can’t find a way to counter it without just repeating multiple times that i am not personally religious myself because i can’t exactly be like ‘are you talking out of your ass because you were made to feel uncomfortable about your assumptions, or about your liberal desire to receive an explicit dose of no but dw ur so right, islam totally does suck even and especially in stories that are about political islamophobia… or are you genuinely sitting there looking at comrade maedhros and thinking ah yes, here sits an incongruously feminist progressive without a patriarchal bone in his body because if it’s the latter then i would love a sip or ten of your drink’…
…i simply do not think ‘this sounds like a gifted kid complaining about getting only 95% for their exam’ is a normal response to have. anyway enjoy a totally not related snippet from the wip.
The contemporary resurgence of 1921 as a site of memory-contestation is inseparable from the broader Hindutva project of constructing a narrative of Hindu civilisational victimhood extending backward through history. The BJP+RSS deployment of the Mappila rebellion as evidencing some sort of intrinsic Muslim propensity for communal violence follows a template plucked straight from the colonial archive: a selective extraction of historical incidents from any structural context, their reframing as evidence of essential religious characteristics, and their posthumous insertion into a contemporary political narrative in which Muslims constitute an ongoing existential threat to the Hindu nation.
As such, the younger Fëanorians face the permanent structural suspicion that haunts the Indian Muslim in majoritarian nationalist politics: the suspicion that their secularism is tactical and that what lies behind the Indian passport is a communal loyalty that will assert itself at the critical moment. The history books of postcolonial India soon realise that any Muslim-led anticolonial rebellion against the Empire can be used to suggest that Muslim political loyalty to a non-sectarian nationalism will always be contingent and revocable. The family (and this includes Curufin, in his misguided application of his father’s apparent principles) must work doubly hard to demonstrate a loyalty that their Hindu counterparts are assumed, by default, to possess.
Taking you up on answering Prayers to Broken Stone questions here instead of your comments! I finished the fic and I was intrigued by the forest and dam visit chapter and would love to know more by your apparent dislike of dams and hydro-electric power. BTW, I’m from the US but you don’t have to dumb it down too much, I’m a international development studies major in a Massachusetts university, we actually covered Nehru’s dam building in our classes, and it was showed as an example of succesful development after colonization. So I got confused after reading the chapter because you classed dams alongside factories as a pollutant, when in reality it’s kind of the opposite? Thanks for your time.
You can ask Prayers questions in the comments if you like haha, I’m just likely to be faster to reply on Tumblr. Anyway, happy to answer, and I don’t actually “dumb things down” at any point in the story or meta around it, I just contextualise more than I would normally do since it’s a heavily political story and the readership skews USAmerican/Euro/Australian so I don’t assume too much background, and at the end of the day it’s a fanfic so I didn’t want there to be any prerequisite knowledge or whatever… however, if ‘Massachusetts universities’ (sorry idk what this is supposed to mean, I’m not American sksksks) are teaching Nehruvian dam building as an example of ‘successful development after colonisation’, I see why you may collate the two 🥲there is a lot of writing on this matter, way better than I can explain, and I mention a few general texts at the end by Roy etc.
It’s not that dams themselves are my issue and obviously not hydro power either: rivers have been dammed since forever, I’m not an engineer and far be it from me to slag off the humble beaver etc etc. And it’s not even that I think India shouldn’t have built any dams after independence: as irritating as I find Nehru, the guy had a bit of A Task™️ ahead of him on the development front, and hydraulic power, on paper at least, seemed to be a pretty good route when it came to ‘powering up’ and irrigating a hot country of such vastness.
The issue I have with the Nehruvian dams and similar ‘development projects’, and the issue I tried to explore in Prayers with the site of the police torture camp being on the same site as the Kakkayam dam, is that immediately postcolonial/Nehruvian India pretty much consecrated hydraulic gigantism at all costs as the language of postcolonial freedom and sovereignty, and the very long shadow of that, both the ecological and human cost, is borne almost entirely by Adivasi and other marginalised communities.
So when Nehru inaugurated the Bhakra Dam in 1954, he described the site as being (paraphrasing here) grander and more sacred than any temple, and that temple metaphor does two things at once in a way that pretty much describes Nehru himself spot on. Ie whilst covering everything in extremely ‘secular’ language where technology is the new religion, he also plays on religious sentiment to make the point itself, casting these enormous dams as this massive, almost spiritual expression of what a newly independent country should be doing, and himself as the lightbringer, so to speak.
Now the ‘advantages’ of these dam projects across India are characterised by distributional bias of in favour of India’s dominant proprietary classes, ie post independence India functioned, in practice, as a set of of elite grabs of land/water/forest resources… dressed up in Nehru’s ‘universalist’ development vocabulary. And what that does is erase the actual cost of these dams. Roy has written on this alongside others, but the Narmada Water Disputes Tribunal deliberated for a decade before sanctioning the Sardar Sarovar Dam, yet the transcripts of these deliberations don’t involve discussions of adivasi or other indigenous communities, despite the fact that areas submerged by the construction of the dam were overwhelmingly inhabited by them.
Which is pretty much just colonial governmentality with a postcolonial face, wherein the colonial Land Acquisition Act 1894 was retained by the postcolonial Indian state, ie political orientalisation of indigenous peoples as ‘barriers’ to the extraction of natural resources… and more on Maedhros etc later but in Prayers, this exact dispersal of peoples is referred to in the scene where child Elrond had gone with Maedhros to the site of a ‘killed’ river (the often repeated ‘then his Baba, the terrorist, had wept’ bit from the first chapter)… except due to their own circumstances, Maedhros cannot see what was already happening then and only sees it as a premonition of what would eventually happen to his own people (Muslims) even though the implication re: ration cards and voter slips and promises and certificates make it pretty clear who the ‘scattered people’ actually are. Meanwhile Elrond, who was very young then and later grew up as an idealistic liberal holding on to an imagined vision of Maedhros as a kindly and benevolent figure, read it as his father weeping for the lack of care towards nature and clung on to that vague interpretation.
So, much like with the related Kakkayam Dam and police torture camp in Chapter 15, the ‘dead’ river that is front and centre of the story, is in actuality invisible to all the characters who see it and is the basis of Haleth insisting that no riot/protest at the police station would lead people to see it for what it is unless the body of the white/politically and narratively important/visible Elros is brought front and centre.
The snicksnick of ribbon-cutting and factory-opening, the construction of new statues to replace the broken scarecrows. And the scattering of people.
Across the backwaters and temple tanks, along the railway lines and shuttered depots, men and women disappearing into creases of the land, neither fleeing nor returning, but doing something stranger: withholding themselves. They take no songs, no slogans — only ration cards, voter slips, certificates promising this and that. They leave quietly past quieter mosques, drag their heels beside a deader river, and disappear without a sound. The tree cover thins and time curdles. The betrayal comes dressed in khadi cotton, bundle upon bundle of homespun atrocity waving subsidised flags. Redistribution turns into reconciliation, and textbooks outlive memory.
I wouldn’t call Prayers eco-lit by much of a stretch, the actual narrative focuses mostly on communal relations and state violence and Islamophobia, but there definitely is an ecological underpinning to the main plot, and that’s why the river, which had been killed by the dam, the dam itself, and the police torture camp in a very beautiful national forest just a stones throw from the dam, are all linked directly to the ‘human story’ — @tobermoriansass pointed out in the comments of Chapter 15 re: the provision in the Forest Conservation Amendment Act 2023 which allows for ‘defence’ structures in national forests. Essentially, the atrocity that happens to Elros which fuels the main narrative would never have happened without the existence of that dam, or the militaristic incursion of the Indian state into the forested territories… it just took it happening to Elros for them to get that.
Also another thing re dams and my preoccupation with rivers in general (similarly in The Star Tree) is that a river isn’t just a water delivery system! They’re entire ecosystems sustaining vast biodiversity, subsistence agriculture, numerous communities and hold hella cultural+cosmological meaning… and this is very much the case in Kerala too, where further south than Kozhikode, there’s an entire network of backwaters populated by houseboats and riverside villages etc etc. Which is again why I wanted to use the dead-river: everyone thinks the river means only what it means to them, and that leads to the official ‘meaning’ of a river becoming what it means to the most important person to whom it means something.
Maedhros, much like Elrond, is unfortunately (in literary terms at least) from Kerala. Water has forever been the state’s tired, tried-and-tested all-purpose tool. In cinema and books and poetry, songs across centuries from Vadakkan paatu to film-tunes, the rise and fall of the sea and all its naughty children had become a recognisable switch, a familiar sting on the buttock, a whip for self-flagellation and a side-mouthed behave yourselves or else. Mess up and the sea would take you, or send its little friends, the rivers, to do its dirty work. Everything set in Kerala with even the skeleton of an emotional narrative will have a drowning, either a dramatic one in some sunset-stained sea or a quiet little pond-feeding in someone’s back garden, or anything in between. No wonder Elrond is writing a book about bloody rivers, he snorts dryly even in the dream, no wonder he called his magical storybook Sea Stories. Literary histories like his, he’d have written about the closest puddle.
Anyway, the Nehruvian planning apparatus pretty much reclassified rivers from entire ecosystems to hydraulic resources to be ‘rationalised’, again reproducing that colonial pattern I mentioned above: treating any unused or unmanaged natural resource as unproductive + restructuring native environments to serve economic ends, where indigenous peoples are severed from their livelihoods and relationships to place. Arundhati Roy's The Greater Common Good is a very incisive literary-political intervention here at the time it was written and catalogues the ecological fallout ie waterlogging, salinity, the spread of waterborne disease, reservoir-induced seismicity etc etc while making clear that the displaced were overwhelmingly the poorest: farmers, Adivasi, Dalits, herded out of their rich natural habitats in the name of development… very much worth a read. [And at the same time also worth keeping in mind while reading, Roy’s own positionality, vantage point and the audience she’s writing to — Roy and Ghosh are good starters into Indian ecocrit, especially for people outside India, but the whole ‘who speaks in whose register’ thing is just as relevant in oppositional movements as it is within the state itself… not critiquing how they write but how theyre read, especially overseas].
The long shadow of all this probs most visible in a mainstream politics sense is in India's interstate water conflicts, where the infrastructural decisions of the colonial and postcolonial eras continue to generate live political crises, and the Mullaperiyar dispute between Kerala and Tamil Nadu is a good case study. Where the entire dispute has basically turned into a political clusterfuck that, to put it very simply, plays out through MPs and CMs and electoral gains and bargaining chips, wherein the people actually affected by the conflict are turned into case studies for said political plays, where legal intervention repeatedly substitutes for cooperative dialogue and millions of peoples safety and access to resources are contingent on Supreme Court orders and political brinkmanship.
And that’s why I really wanted to use the river -> dam -> torture camp site as a thruline in the fic, to showcase the postcolonial contradiction of a state that genuinely believed it was ‘modernising and liberating’ its people while replicating the spatial-legal logics through which colonial power had already extracted value from the same land and same bodies… and because the post-Nehruvian river-dam issue is one that plays out repeatedly all over India in many incarnations… the stone also hits the bird known as Kozhikode exceptionalism of being somehow ‘outside’ India. Wherein it’s not that I dislike the concept of dams or think that irrigation/electricity/flood control are non issues lol, but rather I’m just pointing out the institutional silence around which the development apparatus was built and to some extent continues to operate under.
Ultimately, Prayers is fundamentally a reckoning with Nehru’s India as experienced belatedly by a contextually privileged group of people—where the Fëanorians are Muslims, ie ‘undesirable citizenry’ in a national context, yet operate as politically powerful local figureheads within an insular culturally Muslim region, hence them only perceiving state violence when it affects them personally, everyone from Fëanor to Maedhros to Arwen (the canonical reasons for this are pretty self-evident, I hope…)—and the belatedness of the experience is pointed out several times by Haleth, who knew full well that the most shocking instances of said state violence in the fic have been going on for years, if not decades, almost entirely unnoticed by the Comrade Maedhroses of the world.
Essentially, just a case of ‘first they came for the X, but I did not speak because I am not an X’ playing out — where the Fëanorians, and Kozhikodan political society in general — were in fact the group who benefited from these state development projects and thus the institutional silence around them, hence, they either ‘never saw it coming’ or ‘saw it coming but did fuckall about it’ until it finally came for them. And that’s pretty much why I structured the story like I did, to parallel that wilful blindness: the site of the Kakkayam dam being only a momentary presence in the story, narratively relevant only for its role in the tragedy of Elros Tar Minyatur, the son of a powerful local politician and a high ranking British official, rather than for the widescale systemic brutality meted out by both dams and police camps.
Some quotes from Chapter 15 that might make my point clearer now:
“(Malayalis) like to imagine ourselves the last blameless bastion of virtue in this country, and so blind ourselves to all the silent ways we become architects of the suffering meted out to others.”
“Maedhros had not known. Neither of the rising of the dam, nor of the boy-after-boy taken into it. The arrogance of permanence, in a state shaped by flood, monsoon, drift, and typhoon. From the air, it looks almost peaceful, a necklace of grey tucked into green folds. Still, the dam does not belong to the land, but to a fever-dream of control. The forest had borne witness to violence long before they started dragging boys into its foliage. The boot would not have kicked, had it not had cement to rest upon.”
“The Indian Emergency was no dark night, it was the solar cycle itself. The rot did not begin with its proclamation, nor will it end with its repeal. The tiger is the national animal of India. And Kozhikode too, is full of tigers.”
Some reading recs: a lot of these are ‘general’ texts but it really isn’t because I’m devaluing your intdev degree, it’s just that clearly said degree isn’t penetrating too deeply into the Indian context if Nehruvian development projects are taught as being a net positive… Arundhati Roy, The Greater Common Good / Huggan’s Postcolonial Ecocriticism, Oxford UP’s The Dam and the Nation / The Struggle for Narmada by Nandini Oza / and Archana Prasad is also an interesting read.
anyway if anyone thinks prayers is exaggerating about how fucking unhinged the anti-muslim sentiment is in india, please look at this fucking ai generated h*ndutva propaganda ‘joke’ post i came across today. like you cannot make it up. i mean it IS made up but like. you cannot make it up that there are millions of ppl across my country nodding away at this and other assorted shit like this. like they literally genuinely wholeheartedly believe that indian muslims are jihadis paid off by pakistan (which might sound ??? even for this kind of storytelling but pls remember we are talking about an extremely brainrotted people here). like what the fuck do you even DO when people are swallowing this shit and literally getting horny about it man!
anyway, author’s ‘credentials’ (ie made up shit) 🙃👇🏽
man it’s very hard being me because the last thing i want to do is glaze jawaharlal nehru more than he deserves because i personally think he is the cause of several of the ills plaguing contemporary india etc etc and also i find the congress wanking of nehruvian sentiment and what not extremely irritating. on the other hand, the bjp continue to be so fucking insane about him and are currently like two steps away from accusing the guy of using chatgpt to write the indian independence speech in 1947 because the first line has the phrase “now the time comes when we shall redeem our pledge, not wholly or in full measure, but very substantially” and i am still 90% sure the only reason they don’t do it is because the entire indian cabinet almost certainly asks chatgpt to tell them what to have for breakfast every morning ygm.
like. i don’t want to defend this man. however you are making me defend this man. i cannot believe i am looking a 45 y/o in the eye and telling him ‘no uncle, nehru did not give syphilis to half the upper house of parliament. i think you are mistaken’. trying to explain without cracking how this is a genuinely weird thing to believe if you are literally anyone except this growing niche of complete freaks who eat whatsapp forwards and shit out votes. what has my country become. i feel like those annoying nehruvians going ‘what has my india turned into’ even though they contributed heavily to the turn in question. what has my india turned into. #myindia etc
"#and don’t get me started about vague ‘islamicate’ aesthetics in diversity-fanart…#that is outright just SLB-bollywood core#aka biggest cultural export and one of the clearest methods of ‘erasing muslims while using sexy mughalcore aesthetics’"
hello sorry this is not directly relevant to your tags but i was wondering if you had any thoughts on like. (correct me if i am wrong) the indianisation of middle-eastern media (e.g. the 2019 live action aladdin and the casting of charithra chandran in one piece live action as the princess of a middle east/north africa inspired country) or if you had any leads on commentary about it!
OH BOY OH BOY THANK YOU FOR THE QUESTION, and apologies in advance that I have, as per, taken the opportunity to yap, and run… the comparison did have me Thinking A Lot on my train ride today so thank you for that as well, considering my commutes are normally very dreary…
Also before I actually start, a quick note re: my tags referring to fandom, I do want to note that it’s not that I’m calling these elements “problematic” or whatever, hell I often enjoy the spectacle, and have used these aesthetics myself. I also think Islamicate aesthetics do have progressive potential when done with a degree of self-awareness and used as a tool rather than a medium, especially in period-fantasy eg Tolkien (and not to blow smoke up my own ass but thinking about how Maglor and his musicality is introduced in Prayers via old-timey romantic ghazals and qawwalis before he starts singing about “waspfuckers”), or even in cinema itself as with the old Kamal Amrohi film Pakeezah, one of the best “queer death/anti-futurity” narratives that Indian cinema has come out with.
It’s more that I see these aesthetics replicated so often as progressive in and of itself, “representative” of a culture, specifically, the South Asian subcontinent and India in particular, where said representation just directly echoes the dominant cultural narrative whilst framing itself as transgressive or antiracist… without such a framing, the aesthetics aren’t “regressive” in themselves. I see it kind of like, idk, making Tinkerbell wear a Wonder Woman leotard, where the leotard isn’t a problem and can be cool, but the intention of it is deeply uncool. Or to use a MENA example, a 2025 Iranian state production of LotR starring Ayatollah Elrond dealing out fatwas to Sauron Rushdie. But with both examples being called “progressive antiracist portrayals” that will decolonise fandom/cinema/literature/whatever. Each region or regime has its own nationalistic propaganda, but Bollywood and Hollywood have a much larger stake in global film culture so to speak, hence me focusing on them. Basically, less “this is bad and people shouldn’t do it” and more “this is what’s actually happening here”.
I also have reading recommendations/reference list at the end because I don’t want to look like I’m talking out of my ass lol.
So my (academic) background when it comes to film studies is more in the Indian popular cinema area since the cultural exports I worked on were from the subcontinent, in that I did a comparative study and Malayalam regional cinema read against Bombay-produced ‘cultural export’ films… And coming from that position, I’d say the ‘Indiafication’ of MENA aka Middle Eastern & North African identities in Anglophone cinema, primarily Hollywood, and the ‘Islamicate’ tropes of Bollywood cinema, are two manifestations of a very similar visual-political logic, but also that the former is proof of the latter’s relative “success”.
By “visual-political logic”, I mean both speak to a similar selective appropriation & decontextualisation of Muslim cultures to serve dominant narratives, ethno/nationalism in the case of Indian popular cinema + cultural imperialism in the case of Hollywood/US cinema. However, the historical trajectories of said flattenings are very different, as Indian cinema actually used to portray Muslim subjects as far more complex and multifaceted (see: Garm Hava, Pakeezah or early Shyam Benegal films, or even current Malayalam middle cinema), but now either view them as romanticised, nostalgic ‘Islamicate’ relics (see: Umrao Jaan, Bajirao Mastani, Kalank) or walking, talking terror threat (see: Kerala Story, Uri: Surgical Strike) or both (see: Padmaavat). And with Hollywood, “Indian-humour” of the “haha they have stinky-lunchboxes” variety was widespread until, speaking loosely here, the late 2010s, when politics-of-representation entered the field.
So the "Islamicate" in Bollywood refers to cultural artefacts shaped by Islamic civilisation but divorced entirely from Indian Muslims: stuff like ornate calligraphy, Mughal courtly architecture, Urdu-inflected dialogue, sufistic motifs. These forms remain central to Bollywood’s visual economy, especially when drawing up a romanticised precolonial North India, yet detaches it from living Muslim presence in the country, which is seen as undesirable to the point that citizenship itself is withheld. And “real Muslims” are then demonised in the exact same film industry, while the aesthetics of precolonial Mughlai Islam is commodified… especially insidious when the “Indian Muslims are descendants of barbaric Mughal invaders” has not only been used to whitewash extreme acts of violence and brutality to said population, but is quite literally the official line taken by the nation-state. Essentially:
The ✨ Islamicate ✨ in Popular Cinema:
👿 Muslims 👿 in Popular Cinema:
The reason I mention this specific bifurcation or go into Islamicate cinema at all even though your question doesn’t relate to that, is because imo Bollywood’s selective aestheticisation and erasure of Muslim identity is mirrored in global cinema and one of the ways its done is through said Indiafication of Middle Eastern cultures and individuals. So in Anglophone films, especially post 9/11, actors of South Asian descent are often cast as generic Middle Eastern, Arab or “vaguely Muslim” characters without cultural specificity… like the Aladdin example you mention, where any racial/religious complexity is collapsed into this fungible “brownness”. On the surface level, it’s that South Asian, often Indian, bodies are used to stand-in for the Muslim ‘other’ in order to avoid using Arab/West Asian actors, who are considered more politically volatile. But further in, this kind of superficially diverse casting is also used to mask the persistent Orientalist tropes in US/UK cinema: an Arab Muslim is either a violent terrorist, an abject victim, a fully-assimilated patriot, or a liberal poster-child who disavows all aspects of his ethnic, religious or national identity aside from said vague “brownness”.
South Asian actors, especially Indian ones, are seen as more pliable: familiar to Western audiences through the global reach of Bollywood, and yet “brown” enough to evoke Muslim alterity without ever actually naming it. So Jack Shaheen talks about this very in depth in Reel Bad Arabs, but this kind of flattening isn’t just out of convenience or “they think we’re all the same”, it serves the ideological function of separating the viewer from “real Muslim lives” so that, say, imperial wars instigated by the States, or Britain’s surveillance regime (Prevent), can continue without a mass “hey aren’t those actual people?” awakening. And the use of Indian actors and “Bollywood” aesthetics in films or other visual productions that ostensibly depict the Middle East just reinscribes that racial hierarchy: India and Indians posited as a more acceptable, liberal, secular postcolony, while the Arab world can remain as the locus of danger, tribalism, and extremism. And the language of representation, ie, the well meaning and often diasporically originating “finally we Indians, nay, not just we but a super scrubbed down and regionally isolated performance of our culture, get to participate in a Hollywood that used to be super racist about us”, is used to couch that process, in order to tamp down protest against what is just straight up Orientalism II: Cinematic Boogaloo…
Also was chatting about this with @antlered-vixen and he mentioned the role of colourism and the catered-to audiences’ need for ontological signifiers for The Evil Muslim Other, and I think that’s definitely worth mentioning here, so a swift addition on the matter with these indented paragraphs:
Colourism absolutely impacts casting practices in both Bollywood and Hollywood, shapes which bodies are deemed visually “authentic”, and this is definitely a thing when it comes to villainous Scary Muslim Terrorist roles, or in period fantasy pieces, Jaffar-type Roles (and I think this is actually an area where both the PJackson films and RoP have shat the bed in). Darker-skinned South Asian actors are disproportionately hired to portray violent or extremist Muslim men because their appearance conforms to visual tropes that associate darkness with deviance and hypermasculinity, again thinking about that colonial visual economy, paper-bag ism etc. And global cinema, particularly post-9/11, these actors are frequently cast as undifferentiated “Middle Eastern” threats, signifying a generic, menacing brownness, eg Body of Lies or Homeland… and this logic comes from epidermalisation (Fanon term, iirc) ie. reduction of identity to skin where darkness = ontological threat.
+ crucially, this visual coding is gendered: darker Muslim men are not only racialised but also hypermasculinised, portrayed as aggressive, libidinal, and incapable of tenderness (again thinking about Prayers Maedhros who is deliberately said to have “white” facial features ie eye colour/hair colour combined with tanned skin, hypermasculine Muslim aesthetics and other external signifiers lol…).
But yes, this sort of thing ties easily into broader regimes of postcolonial masculinity, where the Muslim man becomes a symbolic antithesis to the secular, palatable, liberal subject. In Bollywood, you can see this (above) in Alauddin Khilji in Padmaavat, whose deliberately darkened skin, “animalistic” sexuality, and violent excess mark him as both racially and morally “other” to the fair-skinned, dharmic Rajput hero. In both contexts, darker-skinned South Asian men are thus instrumentalised rather than “included”: their bodies used to enact a performance of dangerous Muslim masculinity that stabilises nationalist or imperialist narratives, whether it be Hindutva-inflected “secularism” in India or liberal multiculturalism in the West…
Overall, I guess my take on the matter is that these visual/casting economies aren’t just accidental or representational or unrelated, but ideological tools which uphold geopolitical power structures on a global basis. As such, US cinema’s Indiafication of the Middle East + Bollywood’s Islamicate aesthetic both serve Orientalism, aka romanticising + pathologising whatever iteration of The East is deemed to be the current threat. In the postcolonial and neoliberal movement this is mediated not just through journalistic or political propaganda but also circuits of soft power… hence Bollywood, as India’s most powerful cultural export, participates in a “theatrical articulation/performance of the nation”, where the country’s ostensible pluralism and diversity is marketed abroad even as religious minorities and the caste-oppressed face everything from precarity to state violence on the domestic front. And similar to that, Anglophone cinema’s substitution of Indian for Arab actors aligns with global capital's desire for de-risked diversity: South Asian actors are often seen as less politically fraught, less culturally resistant, and more easily integrated into Western liberal narratives.
And in both instances, Muslim cultures are not represented but “managed”, aka converted into aesthetic forms that reinforce the mythologies of secular India and liberal Empire, while occluding the lived realities of exclusion, surveillance, and violence faced by people in the MENA region across national contexts, which includes both international occupation/threats but also regional ethno/religio-nationalist regimes, eg, Saudi Wahabbism, Ayatollah as heads of state in Iran, etc…
Hope that’s a decent chewing through? And just to swiftly swerve back to fandom but also with cinema in general, it’s less that I want to see ‘less’ of that specific aesthetic, and more that there are dozens and dozens of other ways to define ‘Indian-ness’ beyond Bollywood, or the kind of costuming and set-pieces used in these big-budget Bollywood films. Eg. looking beyond the UP-Delhi-Bombay belt gets you quite a lot of costuming room, and frankly I think creating an AU in which Maedhros and Maglor walk around in mundus should be referred to as my sexiest and most valuable contribution to the Silmarillion fandom…
Thank you so much again for the question, this was fun to think about, and I hope I didn't sound too dry because I feel like I can sometimes... and sorry for going on all these random tangents!
And a reference/readings list, as promised... a couple of sources are academic-access, iirc the Alsultany one, but I've picked out WorldCat library links for the others!
Sunaina Maira - Youth, Citizenship & Empire After 9/11
Jack Shaheen - Reel Bad Arabs: How Hollywood Vilifies a People
Evelyn Alsultany - Arabs and Muslims in the Media: Race and Representation after 9/11
Tejaswini Ganti - Producing Bollywood: Inside the Contemporary Hindi Film Industry
Mushirul Hasan - Legacy of a Divided Nation + Moderate or Militant
Marshall Hodgson - on the generally valuable debate around the term 'Islamicate' when used in wider-cultural terms, however, pretty uncontroversial when discussing Bollywood/cinema...
Christophe Jaffrelot - Modi's India - rise of an ethnic democracy
man every time i think i am detached from the ‘regular jolt of horror/surprise at just how fucking islamophobic india and the general national culture has gotten experienced by someone from kozhikode ie an insular, ostensibly peaceable and very culturally muslim area in the south where the environment is conducive to burying your head in the sand’ thing enough to write a 250k+ word series about an entire family experiencing this very phenomenon in a multitude of ways, my beloved country will always find a way to get even more islamophobic and thus prove me wrong.
anyway, just spent an hour tormenting myself by reading glowing reviews of what is literally just a glorified propaganda film and am now thinking about these passages from prayers!au:
Hi Dr Balls, I was talking about PRAYERS to a inlaw of mine who is from Kerala Trivandrum, and when I mentioned it’s a gay story set in Kozhikode she said it’s not surprising because everyone knows Kozhikode is the gayest town in Kerala. It made me think about Finnu saying there was very little queer community there in the 70s and he and Maedhros only have each other, and it made me so sad to think about the gay culture and acceptance they missed on. I was wondering if you heard this saying? Is it true and was it a recent change?
As always, sorry for the delay! Hahaha yes, I am very familiar with the stereotype, being from there myself… I think I answered this same question once but it was months ago so CBA to find it… anyway, yup it’s actually even engaged with in the fic. Plus in my fridged WIP, it’s said that the cops in Kozhikode would refer to Maedhros as ‘Triple-K’ as a kind of in joke, which stands for Katta Kozhikodan Kundan, which translates, in terms of slur severity, as ‘pure Kozhikodan f-ggot’, where Kozhikodan kundan, ie Kozhikodan f-ggot, is a pretty common term in itself and used as a slur in areas outside Kozhikode.
So yes it’s absolutely a real saying and quite a popular one, but the wording of it isn’t ‘Kozhikode is a gay paradise’ — it’s really not a Brighton situation haha, the region is actually very small-c conservative (Maedhros and Finarfin are great ambassadors LMAO) and the community is considered somewhat socially recalcitrant and insular…essentially, it’s no more or less gay or homophobic than any other similar town in India.
The wording is actually more like ‘everyone in Kozhikode is gay’ or ‘there are lots of gays in Kozhikode’ (and refers to male homosexuality rather than any sort of general queerness), and it is, like I said, a very well known saying… its existence is due to quite a mix of honestly very interesting and unrelated factors, almost none of which have anything to do with how many gays there actually are. I’ll rattle off some of them (and how the fic engages with that stereotype) if you’re keen so my PhD can feel useful instead of sitting sadly on the wall.
The first one is a pretty evident reason if you’ve read the fic but around 42% of Kerala’s entire Muslim population are concentrated in Kozhikode, its neighbouring district Malappuram, and the adjacent Lakshwadeep islands: hence that entire area is culturally very Muslim, hence why things like the kuthu ratheeb ritual are such a commonplace cultural ‘event’ (and it’s been queered in interesting ways in cinema/literature based there, hence my inclusion of it), Maglor specialising in Urdu ghazals, etc etc… whilst Kerala as a rule tends to be culturally Hindu regardless of left politics, with the Church playing a significant political and social (ie happily upholding the caste system) role.
And obviously if you’ve read the fic you know that a broad theme there is how, through the Comrade character mostly, we see the ways in which orientalist tropes are projected onto Indian Muslim bodies by their own ‘kin’ even, and this is just a geographical manifestation of the same, ie a historical linking of Islamic societies with both hyper-regulation of sexuality *and* clandestine, ‘depraved’ same-sex practices, where both stereotypes exist simultaneously. There’s a part in Chapter 8, where a (fellow Muslim) character criticises Maedhros for playing into stereotype which says it better than I can explain now:
“The Hindutva is catching on there with the Shiv Sena, fundamentalist propaganda is everywhere, and not just from the right wing. You know they are saying our people, Muslims, brought homosexuality to India?” Reza sighs. “Saying we are all like that. Deviants, corrupting the nation, see how we wear kohl, eyeliner, like women. The Sena are printing in the papers that all Muslim men are secretly homosexuals, my own daughter’s teacher dared to say it to my face. All saying bismillah in the front and giving it to each other in the back. I’m not asking you to bar him outright — just talk to him. The Comrade being a politician with that much local sway, and carrying on like that publicly… it’s just playing into their hands, Ustadji.”
Essentially, one reason Kozhikode is seen as being full of gays (derogatory) is because it’s full of Muslims (also derogatory).
Secondly is the word kundan itself: I’ve said before how the Kozhikodan dialect is quite harsh and aside from the accent itself being heavy there are some words and phrases that are used differently. One of those is the term kundan, where in many other places in Kerala, especially the south, the word is a homophobic slur, ie f-slur. In Kozhikode however, and neighbouring northern districts iirc, it just means guy or fellow, or more accurately perhaps, lad. So it’s pretty normal to see a group of young guys and refer to them as kundan, and sometimes boys would address their friend as kundan, similar to ‘mate’ for example.
It’s actually quite a depressing ‘opposite’ to how the word queer was used as a pejorative and is now reclaimed by the queer community. In that nowadays the word kundan is going out of fashion among younger people in Kozhikode especially with internet/social media usage where the word is now so commonly associated with the slur that some Kozhikodan youth feel self-conscious using the term as they normally use it, ie to mean lad or friend. And the popularity of specifically ‘Kozhikodan kundan’ as a gay slur outside Kozhikode again has guys not wanting to play into the stereotype.
In the fridged story I mentioned, Maedhros (who is notably averse to stepping foot out of the district) had actually gone until middle age without knowing that the Triple-K nickname was a pejorative against his homosexuality: he’d actually just assumed it meant ‘fellow’ and thought it was just a weird and unimaginative nickname 🥲
Thirdly, Kozhikode has a pretty strong culture of male homosociality: like I said it’s a small-c conservative town and because it’s culturally Muslim, there’s a level of gender segregation due to women keeping purdah (in that they practice keeping distance from males, not that they’re all in burqas). Elwing actually makes a note of this in the final chapter:
Times have changed, and the veiled Nerdanel no longer lives in the cliff-house. But Kozhikode still has a high Muslim population, and many still practice modesty culture, regardless of whether or not they cover their hair. And Maedhros does not touch women. Several things can be true at once. Maedhros is an old-fashioned misogynist who needs a slipper-whacking every now and then to be kept in his place. And Maedhros, whose mother had worn a veil, does not touch women.
There was very little else to it. It was only ever a little part of the gestures that made a man. A gentle, non-malignant symptom of his environment, an unconscious extension of respect as natural to him as his split-second fury. A symptom he broke through, deliberately and only this once, simply because Elwing had needed a moment of comfort, a hand to hold in the lonesome dark. Who could blame Elrond? she wonders.
And this cultural gender segregation means that a lot of activities were either male only or female only: it doesn’t ‘explain’ Maedhros’ misogyny (that’s just because he’s the eldest son in a 90% male household lmao crows would fly before this man stopped believing Maglor is only good at laundry because he has ‘lady hands’) but it absolutely does explain how he’s managed to live a public life in which he almost exclusively interacts with men… because it simply wouldn’t have been seen as particularly ‘abnormal’.
And compounding this is the fact that Kerala has a very high level of migration to the Arab Gulf states, and in Kozhikode the majority of them were Muslim male labourers who develop various novel methods of homosocial interaction and kinship for support, living as indentured servants under the brutal kafala system in a foreign country that treats them as third class citizens. And these ways of bonding return with the men and take root in the ‘home soil’ so to speak, except those at home do not understand or have context for these specific types of homosocial interactions, intimacies and communality, and it is just taken as ‘gay’. (Note: I’m not saying that these bonds aren’t queer, mind you… I actually would define them as queerplatonic… I specifically mean that it’s perceived by the public as homosexual rather than queer).
Additionally it was a port city, and port cities are, in a cultural studies sense, considered spaces of fluid and transient sexuality and ‘immoral’ activities, being the point of mingling with the world. This is obviously doubled when it’s also a fishing community, again applied to male homosexuality as fishermen and sailors have historically been mostly male. Mobility + anonymity + exposure to the ‘corruptive world’ = stereotype of sexual permissiveness. (I will say here, while it’s no more gay than any other city let alone be close to somewhere like Bombay, there is quite a significant male cruising culture in Kozhikode compared to many other areas… however this would not affect/apply to Maedhros and Fingon, who have been insufferably monogamous for almost 4 decades).
Again, this is another reason why the types of homophobia Maedhros and Fingon experience is written as being starkly different: both are affected by both, but Finnu’s experience of homophobia comes primarily from the religious direction because his general effeminacy and open pursuit of ‘girlish’ activities and attire are a transgression against one of the primary fears of conservative christianity: the unruliness of gender.
While Maedhros primarily experiences it via secular means so to speak: from the state/nation because both the Kozhikodan kundan slur and the ‘Kozhikode is gay’ stereotype as they operate implies and refers to men like Maedhros rather than men like Finnu if that makes sense, as well as from the town itself (see: cops, guy in the mosque etc). Because he, as in Muslim men who engage in ‘clandestine’ homosexual relations (because technically speaking, Maedhros is closeted), are seen as the reason such a stereotype exists in the first place and are resented for it. A vicious cycle of sorts, and one of the major reasons for the fic’s running theme of starving dogs standing on its hind legs to reach a seat at the table, only to find its own organs on the plate 🥲
I hope this made sense re: gay Kozhikode stereotype! Also sorry for yapping I am bored on a train as usual!
I feel like everything I said about annoying South Asian diaspora literature here can be illustrated by how this book of all books, written by the third-biggest Indian-lit nepo baby of all time, has been longlisted for the 2025 Booker Prize. Now, I would also give the writer in question an award, but less because the book is particularly good and more because even I’m very impressed at how someone has managed to fit in every single insufferable-diaspora-lit trope into a single book:
