Technologies of culture: Cinematic infrastructures of caste in Kochi

In India’s southwestern port city of Kochi, like in several other postcolonial cities, development has been an unequal process when it comes to places inhabited by marginalised communities, including religious minorities and caste-oppressed people. Such marginalised spaces and people start getting visibility in the frames of Malayalam (is the language of the state of Kerala, of which Kochi is a part) cinema from the mid-2000s. Interestingly, the growth of cinema studios from the 2000s is connected to better infrastructure connecting Kochi directly to other big cities, including a full-fledged airport in 1999. Over a period of time, the cinematic frames present multiple geographies, from thriving business centres and successful characters to the peripheries of the city and sometimes even caste-oppressed people. The visualised people and infrastructures (or the lack of it) are in a continuum with available technology and the social production of urban geographies. By analysing Kammatipaadam (2016) , a Malayalam movie, I foreground the entanglements between media technology, infrastructure, ‘peripherised’ urban geographies and caste. I trace the evolution of urban infrastructure and cinema through the socio-political changes in postcolonial India to lay out the context for analysis. My analysis of spaces of caste in cinema and urban infrastructures of caste demonstrates that, while a technological narrative in Kammatipaadam maps out the urban infrastructures of caste, the Dalit protagonists’ agile bodies are accentuated at the cost of exploring their spatial depths as human beings.