Precarious Childhoods in Malayalam Films: Negotiating Precarity and Posthumanism in Ottaal and Veyilmarangal

This article considers two Malayalam films, each of which uses ‘the child’ to reflect on ‘precarious childhood’. Ottaal (2014, Dir. Jayaraj) and Veyilmarangal (2019, Dir. Bijukumar Damodaran) present the ontological relationality of their child characters within their context and the political and social realities of the people in Kerala. The ecological disasters, economic catastrophes, and multilayered forms of social abjection push the children out of human primacy, predominantly through their birth and existence as ‘nameless’ Dalits. The child characters, who contrast with the adults, negotiate a space for themselves amidst the question of belongingness through their relation with animals and the environment around them during the phase(s) of displacement. Borrowing Haraway’s concept of ‘companion species’, we expound on their assemblage with the environment through which they are able to survive the complex realities of daily life. Furthermore, the children are singularly and effectively extensions of animal personhood in their inability to determine the terms of their existence. In response to the larger question of precarity and childhood in the context of Kerala, this paper explores how these Malayalam films, by realistically portraying the idea that human primacy is oblivious to its precariousness, address the ecological predicament and the interconnectedness of all living things, emphasizing values of cohabitation and mutual care, which are central themes in posthumanist thought.