Me Too, Again

On 31 August, journalists in Kerala eagerly gathered for a press conference by the actor Mohanlal, one of the most celebrated stars in Malayalam cinema. But this was not a press meet to promote a film or an upcoming project. The superstar looked visibly uncomfortable. He admitted as much. “I am not someone who faces such press conferences,” he said. “I don’t know how to speak with authority.” Four days earlier, he had resigned as president of the Association of Malayalam Movie Artists, a collective of Malayalam film actors.

The events leading up to his resignation had been triggered by the release of a report by the Hema committee, a three-person inquiry set up in the wake of the disturbing assault on a woman actor, in 2017. Even though sensitive details had been redacted, the report’s findings caused a massive stir in the industry. It reinvigorated the Me Too movement of 2018, where women across the country had made public their experiences of sexual harassment, abuse and violence, to protest a culture of silence around these subjects. Women in Malayalam cinema began sharing accounts, accusing several influential men in cinema of crimes ranging from sexual harassment to rape. The Kerala Police is now investigating complaints against the director Ranjith Balakrishnan and the actors Siddique, Mukesh Madhavan, Jayasurya Jayan, Nivin Pauly and Baburaj Jacob, among others. Some of the accused men occupied senior positions in the AMMA. The police issued a look-out notice against Siddique in late September. At the time of publishing, the Supreme Court had granted him interim protection from arrest.

But the reactions to the Hema committee report in the Malayalam film industry have been pockmarked with the same discourse that surrounded every Me Too wave: silence from many, scepticism or mockery of survivors’ experiences from others, and denialism from the most powerful in the system. And, while there is an unforgiving scrutiny of the politics of the members of the Women in Cinema Collective—which had been set up in the wake of the 2017 incident—and other women speaking up, men who made minimally satisfactory statements acknowledging the report have received disproportionate praise.

On the night of 17 February 2017, a woman actor was abducted and sexually assaulted by seven men. After escaping, she decided to lodge a complaint and seek justice. Over the next few months, there came some shocking revelations, including the arrest of the prominent actor, Gopalakrishnan Padmanabhan, better known as Dileep, after he was accused of plotting the crime.