Cheap B-grade films once kept Kerala's whole film industry afloat
In 2001, about 57 of the 89 Malayalam films released were low-budget softcore pictures, many starring one actress, Shakeela. Critics called them crude, yet historians broadly agree these films carried the industry through its worst years, keeping cinemas open and crews paid when family comedies were flopping.
Frank treatments of sexuality reached Malayalam cinema in the 1970s. I. V. Sasi's Avalude Ravukal of 1978, about a teenage sex worker, was the first Malayalam film rated adults-only; it was sold as titillation outside Kerala but is now seen as a cult film with a social message. Some analysts date the later flood of softcore to Bharathan's Rathinirvedham, released the same year.
Home video and more television sets fed demand from the mid-1980s. A common tactic was to shoot racy scenes separately, keep them from the Central Board of Film Certification, and splice them in for rural screenings; these reels were nicknamed Thund, or bits. In 1986 roughly 14 of some 32 releases used the trick, and a Kerala film chamber president complained that family dramas that thrived in cities were dying in villages. Adipapam in 1988 made the model pay: it reportedly grossed 25 million rupees on a budget of 750,000.
After a lull in the 1990s, theatre strikes and failing comedies set up a comeback. Kinnarathumbikal, released in March 2000 with Shakeela, earned around 40 million rupees against 1.2 million and was dubbed into more than six languages. The Shakeela wave followed. Scholar Darshana Sreedhar Mini argues her name on a poster guaranteed revenue, and with it the jobs of film workers; one of her 2001 films held its own against much bigger productions.
Unusually for Indian cinema, these films put the heroine at the centre and made the men secondary, though the women were written to type. The internet ended the boom: free clips beat cassettes, no new actresses were brought in, the state censor board clamped down, and revival attempts between 2007 and 2010 failed. Footage from the old films still earns money on Indian adult websites.
Source: Malayalam softcore pornography
