https://doi.org/10.67147/literariness.v1i4.078
Capturing the Self: Memory, Spatiality, Temporality, and the Reproduction of Power in Bramayugam
MUHAMMAD SALEEM A. M.
Assistant Professor of English
P.T.M. Government College, Perinthalmanna, Malappuram, Kerala
Email: saleemlaya@gmail.com
ORCID: 0009-0002-0266-1913
DR. P. M. ABDUL SAKIR
Associate Professor
Amal College of Advanced Studies, Nilambur, Malappuram, Kerala
Email: drpmsakir@amalcollege.ac.in
ORCID: 0009-0008-6853-4937
Abstract: Rahul Sadasivan’s, Malayalam neo-genre film, Bramayugam (The Age of Illusion) has received critical attention for its nuanced representation of caste hierarchy, Brahminical authority, the uncanny mana (mansion), spatial confinement, and supernatural power. Building on these established interpretations, this article examines hegemony as a process of subjective dispossession through which domination reconfigures selfhood, memory, knowledge, temporality, and spatiality. It observes that Kodumon Potti’s or Chathan’s mana embodies not a site of physical captivity, but a temporal-spatial regime that progressively disrupts the adiyan’s [captive’s] spatial identity and temporal experience. Chaathan’s subversion of ordinary temporality and appropriation of spatial relations produce disorientation, mnemonic erosion, and epistemic dependence. Thevan enters Chathan’s mana with a coherent identity, caste history, memory, love of his mother, and desire for home; but prolonged entrapment gradually severs these coordinates, rendering him dependent upon the interpretive structures imposed by his Chatan, thamburan (lord). It analyses Bramayugam’s deployment of magical realism as a narrative mechanism through which historically embedded hierarchy of caste and servitude become perceptible through the supernatural traces. Chaathan occupies contesting temporal positions as servant and master, oppressed and oppressor, captive and captor. His enslavement by the Brahminical Potti household transforms the supernatural into an allegory of spatial servitude, while his temporal appropriation of Kodumon Potti’s corporeality subverts without dismantling the hierarchy that engendered his subjugation. The article contends that Bramayugam’s insidious horror remains not in spatial captivity itself but in the transformation of the captive into a potential carrier of the power that produced his temporal captivity. Drawing on Foucault’s conceptualisation of power/knowledge and transforming power relations, Ricoeur’s conceptualisation of narrative temporality, spatiality, and identity, and Butler’s observation of subject formation through subjection and recognition, the article observes how temporal and spatial traces of domination generate hierarchical subject formation and enable the reproduction of hegemonic power.
Keywords: Power, Horror, Memory, Captivity, Temporality, Spatiality
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