Opinion Jaya Jaya Jaya Jaya Hey: How a movie about domestic violence reveals the patriarchal biases we have as an audience

But the movie entirely subverts that expectation. The scene is not a figment of Jaya’s imagination. It has really taken place. The table remains broken. The husband is left with an ache in his lower abdomen. The material remains of her training are presented as evidence of her new-found physical capabilities. The footprints on the bathroom walls where she has practised her sure-footed kicks, the pillow hanging limply from a tree in the back of the house where she has honed her punches, and long white twists of fabric in the cupboard which she used to wrap and protect her hands with. The dramatisation of the scene reminds us that the directors are not actually suggesting this as a remedy for those facing domestic abuse. It is satire, much in the same club as Darlings (2022) not actually suggesting that one has to drug and kidnap husbands. Instead, the reactions are meant to highlight just how desperate and bleak the situation appears to those who face domestic abuse.

These reactions don’t suggest plausible solutions, and instead the films largely focus their attention on highlighting the issue at hand, and the very real apathy of society towards these women. But what was interesting to me, while watching this film was this immediate assumption, I made on the kick being in Jaya’s imagination. While the use of hyperbole in this first kick, as well as in the two fight sequences could suggest the fight against domestic violence and patriarchy as both literal and metaphorical, there is one more point to be made. My assumption emerged entirely from my never having seen the average female lead take part in a fight sequence in the same way that men do on-screen. If a Dulquer, or indeed Basil Joseph (playing the abusive husband) himself had undertaken a similar fight, I would not jump to the hasty conclusion of it being a dream sequence. The average film-viewer is attuned to the larger-than-life physical prowess and capabilities of the male hero. I have never seen a similar visual used for female leads, of the ordinary, everyday variety like Jaya.

And so, when I saw Darshana Rajendran as Jaya carry out those moves my suspension of disbelief, which I carry in ample supply to Indian movies, ran short. This points towards how the movie has not just created a well-executed storyline which drives home the point without preaching, but also how it pushes audiences themselves to examine what they expect out of certain genders playing themselves out on screen. When everyday men can have fight scenes shot in excruciating slow-motion, with sound effects to boot, vegetable carts toppling and entire marketplaces destroyed, why can’t Jayabharati have a similar moment in the sun. The last fight sequence, where she thrashes her ex-husband’s workers who have come to shut down her business, had me wanting to clap and whistle in the same way that I have seen men in theatres do during fight scenes. My intent is not to glorify violence or say that fight sequences are an ingrained part of commercial cinema, and there is nothing problematic about them. Instead, I am trying to highlight how as viewers we ourselves enter into the fictitious world of cinema with certain gendered societal rules intact, even if we are willing to forgo all laws of physics when it comes to men fighting. In disrupting expectations by having an ordinary woman have extraordinary martial moves, Jaya Jaya Jaya Jaya Hey to me marked an important moment in Indian and Malayalam cinema where overtly masculine displays of power and prestige are wielded to more feminist ends. In doing so, it allows us to question both the presence of the fight scene, as well as the gendered expectations of the viewer, which cinema is afflicted by while in the real world one must never listen to Rani Mukherji, in the cinematic universe women fighting might indeed have a role to play in upturning patriarchal notions of how women are performed.

The writer is a kuchipudi practitioner and PhD candidate at the University of Cambridge