The trailer for The Kerala Story 2–Goes Beyond dropped on YouTube this week. Malayalam social media has been busy laughing at it—one scene, in which a Hindu girl from Kerala is shown being force-fed beef, struck many viewers as culturally illiterate in a State where beef is eaten across communities. Kerala Chief Minister Pinarayi Vijayan called the sequel divisive and potentially damaging to communal harmony. But the jokes and reels are for us. They will not travel as far as the film will.

The Kerala Story (2023), directed by Sudipto Sen and produced by Vipul Amrutlal Shah, did not need Malayalis to take it seriously. It found its audience in States far from Kerala, where it was received as documentary truth. The film won two National Awards—for Best Direction and Best Cinematography—and Prime Minister Narendra Modi invoked it during election campaigning in Karnataka. Madhya Pradesh and Uttar Pradesh granted it tax-free status. The sequel—directed this time by Kamakhya Narayan Singh, with Amrutlal Shah producing again—may do similar damage, in the same places, among the same people, who had no reason to question the original. It is in this climate, where cinema has become a vehicle for communal messaging, that revisiting Kamal’s Perumazhakkalam (2004) feels like an attempt to find what has been lost in our cinema.

Two families, two villages, one monsoon

What Perumazhakkalam retrieves, above all, is a truth the Gulf has always pressed upon Malayali life. Pravasam, or expatriation, is a defining condition for the community. The Gulf is not a distant geography, even for those who have never left Kerala. Perumazhakkalam, written by the late T.A. Razzaq, opens with the news of a tragedy arriving from abroad. The film is set entirely across two hamlets—Kalpathy in Palakkad and Kallayi in Kozhikode—where Ganga and Raziya, wives of two Malayali immigrants in Saudi Arabia, wait out their husbands’ absence.

The tragedy that reaches them is devastating in its ordinariness. Akbar and Raghu are friends who work together in Saudi Arabia. During a fight with a third worker who has absconded with Akbar’s money, Akbar swings and misses—and accidentally kills Raghu. A monsoon brings their families the news of Raghu’s death and of Akbar’s impending execution under a Sharia court ruling. The sentence is to be carried out within two Jummah prayers. Raziya and her father begin knocking on the doors of legislators and filing petitions, but are told there is little the Indian state can do to override the laws of an Arab country.

A mutual friend, John, travels from Saudi Arabia to Kozhikode and explains to Raziya the circumstances of Raghu’s accidental death. He tells her of one thing a Sharia court might consider above blood money: a word of mercy from the deceased’s wife or mother. What follows is Raziya’s journey from Kozhikode to Kalpathy—to seek forgiveness from a grieving Ganga—in the hope of sparing Akbar his life.

A signature

It is at this point that the film’s real subject comes into focus. Raziya is desperate for something that Raghu’s family has every right to refuse. Their meetings unfold against some of the heaviest rains of the season. Ganga’s anguish and resentment are not dissolved—they are witnessed. When Ganga is ready, she travels to Kozhikode herself, hands over the pardon, defies her family, and risks ostracism.

The film gives both women their full weight. Raziya shows up, against all odds. Ganga makes the hardest choice while still in grief. Neither is a symbol. Raziya’s young daughter will grow up with Ganga as her amma—a relationship born entirely from the wreckage of what came before.

The contrast with The Kerala Story is sharpest here. In that film, the character Shalini is manipulated, converted, and trafficked. The narrative stays fixed on what is being done to her and who is doing it—the identities of those responsible are the film’s subject, not Shalini herself. In Perumazhakkalam, Raziya and Ganga stand face to face as individuals, navigating a shared tragedy. One film uses women to perpetuate fear. The other lets them act.

The story’s reach goes well beyond Malayalam cinema. In 2006, director Nagesh Kukunoor watched Perumazhakkalam at the International Film Festival of India in Goa and purchased the story rights from Kamal. He relocated the narrative to Rajasthan and made Dor, with Ayesha Takia and Gul Panag in the two central roles. The film was well received across the country. What the episode also confirmed was how far Razzaq’s story could travel, and how intact its emotional core remained in the crossing.

The award, and what it meant

That Perumazhakkalam‘s humanist instinct found audiences in Hindi as much as in Malayalam says something about the moment the film belonged to. It won five Kerala State Film Awards and the National Film Award for Best Film on Other Social Issues—a category later merged into the broader Best Feature Film Promoting National, Social and Environmental Values. It came from a period when “cinema with a message” was understood to mean something that brought people together rather than sorted them apart.

That consensus seems missing now. Twenty years ago, asking “Why is it always Ganga who must forgive?” would have been read as parochial. Today, critics say, it would start a war—online, in the news, in speeches from campaign trails.

Perumazhakkalam is available for streaming. The Kerala Story 2–Goes Beyond, meanwhile, opens in cinemas on February 27 with a trailer that warns, in its opening seconds, that India may become an Islamic state within 25 years. The category of films Perumazhakkalam represents now competes with productions that carry the state’s endorsement. What that endorsement costs, in terms of social trust and the imaginative space cinema can occupy, will take years to fully understand, and by then the accounting will feel overdue.

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Vineeth Menon is an analytics professional based in Bangalore. He likes to think of himself as an eternal student of mainstream cinema.