The Kerala Story 2 Goes Beyondwhich is an unabashed attack on the Muslim community aimed at stoking fear and hate, systematically deploys the weapon of rape to drive its highly divisive message home. Nothing could be more devastating for one of the film’s protagonists, Neha, an innocent Dalit girl and an aspiring national-level javelin thrower, when her young Muslim husband betrays her by forcing her into sex work.
Neha (played by Aishwarya Ojha) leaves her parents to tie her fortunes with a man who turns out to be a villain, and emotionally blackmails her to convert to Islam. To achieve this task, incidentally, the film shows him beings handsomely rewarded with money from the maulvi. What’s more horrifying is when he allows the same maulvi, who officiated their marriage, to rape his wife. Her hell is just beginning, as any girl’s worst nightmare awaits Neha at her so-called husband’s home.
High-tension horror trope
She is locked up in a room and burly men, young and old, pay money to take turns to rape her. When she protests, she is tied to the bed. Every time the doors open, she screams in panic and fear. The scene is created to chill the most stoic of hearts. It is a classic, high-tension horror trope designed to build terror.
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Nothing can possibly stir the boiling pot of hate than this scene.
Her husband, the one who swore undying love to her, watches as his young brother pesters the ‘Madam’ to give him more chances to rape her. The husband only casually advises him not to “bash her up”, since other clients were complaining about her bloody face. In her deepest misery, Neha (who is now Nafisa) sees her loving father, who had actively nurtured her dreams of being a javelin thrower, open the door to save her from this house of horrors. Nothing could possibly stir the boiling pot of hate more than this scene.
Interestingly, after her miraculous escape, the police and Neha, with her supportive parents by her side, arrive at her husband’s house with India’s by-now familiar symbol of destruction – the bulldozer.
The scene has an almost absurd touch to it, as a crowd chanting “Har Har Shambho” walks alongside the bulldozer, which appears to have a character and a life of its own. Neha watches as the bulldozer’s claws rip through the house. In that destruction lies her revenge. The audience, too, probably feels a sense of satisfaction as though justice has been delivered.
Rape as a tool in Part 1
In the first version of the series, The Kerala Story too, the principal character, Shalini Unnikrishnan, an innocent Keralite nursing student, is brainwashed, converted to Islam and recruited into the Islamic State militant group. She suffers a similar harsh fate. She is first raped by a man who initially portrays himself as her saviour after she becomes pregnant by her Muslim boyfriend who abandons her. He brings her to Syria, promising to take care of her, but shows his true face by raping her despite her being heavily pregnant. “I don’t care what happens to the baby since it is not mine,” he says.
Later, she is raped by terrorists at the Iran-Afghan border after her baby is cruelly snatched from her. These scenes are shot crudely, leaving no doubt in the audience’s mind regarding the sheer horror heaped on her. Subsequently, she never finds her baby.
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The warning is dire in both films: this is the outcome when Hindu girls stray from the fold. Unnikrishnan’s Hindu friend at her nursing college, too, is dealt a cruel hand by a Muslim man introduced to her by their Muslim roommate. He spikes her drink and he and his friends take turns to rape her. Meanwhile, another girl is threatened by her Muslim boyfriend that he will release her naked photographs on the internet.
The Kerala Story 2 goes beyond
The Kerala Story 2 Goes Beyond tracks the lives of three girls who fall in love with Muslim men and the terrible things that happen to them.
Neha’s story arc in this film strikes terror in the hearts of the audience. But, the other two girls in the film, whose lives end in tragedy, do not have to contend with rape. Yet, their stories too are filled with betrayal and bloody violence, which are clearly meant to instil fear.
Sixteen-year-old Divya (Aditi Bhatia) from Gwalior loves making sexy dance reels and dreams of becoming an influencer, earning more than her father. Her parents come down on her harshly for making such “vulgar” reels and she rebels by running away with her Muslim boyfriend towards ruin and despair.
The Keralite girl, Surekha (Ulka Gupta), is progressive (its established in the beginning she doesn’t pray and doesn’t know how!) and opts for a live-in relationship with her liberal Muslim boyfriend while her father worryingly keeps poring through new clippings of the real-life, infamous Shraddha Walker case, who was chopped into pieces by her live-in boyfriend.
Surekha too pays with dire consequences for not heeding her parent’s well-meaning advice not to trust her Muslim boyfriend – he ends up locking her up in a room and forces her to eat beef circled by hijab-wearing women.
Ominous threat
This ominous threat of Muslim men wooing gullible Hindu girls for the sake of conversion is real, warns the film. There are organised syndicates waiting to prey on them and quotes arrests of such syndicates in Uttar Pradesh as proof.
All of this, explains the film directed by Kamakhya Narayan Singh and written by Vipul Amrutlal Shah and Amarnath Jha, is to ensure the grand design by Muslims (who make up 14.2 per cent of the population according to the 2011 census) to become the majority community in India by 2047. In fact, a cleric outlines a calculated strategy to shift India’s demographic landscape over 25 years, with the ultimate goal of implementing their religious law.
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How do they hope to achieve this goal? By targeting every single unmarried Hindu girl in the nation, claims a character in The Kerala Story 2.
What better way to stir up anxiety in the hearts of women in the country against one community but to wield the stick of sexual violence? The Hindu girls, however, don’t have much agency in this entire diabolical narrative, and even if they do, they are incapable of making the right choices.
The Kerala Story 2 ends with a rousing call to Hindus to rise and fight against love jihad, and mocks Hindus for not being united like “them”. Hindus have been divided for over 1,000 years and that is why we are in this situation, claims Divya’s father with frustration.
This Hindi film, allegedly aimed at creating “awareness” about the “suffering” of Hindu girls who marry Muslims, uses rape as a Damocles Sword to deter them from inter-faith marriages. In the end, this film is neither a Bollywood story at its heart nor a Kerala story. It is just a deeply unsettling hate story.
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