Between Rescue and Rule: Anandan’s Identity Crisis in Anandabhadram

Abstract

This paper examines the character Anandan in the Malayalam film Anandabhadram as a figure caught in an acute identity crisis, functioning simultaneously as a savior and a colonizer within a postcolonial cultural landscape. While Anandan is narratively positioned as a reformist hero who rescues the oppressed and restores moral order, this study argues that his savior role is inseparable from the internalization of colonial power structures. His authority is derived not merely from compassion but from rationalism, education and epistemic superiority traits historically aligned with colonial dominance. This paper is trying to analyse the character “Anandan” in Anandabhadram who is having a hybrid identity and he is in an unconscious search for his single identity. According to Homi K Bhabha, if an individual is living in between two cultures, it is the result of hybridity and ambivalence. It can happen to both colonizer and colonized. In this film, the manifestation of both orient and occident culture culminates in an single individual which make him a victim of hybridity and ambivalence. The protagonist of this film fluctuates between two different worlds and this victimizes him. Frantz Fanon, a Postcolonial critic in his work Black Skin and White Mask says that, “In the world in which I travel, I am endlessely creating myself, and what left for an individual is his fragmented self”. The same thing happens in the life of Anandan, and what remains is his fragmented self. Anandan is a migrant, who is in an unconscious search for his identity. He is brought up as a hybrid person in foreign land. At the beginning of the film Gayatri Devi, Anandan’s mother is telling stories about her homeland to Anandan.