The Malayalam film 19(1)(a) (2022) opens on a statue that brings to life an episode from Sangam literature: King Athiyamān Nedūmān Añci offering a life-extending nellikkani (Indian gooseberry) to the poet Avvaiyār.Footnote 1 In the legend, the king withholds the rare fruit from himself and gives it instead to the poet, so that her words may live longer than his reign. Read against contemporary India, the shot signals a reversal of this ethic: in the world of the film, it is no longer the ruler who secures the poet’s survival, but anonymous readers who must decide whether to grant endangered texts a future in the face of hostility and violence.
That both films examined here emerge from Malayalam cinema is not incidental. From the social realism of K. G. George and Adoor Gopalakrishnan to the recent wave of films engaging with caste, gender, and state violence, Malayalam cinema has historically offered space for dissenting voices that other Indian language cinemas have rarely afforded.Footnote 2
Post-2014, India has witnessed an increasingly securitised climate for literary and cultural expression, where censorship appears less as an exceptional act than a structuring condition of public life. The assassinations of rationalists and intellectuals such as Narendra Dabholkar, Govind Pansare, M. M. Kalburgi, and Gauri Lankesh, alongside the harassment of writers like Perumal Murugan and S. Hareesh, mark a significant shift from sporadic bans to a sustained atmosphere of intimidation.Footnote 3 When right-wing groups burn copies of Madhorubhagan in Tiruchengode or mobilise advertisers to force the withdrawal of Meesha, they act not simply as outraged readers but as para-institutional censors: the very act of writing becomes punitive, and the author is branded culpable.Footnote 4
This dispersed yet convergent censorship regime forms the backdrop against which 19(1)(a) and Private must be read.Footnote 5 Rather than simply depicting repression, both films reconfigure the conventional author–reader–text triad: the hunted text moves to the centre, while the author recedes, leaving the ordinary reader as its reluctant custodian.
1. Hunted texts, ordinary custodians
In 19(1)(a), the writer-activist Gauri Shankar is a composite figure. While his first name inevitably recalls Gauri Lankesh, his Tamil origin, rationalist politics, and persecution echo Perumal Murugan. The Murugan controversy similarly unsettled the boundaries between author, reader, text, and context, turning the author’s attempted withdrawal into another form of textual afterlife.Footnote 6
In the movie, Gauri leaves his unfinished multilingual manuscript Karuppu (“Black”) at a small photocopy shop and is assassinated soon after, forcing the unnamed woman who runs the shop into the role of custodian and anonymous distributor of his work. His posthumous manuscript echoes debates on the death of the author and the redistribution of responsibility from writer to readers and institutions. Foucault’s concept of the “author-function” is relevant in this context, since the absence of an author does not mean the loss of the organisational role that the author plays in society; rather, this role can be shifted to other social structures and individuals.Footnote 7
Private (2025) widens its moral horizon even before the plot turns into a road film about hunted pages. The film’s makers released the single “Alone” with half the music video’s frame devoted to images of children killed in Gaza, accompanied by an appeal that “they too deserve to live.”Footnote 8 This gesture places the film’s story of an assassinated Indian activist and a suppressed manuscript in a transnational field of vulnerability: a space where state violence, occupation, and censorship are experienced as connected forms of control over which lives and stories are allowed to continue.
The film’s formal structure enacts its thematic argument. It begins with Ashitha Begum, a young woman from Malappuram who flees a forced marriage and arrives inadvertently at a stranger’s doorstep. From here on, the story of Balan Marar unfolds: a retired man living under police surveillance after his activist son was murdered by fringe groups for writing a politically charged manuscript. The manuscript exists in fragments in the safe custody of friends, and digitally stored on a hard disk buried under an unmarked gravestone. When Marar’s attempts to gather these fragments fail, it is Ashitha who agrees to drive. The film’s shift from a domestic drama to a road thriller thus becomes an argument about the common reader’s role in sustaining literary expression.
Rather than insisting on heroic preservation, both the films imagine custodianship as an everyday practice of carrying, remembering, and transmitting texts across uncertain futures. Custodianship, as the film insists, is neither individual nor voluntary. It is contingent, collective, and corporeal. This also explains why movies produced during the era of the internet and digital platforms continue to circle back to photocopies, hidden hard disks, and other similar tangible artefacts. Their material fragility makes the physical danger of custodianship evident in ways that an electronic document cannot. By giving dissent a body, weight, location, and vulnerability, the films reimagine preservation as an embodied ethic between object and custodian. As Maryanne Dever argues, digital technologies have made the material properties of paper newly visible rather than irrelevant.Footnote 9 Characters in the films make choices about the preservation of the physical text, its duplication, whom to trust, and who in the future might need access to the document.
Custodianship is therefore also an archival act. As Derrida suggests, the archive cannot be separated from questions of authority, choice, and survival.Footnote 10 The custodian therefore becomes a temporary archivist as they assume responsibility for what must not disappear. Such custodianship also has older forms: South Asian textual cultures have long relied on memorization, recitation, oral transmission, and performances to carry texts beyond the life of authors. The clandestine reproduction and dissemination of manuscripts in these films also recall the workings of samizdat in the Soviet Union. Scholar Ann Komaromi proposes to understand samizdat as a mode of textual existence that generates alternative communities of readers.Footnote 11
The central figures in both films are not heroic lawyers or journalists but an ordinary reader and a grieving parent. Their very ordinariness is the point. The work of deciding whether to keep a dangerous manuscript, whom to trust with a copy, whether to risk a journey to a publisher, is shown as slow, affectively fraught labour rather than a single climactic act of defiance. The films thus make a larger claim: under present conditions, the most consequential political act may not be the writing of a radical book, but the quiet, risky everyday decisions through which non-authors ensure that a hunted text continues to exist at all.
2. From state to democratised censorship
Although these films begin with hunted manuscripts, they quickly widen their frame to show that the threat to such texts no longer comes only from the state, but from a diffuse network of actors who together produce a regime of democratised censorship.Footnote 12 This relates to Matthew Bunn’s articulation of “new censorship theory,” whereby the focus is moved away from censorship as a separate act of state oppression towards the structure that influences texts and the communication network that constrains them.Footnote 13 Lawrence Liang’s examination of India’s “hurt sentiments” controversies shows how censorship can be dispersed across crowds, mediators, and markets, turning into the instruments for conducting the state business of suppression, even as the Indian film industry finds ingenious ways to sneak dissent in.Footnote 14
Similarly, Robert Darnton’s history of censorship complicates the portrayal of the censor as the singular state official standing between the writer and the reader. Instances of proscription have often operated within the social networks between writers, publishers, officials, printers, and readers; they involve negotiation as well as prohibition.Footnote 15 In 19(1)(a), the writer’s assassination is never reduced to a single identifiable perpetrator. Rather, the film situates his killing within a climate of hostility where dissent is punishable, rationalists and journalists are routinely targeted, and the state appears more interested in containing fallout than in defending free expression. Private makes this dispersed structure even more explicit. The same manuscript is shadowed by a right-wing vigilante group modelled on contemporary Hindu nationalist organisations, and local police invoking security and UAPA charges.Footnote 16
The irony is that both films are themselves products of a system of cinematic gatekeeping. Under the Cinematograph Act and the Cinematograph (Certification) Rules, films require certification before public exhibition in India. Private’s production history reinforces this argument. The Central Board of Film Certification (CBFC) subjected the film to nine cuts, sanitising references to the Citizenship Bill, Hindi-speaking outsiders, and a Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS)-like organisation, demonstrates how subversive films are forced to negotiate the boundaries of permissible dissent.Footnote 17
In interviews around the release, director Deepak Deon remarked wryly that “the freedom of expression of the censor board is what seems to be protected, not that of creators,” warning that the kind of censorship now normalised in cinema and the press will soon overreach into other dimensions of everyday life.Footnote 18
As Gautam Bhatia notes, contemporary threats to free speech often arise from structural pressures rather than direct bans. Private’s trajectory from CBFC intervention to delayed release and ideological cuts exemplifies this dispersed form of regulation. Together, the films show that the centre of gravity in censorship debates has shifted from a singular, visible censor to a field of overlapping institutions and publics whose combined actions render certain texts perpetually precarious.Footnote 19
3. Free speech as quiet practice
Both 19(1)(a) and Private refuse to stage free speech as courtroom drama or viral spectacle. Instead, they render it as a series of quiet, almost banal decisions taken far from the spaces where “freedom of expression” is usually invoked. The unnamed woman in 19(1)(a) does not deliver impassioned monologues about the Constitution; she reads in snatches between customers, chooses to keep a copy of Karuppu when she could have shredded it, and finally risks anonymous couriering of the manuscript to people who might understand what it means. Similarly, Balan Marar in Private is not a rights activist but a father who decides that honouring his son’s memory requires more than private mourning. He gathers pages, trusts a stranger with the car keys, and drives through unfamiliar landscapes.
In 19(1)(a), the unnamed woman’s act of photocopying, rather than authoring, constitutes the text’s afterlife. In Private, the corresponding gesture is the retrieval of a hard disk from beneath a gravestone: the manuscript’s survival is inseparable from acts of mourning, risk, and physical labour. In both cases, Barthes’s theoretical claim about the death of the author thus acquires an unexpected material afterlife: once the author disappears, the question is no longer simply who owns the meaning of the text, but who assumes responsibility for its sustenance.Footnote 20
What separates the two films—one released without major cuts in 2022, the other subjected to nine CBFC interventions before a delayed release in 2025—is itself evidence of the mounting pressure on dissenting cultural expression in India. Together, the films recast free speech as a quiet practice of care. In doing so, Malayalam cinema becomes an archive for literature itself, situating the endangered book at the centre of contemporary political imagination.
What is preserved, then, is more than a text. It is a series of relations between the dead author, the surviving document, the reader who discovers it, and the future readers to whom it may still matter. Literary survival is thus not identical to textual survival. A document may survive materially but become forgotten; a book may be fragmented or unfinished, but survive through the reader-custodians.
By bringing fictional manuscripts and their threatened authors into circulation, 19(1)(a) and Private function as cinematic archives of literary dissent and contemporary custodians of literary expression.
The question the films leave behind is not whether a writer can speak. It is who will keep the text alive.
Author contribution
Conceptualization, Data curation, Formal analysis, Investigation, A.S.
Funding statement
No funding was received for this research.
Conflict of interest
The author declares no competing interests.
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