Mediatization via Mourning and Vice Versa: Television, Mass Grief, and Liveness in Kerala

Muhsina K K and Akshaya Kumar

Abstract

This article engages with the corporeal and mediated intensities of mourning publics at celebrity funerals in Kerala, attended both in person and via TV and other live-streaming platforms. Live coverage transforms discrete emotional valences of these events into monumental media spectacles, consolidating an affective economy of grief based on the expression of “liveness” in all its urgency. This urgent expression results from the historical transition from traditional to new media in digital environments over the last two decades. Spectacles of “liveness” are key to understanding the cultural dynamics of mass participation in Kerala, which often abjures the general South Indian public’s enthusiasm for celebrities. Emotional eruptions at mass funeral processions form a melodramatic counterbalance to the “rational,” realist Malayali public sphere, which is proved, by such displays, to be an inadequate lens for viewing cultural self-definitions within popular discourses in Kerala.

In 2004, Kairali TV, a Malayalam-language[1] general-entertainment television channel owned by Kairali TV Network and the mouthpiece of the Communist Party of India Marxist (CPIM) in Kerala, live telecast the six-hundred kilometre long funeral procession of E. K. Nayanar, a popular leader of CPIM.[2] The channel covered his funeral procession from Thiruvananthapuram to Kannur to reach the designated resting place, with the dead body kept in a glass coffin covered by a communist party flag in a Kerala state transport bus, and accompanied by thousands of people. The time of Nayanar’s demise coincided with a significant shift, marked by the rise of satellite channels and the Indian government’s new permission to directly uplink programs from within the country. The channel team and officials of Kairali TV who accompanied Nayanar’s funeral procession documented and aired the emotional responses of thousands of Communist Party leaders, workers, followers, and ordinary citizens across the route.[3] In addition to the general Malayali audience and the political public, the main audience for the live broadcast was the Malayali diaspora, particularly in the Gulf.[4] The live streaming afforded them a sense of ceremonial participation in the occasion. Kairali’s extensive live broadcasting of Nayanar’s funeral procession inaugurated a popular media practice in the state; it turned certain public figures’ funerals into grand televisual spectacles.[5]

The death and funeral of a public figure, whether a monarch or a statesperson and the emotional responses exhibited by their subjects, constitutes a site of public interest due to the spread of recording devices. This essay focuses on the monumentality of the mourning public at the funerals of public figures in Kerala and their emotional valences, which have turned into media extravaganzas post-2000s. By critically engaging with the funerals, covered on live television, of Kalabhavan Mani, an actor; Panakkad Sayed Hyder Ali Shihab Thangal, a spiritual leader; and Oomen Chandy, a political leader, the essay offers a line of argumentation for the importance of the corporeal and mediated intensities of public emotion for the state.[6]

Over a decade after Nayanar’s death, the 2016 funeral of Kalabhavan Mani (hereafter Mani), a popular Malayalam actor and singer, saw a congregation of tens of thousands of mourners and garnered extensive media attention. The extensive media coverage of Mani’s funeral was shaped by a highly competitive and dynamic television landscape that developed in Kerala as the first decade of the century drew to a close, marking a stark contrast to the media environment surrounding the deaths of Nayanar. The emergence of a vibrant news television industry, the expansion of satellite television, and their convergence with internet-driven media and platforms like YouTube were central to the state’s media landscape during this period. Mani’s funeral was broadcast live on nearly all major Malayalam TV channels, including Manorama News, Mathrubhumi News, Media One, and Jai Hind TV, and was also streamed live on their respective YouTube channels. The coverage began at the Thrissur Medical College, where Mani had passed away, and continued with live streaming of the emotional reactions of the public, tributes from various public figures at different locations, and the family’s private moments during the cremation at his residence.

Similarly, the spectacular turnout in the 2022 mourning procession of Panakkad Hyder Ali Shihab Thangal (hereafter Thangal), a reputable politician who served as the state president of the Indian Union Muslim League (IUML), Kerala’s third-largest political party, and a highly revered Muslim spiritual leader, garnered a massive display of public affect that spammed the television screens and social media for days. Although most prominent Malayalam channels telecast the funeral of Thangal, Media One TV—owned and run by the Kerala unit of Jamaat-e-Islami Hind and one of the few Indian news channels owned by an Islamic organization—telecast the events live for two consecutive days. In a breaking news bulletin around 2:00 p.m. on March 6, 2022, the channel announced the death of Thangal. It started the live coverage from the hospital where Thangal died, where many party leaders and followers gathered soon after the news was released. The channel live-telecast the emotional responses of a colossal mourning public until his mortal remains were laid to rest, while on split screens, the police struggled to maintain order as people crowded the streets. Many party workers of the Indian Union Muslim League from the Gulf countries publicly commended Media One channel on Facebook, tagging the reporters behind the extensive live coverage of Thangal’s final journey, and expressed that the live stream provided them with a sense of ceremonial participation in the event, despite their physical absence.

Exceeding these broadcast events, the media coverage of Oommen Chandy’s funeral, a former chief minister and one of the most popular political leaders of the state in 2023, was unprecedented, with nearly all major television channels providing continuous live broadcasts for seventy-two hours, capturing the immense public outpouring of grief as his funeral procession made its way across south Kerala. Almost all prominent Malayalam TV channels, including DD Malayalam, live-telecast his funeral for three consecutive days. An even bigger audience watched the procession live on television, and the event was also trending on news websites. The live telecast commenced with the announcement of Chandy’s passing through his son’s Facebook post, revealing that he had succumbed to cancer, and continued telecasting the emotional responses to his death for three days, marking a grand spectacle both in the cultural and media memory of the state. As the procession following his hearse from Thiruvananthapuram to Kottayam, where he was laid to rest, which spanned 150 kilometres, took twenty-eight hours to complete, most news channels suspended their regular programming to televise it and the final tributes paid by thousands of people, including elderly women and children, who waited along the roadside as the vehicle carrying Chandy’s remains inched forward.

This essay asks how the cultural dynamics of live-streaming celebrity funerals unravel the engagements of the state’s public sphere with public affects. The monumentality of this mourning public contradicts the crosscutting discourse of Kerala’s progressive public sphere built on the plank of a “reasonable” public, deviating significantly from the character of the South Indian public sphere at large.[7] Even if one disregards the discursive intensity of such a projection, it is important to ask why the monumental mourning public is triggered by death so much more than by the landmark life events of celebrities. To grapple with these colossal mourning publics, it is essential to examine their interplay with the cultural politics of mass participation in the VIP funerals of South India and their lineage in the culture of star worship within the context of cine-politics.[8] The cine-political formations in the South Indian states of Tamil Nadu, Karnataka, and Andhra Pradesh, characterized by the conversion of star power into political power, primarily manifest through fan devotion to legendary matinee idols (Prasad). Such formations not only transform celebrity deaths and subsequent mourning into events of monumental public attendance and frenzied public behaviour but also display the power to convert citizens into fans (or devotees), through all the landmark events of cine-political significance. The public outpouring of emotions at celebrity funerals is then shaped by the mourners’ imaginary identifications with the star charisma of the deceased and their political aspirations for a virtual political order, which is reinforced by the quasi-religious meanings accorded to stars’ cinematic roles. This process, in turn, is retained in and reifies the public legitimacy of star personas and reflects the visceral intensity of public emotions upon stars’ deaths.

What sets apart the corporeality of the mourning public in the funerals of public figures in Kerala is that neither their personal lives nor their civic engagements commanded substantial public validation or massive media attention during their lifetimes, except for Kalabhavan Mani’s cinematic roles. The massive display of public emotion and monumental scale of media attention at these figures’ funerals signify a marked disjuncture from the relatively subdued public lives of the icons.  A newly emergent media ecology has fostered the growth of attention economy over the urgent expressions of liveness facilitated by internet-driven media. The rapid multiplication of devices with screen network connectivity in the last four decades is crucial to this new media habitus. This thriving televisual economy has also been amplified by YouTube, which became a significant cultural infrastructure in India and a decisive digital intermediary for legacy television by 2010 (Lotz). The parallel live streaming of these funerals on YouTube channels, owned by respective TV channels, hence augmented the creative possibilities of legacy television in consolidating the economy of grief and expanding their audience demography.

The mourning public gathers not only in person to join the funeral processions but also in front of TV sets and, more recently, via live streaming to participate in the moment of spectacular grieving. The phenomenon of mass grieving stands at a curious historical-theoretical cross-section. On the one hand, there is a monumental crowd in physical attendance, paying last tributes. This crowd, ephemeral in its lifespan, forms the fulcrum of the media extravaganza. On the other hand, the moving and still images of this monumental live attendance, available via electronic media, precipitates the wider arena of the mourning public that joins the crowd via their private screens. As they watch the mourning event live, they mark their “attendance” at the funeral procession in (physical) absentia. As we further illustrate attributes of funereal mediatization and the mourning public, we will encounter the core contradiction of a monumental live attendance facilitated by the spread of media. In making sense of this public that really “need not be there,” we grapple with communication systems designed to harvest attention at the cost of corporeal attendance; in this brief moment of monumental live attendance, though, the live attendees set aside the explicitly mediated experience of the funeral procession.

The intensely affective and networked publics formed around these visual spectacles in Kerala disrupt the state’s claim to a rational mediation of public affect, the very underpinning of its further claim to a progressive public sphere. While Kerala appears relatively immune to star power and maintains a more rational stance vis-à-vis monumental expressions of public emotion during VIP funerals, it remains deeply embedded in star politics, albeit through the distribution of star value beyond the institutions of cinema. The melodramatic outpouring of emotion in mass grieving destabilizes Kerala’s claim to “rational” exceptionalism, particularly in terms of its progressive citizenry.

Kerala vs. South India: A (Melodramatic) Rain Shadow Region?

The personas of certain legendary South Indian icons who managed to convert their star power into political significance engendered vital imbrications in popular culture, celebrity politics, and broader socio-political mobilizations. Unsurprisingly, their deaths—M. G. Ramachandran (hereafter MGR, 1987), Jayalalitha (2016), M. Karunanidhi in Tamil Nadu (2018), N. T. Rama Rao (hereafter NTR, 1996) in Andhra Pradesh, and Rajkumar in Karnataka (2006)—triggered frenzied collectives of mourners. Following MGR’s demise, many Tamil people even resorted to acts of self-harm, such as self-immolation, wrist-cutting, and ingestion of poison, which resulted in thirty-one deaths in two days (Venkatramani). Many young men tonsured their heads, a customary Hindu practice typically observed following the death of a family member.[9] The more shocking incidents established associations between public grief over the deaths of political icons, particularly matinee idols in these South Indian states, and suicide and violence.[10] The hysterical mourning of the public was identified as a feature of fan bhakti [devotion] (Prasad). In informal public discourse, the adulation of these celebrity politicians made them individuals with quasi-divine personas. Prasad argues that fan bhakti as a cultural practice derives from the historical phenomenon of cine-politics, manifesting in virtual political sovereignty, whereby the marginalized population achieves a surrogate political existence in the shadows of the new nation. As Prasad shows, this history took shape in the wake of regionalist assertions of linguistic nationalism by South Indian states. The public enthusiasm surrounding star bodies thus signifies a sense of political community forged between a star and his fans. It becomes a locus of imaginary identification for individual fans amid conflicts over national identity at a specific moment in Indian history. This is the political enthusiasm that later extends to dead bodies in public view.

The adulation of celebrities and enthusiasm for their funerals in Kerala nevertheless shies away from “irrational” bursts of public emotion. The disproportionately large farewells given to public figures such as literary and cultural practitioners, spiritual leaders, and small-time film actors need to be understood as part of the cleavages between the political and cultural spheres in Kerala, as opposed to the relatively smooth translation of star power into the political domain in South India (Radhakrishnan, “What is Left?”). The cleavages are built upon the state’s relatively subdued and stoic star-fan relationship. The influence of social and political movements—particularly the stronghold of communism in public life—as well as the role of religious communities in contestation with the distribution of development metrics across Kerala’s linguistic community, have made it less cohesive around a small number of cultural-political icons but more accepting of a wide array of social leadership. What makes the Kerala case particularly curious is how this cultural media economy of grief permeates into the rational, progressive premises upon which the popular discourses of the state’s public sphere are mounted. The corporeal intensity of the mourning public disrupts the historical tension between realism and melodrama which is vital to the fashioning of the state’s rational, progressive self-disposition. This Malayali self-image is built upon the spatial reconfiguration of the inside and outside as distinct realms of melodrama and realism, which posits melodrama as an irrational remnant of realism and its cultural authenticity. As we have argued elsewhere, this split mandate undergirds the privileging of secular rationality around which the public sphere has been imagined and manifests in the repression of public mourning from Kerala’s visual culture (KK and Kumar).

The claims of the Malayali public as an enlightened reading public, a by-product of rational modernity’s formation of the state’s public sphere, significantly shape the cultural authenticity of realism in the state (Radhakrishnan, “‘Worlds’”; Varughese). The progressive credentials attributed to this reading public have nonetheless engendered cultural disdain towards Kerala’s neighbouring states, manifested predominantly in perceiving its public within the affective economy of melodrama and the populist idioms of mass cinema. Condescension toward the “irrationality” of the mass audience of neighbouring states, particularly Tamil people, has emerged from the hyper-visible fandom around South Indian male stars (Srinivas), and popular cinema being adopted as a medium for linguistic mobilization (Pandian). Such irrationality is, in turn, positioned against the predominance of social realism in Malayalam cinema that endorses a “developmental aesthetics” (Prasad 189) and a claim to the rational credentials of the state’s cultural industries and its audience.

The interventions of culturally progressive movements, such as the library movement and literacy movement,[11] along with rational, progressive movements, such as the Kerala Sastra Sahitya Parishad (People’s Science Movement) and the rationalist group Kerala Yukthivadi Sangham, which sought to transform popular spheres into rational political space, consolidated the discourses of secular rationality by building a progressive and scientific temperament around the public sphere. These movements, strongly supported by the Communist Party, served as the primary vehicle for Malayali engagements with scientific discourses from the 1960s to the 1980s, promoting a secular understanding of science through mass education and numerous campaigns for civil action and community development (Bijukumar). These initiatives are an extension of the broader communist project aimed at constructing a public sphere through engagement with popular domains such as cinema, folk songs, and theatre, which enabled it to bridge the gap between the nationalist elites represented by the Indian National Congress and the common masses (Mannathukaran 2013). While it allowed the Left to consolidate and mobilize a public sphere, expanding its base among marginalized and working-class populations, their appropriation of key public spaces—such as libraries, reading rooms, tea shops, and village squares—were projected as emblematic of the rational, progressive credentials of these spheres, emphasizing the importance of reading in the regional public culture. Ratheesh Radhakrishnan argues that the narratives of Kerala’s exceptionalism are claimed through the credentials of an enlightened reading public, a distinctive history of communist mobilizations, and a model of social development that obscures its reliance on remittances from the Persian Gulf (“‘Worlds’”).

Even as they contributed to the formation of the state’s public sphere, these interventions have been instrumental in fashioning the narratives of its genealogy through literary and cultural modernity and its translations into the Malayali rational self-definition. It is within the valences of a rationally modern public sphere in the cultural politics of the state that the inquiry into what drives an affective economy on the monumental scale of public emotion during these funerals emerges. Key to this conflict is the way Kerala, while being facilitated by the state and other democratic edifices, situates itself within the broader context of star worshipping and its populist dynamics in South India. For instance, unlike the frenzied collective of mourners discussed earlier, the funerals in Kerala drew a relatively disciplined and self-restrained public in grief. Attending these events in person held great importance in recognizing and installing people’s respective leaders in public memory as mass heroes. The heroes’ cultural sovereignty is translated into political sovereignty, however ephemeral. While Kerala may be different in handling the tensions, it firmly inhabits South India in terms of the conflicts and anxieties that divide cultural and political domains. Celebrity funerals are occasions when we witness a public reclaiming of the political by the quasi-monarchic splendour accorded to cultural icons of smaller constituencies.

The state retreats and allows this public reclaiming of the political by way of the dead body of the cultural sovereign, partly because it poses no threat, but also to acknowledge the abrupt and incomplete transition from monarchic rule to constitutional democracy that characterizes much of South Asian politics. While the abruptness of this unstable transition is owed to the period of colonial rule, the post-independence cultural realm of South India has had to bear the burden of “serving as a shadow structure of political representation” (Prasad 19). The monarchic monumentality of celebrity funerals—even if ephemeral, since it is triggered only by mass public attention to events surrounding death—is, therefore, ironically facilitated by the state functionaries and procedures that represent the democratic artifice. It is important to note, however, that the growing public interest in these televisual spectacles has not replaced the newspapers’ coverage of VIP funerals in the state. Yet both television and newspapers have prospered and proliferated due to the endorsement and public validation offered in reciprocation. Hence, the genealogy of the state’s visual media, particularly its transition from traditional to new media through the convergence of legacy television with internet-driven platforms, is key to understanding the emergence of media practices that facilitate the spectacles of mass grieving. This shift has been pivotal in the proliferation of news television in the state. To explore this further, let us examine how satellite television laid the foundation for this phenomenon, particularly through the proliferation of live-streaming.

Satellite Television and the Proliferation of News Channels

The surge of private satellite television channels during the early 2000s broke the long-standing dominance of DD Malayalam (the regional arm of the national public broadcaster, Doordarshan) as well as Asianet and Surya TV, which had been the only private channels in Malayalam until 2000. Apart from the newly acquired functional freedom of the private sector following the economic liberalization, which resulted in a deregulated broadcasting market (Mehta 2008), the widespread popularity of private cable TV networks by the late ‘90s also precipitated the expansion of satellite channels.

The first Malayalam satellite channel, Asianet—also one of the first private satellite television channels in India—was introduced in 1993 as a current affairs and entertainment channel using a Russian satellite.  It appealed to the Malayali audience through entertainment shows, news, and serials. It was well received in the wake of mounting anti-establishment political energies and the “neoliberal global market’s promises of the avenues to gratify one’s desires that were hitherto forbidden within the moral economy of the welfare state” (Joseph, “Contemporary Television” 4). Asianet’s popularity grew quickly and was followed by the 1998 launch of Surya TV, owned by the Sun Network, one of the largest media conglomerates in the country. The subsequent rise of multiple satellite television channels like Kairali TV, Jeevan, Amrita, Kiran TV, Jai Hind, Kairali We, Mazhavil Manorama, and Flowers led to a significant change in the state’s mediascape in the 2000s. Most of these channels, including Asianet, Surya, and Kairali, have also launched more channels exclusively for movies, musicals, and phone-in programs.

The idea of liveness, mobilized on the claim of providing direct access to the distant “now”—the mainstay of live television broadcasting—has been crucial in expanding the audience demography of these channels. They built substantial popular interest in the live telecasting of various major events, including VIP funerals, election results, and so on, by providing immediate access to the distant. These channels broadcast live the football World Cup, cricket tournaments of the Indian national team, highlights of state annual budget sessions, beauty pageants, award shows, and some of the festivals and game shows that are popular in the region, and gained these channels substantial domestic and diaspora audiences.[12] The last two decades also witnessed the emergence of niche Malayalam channels. For instance, most of the prominent political parties in Kerala launched their TV channels—either party-run or owned by individuals or firms affiliated with political parties. These channels, including Kairali TV, Jai Hind TV, India Vision, and Janam TV, helped their parent body to consolidate their base and reach a wide audience by spreading their ideologies or fashioning the public image of many regional political leaders.[13] The media establishments run or owned by political parties have not only thrived but dominated the media ecosystem of Kerala, which was shaped as much by neoliberal economic policy as by Delhi media. Regional politics has, therefore, superseded what was effectively a political move toward the “free” flow of information.

This assertive cultural multipolarity has expanded the media industries manifold. The key breakthrough for the purpose of this essay was the introduction of around-the-clock news channels such as India Vision, Asianet News, Reporter TV, Manorama News, Kairali People, Mathrubhumi News, Media One, and 24 News TV. They significantly augmented the Malayali television audience’s exposure to news, particularly primetime news. Since most of these news channels are extensions of popular newspapers in Malayalam, the televisual economy operates as an overlay upon the newspaper-reading public. This newspaper-reading public has been at the heart of Kerala’s literary and political public sphere.

 

In the competitive media ecosystem of official media partners and broadcasters, news channels recognize the potential of the live coverage of VIP funeral processions. Around 2015, with the launch of Reliance Jio with predatory pricing (Athique and Kumar), the eruption of a strong digital video ecosystem resulted in most news channels starting an official YouTube channel. Proliferating mobile screens began to overwhelm television viewing behaviour. Nevertheless, it is important to understand that digital disruption has not replaced television; it provides another interface for legacy media, particularly to channel public attention towards VIP funerals animated by urgent expressions of “liveness.”  Despite Derrida’s critique of “televisual artificiality,” which highlights the live broadcast as an inherently constructed event that mediates, interprets, and often distorts reality, the live coverage of grand funerals holds the potential to evoke powerful spectacles of public emotion, marking the collective cultural memories of the state.

The Affective Public(s)

In The Cinematic Mode of Production: Attention Economy and the Society of the Spectacle, Jonathan Beller explains how capitalism transformed the act of looking into value-productive labor with the emergence of cinema and its succeeding formations, particularly television, computers, and the Internet. He argues that capitalism began monetizing attention, which resulted in many media platforms operating within the computational logic of capital. Indeed, the most well-known case in which the media spectacles around an individual’s personal and public life found its logical extension in their death was the live coverage of the death and funeral of Princess Diana (1997), one of the most-watched live broadcasts to date (Rigney). The extensive live coverage of her funeral that turned into a global event of seemingly epic proportions is founded upon the scandalous value of her life as an object of global fascination and obsessional documentation, both in the tabloid industry and across the spectrum of mass media. The heavily dramatized televisual spectacle of mass hysteria around Diana’s death was the cloyingly sentimental effect of media manipulation and populist reaction, anchored by the royal figure rich in cultural themes and fantasies (Kear and Steinberg; Hay). Analyzing the role of photographs in constructing the image simulacrum of Princess Diana, Jill R. Chancey posits that the global reaction to her death is propelled by photographs fostering a perceived intimacy with the public, thereby contributing to the worldwide outpouring of grief upon her death. Diana lived under great media scrutiny fuelled by an insatiable hunger for sensationalism. It quite literally chased her to a violent death. The funerals under discussion here, by contrast—those of Kalabhavan Mani, the Dalit Malayalam actor, in 2016; of Panakkad Hyder Ali Shihab Thangal, in 2022; and of the former chief minister of Kerala, Oommen Chandy, in 2023—which are detailed earlier in the essay, were preceded by relatively sedate public lives. The massive emotional outpouring registered at these figures’ funerals did not merely follow from a life lived in the fast lane of media attention.

            How do these spectacles manifest affective publics? How can their emotional valences be engaged in relation to the affective qualities of the public sphere, and counterposed to rational modernity’s claims of public reason? The dominant imaginaries regarding Kerala’s public sphere are predicated upon a rational modernity paradigm, materialized in the discursive terrain of rational debates in the public domain (Bijukumar 2019; Harikrishnan 2022; Joseph, “Contemplative Spectator”).[14] This paradigm has excluded and delegitimized a wide range of emotional expressions and “irrational” outpourings, prompting the rise of multiplicities of public spheres, particularly of counter-publics (Warner) that disrupt this rational cleansing. As Michael Warner suggests, these counter-publics have emerged as distinct subgroups that challenge or diverge from dominant publics, giving voice to marginalized groups often excluded from mainstream discourses. Communication technologies play a crucial role in facilitating interactions between these publics and counter-publics. Televisual networks have maneuvered the potential of live broadcasting to mediate and amplify spectators’ affective sensibilities and visceral responses to loss. Analyzing live broadcasting as the semantic specificity of television, Jerome Bourdon argues that live broadcasting, which is valorized as a means to transcend temporal and spatial constraints, facilitates the convergence of vast groups of people in a distinct collective experience. Mapping out the implications of “liveness” both as material and as affect in the convergence of news narratives in Indian television, Akshaya Kumar writes:

liveness is audio-visually composed as much of live handheld footage as it is of dramatic soundtracks, of animated movement across images or screens, of animated texts and scrolls, of still images dramatically zoomed into, and of old live footage referring to new subjects. When news subjects walk away from a sea of journalists and cameras, the new media screens split between them and the newsroom, combining live action and sensational text with the high-pitched enunciation of urgency. Liveness within news media collapses the wall that separates us—the audience—from the substance rendered in live coverage, seemingly dismantling media’s critical role in connecting news content and the audience. The problems of liveness then are twofold: (1) the analytical gap between content and audiences collapses, and (2) the news media works out a convenient exceptionalism by which spaces away from the newsroom are further removed. (539)

Similarly, the live coverage of celebrity funerals blurs the distinction between content and audience since it unfolds in real time, directly from actual locations. This distance from newsrooms and media studios generates an illusion for the audience of active participation in the unfolding events. Moreover, the news anchor’s presence is limited to a voiceover, guiding the spectators through the series of events displayed on the live television screen. Live telecasting intervenes in the usual formulas or genres of broadcasting that are either suspended or preempted, followed by special announcements or preludes. The live coverage of funerals thus commences with a breaking news bulletin that announces the death to the viewers and thereby removes them from the routines of the daily news by locking them into liveness for hours or days. Contrary to the television programs intended for an undifferentiated audience assumed to be passive and with a short attention span, the live streaming of celebrity funerals runs for hours and is envisioned primarily for a specific audience. This visual and live evocation triggers a sense of ceremonial participation among the viewers.

For instance, in the animated voice-over that accompanies the images of Chandy’s funeral, he is constantly addressed as Kunjoonj or Puthuppalli’s Kunjoonj, a constituency he represented for more than five decades. The telecast is filled with emotionally charged testimonies from people who reiterate his phenomenal presence among them. The channels present the crowd thronging the roadsides, people running behind the funeral cortege, and the public waiting patiently for hours to meet the leader one last time, much like they did during his Janasambarka paripadi, a mass contact program[15] lauded as a unique democratic experiment under which the chief minister would go to the public to hear their grievances and ensure relief, short-circuiting the bureaucratic procedures. By comparison, channels extol Mani’s working-class origins while celebrating how he remained an integral part of public life in Chalakkudi, his native place. The channels continuously state that the mass grief around his death resulted from the warmth he exuded as a performer and a human being, which endeared him to thousands. Similarly, Media One’s narrative highlights Thangal’s ability to maintain cordial personal relations despite political differences.  One of the key recurring motifs in the live coverage remains that of historicity—in the sense that the events on the screen are unique and that participants and commentators are privileged to be a part of this history. The telecast also features live coverage of eulogies and speeches delivered at the funeral, allowing the audience to witness heartfelt tributes from close associates, loved ones, and the public. Numerous camera angles capture poignant moments of grief, including close-ups of reactions from attendees. High-pitched background scores, insertion of images, and live videos from multiple locations within the same arena uphold this intensity.

These spectacles thus contribute to the “affective economies” of grief (Ahmed) by recruiting televisual and social networks to shape the process of mourning, even as these networks retain an economic force that significantly affects social relationships. Echoing Sara Ahmed’s views on the role of emotion in forming subject alignments within collective bodies, a robust economy of grief has consolidated around public mourning, revealing how public affect intersects with social and political structures while being shaped by broader economic and cultural forces (“Affective Economies”). Live media events spread across various platforms, leading to the revival of live television that reimagines and reinvents liveness itself; however, it confers a distinct competitive advantage upon TV networks over streamed content services (Sørensen).[16] Boyd understands networked publics as both the space constructed through networked technologies and the imagined collective that emerges as a result of the intersection of people, technology, and practice. The swift dissemination of short video clips from live-streamed funerals, which may span several days, leverages the immediacy and extensive reach of these platforms to cater to users seeking brief updates.[17] This contrasts with television and YouTube, which serve audiences accustomed to more prolonged and detailed content. Additionally, the broad reach of social media facilitates the content’s accessibility across various languages, though this expansive reach frequently emphasizes the spectacle and visual grandeur of the event over deeper engagement with the content.

The massive popularity of digital and social media—and by extension the vast profits to be made by harnessing this popularity— also led to the rise of algorithmic biases of personalized content filtering, including filter bubbles (Pariser) and echo chambers (Quattrociocchi et al.), which tend to isolate users from a range of viewpoints. Nevertheless, the mourning public mobilizes and connects through displays of heightened expressions of emotions and sentiment. By situating monumental spectacles of public affect within the broader context of the public enthusiasm for celebrity figures and star politics in South India, we show how these displays constitute a cultural counterpoint to the state’s otherwise rational self-positioning.

The Enchantments of Public Grieving

The public spheres of South India have contested the preeminent, post-independence center of political life in India by negotiating supra-national structures through cultural and political idioms of linguistic sub-nationalism. These negotiations, which intensified in the mid-1950s via acts of self-immolation and widespread public unrest for the linguistic reorganization of states, led to the recentring of popular consciousness on new linguistic-national identities marked by cultural distinctions. The subsequent emergence of multiple and fragmented sovereignties has further amplified social clusters’ public confrontations with the Indian social body (Hansen). The phenomenal star power of celebrities across South India also emerges from this context of political formations cursed with a congenital identity crisis (Prasad). We are, therefore, confronted by virtual sovereignty formations around star figures that supplement the lack of political representation, utilizing linguistic nationality as the basis for popular sovereignty.

Kerala has remained largely detached from this trajectory of cine-political cultural formations and fan bhakti as a source of popular enthusiasm. The development of cinema and the star system in the region has not fostered fan devotion as a pivotal resource for forging community. The lack of star power’s translation into political power has led to a more stoic relationship between film stars and fans in Kerala and is claimed as a manifestation of the rational, progressive sensibility of the Malayalis. On the contrary, we contend that a primarily televisual economy, which capitalizes on the emotional valences of a monumental mourning public, incorporates Kerala within South India’s star politics. Concurrently, we situate the tableau of monarchic splendour manifested in the public’s emotional outpouring at the funerals of prominent figures in Kerala as indicative of the broader cultural intensities of South India. It also elevates public figures with relatively sedate lives to the status of stars endowed with charismatic authority through the iconization of their deaths. During the fleeting moments of their beloved leaders’ final journeys, the monumental public and their emotional outpourings embody the cultural manifestation of popular sovereignty, which is, remarkably, choreographed in part by democratic functionaries of the state. To illustrate this, the live broadcast of these funerals showcases how the public is granted access to the ceremony in which they stand witness, mourn, pay homage, and actively contribute to the grandeur of the funeral. Also, the state accommodates mourners with a specially modified bus with wide windows for public tributes along the streets. The primary focus of the live media broadcast is thus on the bus navigating through the grieving crowds, along with the close-up shots depicting the scenes inside the bus and the state honors given by the Kerala police. The scenes on these contrasting ends are often displayed side by side via a split-screen.

The state and its parties also make elaborate arrangements to invite the general public to offer their final farewells at the official residence of party leaders, party offices, community halls, public stadiums, and huge pavilions, all known for their capacity to accommodate large gatherings. The TV channels focus on emotionally volatile audience members in these civic arenas, which become a key site for focusing and galvanizing public attention and sentiment. While the rational self-fashioning of the public sphere in Kerala may be repressive for mourning practices in general, the overwhelming eruption of emotion among the monumental attendees is nevertheless rationalized by a “civic sense.” Not letting the emotions get the better of them, the relatively “orderly” attendees remain aware of and sensitive towards a sense of civic duty to reciprocate the gestures made by the state. Therefore, the visceral outpouring of emotion against the rational stranglehold over the public sphere does not translate into general protestations against the state and its symbolic, order-maintaining power. The civic responsibilities of both state and mourners are wedded in events that enjoin the media and the citizens at large to stand witness, if not participate directly.

Nonetheless, these spectacles reveal a form of popular sovereignty that publicly deviates from, if not challenges, the electoral basis of sovereign power. Recognizing the heightened media attention and emotional resonance surrounding such occasions, political parties often appropriate funeral processions by embedding their ideology in communications with the grieving public. After all, funerals of public figures provide an opportunity to consolidate cultural, political, or religious ground by plugging into the legacy of the departed figure. Therefore, the attention economy built around mass grieving lies at the crossroads of popular culture and the socio-political context, duly amplified by the affordances of live coverage. Kerala’s contemporary spectacles of mass grieving disrupt the self-definition of the Malayali public sphere by hitting back at the historical repression of melodramatic outpourings in public.[18] The economy built around the affective valences of a monumental crowd not only amplifies and summons populist sentiments but also provides a visual archive of the emotional outpourings that militate against a public sphere historically alienated from the events of public grieving. The mediatization of the mourning public in Kerala restores, to some extent, the reciprocal order at the heart of democratic governance by allowing a breach of the disenchantment central to the emergence of rational modernity; indeed, this long-withheld breach further amplifies the enchantments of public grieving. In effect, public grieving and its mediatization in Kerala has become increasingly overdetermined by the historical- cultural embankments against overwhelming and possibly multiplicative emotional turbulence.

Conclusion

We have elucidated the dynamics of a media ecosystem of mass grief in Kerala, exploring how it has consolidated an attention economy around the corporeal intensity of the attendees’ visceral responses at the funeral sites of public figures. This media economy has emerged in the state over the last two decades and leverages urgent expressions of “liveness” to galvanize the crowd around TV sets and other personal screens. The resultant affective economy of grief has birthed a set of cultural practices that reside at the intersections of politics, religion, and popular culture. However, expressions of quasi-monarchic cultural sovereignty at these funerals are not mere effects of media-centric spectacle. The digital monumentality of the live-streamed crowd in mourning supplements the real-time congregation of the mourning public. While televisual networks certainly contribute to a procession’s spectacular effects, the actual event and its material manifestations—that is, the mass culture of mourning crowds—hold more significance for understanding the dynamics of this cultural practice.

The temporality of the mourning public is in a peculiar self-identification here, because what calls it into existence is death—an absent presence whose quiet durability guides the life of every organism. The ephemeral monumentality of crowds thus punctuates the durable communication between life and death for the chosen few whose deeds managed to affect people deeply. The mourning public, therefore, stands witness to the materiality of death rituals while rendering “heavy” corporeality to the media event. In their workday lives, public figures might not assert the quasi-monarchic popular sovereignty bestowed upon their deaths, but this contrast is broadly indicative of the repression that characterizes the rational self-fashioning of the Malayali public sphere.

            The insistent presence of grand media spectacles—live coverage of events that suspend routine television programming for several days—uncovers the ruptures intrinsic to the public sphere. William Mazzarella investigates the “totalitarian pathology” of the North Korean crowd in an essay on Western media’s disdainful responses to the widely circulated images of people crying at the death of North Korean leader Kim Jong-Il in 2011. He argues that the disdain is derived from deep-rooted liberal anxiety in Western political discourses. The impossibility for Western observers to believe the sincerity of the crowd’s tears, he avers, manifests an itch in the liberal imagination informed by a purported logic of irrationality. The underlying tension between reason and affect, a fundamental conflict in mainstream political discourse, has also been a significant axis of the rational discourses around Kerala’s public sphere. However, a rampant media economy built around the visceral apparatus of a monumental mourning public challenges, if not entirely disavows, the prevailing discourse around the rational, scientific temperament of Kerala’s public sphere. The pervasiveness of mass, melodramatic mourning undermines Kerala’s rational modernity as a cultural singularity by simultaneously situating this modernity within the cultural dynamics of mass politics and star worshipping in South India.

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Notes

[1] Malayalam is the official language of Kerala, the southernmost state in India.

[2] Nayanar, also the state’s longest-serving chief minister, died in 2004, at age 85, at the All-India Institute of Medical Sciences in New Delhi following heart failure.

[3] The channel projected how Nayanar earned the respect and affection of many ordinary people as a stalwart of the communist movement and how his popularity was fashioned largely around his reputation as a charming speaker and witty political entertainer.

[4] By the late 1990s, Gulf Malayali had become a significant driving force for the satellite TV industry.

[5] B. R. P. Bhaskar, a noted journalist, also points out that, since Nayanar’s funeral procession, the families of many distinguished Keralites who have lived and died outside Kerala have come under official and public pressure to allow the bodies to be brought home for a funeral with state adulations.

[6] Even though many other celebrity funerals have witnessed substantial public attention and media coverage, these three could have attracted the most overwhelming emotional outpouring and unprecedented media attention.

[7] South India, also referred to as Peninsular India, comprises the states of Andhra Pradesh, Karnataka, Kerala, Tamil Nadu, and Telangana.

[8] We use the terms VIP funerals and celebrity funerals interchangeably in this article.

[9] The grieving masses also resorted to acts of vandalism: hurling stones, incinerating buses, dislodging road dividers, plundering shops, conflagrating statues of opposition leaders, and so on. Whereas, in the aftermath of NTR’s death, a follower committed suicide and many temples sprouted in rural Andhra Pradesh, where he was worshipped as a Hindu deity.

[10] The funeral procession of Rajkumar in Karnataka, attended by nearly two million people, was also marked by violence, as mourners attacked public property, leading to police intervention involving lathi-charge and tear gas.

[11] The library movement in Kerala is a grassroots initiative that emerged in the early twentieth century, focused on establishing public libraries to promote literacy, education, and access to knowledge for all, significantly contributing to the state’s cultural and intellectual development.

The literacy movement is a significant social initiative that began in the 1980s aimed at eradicating illiteracy and promoting education across all demographics, resulting in the state achieving one of the highest literacy rates in India.

[12] It includes the live coverage of Ranji Trophy tournaments, a domestic first-class cricket championship played between multiple teams representing regional and state cricket associations, and Thrissur Pooram, the largest annual temple festival held in Thrissur, Kerala.

[13] In addition, many channels were introduced to target specific communities, including Amrita TV by the Mata Amritanandamayi Math; Shalom TV, an Indian catholic Christian TV channel; Darshana TV, the first satellite channel from the Malabar region owned by Muslim community management; and Harvest TV, a Christian devotional channel. These channels are borne out of the newly acquired economic and cultural mobility of their respective communities.

[14] These imaginaries include an active reading public nurturing the public sphere (Bijukumar), everyday social spaces such as tea shops, public libraries, village squares, and so on forming as discursive arenas of public deliberations (Harikrishnan) and an enduring legacy of secular rationality vindicated by the left political tradition (Joseph, “Contemplative Spectator”). For more on the formatting of the public sphere, see also Calhoun and Habermas.

[15] Mass contact program was a remarkable innovation, under which he stood on his feet for fourteen to eighteen hours a day in each of the state’s fourteen districts, meeting lakhs of voters in order to address the grievances of the people directly.

[16] Sørensen examines how the live TV coverage of major events is key to the multiplatform strategy of British public service channels.

[17] However, newly emergent short video platforms like MX TakaTak and Twitch, which spread content quickly due to their brief format, have little impact here. This is partly because the subjects of televisual and digital streaming are not heavily affected by time constraints; rather, the prolonged and slow-moving temporality of funerals is a fundamental aspect of the visuality of the final journeys of public figures.

[18] The rational discourses around the state’s public sphere have been built by endorsing realism as the dominant mode of address over melodramatic articulations.

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