India’s Indigenous Lear: Iyobinte Pusthakam

In his 2014 Malayalam-language film Iyobinte Pusthakam (The Book of Job), Amal Neerad combines this Biblical fable with The Brothers Karamazov and King Lear to illustrate generational tensions in a divided South Indian family on a colonial tea plantation. Patriarch Job perpetuates colonial evils, including anti-tribal pogroms and sandalwood smuggling. Here, Job disinherits his youngest son Aloshy (a conflated Edmund+Cordelia figure) upon discovering his Communist sympathies. Through such Shakespearean dilemmas, Neerad’s film raises ethical questions regarding caste, race, politics and environment. Ultimately, familial and societal transgressions reflect pivotal times of national division and transformation, during the era of India’s colonisation, Partition and Independence.