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 colonial tea plantation. Patriarch Job perpetuates evils, including anti-tribal pogroms sandalwood smuggling. Here, disinherits youngest son Aloshy (a conflated Edmund+Cordelia figure) upon discovering Communist sympathies. Through such Shakespearean dilemmas, Neerad’s raises ethical questions regarding caste, race, politics environment. Ultimately, familial societal transgressions reflect pivotal times national division transformation, during the era India’s colonisation, Partition Independence.