Who decides what I should look like? 'Raven' music video from Kerala questions casteism

In the music video, directed by Adarsh Kumar Aniyal, a father talks about his son who is missing and was taunted because of his caste.

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You don’t see the man but you can picture him from the words uttered by his father. He is dark, thin, has long hair that he has coloured red and wears black T-shirts. But for this reason, he has been teased and rebuked and now he is missing.

Raven, a Malayalam music video, begins with these words uttered by an elderly man playing the father of someone who is missing and has been ridiculed for his caste. “These are experiences that my friends and I have gone through, while growing up in Vypin,” says Adarsh Kumar Aniyal, who has written the lyrics and directed the video. The man playing the father is Adarsh’s father, Ambujakshan, who was once a folklore artiste.

The lyrics are not sung, but narrated. It is the father telling the story of his son, with the background score playing up the words. “My son grew up hearing these taunts that a crow can never be a crane / A millipede will not be comfortable on a bed,” the dad says in the video. New clothes and bright clothes won’t suit you, you don’t need to study because you have reservation, did you steal this new cloth you are wearing, did you copy the answers to pass your exam – the father repeats the taunts his son has heard, walking through the streets of Kochi. Who decided that this won’t suit us, dad, the son once asked back, he recalls.

“Like an experiment, I too have once grown my hair long and coloured it. I heard similar taunts. They say it like a harmless joke. But it is casteist humiliation,” says Adarsh.



Adarsh (right) with his dad Ambujakshan

In the video, you also see a few other young men, walking alongside the dad as he narrates the son’s tale. “They are my friends and actors, they have all gone through similar experiences,” Adarsh adds.

The making of the music video reminds you of the Native Baapa music videos made by Muhsin Parari, featuring Mammukoya. In those videos, Mammukoya played the dad of a Muslim man who is accused of being a terrorist, and later an anti-national. He tells his son’s tale, much like Ambujakshan does. “Undoubtedly, I have been influenced by those videos. Muhsin was one of the first to share Raven. The idea of such dialogue oriented performances is to convey a concept in the quickest possible way,” says Adarsh, who has been directing children’s plays for seven years. He chooses strong themes for those too – themes of nature, religion, gender politics and so on.

The video features Ambedkar and Ayyankali, both of them anti-caste revolutionaries. The colour play is also significant - the father, who is initially dressed in white, adopts the colour black towards the end (the colour of the Periyarist movement in south India) and is splashed with the Ambedkarite blue. The ending is reminiscent of the final sequence in Pa Ranjith's Kaala, except it does not include red, the colour of communism. Red, however, is the colour of his hair, his dad says.

Adarsh has assisted in a couple of films, a Tamil one called Monkey Donkey and a Malayalam one called Kannalan. He contacted Bibin Ashok, who has composed the music of Raven, and who also got in touch with musician Bijibal to put up the video on his channel, Bodhi Silent Scape. In two days, the video has been shared widely and has crossed 50,000 views already. “I did want it to be viral, I didn’t expect it to happen so soon,” says Adarsh.

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