Biriyani (2019) / Sajin Baabu

 Flavors of Vengeance: Marginality, Identity, and Agency in Biryani

(On the thematic concerns of Sajin Babu’s new film, following his breakthrough debut Asthamayam Vare)

Introduction

Sajin Babu has established himself as a filmmaker deeply invested in the interrogation of social norms and human psychology. Following his acclaimed debut Asthamayam Vare, his new film Biryani continues this trajectory, exploring the intersections of gender, power, and marginalization. Through the story of Khadija, a Muslim woman navigating a world rife with misogyny, patriarchy, and communal prejudice, Babu pushes familiar cinematic tropes into unsettling and morally complex terrain. The film blends narrative realism with symbolic excess, demanding that viewers confront ethical, social, and existential dilemmas rather than offering easy resolutions.

The Extraordinary in the Ultra-ordinary

A Muslim woman. Born into an impoverished family, with little to no education. Haunted by the absence of a father lost at sea and the instability of a mentally unwell mother. Trapped in a marriage to a much older man from a conservative, financially secure household. Situated within a social milieu where women are reduced to mere instruments of sex. Beyond this, there looms the arrogance of men who interpret even the slightest assertion of female sexual identity as proof of incomplete FGM. Her mother-in-law, seeing her as an interloper who threatens her authority, seizes the first opportunity to enforce the triple talaq oath, severing even the bond between mother and child.

Most of these narrative ingredients—except for female genital mutilation—have long been employed in Malayalam cinema, from Kuttikkupayam to Zubaida. Even when layered with post-9/11 Islamophobia and the rhetoric of the war on terror, they no longer feel novel. But in Biryani, these familiar elements begin to chart unfamiliar trajectories.

At the heart of the film stands Khadija (Kani Kusruthi), marked not only by her eccentricities but also by the marginal vantage points she embodies—those of lives discarded like rusting tin cans on society’s fringes. What defines her is not the prospect of success but her refusal to yield. “At least now, let me make a decision for myself!” she insists. It is not that she—or even her unmarried, middle-aged friend, whom she calls “the best soul I’ve ever met”—possesses conventional heroic qualities. Rather, what animates them is an existential compulsion: to confront life, even if unrealistically, through choices they claim as their own.

The filmmaker does not soften this confrontation for audience comfort. On the contrary, even the most liberal-minded viewers may recoil at Khadija’s chosen path. The film’s iconoclastic visual language insists on this discomfort, reinforced by dialogues and scenes that the Indian Censor Board would never pass without objection. While, on the surface, the film might be hastily dismissed as anti-religious or anti-communal, such readings collapse upon closer scrutiny. Its radical departures demand more attentive engagement, refusing the convenience of reductive interpretation.

Different Female Perspectives

The film’s opening scene signals its central concern: the protagonist—named after the first independent intellectual woman in Islamic history, the Prophet’s first wife—bears the trace of that independent spirit. She knows her assertion of desire will invite her husband’s wrath, for excessive passion in a woman is branded as unbecoming. If Sajin Babu’s debut opened with a shocking image of necrophilia, Biryani begins with its own brutal reduction: the one-sided thrusting of a husband who treats his wife as nothing more than a sex machine, denying her any recognition as a person with agency.

From this moment onward, Khadija’s life becomes a crucible where authority, community, society, state, law, and police converge upon a single goal: the annihilation of her identity. It is within this context that her chosen mode of revenge, however grotesque or implausible it may appear, takes on a sharper significance. The male-imposed boundary between loveless sex within marriage and sex work functions only to preserve society’s moral façade; in essence, there is little difference.

This continuity between loveless marriage and sex work echoes the director’s first film, which featured a young woman who engages in prostitution without moral hesitation, solely to earn the dowry demanded by her lover. Khadija’s own indifference toward pregnancy in the course of sex work suggests that she, too, has come to see her marriage’s futility in those terms. Yet it is not social stigma but sheer tedium that eventually drives her to abandon that livelihood.

Still, neither Khadija nor those around her achieve complete liberation. Their choices remain entangled with contradictions. Khadija’s refusal to spend her earnings on annual family commemorations reveals that she has not fully shaken off the residual pull of halal/haram codes. Similarly, her friend—who advises her to regard sex work simply as another profession—is himself bound by paradox. When Khadija and her mother arrive as refugees in Attingarappally, expelled from their mahal and pursued by the police, he insists that what happens there is not religious, that prayers will not heal her mother, and that she should see a doctor instead. Yet he, too, remains awestruck before the divine aura of Auliya’s grave. His “moderation” cannot bear Khadija’s relentless commitment to revenge; he recoils, declaring that if she confronts wrong with wrong, he cannot remain by her side.

The comparison with Asthamayam Vare further illuminates Khadija’s singularity. That film’s skeptical protagonist, after his mother’s self-punishment in a family consumed by sin, acquires a gun to atone for the transgressions of his father and sister. His revenge is burdened by the horror of self-confrontation, for he, too, is haunted by incestuous impulses. Khadija, by contrast, carries no such guilt. She has defined her enemy with clarity, and unlike him, she is not paralyzed by questions of moral rightness. Her revenge, though brutal, is untroubled by ambivalence.

The Highway of the Nobody

The necrophilia motif of Sajin Babu’s first film reappears in Biryani in a form both more gruesome and socially grounded: the Iftar party that degenerates into a cannibalistic feast. It is here that the film’s central metaphor crystallizes. The dish biryani itself has long been a cinematic shorthand, repeatedly used to negatively caricature the Muslim community. In Babu’s film, the core ethical question is not about the dish per se, but about Khadija’s act: is her vengeance poetic justice or savage justice?

On one level, there is poetic irony in turning the very dish so often mobilized against her community into an instrument of retribution for misogynistic atrocities she has suffered. Yet Khadija pushes her revenge beyond this symbolic reversal. By contaminating the dish with what no human imagination should conceive, she transforms it into a grotesque cannibal feast. In that moment, the possibility of poetic justice collapses; vengeance slips into abjection. At one stage, she even contemplates a still more degrading desecration before finalizing her choice.

Insights from victim politics complicate this further. To frame prejudice and victimization as socially constructed and universally exchangeable is too simplistic. Khadija’s revenge ceases to carry the sheen of moral victory precisely because it mirrors the brutal logic of her persecutors: her actions are shaped as much by their violence as by her own determination. She is, in the end, thrown back into abandonment.

Here the contrast with Asthamayam Vare is telling. That film’s seeker of truth, however tormented, arrives at a subjective resolution. Khadija, by contrast, is stranded at the crossroads—her possible futures leading only toward a railway track, a river’s depths, or the degradation of sex slavery. She is no heroic Nangeli, no monumental Kannaki. She is the “nobody” of her time and social order, insignificant and unredeemed. Her recognition that she has reached a dead end is not a final lesson but merely a continuation: she remains suspended between a life like death and a death in life.

Thus, Biryani does not present its themes as moral resolutions or value judgments. Instead, it demands to be read as a situational perspective, compelling us to inhabit the impasse of a woman whose struggle remains extraordinary yet deprived of transcendence.

Conclusion

Biryani is a film of contradictions, one that refuses easy moral or narrative closure. Through Khadija, Sajin Babu interrogates the structures that confine, punish, and erase women, while also challenging viewers to consider the ethical and existential consequences of revenge. The film’s unsettling imagery, morally ambiguous acts, and radical formal choices position it as a work that is simultaneously familiar and deeply disorienting. It is not a story of heroism or redemption, but a vivid, unflinching exploration of human despair, agency, and the grim realities of marginalization.

In the end, Biryani asks us to witness rather than judge, to inhabit the world of its “nobody,” and to reflect on the societal, gendered, and moral forces that shape, constrain, and sometimes destroy human lives.