'Lokah Chapter 1: Chandra' reframes Neeli not merely as an object of fear or reverence, but as a rupture in Kerala’s patriarchal and symbolic order, a haunting force that demands reckoning rather than resolution.
Published Sep 08, 2025 | 8:00 AM ⚊ Updated Sep 08, 2025 | 8:00 AM
While the original Neeli myth narrates the spectral revolt of a betrayed woman against patriarchal treachery, Lokah detaches this subaltern protest from its rooted historical context.
Synopsis: The film, ‘Lokah Chapter 1: Chandra’, subtly echoes a historical moment in Kerala when missionaries and social reformers encouraged Dalits and marginalised communities to abandon their deities in favour of Christian or Sanskritic Brahmanical pantheons. Lokah unwittingly mirrors this erasure by stripping Neeli’s rebellion of its caste-specific radicality and reinscribing it within a timeless superhero fantasy.
Southern Kerala’s folk tradition is rich in Thekkan Pattu, or southern ballads, which weave stories of women’s lives, encompassing birth, schooling, midwifery, martial training, and even rulership, into vivid narrative song.
Notable among these are Ponnirathal Katha, Purushadevi Katha, and Neeli Katha, each centered on female protagonists navigating domestic betrayal, societal violence, or supernatural transformation. In the case of Purushadevi, she is unique among women who not only rise to rule but embody divine authority.
In contrast, characters like the women in Ponnirathal and Neeli begin as ordinary women who suffer betrayal or murder by men, only to return as powerful yakshis, a form of avenging spirit. These figures don’t limit their retribution to individual perpetrators; they unleash disruptions across entire villages, as though signalling a stern warning to Brahminical patriarchy itself.
Through such narratives, these southern ballads articulate women’s inner worlds and external agency, articulating how their everyday rituals and routines, whether weaving, teaching, or training, are embedded with the potential to challenge entrenched social norms.
Moralism, dominated by male authority, is called into question through the persistence of these stories, which assert feminine power in both routine life and mythic retribution, Purushadevi is only one powerful embodiment of that tradition.
Among the numerous southern ballads, Neeli Katha stands out as one of the most widely known and culturally resonant narratives in southern Kerala. Sung for centuries as part of the Thekkan Pattu tradition, particularly in temple precincts and ritual performances like Villupattu, the story of Neeli has captivated generations with its blend of tragedy, betrayal, supernatural revenge, and eventual deification.
While figures like Purushadevi embody regal feminine power and spiritual solidarity, and characters like Ponnirathal reflect the violence endured by women in patriarchal societies, Neeli captures a more terrifyingly transgressive feminine force. Unlike other heroines who embody justice or moral virtue, Neeli’s wrath spreads across landscapes, consuming not just her betrayer but the very communities complicit in her suffering.
Her story, thus, has become the most iconic among these ballads, not only embedded in oral traditions but also finding its way into Malayalam literature (as in CV Raman Pillai’s Marthanda Varma), drama, television, and cinema. Neeli’s haunting presence continues to serve as both a cautionary tale and a spectral critique of the gendered violence embedded within historical and social structures.
Neeli, a bloodthirsty yet divinely beautiful yekshi (female spirit), is said to have haunted Panchavankadu in Thiruvananthapuram. She was originally born as Alli, the daughter of Karveni, a Devadasi from Pakhakannur in the ninth century.
Alli, known for her mesmerizing beauty and long hair, married Nambi, the priest of the local Shiva temple, who sought her wealth and regularly cheated on her. Disgusted by his behaviour, Karveni expelled Nambi, but a pregnant Alli left with him. Nambi killed her to steal her jewels, and Alli’s younger brother, Ambi, committed suicide upon discovering her body. Nambi later died from a snakebite.
Alli and Ambi were reincarnated as the Chola king’s children, Neeli and Neelan. Their malevolent nature manifested in terrorising the land and drinking the blood of cattle. Once the Chola king discovered their deeds, he abandoned them near Panchavankadu, and Pazhayannur village became their haunt. Seventy local Uranmas enlisted a sorcerer, Nambi of Nagercoil, to restrain Neelan, which succeeded, but Neeli remained unconstrained. She pursued Anandan, the reincarnation of her treacherous husband, who was protected by a magical wand.
In a cunning disguise, Neeli tricked Anandan and ultimately killed him. Observing his death, the seventy Uranmas, bound by their vow, entered a fire to fulfil their promise. With her vengeance complete, Neeli chose to reside beneath a Kallipala tree (Devil’s tree), gradually transforming into a revered mother goddess.
Neeli’s story, blending betrayal, vengeance, and transformation, reflects the complex interplay of human injustice, supernatural retribution, and the eventual deification of a female spirit in South Indian folklore.
The story of Neeli has been orally transmitted for centuries in southern Kerala, particularly through the folk-art form known as Villupattu, a narrative singing style performed in temples and local gatherings.
A poster of the 1979 Malayalam horro movie, ‘Kalliyankattu Neeli’.
In these performances, bards would recount the life, vengeance, and transformation of Neeli, blending musical rhythm with dramatic storytelling to engage audiences and preserve collective memory. Her tale has enjoyed enduring popularity in the region, both for its thrilling narrative and its moral, social, and supernatural dimensions.
The legend of Neeli has been incorporated into literary works, such as the classic Malayalam novel, Marthanda Varma, by CV Raman Pillai, where supernatural and folkloric elements enrich the historical and cultural texture of the narrative. In contemporary media, the story inspired the
Malayalam horror film Kalliyankattu Neeli (1979), directed by M Krishnan Nair, as well as several television series that retell her exploits for new audiences.
Some versions of the story also highlight the syncretic religious practices of southern Kerala, showing how Hindu and Christian traditions intertwined. According to these narratives, the Neeli Yakshi was finally neutralised by a mythical Christian priest, Kadamattathu Kathanar, who wielded magical powers to contain her supernatural wrath.
Beyond literature and film, the story has been adapted into dramas and temple-ballet performances, local semi-dance dramas popular in Kerala, which bring her story to life through music, movement, and theatrical spectacle.
Neeli continues to be venerated in southern Kerala, with temples such as those in Pazhayannur and Panchavankadu dedicated to her worship, where she is revered as a protective mother goddess.
Across these different media and ritual contexts, oral ballads, literature, cinema, television, and live performance, the story of Neeli demonstrates the enduring fascination with female power, vengeance, and transformation. It highlights how supernatural narratives intersect with local religious practices, communal memory, and cultural performance, reflecting the complex ways in which folklore negotiates ideas of gender, authority, and the sacred in southern Kerala.
The Malayalam film, Lokah Chapter 1: Chandra, reimagines the age-old legend of Neeli through a visually rich and narratively bold lens. Set within a speculative fantasy world, the film follows Chandra, a young woman grappling with trauma, who begins to manifest supernatural abilities.
Kalyani Priyadarshan in Lokah: Chapter 1 – Chandra.
What appears at first to be a personal transformation gradually unfolds into a revelation: Chandra is the reincarnation of Kalliyankattu Neeli, a mythical figure long embedded in the folklore of southern Kerala.
In this version, Neeli is not merely a feared yakshi or vengeful spirit, but an immortal being who has lived through centuries, retaining the physical appearance of a woman in her twenties. Rather than emphasising her destructive or demonic aspects, the film reworks her origin as a figure of resilience and abstract justice, someone shaped by brutality and violence, but redirected towards protection and defiance. Neeli becomes a kind of superhero in the narrative, an agent of vigilante justice with deep mythological roots.
Unlike traditional ballads or ritual performances that depict Neeli as a terrifying, bloodthirsty entity haunting villages, Lokah transforms her into a layered, emotionally complex character. This shift underscores how folklore can be contemporised to speak to modern audiences, especially around themes of gendered trauma, marginalisation, and spiritual resistance.
On the one hand, the film does not discard the myth but rather elevates it, expanding its possibilities while retaining its haunting core. In doing so, Lokah brings Neeli back into the cultural conversation not as a cautionary tale but as a potent symbol of female agency and post-traumatic transformation. It places her alongside other global re-imaginings of mythical women, those who have been vilified in history but are now being reclaimed as figures of power and autonomy. Through its stylistic flair and narrative innovation, the film offers a compelling testament to the enduring relevance of Kerala’s mythic past in shaping its speculative futures.
In Lokah, thus, the figure of Neeli does not simply return as a ghost of vengeance but as the return of the Real, the traumatic kernel that cannot be symbolised within the dominant coordinates of cultural order. Chandra’s slow transformation into Neeli is not a metamorphosis in the conventional sense but the surfacing of the disavowed core of Kerala’s gendered and mythic unconscious.
What erupts through her is not madness but the truth of madness: a force that reveals the obscene underside of social norms, historical betrayals, and patriarchal repression. Neeli, as portrayed here, is not the Other to be contained by magical rituals or rationalised by mythic explanations; she is the rupture of the Symbolic order itself. Her presence undoes the fantasy of social harmony and linear causality. She carries with her the “undead” quality of the drive, not aimed at fulfilment but circulating eternally around a void, a loss, a wrong that cannot be righted.
However, on the other hand, it is not merely that the betrayed wife’s “hysterical rage” is transposed onto the supernatural powers of a prepubescent girl; rather, the film abandons the radical political thrust of the original myth—where hysteria, in Freudian terms, marks the return of the repressed through embodied symptoms and spectral force—for an abstract, Bollywood-style fantasy that recasts moral conflict in terms of supremacist right-versus-wrong binaries, erasing the subaltern memory and social critique embedded in Neeli’s origin.
Kerala’s modernity prides itself on rational secularism and progressive gender norms, but the fantasy persists, of harmony, of containment, of feminine divinity that does not disturb masculine law. In Lokah, Neeli’s re-entry into history is precisely the moment where this fantasy cracks. The film’s narrative builds a layered tension between the old and the new, between trauma and transcendence, only to suggest that these binaries are sustained by fantasy itself. Neeli does not seek justice as closure, she insists as an excess that refuses ideological pacification.
Nevertheless, the myth of Neeli is thus reactivated not to soothe but to destabilise. Her re-emergence, now through Chandra, reopens the wound that the myth had sealed over. This is not catharsis, but what psychoanalysis might call traversing the fantasy: confronting the conditions under which we construct our moral universe and choosing to act despite its collapse.
Chandra’s body, like Neeli’s in the older narratives, is a site of both fascination and fear. It is aestheticised, objectified, possessed, and yet ultimately reclaims its agency not through speech but through jouissance, a radical enjoyment that escapes the bounds of moral or narrative legibility. Her actions no longer “make sense” in the conventional frame. That is precisely the point. She becomes the subject who breaks free of the interpellation that has defined her existence: not woman-as-symbol, but woman-as-force.
In Lokah, the myth of Neeli expands exponentially, no longer a local supernatural entity confined to Kerala’s southern forests, she traverses global and historical terrains. Chandra casually remarks that she once spent twenty years in Sweden, and on another occasion refers to a British-era boyfriend who died for her in the early 1900s. These disparate references, spanning continents and centuries, inflate the local legend of Neeli into a transhistorical myth, an conditionally immortal being with a life richer and more complex than any contained by folklore alone.
This narrative inflation achieves two critical effects. First, it elevates the local to the global, turning Neeli from a regional ghost into a worldly figure whose life arcs through modernity itself. Second, it reflects a reflexive cultural move: the local (Neeli) desires the global, while the global, through contemporary storytelling, fetishises and appropriates the local. It’s a post liberalist fascination with authenticity, a commodification of folk myth that feels both capacitating and appropriating. In spite of, or perhaps because of, her mythic origins, Neeli becomes a palimpsest, a figure onto which new meanings are inscribed in the name of modern cosmopolitanism.
In cinematic terms, this broadening of Neeli’s biography allows the film to marry local myth with global genre tropes, vampires, superheroes, and urban noir, creating a cinematic hybrid that capitalises on the nostalgic resonance of folk while riding the wave of global narrative forms. Ultimately, the film reframes Neeli not as a curio of regional superstition but as a diasporic, hybrid anti-hero, the spectacle of the local made global and the global made intimate.
While the original Neeli myth narrates the spectral revolt of a betrayed woman against patriarchal treachery, Lokah detaches this subaltern protest from its rooted historical context and reconfigures it within a stylised, colonial fantasy. In the ballads and ritual traditions of southern Kerala, Neeli’s vengeance arises from a deeply personal and caste-marked betrayal—she is a devadasi’s daughter, deceived and murdered by a priest, whose bloodline and community complicity she violently avenges. This older myth served as a powerful critique of Brahmanical patriarchy and social exclusion.
Lokah, however, substitutes this with a grander but more ambiguous narrative, where a king—not a priest—destroys a subaltern deity and its temple. The murdered child, Neeli, is resurrected not through ritual memory or oral tradition, but through a cinematic logic of magical realism and posthuman continuity.
In this shift, the film subtly echoes a historical moment in Kerala when missionaries and social reformers encouraged Dalits and marginalised communities to abandon their deities in favour of Christian or Sanskritic Brahmanical pantheons. Lokah unwittingly mirrors this erasure by stripping Neeli’s rebellion of its caste-specific radicality and reinscribing it within a timeless superhero fantasy. The result is a seductive narrative of feminine vengeance that dislocates the original story’s rooted critique, replacing it with a posthuman mythology that may exhilarate but also risks depoliticizing its subaltern core.
The gaze in the film, of the villagers, the family, the viewers, is consistently unsettled. Chandra becomes the object of the gaze and then its destroyer. In Žižekian terms, she “returns the gaze”, not by looking back, but by acting in a way that short-circuits the gaze itself, making the viewer complicit in the violence they wish to control or deny.
Lokah plays with time, not as historical progression but as trauma-time, where the past remains unfinished, unburied. The story of Neeli is not a distant cultural memory but an undead residue that haunts the present. The film refuses linear temporality; instead, it stages a kind of repetition compulsion, where the violence of betrayal, murder, and spectral justice repeats, not to resolve, but to insist. This repetition does not signify stagnation. Rather, it is a structural loop that reveals how fantasy sustains itself: by repeating its own disavowals. Neeli’s return, like that of the spectre in Marx’s metaphor, is the moment when history confronts what it has tried to forget.
What Lokah achieves, beyond its aesthetic spectacle, is a cut in the ideological tissue. It lets myth speak in a new tongue, not as fable but as symptom. Neeli is no longer a cultural curio or a ritual relic. She is the moment when woman ceases to be a metaphor and becomes a rupture. Not a Goddess to be worshipped, not a yakshi to be contained, but a force that demands a new language. In this sense, Lokah is not a horror film. It is an act of collective anamnesis: a cinematic séance through which the dead speak not to console, but to confront. The story does not offer redemption. It offers the trauma that is truth.
The yakshi in Lokah exemplifies a striking posthuman configuration, embodying an ontology where the spectral, the mythic, and the technological coalesce. Traditionally imagined as a supernatural being feeding on the life-force of humans, Neeli in Lokah is sustained not through folkloric blood rituals but through transfusion bags—an icon of biomedical modernity. This transformation from organic consumption to medicalised sustenance is emblematic of a shift in her ontological status: from a demon of ancient vengeance to a being suspended between life, machine, and myth.
Her accessories are stored not in enchanted groves or mystical caves but in climate-controlled vaults, and her weapons have evolved from rustic spheres and ancestral tools to advanced artillery. This technological escalation does not make her invincible, however; rather, it dramatizes her posthuman fragility. She is augmented, not transcendent—her body is not immortal but maintained, her power not infinite but infrastructurally supported.
The yakshi becomes a figure whose capabilities and vulnerabilities are networked through circuits of modernity—blood banks, armories, biometric sensors, and emotional residues. Her hauntings are no longer strictly metaphysical but mediated through databases, surveillance, and pharmacological protocols. The traditional binaries between spirit and body, woman and monster, past and future collapse in her figure. She is both the leftover of a mythic past and a prototype of techno-mythic futures—a posthuman relic that continues to bleed, desire, avenge, and glitch. In this way, Lokah’s Neeli is less a return of the past than a symptom of the incomplete transcendence of the human—a being suspended in the uneasy threshold between retribution and renewal, data and blood, the spectral and the cyborg.
The journey of Neeli, from a bloodthirsty yakshi haunting village periphery to a symbol of female agency in speculative cinema, demonstrates the complex cultural politics of local myth. Rooted in oral ballads and ritual performance, the legend of Neeli has served for centuries as a narrative site where social anxieties about gender, betrayal, and justice were staged, ritualized, and often contained. Yet, its recent transformations, especially in texts like Lokah Chapter 1: Chandra, refuse such containment. They reframe Neeli not merely as an object of fear or reverence, but as a rupture in Kerala’s patriarchal and symbolic order, a haunting force that demands reckoning rather than resolution.
In the contemporary moment, where questions of gendered violence, historical injustice, and cultural memory remain urgent, the reactivation of such myths becomes politically potent. They allow us to revisit the suppressed or spectral dimensions of our collective past, not to mourn or mythologise, but to confront. Understanding how Neeli has travelled across centuries, genres, and ideological terrains is thus not just an exercise in folklore studies, it is an invitation to reflect on how cultures remember, rewrite, and reimagine themselves through their most unruly, undead figures.
(Views are personal. Edited by Majnu Babu).
