Culture lives in language, and Malayalam cinema has canonized the dialects of Kerala. Unlike the standardized "Sanskitised" Malayalam of textbooks, cinema celebrates the Thengu (southern accent), the Malabari slang, and the Christian dialect of Kottayam.
The 1960s and 70s were the golden age of adaptation. Filmmakers turned to the rich cannon of Malayalam literature (MT Vasudevan Nair, S. K. Pottekkatt) to produce films that were indistinguishable from literary masterpieces. This was the era of Nirmalyam (1973), which deconstructed the hypocrisy of the priestly class, and Elippathayam (1981) by Adoor Gopalakrishnan, which used a rat trap as a metaphor for the destruction of the feudal Nair household. Culture lives in language, and Malayalam cinema has