TAMIL CINEMA:

THE CULTURAL POLITICS OF INDIAS OTHER FILM INDUSTRY

Edited by S. Velayutham
New York/London: Routledge, 2009, 204 pp.

Reviewed by Prakash Younger

Heres something you might not have known: for the past thirty years the city of
Chennai (formerly know as Madras) in India has produced the largest number
of feature films in the entire world. In other words, this city in the South Indian
state of Tamil Nadu has over a thirty year period produced on average more films
per year than any nation-state in the world, including the United States, and,
though some of this production is in Hindi, Telegu, and other languages, the
majority of films being made are in the Tamil language. These facts, taken
together with the fact that Tamil Nadu has always had a large and engaged cinema-
going population (currently in excess of sixty-five million) means that, at least in
historical and quantitative terms, Tamil-language cinema is more vital and robust
than any European national cinema has ever been.
If Tamil cinema has been vital and robust for so long, why has it not become
known beyond its Tamil-speaking audience? Such a question leads us to the
blunt facts of cultural difference and the disposition of power in the global cul-
tural economy; facts which, if not appreciated, can incorrectly suggest aesthetic,
social, and/or cultural deficiencies. Bollywood films themselves long languished
in obscurity as far as Film Studies is concerned. They were perceived as having
too many songs and dances, too much melodrama, being too long and as demons-
trating a general excessiveness when measured against standards derived from
Hollywood and art cinema. The essays collected in Tamil Cinema would be inva-
luable to anyone interested in discovering Tamil cinema, and yet it is still unlikely
to become well-known to Film Studies scholars any time soon. Why? For the
most part, Tamil films, like Bollywood films, do not carry the standard pas-
sports (art cinema, transcultural comedy or action) that allow for circulation in
the global cultural economy. But more importantly, and in addition to what we
might call the aesthetic obstacles, the content of Tamil films is insular in a way
that makes them relatively opaque to an outsider.
It is important to remember that despite its unique aesthetic forms, the
content of Bollywood has always been transcultural and transnational, synthesi-
zing the diverse elements of North Indian popular culture (e.g., Islamicate culture,
Hindu mythology, folk narratives, Charlie Chaplin, melodrama, etc.) to create a
form that successfully addresses distinct audiences both within India and abroad
(Africa, the Middle East, Central Asia, China, etc.). Tamil cinema, in contrast,
addresses an audience whose culture has remained relatively sheltered from the
many waves of outside influence that shaped North India and Bollywood. It is,

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consequently, very much a national cinema. Though any film from any country
is liable to address its spectator as a member of a national audience (i.e. as a
member of a social group with a unifying cultural and political history), in this
regard very few cinemas could match the consistency and self-consciousness of
Tamil cinema; without knowledge of and investment in the relevant cultural
backstories, it is hard to understand or care about what is going on.
Though it has little to say about film style, auteurs, or any of the traditional
topics of Film Studies, Tamil Cinema provides an excellent introduction to those
cultural backstories. Only one of its eleven authors is a film scholar; the rest are
social scientists (Indian or American) and/or Indian public intellectuals who have,
as it were, been led to film by virtue of its central place in the cultural and poli-
tical history of Tamil Nadu. Though the volume is not organized in this way, I
would divide the backstories being treated into three broad categories: what I
would call the Big Story (the intertwined history of Tamil cinema and politics), the
Womens Story (the feminist critique of Tamil patriarchy) and the Peoples Story
(anthropological accounts of the interface between cinema and Tamil society).
The Big Story gets its name because it most dramatically demonstrates both
how and why Tamil cinema developed into a national cinema. The story begins
in Tamil political culture during the run-up to Independence in 1947, as Tamil
nationalists sought to define their ideological and strategic position within the
incipient nation-state. Borrowing ideas and categories from European attempts to
understand the caste system and other products of several millennia of social for-
mation, Tamil nationalists posited the Tamil language, Tamil culture, and the Tamil
people as the last pure remnant of an original Dravidian culture that preceded
the many invasions that defined India as a whole, and North India most stron-
gly (first the Aryans from Central Asia, then Islamic rulers from Turkey and
Persia, and last the British). In order to redefine Tamil culture as pure, Dravidian
ideologues were forced to repudiate the Sanskrit and Hindi languages, the caste
system, even Hinduism itself, as elements of an alien ideology; recognizing the
political potential of the cinema, they began to articulate their reformist agenda
and themes of Dravidian self-respect within the scripts of Tamil films, thereby
interpolating the audience as Tamil.
Shortly after Independence, the Tamil nationalist Dravida Munnetra Kazha-
gam (DMK) party was founded by the screenwriter C.N. Annadurai, who was
soon joined by many of the most prominent figures in the industry. Working
through various grassroots organizationsthe most important of these being the
fan clubs of the film star and soon-to-be Chief Minister M.G. Ramachandran
(MGR)the DMK first came to power in the state in 1967, and it or one of its
off-shoots has remained in power ever since. J. Jayalalitha, MGRs former co-star
and mistress/protg, who was Chief Minister from 1992-1996 and 2002-2006, is
the latest ruler in a cinema-based political culture still in very good health. The
cultural and political history of the first half of this Big Story is outlined in this

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anthology in Theodore Baskarans Encountering a New Art: Writers Responses
to Cinema in Tamil Nadu and in Robert Hardgraves pioneering 1973 essay
Politics and the Film in Tamil Nadu: The Stars and the DMK. More recent deve-
lopments in the content of Tamil nationalist ideology are carefully picked out in
the analyses of Rajan Krishnan (Imaginary Geographies: the Makings of South
in Contemporary Tamil Cinema) and Vijay Devadas and Selvaraj Velayutham
(Encounters with India: (Ethno)-Nationalism in Tamil Cinema). Though there
is much more of this story to be told, these essays offer an essential orientation
to its dramatic beginnings and the current state of play.
Like most progressive Indian intellectuals, those who tell the Womens Story
here see the populist symbiosis of Tamil politics and film culture as a debilita-
ting form of patriarchal fascism. Judging by the narratives of Tamil films, the
sanctity and stability of Tamil society often seems to depend, in the final analysis,
on female chastity. C.S. Lakshmis A Good Woman, a Very Good Woman: Tamil
Cinemas Women demonstrates how the good girl/bad girl binary familiar
from feminist film theory is reproduced in Tamil cinema, based in certain myths
of Tamil culture. Sathiavathi Chinniahs The Tamil Film Heroine: From a Passive
Subject to a Pleasurable Object examines the apparent contradictions of this
binary. Kalpana Rams Bringing the Amman into presence in Tamil cinema
deals with the subject of powerful (and empowering) goddesses in Tamil cinema,
and as such reminds us that a) traditional Tamil culture is much more than what
its Dravidian ideologues have chosen to privilege and b) Tamil cinema is by
no means reducible to the impact of neo-Dravidian ideology upon it, however
pronounced this may seem to be.
What I call the Peoples Story is told here by anthropologists who examine
what Tamil cinema means to its audience, how it surrounds and interacts with
their lives. The contribution of Sara Dickey (The Nurturing Hero: Changing
Images of MGR), who has done extensive fieldwork on the subject for decades,
demonstrates just how inextricable cinematic images and political realities are in
Tamil Nadu; though he died in 1987, the mega-star MGR remains the subject of
passionate veneration for his fans, for whom there is still little distinction to be
made between on-screen heroism and the political policies that followed. Pre-
minda Jacobs Tamil Cinema in the Public Sphere: The Evolving Art of Banner
Advertisements in Chennai discusses the massive billboard advertisements that
make Tamil cinema so prominent, and so inescapable in importance, in any
urban area; if Tamil cinema is, as I have suggested, a national cinema, it is so in
part because of its visual dominance of the public sphere. The most moving
contribution in this category, and perhaps in the entire collection, comes from
Anand Pandian, whose Cinema in the Countryside: Popular Tamil Film and the
Remaking of Rural Life documents the intimate ways in which the nativity
genre of films inform the world-view and autobiographical narratives of rural
spectators. Walter Benjamins dream of the cinema as a progressive popular art

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almost seems to have been realized, until Pandian reminds us that the ideology
of the urban middle classes and global Indian diaspora increasingly dominates
all the many branches of popular Indian cinema. Hence his sobering conclusion
that: The future of a vital rural cinema appears as uncertain as that of a vital
rural life.
I would strongly recommend this book to anyone eager to discover a very
different type of cinema and willing to work a little to do it. Obviously, reading
this book and seeing a few Tamil movies will not guarantee the understanding
and enjoyment of Tamil cinema. But doing so will, I am sure, allow you to expe-
rience the existence of the vital and robust culture that I noted at the beginning;
I think that alone is worth doing, whether you carry on from there or not. And
if you do carry on, you will find, behind the now-faded faade of the Big Story,
cinephiliac pleasures of which I have not been able to speak.

Trinity College

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