Tamil Cinema in the Twenty-First Century

Caste, Gender and Technology

Selvaraj Velayutham, Vijay Devadas

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN:
  9780367199012
• eBook ISBN:
  9780429534232
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Film & Video

Tamil Cinema in the Twenty-First Century explores the current state of Tamil cinema, one of India's largest film industries. Since its inception a century ago, Tamil cinema has undergone major transformations, and today it stands as a foremost cultural institution that profoundly shapes Tamil culture and identity. This book investigates the structural, ideological, and societal cleavages that continue to be reproduced, new ideas, modes of representation and narratives that are being created, and the impact of new technologies on Tamil cinema. It advances a critical interdisciplinary approach that challenges the narratives of Tamil cinema to reveal the social forces at work.

Part 1

Caste

1 Contested narratives

Filmic representations of North Chennai in contemporary Tamil cinema

Karthikeyan Damodaran and Hugo Gorringe

In contemporary Tamil films, the representation of North Chennai as a spatially distinct, masculine, homogeneous, and violent urban ghetto has turned the slums and kuppams (residential areas associated with Dalits) in the neighbourhood to dangerous spaces that feed the casteist anxieties and desires of Tamil imagination.¹ This marks the criminalisation of the neighbourhood and its inhabitants as pathologically anti-social. Such films cater to a voyeuristic audience, instantaneously attracted to and repulsed by an imaginary of the ghetto as a zone in need of state intervention. These films show how inner-city places become encoded as territories, and how gangs mark out their turf with their insignia and daily gatherings at particular sites, with particular individuals, specific gestures and the like. Space here plays a prominent role and is marked by social relations. As Foucault (1980, 148) puts it, ‘a whole history remains to be written of spaces – which would at the same time be the history of powers – from the great strategies of geopolitics to the little tactics of the habitat’.

Building on the insight and drawing upon Wacquant’s (2007) idea of territorial stigmatisation, we discuss how Chennai’s northern part – constituting largely working-class populations among whom the historically marginalised Dalits and fishing communities are the most prominent² – has been tainted through filmic representations. Next we discuss about the emergence of ‘Dalit cinema’ (cf. Yengde 2018), which challenges those representations. Films like Madras (2014) challenge the stereotypical representation of Dalit social and spatial life in mainstream Tamil cinema. This chapter will discuss such contested narratives focusing on key films based in North Chennai. Before offering our analysis of the films, it is, however, important to look at Chennai as a landscape in both physical and cultural terms.

The city as a ‘historical space’

Chennai (formerly Madras) is the fourth largest Indian city and the main business and commercial hub of South India with India’s fourth biggest port. Despite its claim to modernity, the city continues to be shaped by both its colonial and cultural past. Nield (1979, 218) argues that it has ‘never quite abandoned its association with rural south India’, and charts how the city was shaped by the dual operating logics of colonialism and caste. She notes how early maps of the city show Fort St George surrounded by an area called ‘the White Town’ and opposed to the area labelled ‘Black Town’. This, in turn, was further subdivided on caste lines: ‘One large paracheri in the Black Town housed several thousand untouchable residents; but most members of this ritually impure caste had to find dwellings on the outskirts of the town and village centers’ (Nield 1979, 227). The spatial ordering of an internally segregated black town next to a walled fort acts as a precursor, and the city in its postcolonial condition maintains its spatial discrimination in the form of a developed South and neglected North. In this sense, it conforms to what Selby and Peterson (2008, 2) describe as ‘an identifiably Tamil disposition or range of attitudes, a Tamil habitus (in Pierre Bourdieu’s terminology) regarding space and place’. As Mines puts it in the context of Chennai city, ‘the legacy of earlier times continues to underlie the developing urban landscape and to influence social relationships’ (2006, 89).

Today, M.S.S. Pandian (as quoted in Srinivasaraju 2007) observes, there is an ever-increasing divide between the prosperous South and the derelict North. He states that the socio-economic maps plotted by the Madras Office for Architects and Designers illustrate the divide clearly, showing how the modern clusters of ATMs and international restaurants have cropped up in the southern part of the city while one can hardly find an ATM in the North. Harriss (2005) likewise explains that the new economy and the service industries and the new consumer culture associated with it are primarily located in South Chennai. The appearance of the globalising city can hardly be seen in the northern city areas which are principally working-class areas, largely inhabited by Dalit, Christian, Muslim, fishing, and other oppressed communities. A 2013 The Hindu report shows that

for most branded fast food chains and cafes, north Chennai still seems to be a blind spot. The most popular consensus is that much of the population in north Chennai is working class and therefore not the ideal market segment for these outlets.

(Khan 2013)

Arabindoo (2008) argues that this divide builds on colonial foundations, which privileged South Chennai, and were continued in postcolonial years with favourable policy changes of urban development in the economically prosperous South Chennai.

Chennai is infamous for its ‘sacred spaces’ of temples which occupy the landscapes of South Chennai. Famed elite cultural organisations like the Madras Music Academy and Naradha Gana Sabha are all located in South Chennai. Harriss (2005) argues that these are all emphatically Brahmin organisations strongly supported by non-Brahmin upper castes, which have arguably reaped the benefits of the Dravidian movement. Saharan, Pfeffer, and Baud (2017, 281) note how the percentage of slum dwellers increased from 19% in 2001 to 28.5% in 2011, which was above the rate at which the city as a whole was growing. They also observed the privileging of South Chennai in terms of infrastructure projects and developments, noting how other locations ‘did not witness much urban development-related growth or investment in its vicinity’, and began to show ‘characteristics of a “forgotten” neighbourhood in dire need of intervention’ (Saharan et al. 2017, 281).

In the contemporary context, Chennai as a globalising city is marked by a pattern of separate residential and productive clusters. During the last two decades, corporate global capital investment has turned Chennai into a ‘neoliberal city’ (Harvey 2008), and the Lefebvrian ‘right to the city’ is constricted by the spatial action of private corporate interests (Khan 2013). This is a form of social stratification scripted on space, which also implies a stratification of mobilities and immobilities. The urban form as described by Lefebvre (1996) is not merely physical but also psychological and social at the same time. Crucially for this chapter, this segregated nature of Chennai city largely marked by its caste/class character has percolated into the filmic imagination. North Chennai, thus, was more or less neglected in Tamil films initially, before finding space as a villain’s den or locale inhabited by gangsters. The area then becomes the site in which the protagonist (largely upper-caste male hero) engages in a sanitising process by getting rid of ‘criminals’. Whilst the dynamics are specific, this has its precursor in representations of the city in Tamil films in general which carried an inherent bias against cities and life in the city. It is to the interplay between Tamil films and cities that we now turn.

City in Tamil films

Most pre-1980s Tamil cinema had a decidedly anti-urban bias. The countryside was presented as a pastoral idyll, while the city featured as a metaphor for social decay. From the late 1970s, in what Sundar Kaali (2000) names the Neo-Nativity genre, films foreground and romanticise the everyday life of the village. They portrayed the countryside as a relatively safe place, whilst the city was showcased as harbouring lumpen elements, criminals, prostitutes, and corrupt and power-hungry politicians. In the 1990s, however, this emphasis changed and a range of young directors inspired by global cinema started to make films set in the pettai (space) or ‘area’ rather than the village (Vasudevan 2017). ‘With the liberalisation of the Indian economy and the rise of an Indian middle class’, as Velayutham (2008, 4) puts it,

Tamil cinema has shifted its orientation towards tapping into the sensibilities and taste cultures of this new film audience. The representation of modernity, progress, affluence and global consumerism is its major preoccupation . . . [and] the urban space and ‘the city’ now serve as the primary backdrop for most films.

During the later period, there was a change in the way cities were portrayed, with an emphasis on spaces promising freedom and economic mobility – albeit containing spaces of economic impoverishment and segregation. In this manner, the city as a signifying space has performed a dual function, both real and imaginary.

Following Balshaw and Kennedy’s (2000) use of Lefebvre and Soja, we note how images or textual representations of reality may be attributed a false ‘epistemological precedence’ over the realities of lived social space. As space conceals the relations of power, this is an important concern. The city thus becomes inseparable from its representations. Representation here works in a wide variety of forms to produce and maintain (but also to challenge and question) common notions of urban existence. The films mentioned above provide selective representations of the city and shape the metaphors, narratives, and syntax, which are widely used to describe the experience of urban living in a certain spatial condition. Within this framework, the investigation of visual and textual representations of urban space is not merely a study of images of place or narratives of urban consciousness, but an understanding of the importance of culture, which then gives us particular readings and visual practices for approaching the spatiality of the city. There is an intricate relationship between urban space and subjectivity. Given the central sociopolitical significance of film to Tamil political culture, our focus here is on spatial representations and the impact of this.

In terms of effect, places carry certain notions of belonging, localised stories, and representations bearing associated memories, which provide cultural and historical values and meanings for urban individuals and communities. So, questions of visibility in terms of representation form an important part of subjectivity. Visuality and visual experience, according to Jay (1988), are part of ‘scopic regimes’, which are contested terrains marked by questions of power and ideology. Cinema disseminates certain techniques of visualising and seeing the city, which is important given the subject’s relation to urban space. Questions of legibility/illegibility and visibility/invisibility come through as struggles for power and identity. ‘Categories of spatial duality’ – of inside/outside, of self/other – serve to ‘naturalise the symbolic order of the city, reproducing social divisions and power relations’ (Balshaw and Kennedy 2000, 11).

The distinctive geographies of social difference and power relations and space in cities thus act as a platform through which urban identities are formed (Mitchell 2003). In terms of formation of identity, the city as a site of intersubjective and collective encounters is marked by its spatiality. The films to be discussed are marked by an ‘obsessive visuality’, which characterises the representation of urban Dalit identity and community. The fetishisation of the authenticity of North Chennai in terms of spatial representation is a major concern. For members of subaltern communities who are territorially stigmatised, questions of representation shape how they are viewed and treated in everyday interactions. Such representations, we argue, fuel the processes of class categorisation and social distancing that Frøystad (2006) analyses in her research. In the following section, we examine how North Chennai has been stigmatised in recent popular commercial films, but before that we will discuss how it formed part of these filmic representations.

The ‘te...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title
• Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of figures
• List of tables
• List of contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Foreword: A refreshing look at Tamil cinema
• Introduction: Tamil cinema in the twenty-first century: continuities and changes
• PART 1 Caste
• PART 2 Gender
• PART 3 Technology
• Index