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Tamil Mythological Cinema 95

In this chapter I consider the beginnings of commercial Tamil cinema
in south India during the 1930s as a key site for examining the articulation
of media, religion, and politics. Following on from previous work concern-
ing silent film mythologicals during the 1920s (Hughes 2005), this chap-
ter continues the story into the 1930s when the introduction of the new
sound film technology posed a new set of problems and possibilities, which
shifted the articulation of religion and modern mass politics in colonial
south India toward new regional agendas. The transformation of silent
cinema through synchronized sound inflected film with a new Tamil lin-
guistic identity and defined a new regionally based cinematic tradition in
south India. As with my earlier work I have been primarily working with
extra cinematic sources, mainly contemporary journalism and government
documents in order to examine how contemporary filmmakers helped to
craft Tamil cinema as a religious mode of address and how critics under-
stood the various political stakes of mythological films.

Early Tamil Cinema and
Its Religious Modes of Address

At no other period and in no other language anywhere in India has there
ever been such a convergence between religion and film as early Tamil
cinema. The degree to which those in Tamil cinema reworked what were
already familiar Hindu stories, songs, and characters during the 1930s is
unprecedented in the history of cinema in India. The numbers of Tamil
films produced reveal a broad outline of this dominance. Over the decade
from 1931 through 1940 there were approximately 242 Tamil films pro-
duced. Of this total, films based on Hindu stories outnumbered all other
kinds of films by roughly three to one. However, during the first five years
of this period the dominance of Hindu religious films was almost total. All
but a handful of the first 60 Tamil films produced from 1931 through
1935 were based on either Hindu epics or the lives of famous devotees or
other Hindu folk stories. From 1936 other kinds of films, not based on
traditional Hindu materials, were increasingly introduced. Even so during
the second half of this first decade of Tamil cinema between 1936 and
1940 Hindu religious films outnumbered other kinds of films by two to
one. Indian mythological silent films had been especially dominant in the
earliest years of Indian film production, but the enthusiasm for them faded
markedly throughout the silent period so that they only accounted for
about 15 percent of overall silent film productions by the late 1920s. So in
comparison to the trends in Indian silent film, the first decade of Tamil