Page 111 - Aesthetic Formations Media, religion, and the Sense

96 Stephen Putnam Hughes

cinema represented a return to mythological sources. But it was a return
that coincided with a period of unprecedented growth and consolidation
for the new Tamil film industry. It has become commonplace to dismiss
this early period of Tamil cinema as being a primitive and backward early
phase in its development. This has prevented scholars from taking the reli-
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gious content of this early period seriously. However, this kind of dis-
missal will never help understand how and why religion and early Tamil
cinema were so closely related.
Before addressing early Tamil cinema’s religious mode of address, this
section starts by posing this question: What exactly was Tamil cinema in
the 1930s? After almost 80 years and 5000 films, it is all too easy to take
the “Tamil-ness” of Tamil cinema for granted. It now seems obvious that
by definition the primary qualification for a film to be categorized as being
Tamil is the language spoken within the film. But because this primary
linguistic identification seems an unambiguous differentiation of the
Tamil-ness of a film, no one now bothers to pose the question: What is
Tamil about Tamil cinema? However, during the early history of Tamil
cinema this “Tamil-ness” was not so easily taken for granted. It was, in
fact, a matter of experimentation, confusion, debate, and contestation dur-
ing the 1930s. Early Tamil film producers had to figure out what a Tamil
film was—how it might be different from other kinds of Indian films and
how it might address its linguistically bounded audiences in south India.
When sound media technology reinvented cinema as “talkies” Tamil
cinema producers and directors were confronted new and as yet untested
linguistic and geographic parameters for imagining their audiences.
From 1931 sound technology immediately began to reorganize the
Indian film industry through a proliferation of regional language–based
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cinemas. Already in 1931 the new problems and limitations facing Indian
market for talkie films were apparent (Anonymous 1931). Before sound the
Indian silent film market had been relatively well integrated. Indian silent
films had an all-India market and, even though they often reflected
regional specificity and used intertitles in regional languages, they rou-
tinely circulated to all corners of British India—from Karachi to Rangoon,
from Lahore to Madras. However, with the introduction of sound Indian

cinema had to address new, more restricted and still uncertain linguistic
and cultural constituencies. As Lakshmana Raju (1933), a south Indian
editor of the cinema journal, Screenland, observed in 1933, the “people in
the south do not seem to be interested in talkies in north Indian languages
which always fail to draw crowds. The majority of south Indians were not
patronizing north Indian talkies because of what he identified as ‘the lan-
guage problem’ in Indian cinema.” Especially for the purposes of film
exhibition and circulation, sound helped create a new set of linguistic