Page 112 - Aesthetic Formations Media, religion, and the Sense

Tamil Mythological Cinema 97

restrictions and regional preferences that radically redefined film markets
throughout India.
At first there was still a tremendous amount of interaction and exchange
across languages and regions within the contexts of production because the
early sound film studios in India were concentrated around Calcutta and
Bombay. For most of the 1930s the majority of Tamil films were very cos-
mopolitan affairs made outside of south India in Bombay and Calcutta by
producers and directors from all over India who were not necessarily Tamil
speakers themselves. In fact the film that is now conventionally recognized
as the first Tamil film was not entirely Tamil. The film, Kalidas, produced
in Bombay by Imperial Films in 1931 was in fact multilingual—the hero-
ine spoke in Tamil and the hero in Telugu. A contemporary newspaper
review, which described the film as a well-known mythological story deal-
ing with the legendary life of ancient Sanskrit poet and dramatist, hailed
the film as the first talkie film to be screened with Tamil and Telugu songs
(The Hindu, 30 October 1931). Even in advertisements that accompanied
the film’s debut in Madras promoted it as “100% Talking, Singing and
Dancing” without any primary linguistic identification (The Hindu, 31
October 1931). In retrospect the film was dismissed as a unique conglom-
erate medley of both Tamil and Telugu dialogues (Muthu 1936), but this
linguistic confusion speaks to the initial difficulties Indian film producers
had in using sound technology to address and identify a new public in
south India.
Confronted with the uncertainties of the new sound medium, the selec-
tion of religious themes was one of the ways that early Tamil film produc-
ers sought to reach out to south Indian audiences. Broadly speaking there
were two main and closely related kinds of Tamil Hindu religious film
genres during the 1930s, which at the time were referred to as mythologi-
cal (purana) and devotional (bakthi) films. These two genres were closely
related and are impossible to separate as completely distinct ways of con-
structing film narratives. My use of these terms is based on how the Tamil
film industry and critics in the 1930s explicitly categorized films with
Hindu religious origins. In general mythological films were moral tales
based upon the Hindu epic story traditions (puranas) and legends about

exploits of the gods, most often relating to either the Ramayana or
Mahabharatha. These stories have their roots in ancient India and were
certainly composed orally through continuous retellings over many gen-
erations before they became written texts. The oldest of the puranas are in
Sanskrit, though there are also numerous relevant Tamil puranas as well.
They have conventionally been attributed to single authors, but it is impor-
tant to note that there is no original text, nor any single, correct version of
3
these epics. Several early Tamil films continued this living tradition in