Page 115 - Aesthetic Formations Media, religion, and the Sense

100 Stephen Putnam Hughes

musical drama repertoire and an established field of star singing perform-
ers (Hughes 2007). For the purposes of my argument here, the key feature
that the example of south India musical drama contributed to the making
of Tamil cinema was the overwhelming importance of the Hindu mytho-
logical sources. During the first years of Tamil cinema, the industry
competitively reproduced the entire mythological repertoire of the Tamil
professional drama companies turning out films that were little more than
filmed versions of the mythological musical stage dramas.
The influence of drama on the early development of Tamil cinema was
a favorite and oft repeated topic for early film critics. Just months after the
first Indian talkie films were released they came in for heavy and repeated
criticism on account of their dramatic origins (e.g., Sesha Ayyah 1932).
Tamil cinema was widely considered to be “a child of the Tamil stage” so
that all the problems, defects, and criticisms of the latter were immediately
applicable to the new medium. Tamil theater provided an inescapable
model for what Tamil talkies should and should not be. It was also the
critical angle that allowed many critics to define both the mistakes and
essential qualities of the new medium. Or in the words of one early film
critic, “When ones sees a Tamil film, one gets the feeling that one is seeing
a play. We see the same obscenities on screen that we see on stage. This is
because our film producers and actors have not realized the special nature
of cinema” (B.N.R. 1935). However, we must be careful not to confuse this
critical discourse relating the Tamil stage and screen for a historiographic
first principle that overdetermined a teleological relationship between the
stage and cinema. All too often standard accounts of the beginnings of
Tamil cinema tend to presume a seamless, linear, and determinant conti-
nuity with popular theater as if one monolithic cultural form turned itself
into another.
Even though a wealth of drama experience, stories, artists, and songs
from the south Indian stage obviously contributed significantly to making
of Tamil cinema a religious medium, there was not a simple transfer from
one cultural form to another. The highly fluid relationships between the-
ater and cinema should be understood as part of more general ongoing
processes of remediation within a wider field of cultural performance,

media, and politics in south India. Instead of a simple stage to screen equa-
tion we must consider a broader historical convergence and collaboration
around mythological subjects. During the 1930s an emerging set of over-
lapping, mutually constituted and parallel media practices involving
drama, gramophone, cinema, and print converged upon mythological
materials through ongoing processes of remediation (Hughes 2003). As
Singer (1972, 149 and 161) noted in the 1950s the stories from the Hindu
puranas were endlessly told and retold in a wide range of media ranging