Page 118 - Aesthetic Formations Media, religion, and the Sense

Tamil Mythological Cinema 103

suffering—such as worship of images, reading, and listening to writings
on divine glory, singing, yoga, congregational devotion, and chanting the
many auspicious names of god (V. Raghavan 1959). Of these practices
music in south India has long been a privileged aid to devotion and con-
templation of the divine through the subtle powers of sacred vibration
(Cousins 1935). The importance of music as a mode of Hindu worship
added a powerful new dimension to the ways that Tamil cinema articu-
lated film spectatorship as a form of religious discipline. Yet, Hindu reli-
gious themes were simultaneously a commercial practice for promoting
cinema attendance, which provided a widely shared rubric for imagining
Tamil audiences based on the presumption that the majority of south
Indians shared common religious attachments.

Shifting Politics of Mythological Films

Silent mythological films contributed significantly to discursive frame-
work within which Tamil cinema was produced, especially in the manner
it had foregrounded a nationalist mytho-politics. However, with the begin-
nings of Tamil cinema this nationalist framework was rearticulated
through the new medium of sound with a new influx of singing drama
artistes giving voice to a new musical medium in response to changing
political scene in south India.
Throughout the 1920s silent mythological films had provided a position
from which to critique Western modernity and uphold the moral and reli-
gious superiority of Indian tradition. Mythological films were explicitly and
favorably compared to the usual fare of imported cinema, which was por-
trayed variously as chaotic, immoral, materialistic, and forever tainted by
colonialism. In contrast the puranas and epics provided a kind of eternal
and endless font of feeling, sentiment, and moral guidance, which were
upheld as being “pure and free of moral objections from the Indian stand-
point” (Aiyar 1928). In this sense mythological films allowed Indians to
remediate the cinema as part of a religious discourse on India’s spiritual

superiority over the West and an affirmation of a distinctive Indian national
culture. A particularly good example of this is Dr. Mrs. A. R. Lakshmi
Pathi’s (1928) written statement submitted to the Indian Cinematograph
Committee in 1927. She argued in favor of cinema as a form of Hindu reli-
gious expression, which underpinned Indian national identity.

Films depicting Indian themes, Indian traditions and culture, particularly the
religious ones and which are in accordance with the Indian temperament,