Page 121 - Aesthetic Formations Media, religion, and the Sense

106 Stephen Putnam Hughes

Devotional Films and
the Emergence of Regional Politics

Over the course of the 1930s the religious themes in Tamil cinema shifted
from a predominance of mythological stories toward devotional narratives
about poet saints. This coincided with a general move in Tamil films
toward a new political engagement with regional, linguistic, and cultural
issues that had not featured in the nationalist mytho-politics of Indian
silent cinema or early Tamil cinema. Over the course of the 1930s the
representational burden of Tamil religious films generally shifted away
from an anticolonial nationalist critique toward the construction of a
regional Tamil identity politics.
The rising importance of Tamil devotional films over the decade
reflected a series of shifts as film production increased and moved south.
For the purposes of this chapter we can separate the first decade of Tamil
cinema into two distinct phases before and after 1935. This was not an
absolute break, but the year represented a kind of tipping point for Tamil
cinema where it reached a critical mass. Up to that point Tamil talkie pro-
duction was insufficient to provide a steady supply of films and their exhi-
bition at most cinema halls in south India was only sporadic until 1935.
This was the year when contemporary sources began talking about “the
8
craze for vernacular talkies.” It was widely recognized that Indian cinema
was for the first time coming into its own: “The first phase of the great
Indian talkie boom is now in. Hindi, Urdu, Tamil, and Telugu talking
pictures are now sweeping the country like an avalanche. We are now
9
reaching the adolescent stage.” Between 1934 and 1935 Tamil cinema
production jumped from 14 to 34 films a year marking the first regular
supply of Tamil films for exhibitors. From that point through the rest of
the decade the number of Tamil films produced remained more or less
constant until the Second World War reaching a peak of 39 films in 1940.
The increases in the Tamil film production totals were matched by greater
numbers of devotional films, which reached a peak in 1939. With devo-
tionals accounting for about 14 out of the annual total of 30 films, 1939
was dubbed the year of the bhaktas in Tamil cinema in an editorial review
in one of the leading south Indian film journals. 10
Another important change that coincided with the rise of devotion-
als during the 1930s was the gradual shift of Tamil film production
from the studios in Calcutta and Bombay to south India. Early Tamil
film producers had been forced to travel long distances with a large
troupe of actors, artists and musicians and hire a studio and accommo-
dation for the duration of the shoot. One Tamil film producer explained