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Tamil Mythological Cinema 111

The promotional discourse clearly aligned the film with the scholarly
rediscovery of Tamil literary classics during late nineteenth century and
early twentieth century, which has been called the Tamil Renaissance and
considered a key part of the emergence of Dravidian nationalism in the
twentieth century (Nambi Arooran 1980; Ryerson 1988). The fact that the
Tamil bhakti singing poets were an important part of a Tamil literary tra-
dition that began in the sixth century was used to support the idea that
Tamil-speaking people had a distinct national identity (Irshick 1986).
Tamil cinema was able to materialize and give voice to this imagined
heritage in ways that allowed audiences to constitute themselves as part of
a specifically Tamil religious past. Critics praised devotional films as apt
vehicles for highlighting the greatness of Tamil: “As a Tamilian I would
request these people to bear in mind that we should immortalize our glo-
rious and enviable heritage and the talkie screen is a good medium for
doing this. The soul-stirring ditties of our ancient composers and poets
introduced in appropriate occasions would enhance the effect of the situa-
tions.” The author singled out another and even more successful film ver-
sion of Pattinathar (Vel Pictures 1936) as being exemplary in this regard:
“Its sole cause for success is the songs. Those songs are pure Tamil tunes,
which every Tamilian is conversant with. These songs make their direct
appeal to our minds and we long to hear the sweet melodies again and
again” (Thangam 1937).

The Secular Critique

As Tamil film producers imaginatively reached out to a new linguistically
and culturally defined religious public with mythological and devotional
themes, these very films also became a conspicuous site for the articulation
of a strident secular modernist politics. The nationalist mytho-politics and
the regionalist celebration of Tamil religious heroes were both challenged
and refigured as part of new discourses on secular modernism that were
emerging over the 1930s.

Of course, not all secularisms are the same, but are always uniquely
embedded within historically contingent and shifting practices (Asad
2003; see also Larkin in this volume). This discourse of secular modernism
that I am referring to here needs to be distinguished from what later
emerges after Independence as a political discourse of the Indian state and
its characteristic mode of governmentality. Instead, the discourse of secu-
lar modernism, which took Tamil mythological films of the 1930s as their
key negative referent, was an elite discourse of cultural criticism and social