Page 127 - Aesthetic Formations Media, religion, and the Sense

112 Stephen Putnam Hughes

reform. In contrast to the late 1980s when televised mythological serials
seemed to raise new questions about the place of religion within a modern
secular national politics, the key issue raised during the 1930s in south
India was how to reconcile modern secular within an overwhelmingly reli-
gious cinema. Secularism in this case was in a different register and not yet
explicitly linked with any state-sponsored project of liberal democracy, but
was more a matter of cinematic representation. Cultural elites used a secu-
lar modernist discourse as a mode of film criticism to demarcate high from
mass culture.
The critique of religious films was often presented as a matter of urgent
reform. There were repeated demands that instead of “fossilized puranic
themes,” films should reflect contemporary Indian reality and social prob-
lems more “suited to modern life and conditions” (Chettiar 1936). For
example, A. Ranganathan (1936) wrote: “The first reform that should be
made is to put a full-stop to the idea of ad nauseam Puranic plays. Films
with social and historical background must come in” (The Hindu,
30 October 1936). This was discursive framework within which the new
Tamil social film genre was promoted as the modern answer to the mytho-
logical. Starting in 1935 the first few Tamil films not based on mythologi-
cal sources were released. There were a number of films that simultaneously
and competitively claimed to be “the first social Tamil Talkie” around
August 1935. The producers of Dharma Pathni claimed the title “The first
social hit of the Tamil Talkies world” with a story of a London returned
gentleman who married a high class, educated girl, but then drove her out
into destitution only to be saved by her in the end when he falls victim to
his modern vices (The Hindu, 9 August 1935). But when an earlier released
film, Dumbachari—about a wealthy young man who was brought to ruin
by frequenting the brothels of Madras—returned to Madras for a second
run it was also advertised as the first social film. These films were followed
in the same year by Menaka, which was based upon a popular novel of
Vaduvoor K. Doraiswamy Iyengar, which had previously been adapted for
the stage. Advertised as being “modern and realistic”, the story was about a
young wife who was victimized by her husband’s two widowed sisters, who
abducted her and tried to sell her to a pimp. This exposed social evils and

domestic problems in a Brahmin family and notably contained nationalist
songs, which made direct political reference to the social reform agenda of
the India National Congress. From this point onward throughout the rest
of the 1930s the relatively small but stable number of Tamil social films
produced every year offered the first alternative to religious subjects.
A film was deemed “social” in so far as they featured contemporary
stories, settings, and costumes. Usually adapted from popular novels and
dramas, the stories in social films usually revolved around crime, romance,