Page 128 - Aesthetic Formations Media, religion, and the Sense

Tamil Mythological Cinema 113

comedy, satire, and sometimes stunts. They tended to focus on lifestyles of
wealth and luxury enjoyed by urban social elite, either as a parody of
Indians who had adopted Western habits, clothes, and attitudes or as advo-
cating social reform of contemporary problems such as child marriage,
dowry, alcohol, Hindu-Muslim unity, caste inequality, or the treatment of
widows. Though the Indian cinema industry produced silent social films
as early as 1921 and social dramas had been extremely popular on the
Tamil stage from the mid-1920s, this genre was slower to develop than the
other film genres in the south (Hughes 2006). The film censor boards of
British India were more aggressive, especially during the period of Civil
Disobedience, in policing the political implications of social films.
As a mode of a social critique, secular modernist film criticism in the
1930s and early 1940s was based upon a developmental discourse of progress
that was supposed to leave religion to the past. In so far as the secular mod-
ernist critique argued that mythological films were old-fashioned, traditional,
and out of date, it constructed a teleology that relegated religion to an earlier
stage in history. Especially for a younger generation of educated, self-
consciously modern oriented south Indians the popularity of mythological
films was something of an embarrassment. These films were dismissed as a
reflection of an essentially spiritual mind of Indians and attributed to the
general ignorance, lack of education, illiteracy, poverty, and superstition of
the Indian masses. Much of the criticism of mythologicals crystallized
around the notion that they were inconsistent with and could not be accom-
modated within a progressive modern cultural politics. For example, one of
the most persistent criticisms of mythologicals throughout the period was
that they were an anachronistic confusion of modern elements inappropri-
ately mixed with puranic stories (Samy 1935). For these critics, mythologicals
could only signify India’s past, needed to be more carefully delineated from
the present and should strive toward more “realistic” representation of this
mythic history. This was a variant that would widely be recognized as a sec-
ular vision of modernity, but in this case one that measured its own progress
by its distance from mythological and devotional films.
The Tamil social film genre carried the representational burden of sec-
ular modernism, yet did not always live up to the high minded social

reform agenda that film critics had been advocating:

The social aspect of a story does not merely consist in the heroine smoking
a cigarette, drinking a glass of wine or playing tennis. Nor can you call a
story social simply because there is a race course or an aeroplane scene.
Social stories must be reformatory in character. Unfortunately [for] some
social stories of our province too much emphasis is laid on the darker side
of the social customs. Defects in our present day social order should be