Page 129 - Aesthetic Formations Media, religion, and the Sense

114 Stephen Putnam Hughes

gently and lightly touched in a manner that will set them off against the
dangers of ultramodern notions but never over-emphasised so as to lose
their real purpose. (Ranganathan 1936)
This reflects a widespread anxiety and mistrust that too much modernity
would lead to a dystopic loss of moral direction. In fact, the argument
above was less an endorsement of modernity than a prescriptive call for
social films to serve as a moral critique of modernity. In this regard most
social films carried remarkably similar message as the devotional films of
the same period. Both genres served as cautionary tales about the dangers
of immoral lifestyles and how humility can lead to salvation and set one on
the path of advancement and social justice.
In many ways the mythological and the secular were linked in a kind
of mutual dependency, each enabling, informing, constraining, and justi-
fying the other. In the 1930s debates as to the comparative merits of the
various Tamil film genres the sacred/secular distinction was still not
fixed, everything was in play in an unstable and experimental mix. Just as
the stories of the medieval poet saints were justified in terms of making
modern political arguments about social justice and reform, some
defended the religious proclivities of early Tamil cinema against their crit-
ics in remarkably secular terms. When the mythological film, Rukmani
Kalyanam, was released at Broadway Talkies in Madras, a prominent
Indian judge on the Madras High Court, V. V. Srinivasa Aiyangar spoke
during the interval. He alluded to the growing secular criticism of myth-
ological films and claimed that he was not one of those who were against
representation of puranic episodes on the screen. But his defense of the
genre amounted to a secular reading of the film in that he denied that
there was anything really puranic about it. He explained that the film
should be regarded as a modern story of a girl falling in love, resolving to
marry the man of her choice and then how she goes about successfully
doing so (The Hindu, 19 October 1936). Tamil cinema of the 1930s was
open to secular readings of religious stories and religious understandings
of modern situations in ways that suggest that the mythological and the
modern, the religious and the secular were mutually constitutive catego-

ries. Social films did not simply replace the religious themes in Tamil
cinema as might have been assumed as an inevitable outcome of the secu-
lar modernity. But instead they helped to produce a new cultural politics
of religious cinema, which articulated them anew as a key part of the con-
temporary nationalist and Dravidian movements.

By way of conclusion, I will return to where I began by asking what this
brief tour through 1930s Tamil cinema tells us about the contemporary