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Conclusion >> 187

The first question we need to address is: Are the two poles of the spec-
trum—the cinema hall and the political party—adequate sites or analytic
categories to begin with? If one were to consider film music, a component
of films that circulates in the public realm much before and long after the
film itself does, it forces us to consider the radio, television, the Internet, and
mobile phones as sites constitutive of the publicness of cinema as much as
the cinema hall itself, if not more so. Radio, television, the Internet, and cell
phone networks are spaces of public culture with intimate ties to the film, but
with distinct institutional, cultural, and political histories that have shaped
our experience of films. I would argue, then, that a focus on fan practices
that emerge at the intersection of film and various new media and shape
their interaction opens up the possibility of developing accounts of partici-
patory culture that does not necessarily originate in the cinema hall and cul-
minate in the sphere of political parties and electoral campaigns.
The second question we have to grapple with concerns the image of the
fan that we derive from a focus on the cinema hall and its surroundings, and
fan associations of stars like Vijaykanth: obsessive, male, working class, and
rowdy. The “excessive” behavior that marks viewers in front rows of cinema
halls, what Lawrence Liang calls the “protocols of collective behavior”—
whistling and commenting loudly, throwing flowers, coins, or ribbons when
the star first appears on the screen, singing along and dancing in the aisles,
and so on—is routinely cited as what distinguishes fans from the rest of the
21
audience. Further, the public nature of fan associations’ activities—celebrat-
ing a star’s birthday or hundred days of a film, organizing special prerelease
functions, adorning street corners with giant cutouts of the star, decorating
theaters where the film has had a successful run, and the like—and press cov-
erage of such activities have further served to both marginalize and circum-
scribe fan activity as undesirable, vulgar, and at times dangerous. As Srinivas,
drawing on Vivek Dhareshwar and R. Srivatsan’s analysis of rowdy-sheeters
(individuals with a criminal record), writes:

The fan is a rowdy not only because he breaks the law in the course of his
assertion or his association with criminalized politics—the fan becomes a
rowdy by overstepping the line which demarcates the legitimate, “construc-
tive,” permissible excess, and the illegitimate [. . .] as far as the “citizen” is
concerned, the fan is a blind hero-worshipper (devoid of reason) and a vil-
lain. The rowdy/fan is an agent of politics which is de-legitimized. 22

Fans, in this view, are imperfect citizens, or even noncitizens, in aesthetic,
sociocultural, and political terms. Middle-class constructions of norms of