Celluloid Deities: The Visual Culture of Cinema and Politics in South India

Jacob

South Asian Studies • Communications

“A scrupulously researched and thoughtful study of film hoardings and cutout figures in Chennai, South India, this book reveals deep interconnections between cinema and regional politics at work in modern South Asia. Preminda Jacob’s fine-grained analysis of these spectacular hand-painted ephemera makes

CELLULOID DEITIES

visible a ‘temporal’ network between cinematic spectacle and religious vision, charisma and public culture, and commerce and art, promising to spark debates in many disciplines interested in vision, visuality, and the global public sphere.”

Towering billboards featuring photorealistic portraits of popular cinema stars and political leaders dominated the cityscape of Chennai, in the south Indian state of Tamil Nadu, throughout the second half of the twentieth century. Studying the manufacture and reception of these billboards—known locally as banners and cutouts—within the context of the entwined histories of the cinema industry and political parties in Tamil Nadu, Preminda Jacob reveals the broader significance of these fragments of visual culture beyond their immediate function as pretty pieces of advertising. Jacob analyzes the juxtaposition of cinematic and political imagery in the extracinematic terrain of Chennai’s city streets and how this placement was pivotal to the elevation of regional celebrities to cult status. When interpreting these images and discussing their political and cultural resonance within the Tamil Nadu

CELLULOID DEITIES

—Ajay Sinha, Mount Holyoke College

the visual culture of cinema and politics in south india Preminda Jacob

community, Jacob draws upon multiple perspectives to give appropriate context to this fascinating form of visual media. Preminda Jacob is associate professor of art history and theory in the Department of Visual Arts at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County.

For orders and information please contact the publisher Lexington Books A division of Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc. 4501 Forbes Boulevard, Suite 200 Lanham, Maryland 20706 1-800-462-6420 www.lexingtonbooks.com

ISBN-13: 978-0-7391-1060-7 ISBN-10: 0-7391-1060-8 90000 9 780739 110607

Cover image provided by the author.

CelluloidDeitiesLITHO.indd 1

8/29/08 10:52:56 AM

Celluloid Deities

Celluloid Deities The Visual Culture of Cinema and Politics in South India

Preminda Jacob

LEXINGTON BOOKS A division of ROWMAN & LITTLEFIELD PUBLISHERS, INC. Lanham • Boulder • New York • Toronto • Plymouth, UK

LEXINGTON BOOKS A division of Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc. A wholly owned subsidiary of The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc. 4501 Forbes Boulevard, Suite 200 Lanham, MD 20706 Estover Road Plymouth PL6 7PY United Kingdom Copyright © 2009 by Lexington Books All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Jacob, Preminda, 1958– Celluloid deities : the visual culture of cinema and politics in South India / Preminda Jacob. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN-13: 978-0-7391-1060-7 (cloth : alk. paper) ISBN-10: 0-7391-1060-8 (cloth : alk. paper) ISBN-13: 978-0-7391-3130-5 (electronic) ISBN-10: 0-7391-3130-3 (electronic) 1. Commercial art—India—Madras. 2. Painted signs and signboards—India—Madras. 3. Graphic art—Social aspects—India—Madras. 4. Graphic art—Political aspects— India—Madras. 5. Art and society—India—Madras. I. Title. NC998.6.I52M335 2009 741.60954'82—dc22 2008027140 Printed in the United States of America

⬁™ The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48–1992.

For the banner artists of Chennai, in recognition of their artistry, humility, and dedication to their craft.



Contents

Acknowledgments

ix

Introduction

Of Painters, Politicians, and Film Stars

1

Chapter 1

Chennai’s Banner Industry: Artists and their Methods

19

Cooperation and Conflict in Chennai’s Visual Culture: Financiers, Artists, and their Audiences

53

Chapter 3

Tamil Cinema: History, Celebrities, Genres

81

Chapter 4

Cine Signs: The Semiotics of Chennai’s Cinema Banners

117

The Coalescence of Tamil Nationalism and the Cinema Industry

153

The Political Cutout: Celebrity and Cult in Tamil Nadu

185

Chapter 7

Darshan and Cinematic Spectatorship

223

Conclusion

The Future of Chennai’s Visual Culture

257

Bibliography

281

Index

291

About the Author

305

Chapter 2

Chapter 5 Chapter 6

vii



Acknowledgments

In the research and writing of this book, a process that has stretched over several years, I have relied on the guidance, criticism, and support rendered unstintingly by many I have encountered along the way. Research for the book was supported financially by several grants, including a J. Paul Getty Postdoctoral Fellowship in the History of Art and the Humanities, a Rockefeller Humanities Fellowship from the Center for Media, Culture and History at New York University, a Faculty Research Fellowship from the University of Maryland–Baltimore County, an Edward A. Dickson History of Art Fellowship, and an Edward A. Dickson Travel Grant from the Department of Art History at the University of California–Los Angeles. This project could not have been realized without the generous cooperation and hospitality of the banner artist community of Chennai. Individuals from this community educated me about their craft, spent several hours conversing with me about all aspects of their profession, tolerated my multiple visits to their studios, provided endless cups of tea—and asked for nothing in return. In particular, I am indebted to Mr. Mohan, Mr. J. P. Krishna, and Mr. Swami, artists and owners of banner companies in Chennai, for their insights on the historical, technical, and stylistic aspects of the banner and cutout medium. Randor Guy, journalist and historian, generously shared with me his wide-ranging knowledge of Tamil cinema. I am grateful as well to Mr. Mustafa, who worked with me to conduct interviews with the public at cinema theaters in the city. The contribution of my parents, Ashwathi Jacob and K. M. Jacob, who reside in Chennai, was pivotal to the success of my

ix

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Acknowledgments

field research. My project sparked their interest in this aspect of the city’s visual culture. They facilitated the initial contacts that set the research on course and acted as my liaison in the field when I returned to the United States by photographing unusual banners and cutouts and by collecting news clippings of relevant developments in Tamil cinema and politics. The formative influence for this book’s subject matter and theoretical orientation derives from the mentorship of Donald Preziosi, Bennetta JulesRosette, Teshome Gabriel, and Robert Brown. The intellectual guidance of these individuals was a turning point in my comprehension of the discipline of art history and my role as a historian of visual culture. Faye Ginsburg and Barbara Abrash, at the Center for Media, Culture and History at New York University, created a stimulating intellectual environment of seminars and speakers, introduced me to several scholars in the field, and made available numerous resources that helped to bring portions of my research for the book into the public sphere. Vidya Dehejia, Paul Hockings, Janet Kaplan, and Selvaraj Velayutham saw early promise in the work and, by publishing aspects of my research, provided me the opportunity to participate in the ongoing discourse on South Asian visual culture. I am grateful for their instructive criticisms and careful edits. Artists and scholars Colin Ives, Margot Lovejoy, Teja Ganti, and Jonathan Torgovnik share my interest and pleasure in the extra-cinematic sphere of Indian entertainment cinema. I thank them for making available to me their resources, skills and insights on this topic. Their enthusiasm bolstered my convictions about the relevance of my project. This time-consuming and challenging endeavor could not have been realized without the support and encouragement of my colleagues and administrators at the University of Maryland–Baltimore County. In particular, I would like to thank Franc Nunoo-Quarcoo, David Yager, Kathy O’Dell, Symmes Gardener, and Arthur Johnson. To the editors and staff at Lexington Books—Jason Hallman, for his willingness to give me a chance, and Joseph Parry, Melissa Wilks, and Patricia Stevenson for their patience and perseverance—I am eternally grateful. My daughter, Malayika, has grown up with this book; it has become as much a part of her life as it has been mine. I thank her for helping me to put the project in perspective and for teaching me to persevere. This book has multiple voices; that of the banner artists, film producers, and distributors I interviewed, the work of scholars I have quoted, my own voice, and that of my mentor, critic, and editor, Richard Cincotta. To this

Acknowledgments 

xi

singular individual I owe the greatest debt of gratitude. He has lived this book with me, challenged me to articulate my thoughts with greater clarity, taught me to formulate conceptual structures, and to draw connections between them. His involvement in the project has helped me develop and advance my intellectual orientation as a scholar of contemporary visual culture. *This book also has an accompanying website, with additional photos and video, at www.celluloiddeities.com



Introduction Of Painters, Politicians, and Film Stars

From the 1950s until around 2000, enormous, vibrantly colored, billboardsized advertisements turned the main streets of Chennai,1 the capital city of Tamil Nadu, India’s southernmost state, into a series of continuously changing spectacles. Handpainted on canvas and plywood board, the massive images featured on these banners and cutouts (as they are locally called) operated as an indispensable ingredient in the evolving network connecting the Tamil-language cinema industry of South India and the political parties of Tamil nationalism. Brokered by these two, interconnected groups of clients, banners and cutouts shaped and powerfully promoted the image of celebrity in contemporary Tamil culture. Film stars were depicted in stop-action combat poses and melodramatic love scenes, and portraits of politicians soared skyward like celestial beings. The numbers, sizes (from twelve to twenty-five meters [forty to eighty feet] high and three to thirty meters [ten to one hundred feet] long), and visually arresting qualities of these images garnered national and international attention. Banners and cutouts became synonymous with the city of Chennai. The new millennium, however, witnessed a dramatic shift in the culture of the Chennai streets as legislation and technology combined to rapidly dismantle the production of handpainted banners and cutouts. By 2004, they had been largely replaced by a new medium of mechanically reproduced images on vinyl. With the disappearance of the handpainted banner and cutout art form, the public culture of the streets of Chennai became more akin to

1

Figure I.1. Part of an elaborate program of street decorations for a political rally, these eighteen to thirty meter (seventy to one hundred feet) cutouts of politicians soared above a major intersection on Anna Salai. The personages featured here left to right are the chief minister of Tamil Nadu, M. Karunanidhi (also a popular screenwriter), the former prime minister of India, V. P. Singh, and the late chief minister of Andhra Pradesh, N. T. Rama Rao (also a popular film actor). Painted by Sakti Arts banner company. Anna Salai, September 1990.

Introduction 

3

the other large Indian commercial urban centers: Mumbai, Bangalore, Kolkata, and New Delhi. This loss, however, is not merely that of a unique, contemporary art practice. In projecting spectacular visual representations of cinematic and political celebrities throughout the public sphere, banners and cutouts crafted a charismatic personality and enabled the amplification of that charisma. And the cultivation of charismatic public personas was pivotal to the fusion of Tamil nationalism and the Tamil film industry, a fusion that has been vital to the formation of contemporary Tamil cultural identity, especially in the region around Chennai city. Other scholars have produced accounts of the coalescence between cinema and politics in Tamil Nadu that analyze the activities of persons who were directly involved in these two spheres of public life. This book is the first to examine the coalescence from the extra-cinematic sphere, that is, the public arena outside the cinema industry where knowledge and information about cinema circulates in a range of media formats from newspapers and magazines to posters and postcards and in a host of industries from fashion to music. This circulation of knowledge and information is vital to cinema’s defining role in contemporary society. In positioning this study in the extra-cinematic sphere, I call for a more sustained attention upon this arena from scholars of cinema, political science, and visual art. I argue that this is where the connections between cinema and politics becomes dense and multifaceted enough to truly impact each other and to produce shifts in political power such that Tamil Nadu witnessed in the elections of 1967. At that time the Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (Dravidian Progressive Federation), a coalition of non-Brahmin caste groups in Tamil Nadu, ousted from power the Tamil Nadu wing of the Congress party, whose membership was dominated by Brahmins, a group whose social hegemony had been entrenched in the region for centuries. This revolutionary change was effected through an electoral process that was democratic and bloodless. Politicians and film stars elsewhere in India and in other nations have attempted to exploit the charismatic impact of the star image toward sustaining the power of political personas but with much less success.

Arguing Art This account of the cinematic and political history of Tamil Nadu is narrowly filtered through the visual culture of the handpainted banner and cutout street advertisements. A substantial portion of the discussion in this book is, therefore, devoted to tracing the aesthetic antecedents of the banner and

4



Introduction

cutout art form, documenting the labor and economics entailed in the production of these objects, analyzing particularities of their style of visual representation, and accounting for their recent displacement by new printing technologies. Banners and cutouts were produced in workshop studios by teams of artists, apprentices, and carpenters. Once the artists completed their work, groups of laborers transported the objects at night from the open-air banner company studios to mount them on spindly towers of wooden scaffolding that they had erected along major streets, beside buildings, outside cinema theaters, and in other public spaces of the city. On site the images led a short life. Cinema advertisements were displayed for the duration of the film, usually between two weeks and three months, while those commissioned by political parties were on display for just two to five days, the duration of a political meeting or rally. Having served this advertising function, the object no longer had a social purpose and it was not preserved. When taken down, the plywood cutouts were turned into firewood, and the banners, painted on canvas, became tarpaulins that covered the huts of slum dwellers. The primary identity of banners and cutouts was that of advertisement. This commercial function of these objects, the fact that they were made to be ephemeral, and the collaborative nature of their production almost wholly precluded them from serious consideration by art historians. The discipline of art history conventionally requires an object that can be collected and preserved and, in the case of contemporary works, clearly attributed in its authorship to a particular individual. In any case, the close association of the banner medium with the culture of entertainment cinema and the overtly commercial or propagandistic content of the images raised doubts about their validity as an “art form.” Even from an insular, regional perspective of the contemporary Indian context, the graphic imagery and neon color schemes of banners and cutouts distanced them simultaneously from prevailing aesthetic notions about modernity as well as tradition. Despite the difficulty that the medium poses for academics the works of banner artists from Chennai and Mumbai,2 the two largest hubs of the Indian film industry, have gained a measure of international recognition.3 Several banner companies were commissioned by artists and curators to produce pieces for exhibitions at important venues, including the Tate Modern in London, the Venice Biennale, and the Victoria and Albert Museum.4 And while their growing exposure demonstrates a groundswell of interest in media culture among the avant-garde artistic and academic communities, scholarly discussions of the history, content, and contextual significance of the banner industry’s cinematic and political imagery remain virtually absent.5

Introduction 

5

Yet there is much to be learned about the visual content and context of Chennai’s hoardings. These images of political and cinematic celebrities were integrally bound to their urban environment both in terms of their stylistic properties as well as their function. Their ephemerality, for instance, continuously remade the urban landscape, allowing film advertisers to capture and recapture the attention of the millions who daily traverse Chennai’s main streets. And because the dimensions of cinema banners mimicked the screens in the city’s largest theaters, which were designed to accommodate films shot in 70mm Cinemascope, their images served to extend the spectatorship of cinema from the darkened, private spaces of the theater into the sunlit glare of the streets. On the streets, however, these fantastic illusions of beauty, wealth, and revenge, juxtaposed with the extreme deprivation of the urban poor, inadvertently exposed the decaying metropolis, the Manichean aspects of modernization. Likewise, the gigantic portraits of political celebrities derived their power from their dominant visual presence in colorful, semi-planned, pseudo-spontaneous processions and gatherings in the public, historic spaces of this postcolonial city and political hub of Tamil nationalism. In October 1990, for instance, Chennai was the site of a huge political rally celebrating the unveiling of a statue of the late M. G. Ramachandran (MGR), an enormously popular chief minister6 of Tamil Nadu and former film star who had died almost three years before. The main agenda of this rally, organized by the late leader’s political party—which had recently suffered defeat in state elections—was an attempt by MGR’s successor, Jayalalitha Jayaram, to display her popularity with the masses and thereby undermine the position of her chief rival to power in Tamil Nadu, then chief minister M. Karunanidhi. In the elections held later that year Karunanidhi’s party lost every seat in the state assembly with the exception of his own (chapter 5 analyzes the historical factors that led to this staggering defeat). Two days before the rally, busy crews of laborers began erecting scaffolding to support the approximately seventy-five cutouts designed and painted for display along Anna Salai, the main processional route for the rally. Scaffolding was also erected for a series of arches that punctuated the entire stretch of the ten-mile long road. Directly opposite the statue of MGR—which remained veiled behind a gold satin curtain—carpenters constructed a grand platform to seat Jayalalitha and other party dignitaries, which then was elaborately and expensively decorated with threaded curtains of flowers and fruit. On the morning of the rally thousands of vehicles converged on Chennai. Trucks and vans, bullock-drawn carts and buses began rolling into the center of the city, each packed beyond reasonable capacity with political supporters

Figure I.2. Banners and cutouts extended cinematic spectatorship and fantasy from the private space of the theater to the crowded chaos of city streets. Detail of a handpainted banner, thirty by three meters (one hundred by ten feet) by J. P. Krishna Arts banner company. Anna Salai, October 1990.

Introduction 

7

from the surrounding countryside. These visitors were welcomed by fullfigure portraits of Jayalalitha standing twenty meters in height, appearing to be stepping toward them and waving, a smile on her face and her hair tied in a loose knot, with strands blowing freely in an imaginary breeze. Other cutouts were double portraits displaying Jayalalitha with MGR. Often her body was turned toward MGR, her hands folded in reverence, highlighting her special relationship as his costar in cinema and his chosen successor in politics. Near the center of the rally, near MGR’s statue, street vendors emerged from the alleys bordering Anna Salai to stake out territories on sidewalks from which they would soon be hawking cool drinks and MGR film posters, postcards, and buttons. Poster images of party leaders appeared on every conceivable wall space. In the vicinity of the veiled statue, an array of loudspeakers blared popular songs from MGR films that momentarily drowned the cacophony of the traffic. By the time the politicians arrived to take their seats on the flower-bedecked stage, multitudes of their supporters had been waiting for at least four hours in the blazing sun. The following day’s newspaper coverage of the event suggested that it was well worth the wait. For some, the sight of the statue and the presence of their party’s general secretary, Jayalalitha, proved overwhelming. As their lorries passed before Jayalalitha, men broke coconuts and lighted camphor as acts of Hindu devotion.7 And some women in the procession wept at their first sight of MGR’s statue.8 Those unable to approach the stage and the statue gazed up instead at the towering cutouts of their leaders, which seemed to be looking down upon the scene. Several depicted Jayalalitha in her youth, clad in various brilliantly colored saris and appearing as she did in films of the 1970s. Others portrayed her in a white sari, bordered with red and black stripes—heralding her status as a politician. In such contexts, gigantic cutouts were transformed from mere publicity into signifiers of the awe-inspiring power of celebrity. As the preceding description suggests, Jayalalitha and MGR, both of whom became political leaders after successful careers in films, were deified by elements of their constituencies. What is more significant, however, is that such a perception of political leaders—as simultaneously film star and deity—is not an exception, but rather an ongoing and vital feature of Tamil Nadu politics since the late 1960s.

The Confluence of Cinema and Politics The collusion of political parties and filmmakers, and the emergence of political leaders from the film industry are not strictly unique to Tamil Nadu.

Figure I.3. Several hours before the ceremonial inauguration of MGR’s statue was scheduled to begin thousands of people had gathered at the venue. Anna Salai, October 1990.

Introduction 

9

Yet, as I argue in this book, the cinema-politics nexus in Tamil Nadu unquestionably represents the most intimate and vibrant connection of these two institutions in India—and probably the world. The industry of filmmaking and the organization of electoral politics in Chennai are historically entwined and remain barely separable. During the first half of the twentieth century, the widespread popularity of the cinematic medium in India forged and defined communities on national and regional levels. Since that time the diversity and influence of this medium has increased steadily so that, despite competition with television, video, and the Internet, cinema remains the most widespread and influential means of communication in India today. Like other regional cinemas, the story of Tamil films begins in the silent film industry in Mumbai, and then is taken up in Chennai after the soundtrack was introduced to filmmaking in the 1930s. From the 1940s the political machinery of the Dravidian movement evolved in tandem with the Tamil cinema industry gaining in strength and visibility when its leaders successfully harnessed the power of cinematic celebrities to promote their political ideology of anti-Brahmanism and Tamil nationalism and widen their constituency base in both urban and rural locations. Film stars’ fan clubs functioned simultaneously as the political cells of the party. And a majority of persons in the film industry, including relative unknowns such as cameramen or ticket collectors, regularly devoted part of their finances or energies or both to promoting their political party.9 Political battles and rivalries were waged not just through speeches delivered at meetings and soundbites in the media, but through verbal innuendoes and visual cues woven into film scripts. Yet structurally the films were essentially a mix of comedy, romance, melodrama, fights, and song and dance sequences. Therefore, a viewer uninformed about Tamil Nadu politics would have been unable to decode the political semiotics of these “entertainment” films. Such subtlety was necessary to evade censorship of the state’s bureaucracy, which was then dominated by Brahmins. The rich development and cinematic expression of Dravidian ideology produced an exceptional diffusion between the arenas of filmic illusion and political reality for the spectators of Tamil cinema. Such a social and political environment provided the ideal conditions for a series of individuals in Tamil Nadu, who were involved in both cinema and politics, to become installed as charismatic leaders of the state. All five politicians who have headed the Tamil Nadu government between 1967 and the present were or are intimately connected with the Tamil film industry.10 In return for the support they received from the film industry, leaders of the Dravidian movement consistently established generous awards and grants to encourage the

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Introduction

growth of cinema in Tamil Nadu. The Tamil film industry now competes with the Hindi film industry centered in Mumbai in size and influence. This functional and logical connection between cinema and politics in Tamil Nadu was visualized and reinforced by the use of identical advertising media, most prominently that of handpainted banners and cutouts. The connections were sometimes overt, as when MGR was portrayed as a film star and as a political leader in a single poster advertisement. At other times the connections were conveyed more subtly through the spatial juxtaposition of film and political cutouts or in the aesthetic similarities in the imagery of the two types of advertisements.

The Following Chapters This book is organized around two sets of research questions. The first set interrogates the status of banners and cutouts as art objects by focusing on their production and semiotics of the medium. To organize this aspect of the research, I ask: Who created these images? Under what conditions were they made? And according to which aesthetic criteria were they produced? The second set of questions considers the complex function of cinematic and political imagery in contemporary South Indian society by analyzing the social, political and religious context of these images. To organize this research and prepare its methodologies, I ask: How did the social and political context of these images produce particularities of their subject matter and artistic style? How did a local audience perceive them? And how are we, from an international or global perspective, to perceive and historicize them? The theoretical discussion and empirical reflections of the first two chapters are based on data (excerpts from interviews and observations) gathered during field research. This research was conducted between 1990 and 1991 in Chennai among the three major groups then participant in film and banner production in Chennai: the artists and owner-artists of banner companies; their clients—those who commissioned these works (film producers, film distributors, and, occasionally, theater owners, as well as publicity representatives of the major political parties in Tamil Nadu); and, finally, the audience for this advertising—men and women who observed banner and cutout imagery almost daily as they traversed the streets of Chennai. This information was updated with an additional series of follow-up interviews conducted in 2000, 2001, 2002, and 2004 with banner artists and the owner of a solvent printing company. The field experience enabled me to more fully understand the aesthetics of the banner and cutout media from the perspectives of the participants in this institution: the artists and designers, the fin-

Introduction 

11

anciers, and the people on the street to whom the images were directed. I gained an awareness of the dynamics of the artist-client relationship, and of the cultural environment and market conditions that shaped this type of artistic production, including the costs of labor and the levels of investment made in the acquisition of skills. Chapter 1 provides a descriptive account of the locational contexts and the process of production of banners and cutouts. These objects are almost entirely handmade, yet their dominant visual effect is that of mechanically reproduced images. Their production is labor-intensive, yet their presence in the urban landscape is startlingly ephemeral. In this chapter I document the techniques, processes, and labor involved in the creation of the advertisements, the “shed” or banner workshop environment and the relationship between the various individuals involved in the production process, including company owners, painters, apprentices, carpenters, and those who displayed the images. The advertisements were produced in small, family-run banner companies. In my interviews these artist-owners of the banner companies reflect on the skills that were necessary for success in this field, questions of style and the individuals who were most influential in shaping their profession. In light of this data I suggest that these artists had evolved a new iconography or a repertoire of stylistic criteria specifically for the representation of cinematic and political imagery. Multiple agendas of art, advertising, and propaganda shaped these images. Drawing on Howard Becker’s institutional theory of functional aesthetics to organize my analysis in chapter 2, I discuss the nexus of art and commerce that was essential to the production of banners and cutouts. Becker, a sociologist writing more than two decades ago, proposed that aesthetics should be studied as a dynamic set of social relationships and fluid economic processes, rather than as a group of static principles. Following from this injunction I compare the perceptions and assumptions about audience taste that determined the aesthetic decisions of both artists and their clients. I propose that in the case of these handpainted street advertisements aesthetics—true to the etymology of the word—is a matter of perception rather than a static set of values inherent in an object. Later in the book (in chapter 7) I develop this concept of perception as it pertains to the charismatic image. The subject matter of film banners is based on the narratives and celebrities of entertainment cinema. Chapter 3, therefore, begins with a historical survey of Indian cinema that includes a generic classification of India’s film output and its division into regional industries. The historical narrative of this chapter prioritizes Tamil film. I review the unique history of Tamil cinema’s symbiotic relationship with the state’s political evolution while also

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Introduction

indicating the stylistic shifts in filmmaking and major film celebrities of the decades from the 1940s through 2000. Banners and cutouts combine the power of the photographic image, magnified to gigantic proportions on mural-sized canvases, to evoke the memory (or promise) of filmic pleasure. In chapter 4 I theorize the production and social impact of the charismatic star image, the primary subject matter of banner and cutout imagery. The star image of Indian cinema is a hybrid with origins both in ancient, indigenous theories of theatrical performance and aesthetic appreciation, referred to by the Sanskrit term navarasa, or nine basic emotions, and in the Western tradition of melodrama that developed from the late eighteenth century onward. I show how these two traditions of theater, rasa and melodrama, structure the connotational dimensions of the cinematic image—poses, gestures, expressions, and compositional layouts. I conclude that cinema banners, like the product they advertise, acquire their popularity by simultaneously rupturing social conventions and reinforcing social stereotypes. My analysis of the context and semiotics of the political cutout begins with a survey of the modern political history of Tamil Nadu in chapter 5, focusing on the Dravidian movement. All of the major film personalities introduced in chapter 3 were associated with this revolutionary, regional political movement that marked a singular turning point in the political history of Tamil Nadu and was decisive in the formation of a contemporary regional cultural identity. The roots of the Dravidian movement, which dates to the early twentieth century, is entwined with the advent of modernity, the politics of the British colonial government, and the Indian independence movement. Since the mid-twentieth century the Dravidian movement has come to dominate electoral politics in Tamil Nadu. I acquaint readers with this unusual political history and analyze the success of the Dravidian movement by focusing on its leaders’ manipulation of cinema for political purposes. In chapter 6 I bring attention to the political cutout as a highly effective instrument of propaganda that remakes the film star leaders of political parties as deities. To gain insight on this process I examine points of intersection in theories on charismatic leadership and traditional Indian concepts of kingship. By melding these concepts with theories about media celebrities, particularly film stars, discussed in chapter 4, I reveal the strategies of Tamil Nadu’s political leaders in obfuscating boundaries between politics and screenplay to acquire a divine authority. The argument is developed through a close study of the rise to power of Jayalalitha Jayaram, the former chief minister of Tamil Nadu state and a highly controversial yet powerful force in Indian politics. My analysis focuses on the shifts in the cutout images of this

Introduction 

13

leader created for campaigns to gain political office and those created during her first tenure as chief minister. These images depict a trajectory in her charismatic status from that of a popular film celebrity to royalty to an omnipotent goddess of the Hindu pantheon. The perception of heroes is a culturally specific phenomenon. In Tamil Nadu the perception of heroism is fostered by a charismatic relation between political leaders and their constituents. This relation is expressed with a fervor that is akin to the bonds between stars and their fans and devotees to deities. In chapter 7 I discuss the overlapping spheres of cinema, politics, and religion from the perspective of the public in Tamil Nadu—in their roles as spectators of cinema, members of fan clubs, or followers of charismatic political leaders. To understand the passionate religiosity in the public’s reception of their film star leaders, I compare two particularly intense modes of gazing at cult images—the practice of spectatorship in the context of a cinema theater and the practice of darshan, or gazing upon an image of divinity in Hinduism. From a comparison of these two ways of seeing images I suggest that the viewing of Indian cinema encourages a dissolution of boundaries between the secular space of modern electronic media such as cinema and the religious space of puja, or worship. Such fluidity of perception, I argue, is essential to the realization of the charismatic power of the star or political image. In the concluding chapter I document the swift transitions in the art world of banner production effected by the advent of solvent printing technology. The discussion is based on interviews conducted in 2003 and 2004 with two artistowners of banner companies that I had previously interviewed in 1991 and 1999, and with an owner of a solvent printing company. I indicate that the change in medium accompanies new perceptions of modernity. One of the selling points of cinema has traditionally been its association with a modern outlook. The new solvent-printed vinyl banners make the handpainted banners mounted on casurina poles look quaint by comparison. The former are quicker and more efficient to produce, and although their prices are three times that of the handpainted banners, the technology is becoming more affordable everyday. To understand the present transition I look back to the aesthetic antecedents of the banner and cutout medium in the nineteenth century when new media of oleography, photography, and cinema produced dramatic changes in the structure, purpose and patronage of visual art forms in India.

Studying South Asian Visual Culture This study of the cinema and political advertisements in Chennai engages with an ongoing discourse on postcolonial visual culture in South Asia that

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Introduction

emerged as a potential field of scholarly inquiry in the early 1990s. In India, a circle of scholars based in New Delhi (Geeta Kapur, Ashish Rajadhyaksha, and Ravi Vasudevan, among others), working in the fields of contemporary art, film, and theater arts, turned their collective attention to popular modes of cultural production, using as their forum a publication, Journal of Arts and Ideas. In the United Kingdom, the publication of two texts in quick succession on the popular visual culture of the colonial period in India by Tapati Guha-Thakurta (1992) and Partha Mitter (1994) helped to legitimize this arena of research by providing historical depth to the subject. In the United States, Arjun Appadurai and Carol Beckenbridge, coeditors of the journal Public Culture, indexed contemporary Indian public culture as the hot new arena for research on South Asia. Appadurai then went on to produce an influential theoretical model for the analysis of public culture in contemporary South Asia arguing that the complexity and contradictions therein are shaped by the intersection of local and global forces.11 By the mid-1990s, South Asian popular, public, visual culture of the colonial and postcolonial period had the makings of a field of study with an aggregate of scholarly contributions that were published in books edited by Breckenridge (1995), Christopher Pinney and Rachel Dwyer (2001), and Sumathi Ramaswamy (2003). Much of this scholarship melds disciplinary methods from the social sciences with those from the humanities. Likewise, my study of popular street advertisements for the film industry and for political propaganda intersects with art history, anthropology, film studies, and political science. At the beginning of this essay, I alluded to the problem these objects posed for the discipline of art history. This problem was addressed, in part, by the emergence of the category studies in visual culture in the mid-1990s. The term “visual culture,” while retaining a contemporary resonance, updated an art historical methodology known as the social history of art that focused on the social, political and economic context of art objects. I will not rehearse here the debate within academia around the term visual culture and the two related categories that preceded it—studies in popular culture and cultural studies—as these have been discussed in depth elsewhere.12 I must note, however, that the rubric of visual culture has created a vital space within art history for the analysis of visual topics that dominate the social sphere, but which are consistently overlooked by art historians. The selection of the term visual culture to describe my conceptual orientation in this book references the interdisciplinary approach I employ to gain a unique perspective on a specific historical and social context from the visual signs it produces. Research for this book, based largely on ethnographic fieldwork, aligns it with the work of scholars who have analyzed South Asian media from an an-

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thropological perspective. Sara Dickey’s research, based primarily in the city of Madurai, Tamil Nadu, focuses on the culture of cinema in India. Her study of audience responses to entertainment cinema in Madurai (1993) as well that on the film star politicians of South India (1993) led to a study (2001) based on the fascinating phenomenon of film star fan clubs in Tamil Nadu. Christopher Pinney’s cogent semiotic analysis (1997) of popular photographic imagery produced in small, family-run photo studios in towns and cities in North India is particularly germane to my own research. His demonstration that the signifying functions of the photographic still image is deeply informed by cinema can be usefully extended to other South Asian contexts. Stephen Inglis (1999) has researched the popular printed images of deities, sometimes referred to as “calendar art.” While others such as Patricia Uberoi, Kajri Jain, and Philip Lutgendorf have also studied these objects, Inglis’s research (1999) impinges mostly closely upon my own work in that we reference the same South Indian artistic community. Inglis discusses the practice of the older generation of artists, who specialized in religious imagery, and I document the practice of the next generation, whose main business was the production of film advertisements. The extra-cinematic sphere that Pinney touches upon is explored in depth in the work of Rosie Thomas, Rachel Dwyer, and Divia Patel. Thomas’s analysis of the star image (1989) in which she unravels a complex web of data concerning the star’s cinematic roles and the extra-cinematic circulation of gossip about the star set a paradigm for research in this area. Dwyer and Patel’s study (2002) shows how the aesthetics of the Hindi cinema in Mumbai, as it is communicated through the costumes, sets, and the associated business of advertising (particularly the film posters screen-printed on paper), is reflected in, as well as informed by, the social values and lifestyles of the viewing public. Just about two decades ago scholarship on Indian cinema was very thin, with the exception of the classic reference, Indian Cinema (1963), by Erik Barnouw and S. Krishnaswamy. Now the scholarly publications on this subject are too numerous to cite here. Scholarship in this field has been much abetted and sustained by Ashish Rajadhyaksha and Paul Willemen’s comprehensive historical survey, Encyclopedia of Indian Cinema (1994). The Bombay-based Hindi film industry, however, receives the greatest attention from film scholars, including Sumita Chakravarty (1996), Madhava Prasad (1998), and Ravi Vasudevan (2000). The only book-length studies of Tamil cinema were those by Theodore Bhaskaran (1981 and 1996). The turn of the twenty-first century has seen an increase in scholarly analyses, mainly in the form of articles, of the South Indian cinema. But Tamil cinema’s relation to

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politics captured the attention of scholars in the early 1970s. Robert Hardgrave published a couple of provocative articles (1971 and 1973) and a booklength work (1975) on the subject. This was followed by Karthikesu Sivathamby’s seminal analysis (1981) of the manipulation of cinema by the DMK party. Sivathamby’s contribution was extended by M. S. S. Pandian’s frequently cited work on MGR in film and politics (1992), as also Dickey’s article (1993) on Tamil Nadu’s film star politicians. Research on Tamil nationalism conducted by historians and political scientists bolstered the studies of Tamil cinema mentioned above. For instance, Robert Hardgrave’s book on the Dravidian movement (1965) preceded his publications on the film star politicians. There followed two book-length studies (1969 and 1986) by Eugene Irschick in which he examined the historical circumstances from the 1910s through the 1930s that set the stage, so to speak, for the Dravidian movement. Christopher Baker’s analysis (1976) of these decades (the 1920s and 1930s) in Tamil Nadu’s political history provided an alternative perspective on the period. While Baker’s account is situated within the Brahmin community, Irschick’s description focused on events in the non-Brahmin communities. Marguerite Ross Barnett analyzed the political history of the state from 1940s through the 1960s, the period that witnessed the full expression of Tamil nationalism and the entrance of the Dravidian party into electoral politics. And Ingrid Widlund’s historical analysis (2000) brings the documentation of the Dravidian political movement to the end of the twentieth century. To recapitulate, the popular, public art medium of banners and cutouts served to visualize intersections between cinema and politics in South India. This book focuses on the particularly striking instance of Chennai, where cinema is a defining aspect of cultural and political identity. Combining theories and methods from the fields of art history and anthropology to analyze publicity images of film and political celebrities I show the power of the cinematic medium and the various ways it functions in this regional context. I explain why politicians in Tamil Nadu support cinema and why audiences are captivated by the medium.

Notes 1. The city was formerly known as Madras. The name change to Chennai, which took effect in 1997, is intended to reflect the precolonial history of the location. 2. In 1996, at the insistence of the Shiv Sena, an ethno-nationalist political party in Maharashtra state, the name was changed from Bombay to Mumbai, after an important Hindu temple in the city to the goddess Mumbadevi.

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3. The banner trade in Chennai in the 1990s, with ten major establishments, was significantly larger than that of Mumbai, which had just four banner companies. Figures for Chennai are from my field research; those for Mumbai are from Rachel Dwyer and Divia Patel, Cinema India: The Visual Culture of Hindi Film (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 2002), 177. 4. The Tate Modern show, “Century City: Art and Culture in the Modern Metropolis” (February 1–April 29, 2001), included handpainted hoardings from Mumbai. At the forty-ninth Venice Biennale (June 10–November 4, 2001), artist Johan Muyle created an installation piece with cutouts painted by banner artists in Chennai. At the Victoria and Albert Museum, “Cinema India: The Art of Bollywood,” (June 26–October 6, 2002), featured printed posters and painted hoardings from the Mumbai film industry. 5. Exceptions include R. Srivatsan, “Looking at Film Hoardings: Labor, Gender, Subjectivity and Everyday Life in India,” Journal of Public Culture 4, no. 1 (Fall 1991); Stephen Haggard, “Mass Media and the Visual Arts in Twentieth Century South Asia. Indian Film Posters 1947–Present,” Society for Visual Anthropology Newsletter 4, no. 2 (Fall 1988): 26–34; and the text by Dwyer and Patel, Cinema India, which includes a chapter on the art of Hindi film posters. 6. The chief minister of an Indian state is the leader of the unicameral state government and head of the state legislative assembly. 7. Indian Express, October 8, 1990, 1. 8. Aside: Magazine of Madras, October 31, 1990, 46. 9. Marguerite Ross Barnett, The Politics of Cultural Nationalism in South India (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1976), 222. See also Robert Hardgrave, “Politics and the Film in Tamil Nadu: The Stars and the D.M.K,” Asian Survey 13 (March 1973): 291. 10. The chief ministers of Tamil Nadu from 1967 to the present are as follows: Annadurai (1967–1969)—screenwriter; Karunanidhi (1970–1976)—screenwriter; MGR (1977–1987)—film actor; Janaki (1988–1989)—film actress and MGR’s wife; Karunanidhi (1989–1990); Jayalalitha (1991–1996)—film actress; Karunanidhi (1997–2001); Jayalalitha (2001–2005); Karunanidhi (2006–present). 11. Arjun Appadurai, Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization (Minneaplois: University of Minnesota Press, 1996). 12. For an overview of the scholarly scope and political resonance of the term visual culture within art history, see “Visual Culture Questionnaire: Responses,” October 77 (1996), 25–96.

C H A P T E R

O N E



Chennai’s Banner Industry: Artists and their Methods

I arrived in Chennai in the winter of 1990, while the city was preparing for a massive political rally of the DMK Party. On my first day in the city I was caught in a traffic snarl as I attempted to pass through the center of the political preparations for the rally. Chief among the decorations for the event was an enormous image depicting the head and shoulders of M. Karunanidhi, then chief minister of Tamil Nadu, painted on a square banner, approximately twenty-one meters (seventy feet) high, that had been erected earlier that day in front of the city’s convention center, the Tiruvalluvar Kottam. The convention center, completed in 1976, during Karunanidhi’s first tenure as chief minister, bears the name of the Tamil poet-saint Tiruvalluvar of the second century CE. Outside the center stands a cement replica of the well-known wooden temple chariot in Karunanidhi’s hometown of Thiruvarur. At least thirty meters (around one hundred feet) tall and elaborately painted, the faux chariot is the tallest structure in the vicinity. As the car in which I was traveling passed Tiruvalluvar Kottam, I glimpsed the freshly painted political banner set against the backdrop of the convention center’s tropical gardens, and second in size only to the massive chariot. The banner was painted, edge to edge, with Karunanidhi’s visage: a gigantic, smiling, rosy-cheeked face, the chief minister’s trademark sunglasses and his neatly center-parted curly black hair. It was an impressive political banner. And I, of course, hoped to photograph it for my research collection. But rather than brave the traffic and the huge crowds of pedestrians gathering for the rally, I decided to return the

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next day to take the photograph. When I returned to the site the next morning, however, I found that the image was gone, totally dismantled at daybreak. It was strangely disorienting that such a large and prominent object could have been handpainted, erected for a single day, and then have disappeared without a trace. Impermanence, however, was a distinguishing characteristic of banner and cutout images and their production system. Their effectiveness as advertisements derived, in part, from their ability to almost magically materialize on the urban landscape, and then vanish from it overnight. This ephemerality, along with their ubiquity, led one to assume that banners and cutouts were mechanically reproduced. And this impression was reinforced by their resemblance to the vast quantities of smaller lithographs and screenprinted posters—the images of deities, film posters, and calendar pictures— that are pasted across urban India and hang on the walls and in the windows of the shops and homes of its residents. Banners and cutouts, however, were not mass-produced. Designed specifically for their location, painted by teams of skilled artists and erected in sections by professional installers, these immense works have gradually gained recognition as a contemporary Indian artform. As I noted in the introductory chapter, since the mid-1990s the art world has focused some attention on this element of visual culture spawned by Indian entertainment cinema. The subject of museum shows, banners, and cutouts are exhibited as another dimension of the already rich cultural landscape of India. Housed in museum spaces and viewed singly or miniaturized in photographic representations, it is not difficult to appreciate the artistic expression and achievement of these productions. Separated from their commercial and propagandistic functions, so integral to local film and politics, banners can be appreciated, or critiqued, much like other forms of public mural art in metropolitan locations around the world. It is not my purpose, however, to argue over where these objects should be categorically placed or not placed along art history’s traditional scale of artistic qualities. I do not separate these works’ aesthetics from their institutional and functional contexts. Rather, the aesthetic properties of these images, I argue, directly evolved from the processes of their commercial production and reception. Both the theoretical discussion and empirical reflections (excerpts from interviews and commentary) in this and the following chapter are therefore directed toward understanding the aesthetics of the banner and cutout media from the perspectives of the participants in this institution: the artists and designers, the financiers and the people on the street to whom the images were

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directed. It is their perceptions and values that were symbiotically linked to the works’ function as advertisements, to the demand for these works, and to the livelihood of the artists employed in Chennai’s banner industry. This chapter opens with a descriptive account of the locational contexts and the process of production of banners. Artists and banner company managers reflect on questions of style and the qualities that were necessary to be successful in this field. A discussion of artistic and communal identities in the banner profession then follows. I conclude the chapter with a brief narrative on the aesthetic antecedents of the banner medium and the individuals who influenced its evolution. Much of the following discussion is based on data gathered during field research conducted the early 1990s. Unless otherwise noted, quotations attributed to artists and audience members, as well as those from two of the financiers (C. Murugesan and T. R. Balu), are translations from Tamil. Words and phrases within quotation marks denote English terms interjected by an interviewee in an otherwise Tamil dialogue. Italicized words denote Tamil words that are either difficult to precisely translate into English or are of particular significance.1

The Image Producers For approximately two decades, from the 1980s to 2000, ten small and specialized family-owned businesses in Chennai handled about 90 percent of the contracts for painted banners and cutouts commissioned by film producers, film distributors and theater owners and publicity representatives from Tamil Nadu’s political parities. These were Swami Arts, Kala Arts, Mohan Arts, Sai Arts, Sakti Arts, Jayaram Arts, Chandran Arts, Jaya Arts, J. P. Krishna Arts, and Art Land. The first six of these concerns located their studios around Anna Salai, one of Chennai’s commercial thoroughfares and the road along which stood the city’s largest banner and cutout advertisements. Three of the other firms resided in the Kodambakkam area, the hub of the Tamil film world.2 Banner and cutout production in Chennai was a highly competitive business. In the view of the owner of Chandran Arts, one of the larger banner companies, three companies produce work of consistently high quality. These three companies share 75 percent of the banner publicity business in the city. They are busy all year round with perhaps just two to three days here and there when there is no work. The remaining seven companies only secure banner contracts now and then, so they cannot employ the best artists because they do not consistently have work for them.

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Chennai’s banner company owners and those professionals in their employ (artists, letter painters, and carpenters) belonged to the city’s bannerartist union, the Ovium Munnetra Sangam (Progressive Artists’ Association, comprising about 150 members). The Sangam was established to curtail the proliferation of small banner companies in the city. Members agreed that start-up banner companies in Chennai would need union approval. And furthermore, that if an individual were to start up a banner business without union approval, no guild artists or support personnel would work for him. Artists on full-time or part-time contract—known as “job artists”—were frequently hired to complete projects. Chennai’s banner companies employed from three job artists in the smallest businesses to fifteen in the largest (owners of Mohan Arts and Sakti Arts both claimed to have employed as many as twenty artists at various times in their careers). Company owners were often practicing artists themselves. And each company maintained from three to eight young male apprentices. Each company contracted a number of additional services. Carpenters, lettering artists—specializing in painting text on banners and cutouts—and construction laborers involved in banner installations on the street and on theater grounds and buildings worked on an intermittent basis, or rotated on contract through several companies. All artists in this business were males. When asked why this was, the owner of Swami Arts offered that “women have never worked in this business. This is ‘hard work’; not work that one can do sitting down with a table and chair and some paints. Here one must climb up and down furniture that is piled ten feet high.” Whether this perception is valid or not, it would be highly unusual to find women in Tamil Nadu at work in professions where they labor throughout the night outside of their own homes, as banner artists often did to complete a commission on deadline. Production Spaces Each of Chennai’s banner companies, regardless of its relative prosperity, adhered to an almost identical workspace paradigm. Each company maintained three distinct work environments: an office, the artists’ shed, and an exterior workspace separated from the street by a wall or fence. Guests were received in the cramped office space, which was generally constructed of brick or cement. Inside, the office was dimly lit and sparsely furnished—a table or desk, several chairs, and a table fan were usual. In some, I saw a shelf for the display of trophies awarded for successful projects.3 The artists’ “shed” (or studio) tended to be spacious. Those I visited accommodated a few large pieces of furniture, usually solid wooden tables. And

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these served a double purpose: as easels, or as ladders onto which artists climbed when painting a large work. The roof, approximately nine meters high (thirty feet), was thatched with palmyra leaves and recycled banners. During the monsoon months, from November through February—the months when films are newly released, and the busiest time of the year for banner artists4—the rain invariably trickled through the thatch, creating puddles on the hardpacked dirt floors of the studio. In Chennai, standing water becomes a breeding place for mosquitoes. And at this time of year, the studios were infested with them. In my visits to the studios, artists worked near the entrance where the natural light was brightest. Banners were usually painted during daylight hours, and thus without need for elaborate artificial lighting in the studio. Further inside, the apprentices mixed large cans of primers and paints and cleaned brushes and palettes. In the darkest corners of the thatched area were stored

Figure 1.1. A view of the Mohan Arts banner studio. Artists and apprentices are at work on a large commission of banners and cutouts for the film Meeshaikkaran. In the foreground the carpenter has just completed chiseling one section of a twelve-meter (forty feet) high cutout. In the background (center) an apprentice is applying the “base coat” of color to banner images that he and other apprentices had traced onto the canvas the previous night using a slide projector. To his left, a senior artist is applying the “final coat” for a figure on a banner that is identical in size and composition to the one visible in this photograph. Mohan Arts banner company, Gopalapuram (a neighborhood adjacent to Anna Salai). November 1990.

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aging banners and cutouts, their faded figures provided an eerie backdrop for the work that was going on. A third workspace was open to the sky, its breeze and sunshine, and kept free of stored materials and other obstructions. Here apprentices stretched, cut and primed enormous canvases and huge sheets of plywood, and they left partially finished and finished banners and cutouts out in the sunshine to dry. Beginning the Production Process Ideally, a banner company had a week to ten days to complete a sizable order of approximately ten banners, each six by three meters (twenty by ten feet), and two or three cutouts, each twelve meters (forty feet) high. Occasionally a client required a smaller order to be completed in one day or overnight. In such instances, artists cut several stages from the production process, resulting in a lower quality product (in the opinion of the artists interviewed). The imagery on banner and cutout advertisements was rooted in two distinct traditions of art practice: the culture of still photography and the culture of drawing and painting. Banner artists emphasized the importance of a good still photograph that followed the conventions of “photogenia,” or the embellishment of the image through “techniques of lighting, exposure, and printing.”5 In the Tamil film industry, the practice of still photography for films is a profession in its own right. Photographic stills (prints made from a single frame of the subject film)— usually 10" ⫻ 8" or 12" ⫻ 10" exposures—were foundational to the banner production process. With each film-advertising commission, the banner company received an album of promotional stills. Then from these, the lead artist—usually the company owner—chose a still and drafted one or more composition layouts for the financier’s approval. The raw stills did not always produce a simple template for the production process. To create an effective layout, the lead artist often mixed and rematched the images within his catalog of film stills. The owner of Chandran Arts explained that “often the client will want us to use a particular still of a face, but the body may not be shown in that photo. So, we will have to attach a body to that face.” And artists maintained their own visual criteria for selection, looking for high contrasts of light and shadow, discarding stills with “flat lighting” and those that lacked “depth”—for depth and contrast were essential qualities associated with professionalism in banner painting. If a client was willing to invest his time and enthusiasm, lead artists were amenable to negotiating layouts, and even suggesting possible compositions that could be photographed at the film studio specifically for a banner layout.

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Once a layout was agreed upon, and the lead artist had in hand the master still—the photograph or composite of the image that would appear as the cutout or banner—artists then set about producing their own set of photographic transparencies for projecting salient features of the image onto canvas and plywood. Company apprentices generally performed the initial tasks in this process. Using white poster paint for the highlights and black for the shadows, apprentices outlined, on a copy of the master still, the most visibly apparent areas of reflected light and shadow. Acting on the instructions of the lead artist, an apprentice delineated the major lines of the figure and accentuated dramatic details—beads of sweat or blood, lines of expression on a face, or folds of clothing. The lead artist then penciled several horizontal and vertical lines across the highlighted photograph with his ruler to divide this image into sections. A photographer turned each of these sections into a master photo negative 2" ⫻ 3" in size. And each ultimately became a banner panel or a piece of a cutout. Each of these sections were later painted individually in the studio, transported and then fitted into the final production on the street. The number of sections of an image depended, of course, on the required degree of enlargement. For example, a 10'' ⫻ 8'' photograph of a standing figure, commissioned to be transformed into a cutout twelve meters (forty feet) in height, was most often divided horizontally into four sections. Photo negatives were made of each section and then mounted as slide transparencies. The transparency was then projected onto the primed canvas or plywood surface. The projections were enlarged to the required size by adjusting the distance between the slide projector and the canvas. Panels (and thus the projections on them) were generally not larger than three by three meters (ten by ten feet). With the projector and canvas set in place, apprentices rapidly traced the projected outline onto the canvas using a pencil. On occasion, a particular image was repeated on several banners. If so, apprentices placed successive banners into position, tracing one after the other, without repositioning the projector. This process of using a projector to enlarge and copy images appeared virtually the same in all the companies that I visited in Chennai. Artists informed me, however, that banner artists in other Indian cities, including in Mumbai, had employed a much more labor intensive and time-consuming method, which they termed the “graph method,” to enlarge and transfer photographic images onto pieces of canvas.6 In the graph method both the film still and the banner surface were divided into squares. Artists then laboriously copied the details of each square in the photograph onto the corresponding square on the banner. While a Mumbai artist had to spend two or

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three days to complete painting three figures enlarged to an area of nine square meters (one hundred square feet), the Chennai banner artists, by using a slide projector, could complete the task, and repeat it in a single day. Interviewees credited banner artist K. Madhavan, a master artist of the first generation of banner painters in Tamil Nadu, for introducing this method. I was unable to determine how Madhavan discovered this technique. There is evidence, not always widely acknowledged, however, that artists from the fine art tradition have employed this or a similar method when working with photographs to create their paintings.7 Recent research has established that Thomas Eakins, the American realist painter of the late nineteenth century, experimented with the method in secret because of the stigma attached to “copying” in fine art. In the 1960s Andy Warhol, a key artist of the pop art movement in America, also copied images from slide projections to create his paintings. Unlike Eakins, however, Warhol publicized the method because the intent of his art was to provoke discourse on the status of copies in contemporary society and their relationship to the original object. The slide projector, besides hastening the production process—always an important consideration for the banner trade—also aided banner artists in capturing individual photographic “likeness” and creating illusionary “depth.” But this method of transferring photographic stills onto canvas did not inhibit artists from manipulating and idealizing their representations of their celebrity subjects. And in the choice and application of colors, I observed that artists commonly disregarded the colors and qualities of the photograph entirely. Painting From start to completion, five successive coats of primer and paint were applied to the canvas or plywood surfaces. Apprentices first primed the gada— unbleached cotton, broken white in color, a cheap material used variously for packaging, lining curtains, and painting banners—with a “water-coat,” a loose mixture of chalk powder and vajram, a reddish-colored glue produced from animal bones, fiercely heated and mixed with water to form a slurry. To make the banner smooth, stiffer, and less porous, the surface was primed a second time with an “oil coat,” white enamel paint diluted with linseed oil. Only then were images projected on them—using the slide projector and photo negatives—and traced onto these prepared surfaces. Following closely the instructions of the lead artist, apprentices then applied a “base coat” of solid colors to different sections of the canvas. At this stage senior artists began their part of the work. The collaborative process ended as artists were each assigned to complete a particular banner

Figure 1.2. Handpainted banners were based on close renditions of film stills. At all stages of the process artists and apprentices held the photograph in one hand while wielding the paintbrush with the other. Artist-owner of Sai Arts banner company, Mr. Vedachellam, paints the “final coat” on a cutout portrait of Hindi film actor, Amitabh Bachchan, for the film Hum (We, 1991) starring Bachchan and the Tamil film star, Rajnikanth. Sai Arts banner company, Gopalapuram (a neighborhood adjacent to Anna Salai), January 1991.

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or cutout. With the “first coat,” the senior artist roughly demarcated areas of light and shade. With the application of the next coat, referred to as the “final coat,” he completed the work by delineating finer nuances of light, shade, and color. Because banners and cutouts were so large, artists worked on small sections at a time. Before painting a section, an artist ordered apprentices to lightly rub the area with a rag dipped in linseed oil. This removed dust that tended to settle on the banner surface. It also facilitated the application of fresh paint, and helped it bind more readily to the underlying coats. Both artists and apprentices painted with relatively large brushes—usually those used for applying paint to exterior walls, varying between four and ten centimeters (about one and a half to four inches) in width. According to the owner of Swami Arts, the practice of working with these “hard and flat” brushes, even using them on details, was unique to the banner artists of Chennai. He explained: In banners the details themselves are large areas. The surface of a single eye could be about one square foot. If you use a four-inch brush you can fill that area with a single stroke. But if you use a long-handled brush, as they do in Bombay, you would have to apply about ten strokes to correctly fill the same area. . . . Work that is done with a lot of “strain” does not compare well with work that is done in a “rough” manner when seen from a distance. For instance, cloth will look like a “tin sheet,” the folds will not look “real.”

Acquisition of Skills Every banner artist that I interviewed, with one exception, had acquired his skills by serving as a banner company apprentice. The owner of Swami Arts described his years as an apprentice: After I finished school, my family sent me to Madras to find work with a banner company. I joined a company as an apprentice, and I cleaned brushes and did other chores. I gradually received opportunities to paint banners when the artists were eating lunch. They would tell me to finish painting a hand, the hair, or a dress on a figure. As for me, I forgot all about lunch and made the most of such moments. Because the artists did not work at night, they would have me paint the portions that were left unfinished. I did not care whether it was night or morning. I only wanted to get a chance to paint. Each night I completed the parts they assigned and the next morning the artists returned and made corrections to my work. In this way I gradually developed my own skills.

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The acquisition of artistic skills and knowledge through a sequence of watching, then assisting with the initial stages of the process or working on the marginal sections of the image and, finally, by perfectly emulating the teacher’s technique, gaining permission to work independently, is typical of a traditional artistic training in a range of visual art forms.8 Artists I spoke with likened this method of training to gurukulam, a traditional system of education whereby students lived with and served their teacher while learning. Several banner artists contrasted their art education with the four-year artschool experience of fine artists, who, upon completing their degrees, usually catered to an elite gallery audience or were employed by advertising corporations. For banner artists, the time taken to qualify varied according to an individual’s talent and his desire to learn, there being no formal system of training. According to the owner of Mohan Arts, a person is “under training until everyone likes and appreciates his work. When this happens he becomes an artist.” Having graduated into the position and status of banner artist, an individual was free to adapt or change the methods he had learned—but within limits, and those limits were set by the company’s need to win contracts and please their patrons. During apprenticeship, trainees learned each of the aspects of banner production. At the end of their training, apprentices chose to specialize in either imagery or text, depending on their skills, preferences, and the current demand for the job within the companies. Installation On the night before the film was released (or the political rally scheduled), installation crews arrived at the studios. Under the supervision of the owner or his assistants, the crews loaded the sections of finished banners and cutouts onto hand-drawn or bullock-drawn carts. Once loaded, they transported the works to their respective theater or street destinations for installation, usually after midnight—when roads are relatively clear of automobile traffic. At their specified locations, the laborers removed old banners and cutouts from their scaffolding. Because most film banners and cutouts were cut roughly to standard dimensions, it was usually unnecessary to build new scaffolding for every project, and the new works were put up where the old ones were taken down. Only when a cutout or banner of unusual proportions had to be installed, or when political works were erected in areas normally devoid of such advertisements, then crews were contracted to construct a new scaffolding of casuarinas—a cheap hardwood from which long poles are available in large quantities. New scaffolding was typically constructed in daylight hours, prior to the midnight installation of the works.

Figure 1.3. A sideview of a cutout scaffolding approximately fifteen meters (fifty feet) in height. The installation of large cutouts was a labor-intensive activity that required the erection of an elaborate framework of casurina poles to support an average of six to ten sections of the plywood cutout. Despite the relatively sturdy construction, stormy weather occasionally dismantled these objects, causing injury to pedestrians and prompting the city corporation to limit the height of film cutouts to twelve meters (forty feet). Cutouts of politicians, however, such as this one of Karunanidhi (then chief minister of Tamil Nadu), were exempt as they remained on display for just a few days. The DMK headquarters, Anna Salai. September 1990.

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The process of attaching the various sections of a giant cutout to its frame—an activity conducted in semi-darkness—was a dangerous and unenviable task. The owner of Sakti Arts told me that the men who erect the banners and cutouts have the most difficult job. They must climb to great heights to do their work. They are experts. They have been working like this for the past twenty years. We do the painting, but the people who install our work are the ones who bring us our fame. It takes two days of labor to erect the framework for a ninety-foot high cutout whereas the painting itself can be completed in just a single day.

The Price of Labor Common to other cultural production in the Indian context, the visual culture of banners and cutouts in Chennai was sustained by the availability of inexpensive labor from skilled professionals. As the description of the production process suggests, banner painting was a labor-intensive endeavor. And it required specialized skills. Yet the monetary compensation for painting banners was extremely low because banner painting was essentially piecework.9 Artists were paid by the square foot of painted product. In 1991 job artists received Rs 1 (one Indian rupee, roughly equivalent to US $0.07 at the time)10 for every square foot of work completed. If he worked quickly, an artist could finish two or even three banners, each six by three meters (twenty by ten feet) in a day. That is, he could earn Rs 400 to Rs 600 (US $27 to US $40) daily, if there were a contract. In 1991 a letter artist was paid either Rs 20 (US $1.25) for each banner or 50 paise (one-half rupee) per square foot of work. About a decade after my first interviews and analysis, in 2002, the banner artists’ going rate had increased to Rs 1.50 per square foot of painting (a 50 percent increase). In 2002 letter artists earned Rs 50 for one banner. Meanwhile the rupee had shrunk to about one-third of its exchange value with the U.S. dollar. I noted that to compensate their earnings artists often accepted portrait commissions or produced advertisements for commercial products other than cinema. Moreover, the sons of some banner company owners, especially those owners who had more than one male heir, had shifted professions into that of still photography or corporate advertising. Surprisingly, though they took pride in their artistic abilities, none of the artists I interviewed complained about their meager salaries. This, despite the fact that a majority of their clients were upwardly mobile political or social celebrities, whereas the banner artists themselves could, at best, aspire only to a lower income bracket.

Figure 1.4. During the early hours of the morning, while the city slept, laborers transported banners and cutouts from the banner studio to install them in public spaces of the city. In the orange glow of a few night lamps laborers resembled ants clambering up and down the dizzying heights of rickety scaffolding while they hauled into position the dismembered parts of a cutout advertisement for Thai Pusam. Shanti Theater, Anna Salai, January 1991.

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Aspects of Style Among the community of banner artists, style mattered—it formed identity and promoted discussion. Artists working in this profession were not bound by a particular set of aesthetic criteria. Yet, from my conversations with artists, I sifted at least five stylistic considerations that they cited repeatedly when evaluating the achievements of their peers or explaining the acquisition of skills in the banner profession. The most highly prized of these aesthetic criteria included an individualized “brushstroke” and striking and appropriate “color schemes.” Artists also emphasized the need to create convincing illusions of “depth,” achieve a close “likeness” or resemblance to the celebrity and devise innovative “layouts” or compositions, including the effective use of three-dimensional projections in papier-mâché or plywood, and other special effects. Artists identified other artists’ works, whether in the studio or on the street, by noting distinguishing characteristics of their brushstrokes that I, at first, was unable to differentiate. Several months into my fieldwork, after meeting artists and cataloguing their work on the street, I began to detect subtle variations between the painting of the younger generation of artists, who dominated some of the newer companies, and the work of those more senior artists. The younger generation of banner artists seemed to favor wider brushes and thicker strokes. They applied broad, parallel strokes of paint without blending the colors—a method referred to as “rough style.” One of the most sought-after banner painters in the Chennai, Selvam, a job artist employed both by Mohan Arts and J. P. Krishna Arts, was reputed in this community for his “rough style” brushstrokes. The choice and application of vivid, undiluted fields of color was arguably the most creative and personalized aspect of banner painting. Except for a general philosophy that violent themes and “crime subjects” should be painted in “hot colors” (toward the red side of the spectrum) and romantic subjects merited “cool colors” (toward the blue side), artists appeared to have a good measure of freedom in their color choices.11 The owner of Swami Arts banner company indicated that while he was well aware of the symbolic meanings associated with various colors in the traditional arts,12 his own use of color had developed over the years in a trial and error method, there being no rules for color selection in banner art. His choice of a particular color combination and mode of application was guided by what he felt would be most effective in a particular image. Besides, he noted, the range of colors available to contemporary artists was much wider than the palette used in the traditional arts.

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Figure 1.5. Balanced precariously on a stack of tables the artist Selvam paints a section of the twelve-meter (forty feet) square cutout for Meeshaikkaran. Because of the startling difference in scale between the human body and the painted image the production process of banners and cutouts was often visually more compelling than viewing the advertisements in their street location. Mohan Arts banner company, November 1990.

Artists’ palettes typically included a mixture of powder colors and enamels. During the months of the rainy monsoon, quick-drying enamels were brushed on as a base coat. Powders, the cheaper alternative, took too long to dry in the wet weather—often two to three days. When the weather permitted, however, most artists preferred using powders. When mixed with linseed oil, powder colors were easier to blend with the underlying coat than fastdrying enamel paint. I noted that banner painters regularly applied a wide range of colors on their paintings—red, Prussian blue, emerald green, chrome yellow, ochre, vermilion, burnt sienna, burnt umber, white, black, and fluorescent orange. The colors displayed on the master photographic still, artists told me, were irrelevant. Banner artists painted for the final effect. “A human eye captured in a photograph is usually a shade of sepia,” the owner of Swami Arts related, “but when we paint that eye on a banner we use many colors—greens, blues, violets—so that there is a ‘full color effect’ when it is viewed from a distance.” The ability to control this “color effect” distinguished a master artist from his peers. This explained why artists did not collaborate in their work. For

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example, while visiting the Mohan Arts studio during the initial stages of my fieldwork, I was surprised to note that the owner had assigned two artists to paint six identical banners. Instead of separating specialized tasks (like an assembly line), which might have hastened the process to completion, each artist, by himself, completed three banners in succession. Artists later clarified that this avoided inconsistency in style, especially in the application of colors and the brushstroke that was unique to individual artists. Manipulation of the “color effect” helped artists attain another desired objective—the illusion of “depth” or three-dimensionality to their images. This stylistic feature—variously termed within art historical discourse as naturalism, photographic realism, mimesis, or trompe l’oeil—was well-matched to the medium of banner advertisements. Trompe l’oeil is most convincing when images are viewed in passing by pedestrians hurrying to their destinations or by drivers and passengers in swiftly moving vehicles. Besides, the trompe l’oeil style democratically positions all viewers as critics enabling them to assess for themselves the success of the illusionism. And since the public’s appreciation of the banner painting was proportionate to the illusionism of the image, banner artists spent much of their training honing this aspect of their skill set. Their varying success in this regard distinguished the experienced artists from novices or mediocre peers. Achieving a close “likeness” (of celebrities) was not only a challenging aesthetic consideration for artists, it also served a key advertising function of the banner and cutout medium, which was to familiarize the public with the visages of stars and political leaders. From the point of view of the public, the thrill of recognizing the celebrity represented in the advertisement was enhanced by the awareness that the resemblance was a product of artistic skill rather than mechanical reproduction. Artists and their patrons interpreted “likeness” as both the essential physical features of the star or leader and the peculiar personality traits that distinguished the individual. Because popular stars are typecast in formulaic roles, characteristic gestures, postures, or other body language become part of the celebrity’s charisma. Banner artists were charged with the task of capturing this distinctive aura in order to produce an iconic image that would trigger a fevered, charismatic response from fans and followers. In the process of painting these portraits artists enhanced the posed and retouched photographic image further by removing blemishes and increasing the muscular strength and height of the male body. And, by lightening the skin color, artists strove to bring the portraits of both the film stars and political figures closer to a “national” ideal of beauty propagated by Indian cinema: that of the fair-skinned northerner. Such a tendency toward idealization

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is an indispensable dimension of portraiture in the Indian visual art tradition. For example, anthropologist Christopher Pinney found that whereas, in a Western context, photography was put in the service of “capturing or recording reality” or “fixing the fleeting moment,” the aim of studio portrait photography in the Indian context was to create a heightened, idealized view of reality.13 And while Europeans manipulated and retouched photographs, in the Indian case the over-painting was extremely thick, obscuring details of the photograph altogether. Even in the contemporary period Indian clients regularly request the photographer to include painted accoutrements, such as turbans or garlands, that were not present in the original photograph. The process of over-painting and embellishing studio photographs and that of enlarging and idealizing the film still in the banner and cutout medium can be viewed as a continuum. The “layout” or compositions of banners often included portraits of several individuals (or of the same individual) in bust, half-length, or full-length

Figure 1.6. Elaborate banner advertisements, such as this one for Samsara Sangeetham by the popular director T. Rajendar, noted for his spectacular sets, often included plywood and/or papier mâché attachments. The perspectival realism of the painted scenes was literalized by such projections, intensifying the illusion of threedimensionality. The lettering was decorated with “dollars,” the term banner artists used for the small plastic disks, the size of a quarter, suspended on small nails attached to the plywood cutout. Upon catching the sunlight and breeze the disks produced a scintillating shimmer. Anna Salai. July 1989.

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representations. Artists employed a range of techniques to give prominence to a particular image or section of the composition. Banners that were thirty meters (one hundred feet) in length had two or three such areas of emphases since they were to be viewed sequentially. Artists directed attention to specific aspects of the composition by enlarging the size of the image in relation to those juxtaposed with it, by using a brighter palette for particular figures or by decorating sections of the banner with dollars—two-centimeter (oneinch) colored plastic disks that, from a distance, resembled sequins. In the more expensive banner projects, the dominant images literally popped out of the banner because they were painted on cutouts that were attached to the banner surface. This allowed artists to project images to different levels, varying their prominence. When two or more images were to command equal attention artists deployed more than one of these strategies to produce a varied and interesting composition. For example, the banner advertisement for the film Agni Alaigal (Waves of Fire, 1991) was dominated by the brooding face and bloodshot eyes of the hero. The heroine’s image, though represented in a full figure dance pose, was only half the size of the hero’s face and was positioned along the upper right margin of the banner. By covering the heroine’s body with the hundreds of glittering dollars, however, the artist balanced the composition by making the smaller, shimmering figure equally prominent. In the interest of creating a striking composition artists had no compunctions about copying ideas for layouts from banners produced by other companies or repeating layouts they had used in previous projects. Originality was not a chief consideration with them. Yet the artists who, in my opinion, produced the most effective work indicated that they always strove for something different in their banners because they recognized that an unusual composition was likely to attract the most attention. The instant a novel idea appeared in a banner, however, it was made formulaic through repetition. During my field research, I noticed a strikingly simple background design of horizontal stripes on a banner that was approximately thirty meters in length. The stripes appeared to further stretch the mural-sized banner, lending speed and dynamism to the composition. Shortly thereafter, a series of banners appeared in the city, all of which included similar striped backgrounds.

Artistic Identity Engaging artists in a dialogue I soon realized that artistic creativity was an important aspect of their identity. Artistic talent was generally considered a

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vara prasadam (god-given gift). Like aaruvam (aptitude and dedication), which all the artists I spoke with identified as a necessary component for success in the field of banner painting, vara prasadam, denotes an innate talent. Artists used a third term, shakti, to explain their unusual abilities. The term literally means strength, energy, or power, but, like vara prasadam, this word also has a religious connotation as one of the names for Lord Shiva’s consort, Parvati. According to popular Hindu belief shakti resides in Shiva and represents the god’s strength or divine powers. This understanding of creativity as an inexplicable power possessed by certain individuals is remarkably similar to the Western notion of genius. Genius, as a manifestation of the concept of the free individual, enters Western discourse in the late eighteenth century during the period of the American and French revolutions. In Kant’s philosophical writings of the 1780s genius is understood as a natural endowment of certain gifted individuals that provokes them to create art. Genius is innate and cannot be acquired through learning. Yet it is indispensable to artistic creation. Banner artists occasionally used the word “genius” interchangeably with vara prasadam. But the Western and indigenous interpretations of artistic identity must be differentiated here. While the inexplicable, instinctual quality of genius was akin to vara prasadam, the association of genius with a strong individual identity was not. In art historical discourse, “a genius in the modern era is traditionally understood as someone who functions beyond the constraints of politics, patrons, and society.”14 Whereas, the collaborative, commercial aspects of banner art was integrally linked to an art world, to clients and to their audience. In fact, the “art” in banners hinged on the immediate response of viewers and clients because the objects were not normally preserved for later interpretation and appreciation. In India, the Western notion of the artist, indicating individual free will and genius, came into usage with the colonial patronage of the arts in the 1780s, around the same time as the term acquired its modern connotation in Europe. By the mid-nineteenth century, when European-run schools of art were established the colonial port cities of Madras, Calcutta, and Bombay, the term “artist” was used to differentiate the graduates of these schools, formally trained in a European style, from the “artisan” communities of local painters, printmakers and sculptors.15 Initially, the choices of media and processes of working of artisan groups were determined by their hereditary or caste communities. Gradually, however, the urban context and the pressure to be competitive tended to erode traditional affiliations making artisan communities more flexible and open to changing styles and methods. Like their “artist” counterparts in the

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government-run art schools, these artisan groups responded to the market demands of their indigenous, Westernized clientele by incorporating, on an adhoc basis, Western techniques of creating illusions of three dimensions. Meanwhile, the curriculum in the art schools also became increasingly hybridized as the faculty incorporated the study of local craft traditions and sought to cultivate in their students knowledge of Indian fine art traditions, such as miniature painting, in tandem with European naturalism. In such a fluctuating environment the artistic identity of many urban-based, visual art producing groups was equivocally situated somewhere between the two hierarchical categories of “artist” and “artisan.” The complex, shifting associations of banner artists with the “artist” or “artisan” categories depended on the context of discussion. At times during our conversations banner artists assumed the mantle of the creative artist graced with a god-given talent. Three artists, in separate interviews, quoted an identical example to communicate the uniqueness of their activity. Each individual contrasted the artistic and medical professions explaining that while eighty out of one hundred people who aspired to become physicians would succeed, only two out of the hundred who attempted to enter the artistic profession would be successful. Curiously, despite such emphatic articulations of their artistic identity, artists refused to discuss their preferences in the subjects and styles of painting, adamant that they were but skilled craftsmen who followed financiers’ dictates and the tastes of their mass audience. As the master artist Selvam responded when I asked him to describe his best works, “that is not up to us to say. We do the work and everyone sees it. It is up to the audience to say which one is good.” And when I continued to press him for his opinion on aesthetics he confided that even if he or his peers personally derived tripti (satisfaction) from a particular work they would never acknowledge it. This ambivalence about their artistic identity was reflected as well in banner artists’ disdain for their counterparts in the art world, those who underwent fine arts training in the art school system. Most art school graduates, banner artists rightly observed, lacked the requisite training to meet the challenges of the banner and cutout medium—working on a large scale, at a rapid pace, using strong, continuous brush strokes. One of their own, however, K. Madhavan, whom banner artists cited repeatedly as the individual most influential in the development of the field, had graduated from the Government Art School in Madras in the 1930s (I discuss K. Madhavan’s contributions to banner art in the final section of this chapter). Artistic identity for banner artists was articulated in terms of the group or community rather than that of the individual. This was signaled most

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strongly by the tradition of signing completed banners or cutouts with the name of the banner company rather than that of the individual master artist. This feature is in keeping with most visual art traditions in India in which artists rarely signed their works. An exception was in the sixteenth-century court of the Mughal emperor Jahangir, a high point in the tradition of miniature painting in India. During this period master artists, on occasion, affixed their signature on works but even in this context the artist’s identity was subsumed by the identity of the ruler and his court.16 In the nineteenth century the practice of signing works became more frequent, but in the competitive urban art market the signature functioned primarily for advertisement rather than as a stamp artistic individuality.17 Often, therefore, works were signed with the name of the press or studio, much as in banner art. Researching artists who painted designs for the popular sami patam (“god-picture” in Tamil) printing industry, Stephen Inglis discovered a sequential method by which artists graduated to signing their works. While apprenticed to a master artist a student signed his teacher’s name to all his paintings. Upon establishing his own enterprise he signed both names (his teacher’s and his own). Only in the last phase of his career did he sign the paintings with just his own name. For Inglis, this was evidence that artists perceived themselves as a link in an “artistic chain,” or as part of a hereditary continuum.18 Such a communal attitude to their practice also encouraged artists to directly copy from each other and from past artists. The success of a unique work was proven only by instant emulation. If an idea was not copied, its newness or originality merited little interest. This is quite unlike the world of modern art where originality is the pivot that tips the work and its maker into art history or out of it. Again, unlike professionals in the field of modern art, the artistic identity of banner artists was not linked to objects. It was only gradually that I arrived at this realization. Initially, my questions on aesthetic issues were framed with a focus on the banner and cutout objects. A vital characteristic of banner art, however, was the dispensability of the object in the cycle of creation, display and recycling. Value, therefore, was invested not in particular objects but in the activity of production and the process of reception. In retrospect, this also explained why artists did little to preserve their creations through photographic documentation.19 Communal Identity In interviews with artists, I tried to determine the existence, or lack of existence, of associations between art production in Chennai’s banner-painting

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companies and identities of caste, locational origin, ethnicity, and religion. The relationships between caste and profession persist throughout India and professional communities often maintain caste identities, even while urban living conditions, physical and economic mobility, and anti-caste politics tend to break down these social identities.20 Artists (when interviewed) tended to downplay caste associations. There are several reasons to expect that there might not have been consistent associations between banner painting and caste identity. Banner painting was a nontraditional urban profession, it was politicized by its affiliation with anticaste Tamil nationalist political figures and the Tamil film industry, which comprised the core of Tamil Nadu’s nationalist parties, had facilitated the erosion of caste-based employment. Nonetheless, there was caste and religious aggregation in the banner industry. And these, I suggest, reflected strong residual relationships between caste, early professional training and the job market in India, despite a political deemphasis on caste and community in Tamil Nadu. Whether purposeful exclusion or not, banner companies were clearly segregated by religion. The owners and all employees of the ten major banners companies were Hindus, a fact that only became obvious to me when, at a political rally, I noted a very effective cutout of the politician Jayalalitha signed Mahboob Arts—a company that was not on my list of the city’s major banner firms. I tracked the studio of Mahboob Arts (which I visited) to a predominantly Muslim area of Chennai, and interviewed its owner and several artists. Rather than a film banner company, Mahboob Arts specialized in advertisements for beedi—rolled tobacco-leaf cigarettes that are sold on the streets of India. Their methods of banner painting and assembly, whether for commodities or for political commissions (which were contracted by leading Hindu politicians), was identical to that of the major companies I had visited. The only significant difference was that of religious community: the owner of Mahboob Arts, his guru (teacher) and all his employees were Muslim, and they operated from the city’s Muslim district. In Tamil Nadu (and throughout most of India) caste is a contentious topic. Caste issues tend to be difficult grounds for discussion, whether among academics, the middle class, or among people on the street. When I broached the subject in interviews with artists, some stated their beliefs quite explicitly. Others acted dismissively of the subject. In one case, I was told that I had deeply offended an individual by bringing up caste issues. Thus, I had to settle for estimates by interviewees who were forthcoming on the subject of caste. These individuals informed me that a majority of the artists in the banner profession were of the Achari or of the Nayakar castes. One interviewee

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claimed that three-quarters of the artists in the trade were of the Achari community. Another told me that about one-third were Nayakars. Members of both these communities were traditionally artisans and craftsmen of a variety of types. Acharis refer to themselves as “Viswakama Brahmins” (the sage Vishwakarma, in Sanskrit mythology, is claimed to be the first artist and architect). But Acharis are not Brahmins.21 On the contrary, along with related castes such as Nayakars and Nadars, their contemporary political categorization is that of a “backward caste” group. Unlike most other backward castes, however, the Achari, Nayakar, and Nadar groups have strong caste associations that historically have been politically active and which continue to lobby the government in the interests of their respective communities.22 The owner of Chandran Arts spoke of the caste affiliations of his colleagues in the following manner: We belong to the Vishwakarma Achari community. For generations our people have been goldsmiths, sculptors, blacksmiths, makers of metal vessels, carpenters, and recently banner painters. So, the artistic mindset is innate. Nowadays others who have the talent also join the profession. But still, most of the banner artists in Madras are of the Achari community. We have the experience of generations.

This individual’s brother, the owner of Jaya Arts, told me (in a separate interview), “wherever you go, whether to Karnataka or Andhra Pradesh, you will find that most artists are Acharis.” And he added, alluding to the pervasiveness of Hindu caste throughout other religious communities, “even if the artist is a Muslim, he is usually of the Achari caste.”23 A third banner company owner, the proprietor of Sai Arts, related that his decision to become a banner artist was based solely on his love for drawing. He added, however, that this could have been because his father and grandfather were Achari goldsmiths: “After all, jewelry-making is drawing and design—a type of art, you see. With their blood in me, I suppose that I inherited this talent. Now my son, who always has had a taste for art, has himself taken up this work. In fact, he is training in this studio.” Despite these archetypical references to caste, to the impact of early exposure to the arts, and to the advantages of personal tutelage, painters from outside of the Achari and Nayakar communities had nonetheless succeeded in finding employment in this profession. Six out of the nineteen artists I interviewed informed me that they were neither Acharis nor Nayakars, and (despite the caste identities of the vast majority of their coworkers) firmly dismissed the relevance of caste in this trade. The owner of Swami Arts

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passionately articulated his opposition to the prioritization of birthright over individual talent and effort. Upset that I had even mentioned the subject of caste, he answered abruptly, “I don’t bother thinking about caste and community. As far as I am concerned, there are only two groups, men and women. I don’t pay attention to other divisions.” In a subsequent interview, he told me that a human being’s births are continuous. The cumulative effect of these re-births determines an individual’s career or skill. Even if a person is born into an Achari community, he may not have the tozhil (talent or ability) of an Achari. In one’s next life one may not even be working in the same field. . . . To say that a person is able to acquire a skill because he or she was born into this caste or that is irrelevant. It is the “balance” that an individual creates in one birth that he or she will have use of in the next birth.

And this artist was not alone in this claim. His idealistic assertion was supported (at least rhetorically) by all of the other banner company owners. Even as they acknowledged their caste affiliations, these individuals were unequivocal in their belief that aaruvam—translated as a keen aptitude combined with focused dedication—was the most important determinant for success in the field of banner painting, rather than caste identity.

Antecedents and Evolution of the Banner Medium Banner painting was a relatively new medium rooted in an urban context. For those individuals whose communities had, for generations, been engaged in traditional art practices such as jewelry crafting or sculpture, banner painting provided a means of adapting their artistic skills so as to continue to earn a livelihood in the arts. For others, who did not belong to artisan communities, but who possessed the aptitude for art, banner painting provided the prime venue for their creative expression. Most of the artists I interviewed grew up in rural locales and may have only completed primary- or middle-school education. Therefore admission to art colleges and subsequently networking within a gallery system was neither an option, nor perhaps, an aspiration for them. From my conversations with banner artists and their clients I have pieced together a narrative on the evolution of the banner and cutout medium. I begin this oral history account of banner art with excerpts from an interview I conducted with master artist, Lakshmipathy (now deceased), at the Mohan Arts banner company in December 1990. This interview serves as an example of the data on which my narrative is based.

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Preminda Jacob: How did you enter this field of banner painting? Lakshmipathy: From a very young age I had an aaruvam (interest or aptitude) for this. Since I was about twelve or thirteen, even at that time, I had a kind of paithiyam (madness or burning) to make pictures. But I did not know how to express this desire, that is, the methods one employs to create pictures, so I came to Madras. PJ: When you came to Madras did you join this trade right away? L: Yes. PJ: Was there someone who taught you some drawing in your village (Rajamannakudi near Tanjavur)? L: No, I worked by myself. PJ: You said your father was a drama teacher. They often have painted backdrops and sets for drama performances. Did you first get inspired to paint by watching those set painters at work? L: Not at all, it was my own effort. PJ: When did you graduate from being an apprentice to being an artist? L: Wasn’t Parasakti (a Tamil film starring Shivaji Ganesan) made in 1953? That was when I started as a banner artist. For a while I wasn’t able to find work, as a result of which I lost hold of my “touch.” There was a newspaper called Kalai Manram. I joined them as a “commercial artist,” deciding that this banner work was not for me. I worked there for about one to one-and-a-half years. Then someone called me to do some “voluntary” work on a banner. I replied that my “touch” was gone and I was unable to do that kind of work any longer. But he insisted that I try and he took me to Trichy where he wanted me to ezhuthu (paint, draw, write) a banner in a theater. After I did that banner a desire to work in this field was rekindled in me. From that time to this day I have been in this field. PJ: You have been in this field for almost forty years. How has your work changed over the years? L: When I began I was sumar (ordinary); then I improved a bit; now I’ve become old, my shakti (creative power) has reached a plateau (evalavu thaan). PJ: Can you name any artists in this profession whose work you admire? L: How can I tell this story . . . [he coughs and clears his throat]. There were artists much senior to me. They are now “retired.” Among them there was an artist known as K. Madhavan. He was a great “genius” artist. Yes. He used to make good banners. But now he is old. . . . So, I cannot say who are the best artists today. PJ: Can you tell me more about K. Madhavan?

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L: All of us learned by watching him. I wanted to paint like him. He provided the inspiration through which many developed. This “banner line” (trade) wasn’t so good in the beginning because there was no method. One could do the work in whatever way one pleased, as long as it was visually appealing. Before, we may have used a dark color here [he indicates an area on the banner near him] to create “depth.” The pictures were correctly proportioned but plain. He is the person who introduced us to the technique of using several colors to create these effects. Seeing him we were all astonished. We thought, aada-da we could have done it in this way! PJ: When you travel on Mount Road and you see a banner or cutout that you have painted, what do you feel? L: I think our people have done a good job; or I think it [the work] could have been done better than this. That is all.

Lakshmipathy’s responses to my questions were a refrain I heard at each of the ten banner companies I visited. Artists responded to my queries about stylistic influences and origins of the banner painting tradition by invoking the names of artists K. Madhavan and Raja Ravi Varma. Artists also acknowledged the legacy of S. S. Vasan in establishing a tradition of extravagant advertising for the cinema that spurred the evolution of banner advertising into a spectacular medium. And claiming legitimacy for banner painting as an art form, artists invoked the name of M. F. Husain, a charismatic figure in the contemporary Indian art scene. Artists credited K. Madhavan (1907–1973) with important innovations in both style and method that gave the banners of Chennai their distinctive quality. K. Madhavan, they claimed, was the one who showed them how to use the slide projector to enlarge images instead of the time consuming “grid method” described earlier in this chapter. And several artists recalled being awed by Madhavan’s ability to create convincing illusionistic effects, especially in the depiction of depth. Like many of his peers in the field of banner painting K. Madhavan was from a family of professional artists.24 His ancestors had specialized in carving wood and ivory but when he came of age Madhavan opted for a Westernized art education at the Government Art College in Madras. Upon graduating he took up jobs in the 1930s and 1940s as a theater set and backdrop painter for popular Tamil drama groups, Kanniya Company, N. S. K. Nadar and T. K. Brothers Drama Company. At that time each drama troupe included a set painter who created dramatically lit backdrops both of landscape and of architectural settings. These illusionist backdrops and sets indexed the modernity of this form of urban theater and distinguished it from the

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traditional street theater of Tamil Nadu, known as Teru Kuttu. Coincidently, Karunanidhi and Annadurai, pioneering figures of the Tamil nationalist movement, were also associated with these companies as scriptwriters and actors. (See chapters 3 and 5.) Like other art school graduates Madhavan found additional employment opportunities as an illustrator. He designed and painted images of deities, known as sami patam (in Tamil) for the commercial printing industry. His illustrations were reproduced and widely distributed through the medium of posters, calendars, and advertisements. Madhavan’s first signed work was a sami patam, painted in 1940, that was used as an advertisement by the Burmah Shell Company. Sami patam were also referred to as “framing pictures” because people typically framed and displayed them in their homes and places of work. Buyers of these calendars or posters, however, rarely paid attention to the name of the artist who created the design. But Madhavan became a household name in Tamil Nadu for his signed illustrations in the popular Tamil weekly, Ananda Vikatan, which pioneered the publication of serialized fiction in India. Later in his career, Madhavan added the painting of cinema banners to his oeuvre. To the field of banner art Madhavan brought the skills he had acquired in theater backdrop painting, magazine illustration, and sami patam design. From his experience in theater he learned how to quickly create convincing illusions while working on a large scale. As a magazine illustrator he understood how to select dramatic moments or fragments of the narrative that provocatively conveyed the main thematic of the story. And from sami patam he adapted techniques of composition, design and the evocation of fantastic effects through the use of intense, saturated color schemes. In the genre of the sami patam Madhavan was not an innovator but a follower. Raja Ravi Varma (1848–1906), who died just a year before Madhavan’s birth, is credited with opening the Pandora’s box of the sami patam industry. This industry currently produces several million prints each year that are distributed throughout the country and worldwide to the Indian diaspora communities.25 During his lifetime Ravi Varma acquired a national reputation becoming the most sought-after artist in India with a clientele that comprised the elite of society—both the Indian nobility and the British administrators. The continuing interest in Varma’s work derives from his influential initiatives in modernizing the Indian visual art tradition. Like many artists of his era Varma was born into a family of professional artists. His uncle, mother, sister, and brother were all accomplished artists and Varma received artistic training from a young age. The family was related to the ruler of Travencore, an autonomous princely holding within the British

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Empire, located in what is now the southern state of Kerala. This association provided Varma with ease of access to elite patrons. Varma’s initial training was in the Tanjore style, then the dominant school of painting in southern India. The Tanjore painting tradition evolved in the eighteenth century under the patronage of the Nayak dynasty centered in Madurai (a hub of Tamil culture). Iconic images of deities, richly encrusted with gems and gold leaf, formed the characteristic subject matter of works in this style. These paintings were among the first examples of visual art in India that were meant to be framed and displayed on walls in temples and the homes of the wealthy. As a practicing artist in the court of Travencore, Varma’s attention, however, gravitated to the traditions of Western art that he observed in the prints that travelers brought to the court and in the oil painting techniques practiced by European artists who received portrait commissions from the Raja of Travencore. Astutely, Varma recognized that by adapting the Western oil painting medium and conventions to Indian themes, he could appeal to the tastes of an elite urban clientele that was intensely curious about Western culture. Moreover, like other Indian intellectuals of his era, fired by nationalistic aspirations and exposed to Western Enlightenment philosophy, Ravi Varma believed that the Indian (specifically the Hindu) tradition must be reformed of superstition and bigotry to women and lower castes if it was to be put in the service of a nationalistic ideology. Colonial ideology had established the Western cultural tradition as synonymous with modernity. By visualizing Indian epics through the lens of Western academic realism therefore, Varma attempted to modernize Hindu theology and bring it into the service of the prevailing nationalist discourse. Varma’s dramatic compositions, the poses and gestures of his figures and the arresting trompe l’oeil effects he achieved, derived from printed reproductions of European academic art—the painting styles of the Renaissance and Baroque periods and interpretations of this tradition in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Another source of inspiration for his paintings was from the contemporary urban theater in Bombay. During the latter half of his career Varma maintained a studio in Bombay where, in the company of his brother and artistic partner Raja Raja Varma, he frequented the theater. This new urban theater was an amalgam of Indian folk theater, Indian classical theater and Victorian melodrama. The visual vocabulary that Varma evolved to capture this hybridity became synonymous with the newly forming concept of India as a nation. Subsequent forms of visual culture in India—sami patam, posters, entertainment films, cinema advertisements, comic books, paintings on vehicles—derive from and expand upon this hybrid iconography that Varma popularized.

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Had he confined his output to the medium of oil painting it is questionable whether Varma’s influence would have endured to this day. Late in his artistic career Varma experimented with oleography, the latest imaging technology of his time, to produce print reproductions of his oil paintings for a mass market. (See the concluding chapter for a discussion on Varma’s printing enterprise.) This foray, though financially unsuccessful to him personally, made Ravi Varma a household name even a century after his death. The print medium, however, substantially changed the visual features of Varma’s oil paintings, accentuating the outlines of the images, intensifying the colors and eliminating tonal gradations. Subsequent generations of artists who took up the business of sami patam design further abandoned Western mimesis in favor of rich, decorative effects. They evolved a distinctive color palette of complementary colors— fiery oranges juxtaposed with deep peacock blues, bright pinks interspersed with yellow-greens to evoke an otherworldly realm. Though the figures of gods and goddesses were depicted in three dimensions and often placed in architectural or natural settings that obeyed the rules of perspective, the figures floated against the background rather than becoming integrated within the space, imparting an iconic quality to the images. The aesthetics of a range of popular visual culture, including banner painting, referenced and reproduced these stylistic features of the ubiquitous sami patam. The third individual pivotal to the evolution of banner painting was the novelist and visionary businessman S. S. Vasan (1903–1969). Ananda Vikatan, the popular illustrated magazine that brought Madhavan artistic notoriety in Tamil Nadu, was one of Vasan’s initiatives. His most famous business venture, however, was Gemini Pictures, a cinema production house based in Chennai. Started in 1941, Gemini Pictures developed into one of the largest film companies in South India. (See chapter 3.) Vasan spent unprecedented sums of money on his films, most of which included extravagant sets, multi-star casts and several song and fight sequences. He even wrote a manifesto, Pageants for the People, defending his use of the cinematic medium for the creation of spectacular entertainment. Apart from championing entertainment films, Vasan’s other great legacy was in the realm of cinema advertisements. The innovation and scale of Vasan’s advertising strategies earned him a national reputation as the “king of publicity.”26 During my fieldwork, I had the opportunity to interview Mr. Krishnajee, who had been Vasan’s publicity manager for thirty-five years. Krishnajee recalled that for each film venture Vasan would employ an advertising strategy appropriate to the theme of the film. For example, to publicize the film Avvaiyar (1953), about a legendary Tamil saint to whom Lord Mu-

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rugan appeared in the guise of a child, Vasan commissioned a large, six by nine meter (twenty by thirty feet) changing neon sign that visualized the miraculous avatar (form changing) abilities of Hindu deities. For another film, Samsaram (Married Life, 1951), “Vasan used the electoral lists to have postcards about the film mailed to every housewife in Madras, Bombay and Gujarat. Because of the novelty of the strategy it had a tremendous impact.” For Mughale-Azam (A Love Story of Prince Salim and Anarkili, his female slave, 1960), the most expensive feature film then produced in India, Vasan’s art department, “converted the Leo Midland theater into a palace. With plywood we completely changed the architecture of the facade. The picture ran for almost a year because all Muslims in Tamil Nadu came to see the film, like a pilgrimage.” And it was Vasan, Krishnajee claimed, who first began displaying banners and cutouts in public locations purchasing advertising rights at forty or more locations in each major metropolitan region. Prior to this innovation, film advertisements were restricted to the compounds (walled enclosures around buildings) of cinema theaters. The more public location of display of these images in Madras and Bombay probably helped trigger, in 1960, the first recorded public protests of “indecent film posters and hoardings.”27 The trend Vasan set for spectacular advertising has continued to characterize the Tamil film industry. This is why the banner advertisements of Chennai surpassed in size and quality cinema advertisements in all other Indian cities. Perhaps it was in recognition of this distinctiveness of the Chennai advertisements that M. F. Hussain chose to locate his photographic series, Culture of the Streets (1981–1982), in Chennai even though his personal associations with the banner painting profession were based in Mumbai. A pioneering figure in the history of modern Indian art, Maqbool Fida Husain (b. 1915) is a cultural icon. His arresting visual appearance and his humble origins has, doubtless, contributed to his mystique. Husain is tall and lean with flowing white hair and beard that contrasts with his brown skin. And he travels barefoot even when visiting elite establishments. As an art student in the J. J. School of Arts in Bombay in the mid-1930s Husain had to drop out for a few years because of financial difficulties. During this time he supported himself working in a banner company painting cinema advertisements. Painting is Husain’s primary medium but he also produces lithographic prints, photographs, and films. And his works commanded high prices even prior to the boom in the market for contemporary Indian art of the mid1990s. Husain became widely known to the general public in India when his works were censored by the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), a conservative Hindu religious political group that ruled the country from 1996 to 2004.

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The banner artists I spoke with unequivocally attributed Husain’s artistic prowess and commercial success to his stint as a banner artist. He was the only artist from the world of the art school–gallery nexus for whom they expressed admiration. The admiration was reciprocal for Husain’s paintings and films frequently reference the visual culture of Indian entertainment cinema, especially the advertisements. Culture of the Streets pays homage to the banner artists of Chennai. This chapter has described the collaborative nature of the banner production process. So too the aesthetics of this art form resulted from a complex process of negotiation and compromise between artists and their clients. It was the connection to the visual culture of entertainment cinema that differentiated banners from commercial advertisements for other products. The dynamics of the relationship between the worlds of banner painting and that of the Tamil cinema industry, and the hypotheses of each group about the preferences of the cinema viewing public, is the focus of discussion in the following chapter.

Notes 1. Portions of this chapter were originally published in Preminda Jacob, “Media Spectacles: The Production and Reception of Tamil Film Advertisements,” Visual Anthropology 11, no. 4 (1998): 287–322. Special Issue: “All Singing, All Talking, All Dancing: Perspectives on Cinema and Society in India.” Guest editor: Preminda Jacob.

2. Chandran Arts, Jaya Arts, and J. P. Krishna Arts studios were located in Kodambakkam, while Art Land’s studios were located far from all commercial or film activity in Choolaimedu, a semi-rural suburb. 3. The continuous screening of a film in city theaters for twenty-five weeks or one hundred days was widely advertised with celebratory events. 4. This period coincided with two major festivals of Tamil Nadu, Deepavalli (occurring in October/November) and Pongal (occurring in mid-January). Between twelve and twenty films were released all at once during this season. 5. Roland Barthes, Image, Music, Text, essays selected and translated by Stephen Heath (New York: Hill and Wang, 1977), 23. 6. Anthony Windsor, “The Dying Art of Movie Poster Painting,” Swasdee, Thai Airlines In-flight Magazine (September 1988): 30–36. Windsor notes that banner artists in Thailand, like their counterparts in Bombay, used the graph method to enlarge the photographic image. 7. David Hockney, Secret Knowledge: Rediscovering the Lost Techniques of the Old Masters (New York: Viking Studio, 2001). 8. Stephen Inglis, “Master, Machine and Meaning: Printed Images in Twentieth Century India,” in Unpacking Culture: Art and Commodity in Colonial and Postcolonial

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Worlds, ed. Ruth B. Phillips and Christopher B. Steiner (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), 130. 9. The piecework system appeared to have been a phenomenon of the 1980s and 1990s. In previous decades, the owner of Kala Arts recalled, artists were paid at a fixed rate. Salaries varied from Rs 400 to Rs 700, depending on an individual’s seniority and skills. 10. In 1990–1991, the exchange rate was Rs 15 (15 Indian rupees) for one U.S. dollar. 11. The classifications “cool” and “hot” have extensive ramifications in Tamil culture that cannot be addressed here. Anthropologists such as Valentine E. Daniel, Sheryl B. Daniel, and Brenda Beck, among others, whose research is based in Tamil Nadu, explain that many aspects of life in Tamil culture, especially foods, states of mind, physical conditions, and personality traits are classified as “cool” and “hot.” Thus a curative for a “hot” state of mind is a “cool” food. 12. The traditional symbolism of colors, stated in both the Natya Shastra (c. second century CE) and the Silparatna, is common knowledge among the artisan communities of India. According to these texts, the symbolism of colors in painting are as follows: light green (love); merriment (white); compassion (grey); fury (red); heroic energy (light orange); terror (black); wonder (yellow); and repulsion (blue). 13. Christopher Pinney, Camera Indica: The Social Life of Indian Photographs (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997), 201, 139. 14. Mary Anne Staniszewski, Believing is Seeing: Creating the Culture of Art (New York: Penguin, 1998), 120. 15. Tapati Guha-Thakurta, The Making of a New “Indian” Art: Artists, Aesthetics and Nationalism in Bengal, c. 1850–1920 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 11, 31–32, 121. 16. Partha Mitter, Art and Nationalism in Colonial India, 1850–1922 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 13. 17. Guha-Thakurta, The Making of a New “Indian” Art, 32. 18. Inglis, “Master, Machine and Meaning,” 131. 19. The owners of banner companies retained only meager photographic records of their previous works stored haphazardly in cardboard boxes. An exception was the owner of Swami Arts Banner company, who had maintained a chronologically arranged album of 340 photographs dating from the 1970s. 20. David Washbrook, The Emergence of Provincial Politics: The Madras Presidency 1870–1920 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976), 136, 138. 21. Christopher Baker, The Politics of South India 1920–1937 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976), 198–99. 22. About the Nayakars, see Barnett, The Politics of Cultural Nationalism in South India, 56. 23. Muslim and Christian converts from Hinduism have been known to carry their caste into their newly adopted religions.

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24. The biographical information about Madhavan is based on the article by Inglis, “Master, Machine and Meaning,” and on interviews I held with banner artists. 25. Inglis, “Master, Machine and Meaning,” 132. The sami patam printing industry in South India is centered in the city of Sivakasi, in Tamil Nadu. In the 1990s the four largest companies in Sivakasi produced over ten million prints each. 26. The biographical information on Vasan and Gemini Studios is based on conversations I held with Randor Guy (a historian of Tamil films), Ashokamitran (a novelist and former employee of Vasan), and Krishnajee (a former publicity manager of Gemini Studios). See Randor Guy, “S. S. Vasan: Cecile B. DeMille of India,” in 70 Years of Indian Cinema (1913–1983), ed. T. M. Ramachandran (Bombay: Cinema India-International, 1985), 158–68, and Ashokamitran, “The Great Dream Bazaar,” Illustrated Weekly Magazine (Bombay, 1985). The article was published in four parts and appeared in the following issues: July 21, 1985 (52–55); July 28, 1985 (42–45); September 8, 1985 (60–61); and October 13, 1985 (44–45). 27. Ashish Rajadhyaksha and Paul Willemen, Encyclopedia of Indian Cinema (London and New Delhi: British Film Institute and Oxford University Press, 1994), 25.

C H A P T E R

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Cooperation and Conflict in Chennai’s Visual Culture: Financiers, Artists, and their Audiences

After interviewing Mr. Vedachellam, the owner of Sai Arts, I noticed that old banners covered the thatched roofs of huts in the slum adjacent to the studio. I decided to photograph the huts to document the way in which banners were recycled. When Vedachellam noticed what I was photographing, he hastened to interrupt me. “This work,” he said, “is an art—a high-class work that we create with great effort and concentration. If people see the sorry end of these objects, they may not value our work.” And he requested that I destroy the photographs that would come of those shots. Field Journal—Chennai, January 31, 1991

In studying the production of art, researchers ultimately must traverse perceptions and traditions of aesthetics—the discernment of beauty and the truth value of objects that qualify them as art—art history’s philosophically most complex problem. In discussing the aesthetic issues that pertain to Chennai’s banner advertisements, I draw on Howard Becker’s institutional theory of functional aesthetics. Becker, a sociologist writing more than two decades ago, proposed that aesthetics should be studied as a dynamic set of social relationships and fluid economic processes, rather than as a group of static principles applied to objects. This reframing of aesthetic scholarship was proposed by Becker to advance research on artistic expression beyond formalist debates over art objects and biographies of individual artists, and to allow scholars to produce studies that take into account a wide range of types of creative expressions. In so doing, Becker hoped to surmount the constraints of subjective and culturally rigid, hierarchical categorizations that 53

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have structured studies in aesthetics, and to move beyond art history’s formalist tautological premise—i.e., those who have been trained to recognize artistic quality, to know quality when they see it. The categorization of commercial art adheres most solidly to Chennai’s banner production. It is a term that is accepted with very little definitional debate in art historical or cultural analyses. Even Becker, whose progressive contextual methods (which I review in the following paragraphs) otherwise question formal definitions and classifications, appears to prefer to keep this immense, varied and socially and economically influential genre of artistic production at a distance, beyond the debates surrounding art production. “[C]ommercial artists,” Becker postulates, “use more or less the same skills and materials as fine arts but deliberately put them to uses no one regards as artistic, uses which find their meaning and justification in a world organized around some activity other than art.”1 Ironically, Becker’s notion that the products of artists in fields that are considered commercial can be distinguished from other worlds of artistic production by assuming that “no one regards [their uses] as artistic” harkens back to the same formalism that Becker worked to undermine. Who, in the absence of research, are the ones in the phrase “no one”? Without research that actually gauges the response of its creators, patrons, and audience, the aesthetic categorization of images and objects are left, by default, to an academic elite. There are indeed outward signs of incontrovertible differences separating the processes and reception of the images and objects of advertising from other forms of artistic production. Most obvious are the differences in their relationship with consumption. Other forms of artistic design and production most often serve, themselves, as the object of consumption or the primary focus of patronage. Visual advertisements are valued in the marketplace by the volume of consumption that they attract to a product or service other than themselves. Thus, in a system of visual advertising, the researcher can expect, prior to investigations, that market considerations dominate the processes of artistic production; that creativity, though clearly sought after and rewarded, is constrained and directed by the dynamics of the relationships between artist and client, and between client and audience—an audience primarily composed of potential consumers of the advertised product. But, we know that all artists are constrained by their patrons, their materials and finances, their times, their critics and audience. How constrained and how expressive then are these artists? What are the types of constraints that are imposed? And what type of expression filters through them? Perhaps more importantly, what tensions between artist, patron, and audience remain

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active, unresolved, and influential in the evolution of the form of production? My objective here is to employ Becker’s theoretical framework to understand the aesthetics of artistic production in an advertising medium—one in a South Asian context. The aesthetics of art objects, Becker proposed, reflected what he called their art worlds—the cooperating network of creators, financiers, distributors, exhibitors, and critics that make art production and reception possible. It is this informal institution that defines the art object, Becker hypothesized, rather than any singular aspect of its appearance and regardless of all exogenous judgments of its quality. Becker notes that “art worlds typically devote considerable attention to trying to decide what is and isn’t art, what is and isn’t their kind of art, and who is and isn’t an artist; by observing how an art world makes those distinctions rather than trying to make them ourselves we can understand much of what goes on in that world.”2 Like society’s other informal institutions, the art world is wholly dependent on the interconnected activities of a group of individuals who share a body of knowledge and who act according to mutually accepted conventions. People come and go, materials and technologies are developed, methodologies evolve, and market conditions and relations experience changes. Art worlds are then naturally and continuously in flux. The pace of this change is sometimes swift, and the structural results of changes correspondingly dramatic. In other cases, the composition of types of actors and their relationships to each other are nearly stable or experience an almost imperceptible drift over time. Becker’s notion of aesthetics as an activity implies that various groups of individuals, engaged in specific tasks of production, marketing, and reception, collectively construct and apply aesthetic standards. These standards allow the most powerful and persuasive of the actors to evaluate works, identify deserving practitioners and restrict others through training and membership in guilds or academies, create reputations, and thus articulate the parameters of their art world. Becker’s analytical model obliges researchers who accept his premise to concentrate equally on the aesthetic perceptions and tasks of the various producers, patrons, and users of cultural objects rather than focus solely upon the objects and artists, as if they were somehow divorced from the systems in which they operate. Becker’s institutional framework, I would argue, is a seminal body of work in the study of visual arts. My own analysis of Chennai’s banner advertisement industry is a study that follows Becker’s precepts: it is fundamentally an investigation of interpersonal interactions, mutual perceptions and misperceptions, and production dynamics of a network of three participating

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groups: banner artists; their clientele of film producers and distributors and political publicity directors; and the mass of viewers of entertainment cinema in Chennai—a group that is largely synonymous with the voting public. Perceptions and assumptions about audience taste, however, determined the aesthetic decisions of both artists and their clients. I construe audience preferences by comparing data gathered from artists and clients with the results of a questionnaire administered to a sample of the film-viewing public chosen at random at nine cinema theaters in Chennai. I begin my discussion of the interacting elements of Chennai’s banner art world at its source—not its creative artistic source, however, but at the source of the financial capital that underwrote advertisement in public spaces: financiers from the film industry and politics.

The Nature of Clientele Spectacular advertising has long been a fundamental and signature component of Chennai’s cinematic culture. Intensely competitive markets for capital and for audience attention, the atmosphere of high risk, high uncertainty and the possibility of extravagant rewards play into the commission of advertisements in the Tamil film industry. Perhaps because the industry is ultimately focused on a group of consumers whose behaviors are clouded in uncertainty, its financiers—producers and distributors—are predisposed to relatively large advertising investments. According to those film producers whom I interviewed, probably between 15 and 25 percent of the total investments raised to produce each film was spent on advertising. Nonetheless, these expenditures could reap rich rewards, as a popular film was typically viewed three or four times by an unusually large proportion of the Tamilspeaking film audience. And while television has made substantial inroads into most parts of South Indian society, much of the entertainment programming on television is still dependent on cinema. There is a broad and varied range of advertising media available to the producers and distributors of Tamil films. These include small, screen-printed posters plastered on public walls by teams of laborers in the employ of film distributors (this practice is ongoing in Chennai but has been curtailed in other cities such as Mumbai and Bangalore). Film producers and distributors contracted radio stations to produce programs that aired film songs, interviewed film celebrities, and played excerpts from the film’s dialogue. Even before the film’s release, distributors marketed audio recordings of the production’s score. Some advertising devices deployed in Chennai were not unlike those used in Europe and the United States. Producers worked to put

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their stars into television spots, allowing them to personally promote their upcoming film. And films were advertised heavily on programming played into closed-circuit mini-television sets installed in public locations, in railway stations and airports. Cinema theaters featured trailers of upcoming films before their main attraction, and producers used newspaper and magazine advertisement and reviews to promote their films. In my interviews with film financiers, they characterized—virtually unanimously—handpainted banners and cutouts as the least effective among the publicity options available to them. Film financiers were most critical of the circumscribed physical scope of film banners. Unlike television and radio, which could reach into homes, banners were confined to a fixed location, upon the assumption that a prospective audience would pass by and note the connection to an upcoming release. Several financiers expressed a belief that the clustering of these advertisements in certain commercial areas of the city diluted the impact of any particular banner. Yet they continued to finance banners and cutouts, reluctant to leave this mode of advertising to their competitors, while not wholly convinced of sufficient return on their investment. The System of Film Financing In the Tamil cinema industry, distributors commonly purchased all rights to a film from its producer for a period of five years.3 The competition between distributors was fierce, especially for big-budget films that featured important stars or a well-known director. Such films were most often purchased early in the shooting schedule. One film distributor whom I interviewed likened the process to an auction. Several distributors, operating through their agents, submitted secret bids for the film rights. A producer then chose a distributor based on the bids and the distributor’s reputation. This system, which film producers and distributors referred to as “outright basis,” in effect, served the function of a “futures market”—shifting some of the financial risk of the venture to distributors. The system provided producers with the capital to finance the completion of film production, and distributors with the rights to rent out films to theaters within a predetermined district for the season (October through March) during which most films were likely to draw their largest audiences. Importantly, the outright basis system motivated producers to finance large-scale publicity for their films before the film had been completed. In Chennai, producer-financed film banners of this type were usually installed at four or five locations along a ten-mile section of the interstate highway that passes through Chennai and feeds traffic into the city’s main street, Anna Salai. These sites, which accommodated at least four banners, each

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thirty meters (one hundred feet) in length, were all in the vicinity of a cinema theater and nearby commercial establishments, restaurants, and large bus stops. For producers, the financing of these banners, installation costs, and rental of space—a payment that went to the Chennai City Corporation4—generally consumed the largest portion of their predistribution advertising expenses. Although producer-financed advertising was ostensibly directed at the film audience, its primary intent was to impress distributors who regularly traveled to Chennai to purchase feature films to sell in their own distribution zone. The Tamil film industry has divided the state of Tamil Nadu into seven film distribution zones, each comprising several towns and cities. Chennai is the only city that qualifies as a distribution zone in and of itself. Once the rights of the film moved into the hands of distributors, much of the dynamics of banner installation (and the interpersonal dynamics with artists) changed. Banner advertisements commissioned by distributors were typically installed on the grounds of theater complexes. Thus, distributors generally did not incur the rental expenses for street venues with which producers dealt. Most distributor-financed banners and cutouts on theater grounds remained on display for as long as the theater screened the film, a period varying from just a few days to over three months. Artists found commissions from distributors more difficult to work with than those from producers. Distributors often required artists to complete projects at short notice—which was usually not the fault of the distributor but a result of the volatility of the film industry. Often distributors were informed of theater availability on short notice, particularly when a film closed prematurely due to poor ticket sales. When a premature closing occurred, distributors required artists to complete a banner, or series of banners and cutouts, within one or two working days, and occasionally overnight. In so doing, artists had to circumvent their own established practices for banner production. Unlike film producers and distributors, who seemed ambivalent about the effectiveness of the banner medium, members of local political groups remained enthusiastic customers of banner artistry (as I indicate in the concluding chapter, this is no longer the case). Politicians in Tamil Nadu were prompted to prioritize oral and visual modes of communication to heighten their appeal to communities within their constituencies with low literacy rates or depressed levels of educational attainment. The plywood cutout was, according to those party publicity directors whom I interviewed, the most spectacular and affordable medium of visual communication then available to political groups. Visually prominent cutouts of political figures imparted a

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superstar aura to their images. For political rallies, party propagandists regularly financed numerous cutouts of their leaders, fifteen to twenty-one meters in height (fifty to seventy feet). Unlike cinema advertisements, political or religious advertisements were displayed on city property free of charge. And while film banners and cutouts were confined to specific locations and restricted to heights no greater than twelve meters (forty feet), no such restrictions existed on political advertisements. The quality of banners and cutouts produced for political parties, however, varied dramatically. Unlike film advertisements that were produced exclusively by members of the banner guild, Ovium Munnetra Sangam, local publicity directors of political parties freely patronized a broader group of banner artists. The commonality of publicity strategies in the spheres of cinema and politics was mirrored in the dual identity of the individuals who commission political advertisements. When I queried the public relations secretary of the DMK party, T. R. Balu, about his strategies, he explained that he had gained his publicity experience as the longtime owner of Silver Screen, a major film distribution company with branches throughout Tamil Nadu.

Conflict and Compromise The high stakes of film production and distribution contributed to strained and uneasy relationships between banner painters and their financiers— particularly those from the Chennai film industry. The older generation of banner artists, whom I interviewed in several companies, referred nostalgically to the days when they worked directly for the large film studios— Gemini and A.V.M.—that were based in the city. Even after leaving the studios and setting up their own banner companies, their business relationships with Gemini and A.V.M. continued to thrive and reap monetary rewards. In those days, film producers lavishly commissioned a range of advertising materials beyond that of banners and cutouts. These included other large-scale painted advertisements, including designs painted on lorries (freight trucks) and theater decorations, but also handpainted designs that were reproduced on a variety of small postcard-like products that were peddled near the theater. “These days,” reflected the owner of Mohan Arts, “we do not get even one-quarter of the work—[our patrons] can no longer afford it.” In the 1940s and 1950s an average of just thirty Tamil films were produced annually, compared with the average of one hundred and sixty films that are produced annually since the 1980s in Tamil Nadu. During the former era, film production cycles commonly spanned more than a year, allowing producers to spend nine or ten months on pre-shooting preparations and

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post-shooting public screenings. I was told by Krishnajee, a former publicity manager at Gemini Studios, that in the 1950s, producing a film was almost like giving birth to a child. Nowadays, films are being produced in one or two months. And [in the 1950s,] even after the film was complete, Vasan (the owner of the production house) would invite all his staff and their families to a preview and request their constructive criticisms of the film, the parts they liked the most, the sequences they did not like. From this feedback he would delete some of the sequences, re-edit or reshoot them.

The current rapid rate of film production in the Tamil film industry obviates the opportunity for lengthy preparations or to conduct public screenings and survey audience reactions. When I interviewed film producer G. Venkateshwaran, owner of G.V. Films, one of the most successful production companies in Tamil Nadu since the 1990s, he cautioned, “The moment you put your idea on the poll, somebody quicker than you can make the film. So while you may win the poll, he may win at the counter! It is better to keep something up your sleeve.”5 From the banner artists’ perspective, however, tight film production schedules seemed an excuse for producers to sacrifice the quality of the films they financed, and to disregard the important preparations related to banner advertising. The owner of Sakti Arts told me, “Years ago, [film producers] would actually visit and discuss the movie with the artist. We would often continue talking late into the night. We were all good friends. Nowadays the producers and distributors do not allow one to experiment. They do not appreciate our work. All they care about is the price.” And clearly the price was not enough. By the early 1990s Sakti Arts had ceased to accept commissions for film banners—shifting their focus to contracting political banners and cutouts. Older artists and banner company owners seemed to maintain little faith in younger film producers and distributors. To them, the new generation of patrons lacked experience, knowledge and artistic appreciation; according to some artists, this generation’s strategies for advertising were hopelessly flawed. The owner of Swami Arts once remarked that Most distributors today know nothing of their business. There are only a few who actually demand good work, and fewer still who believe that the “cinema line” [the business of entertainment cinema] should both entertain the public and benefit the city, as well as line their own pockets. This is the reason why so many of today’s films are failures. . . . If distributors were truly interested in

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artistry and if they trusted me with all of the advertising, I guarantee that I would bring them better ideas and more success than they have now.

The owner of Mohan Arts also contrasted the state of the profession in the 1990s with prior decades. “Producers were at one time very interested in the details of our banners. Now most of our patrons seem content only that we finish the work on time. With these people, the type of workmanship is not a consideration.” Both Mohan Arts and Swami Arts had nevertheless continued to take commissions from the cinema industry. And both had maintained longstanding, apparently hospitable, relationships with some advertising managers and producers among their clients. It was common for producers to contract repeatedly with the same banner company in deference to a long-term relationship. Film producers G. Venkateshwaran and Mr. Subramaniam, the manager of Raj Kamal Productions, owned by Kamalahasan, a major Tamil film star, commissioned all their banners from Swami Arts. In their opinion, he was “number one in India.” These clients used to hold extended discussions with the artist on banner designs, they contributed their own ideas and requested layout drafts from the artist before they made a selection. Similarly Narendra Shah, a producer and distributor, who also claimed to invest considerable time and money in banner publicity, consistently patronized Sai Arts, as the artist was familiar with his specifications and taste. But the responses of other producers and distributors, whom I also interviewed, seemed to more closely match the descriptions that artists had often rendered. The responses of these clients suggested a lack of familiarity with the production methods of the companies they employed. One distributor seemed most interested in companies that could complete his job on short notice. And several distributors were of the opinion that contractual prices for banners should be based on the speed of execution of the work. Most financier-artist relationships appeared delicately balanced. Ironically, those same artists who seemed most ready to criticize the lack of artistic discernment and creativity among their clients were most wary of taking control of the process. During their negotiations with clients, artists generally tended to downplay their own role as the chief creators of the banner advertisements, and only cautiously proposed ideas or suggested changes for fear of provoking discord in the business relationship. If the artist was unfamiliar with his patron, he might “analyze him”—one artist told me (punctuating his Tamil discussion with that English phrase) to discover “his tastes, his mentality, and his interests” (and likewise, in each case, the English abstract nouns were used). Artists often suppressed their own preferences in order to satisfy the patron, perhaps not unlike

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advertising commissions in other settings. Nonetheless, on several occasions I learned that artists, mainly the most senior of them—those from older, established businesses and regular clientele, such as Chandran Arts and Swami Arts—voiced their disapproval of a client’s plan and renegotiated, to persuade him of the merits of alternative layouts. Of course, economic considerations dominated the relations between artists and most of their clients. And the amount of money that changed hands was often a key determinant in the quality of the work produced. The owner of Mohan Arts admitted frankly that Everything we do is based on the money. If [our clients] are willing to spend money, then we display our skills, use rich colors and expend more labor. If they want only to pay for an ordinary job, then we give them ordinary work. It is not possible to execute skilled work for everyone at every price. The best is rare.

Despite this expression of market pragmatism, my conversations with artists revealed that they were engaged in a continual, complex negotiation between the commercial and artistic aspects of their enterprise. The owner of Swami Arts insisted that “there is a method to making quality banners, and it costs money. One can compromise on the method and make banners at a cheaper price, but the banner will not turn out well. And when it does not, I’m unhappy.” Banners and cutouts were priced by square footage of painted material, with extra charges for each “special effect”—for additions in papier-mâché, plywood or plastic. In the early 1990s, the average basic rate charged to patrons was Rs 6 per square foot for banners, and about Rs 12 per square foot for cutouts. About a decade later, in 2002, the price for cloth banners increased to Rs 10 per square foot and for the plywood cutout the price was Rs 20 per square foot. Prices varied by a rupee or two either way, however, reflecting competition between companies and differences in the quality of materials, both of which were contentious issues among banner artists. Several artists were forthcoming, in my interviews with them, to distinguish between banner companies that were mainly (what the artists called) “commercial,” and those who, oppositely, “valued their craft.” The owner of Swami Arts explained how subtle differences in attitude could influence final products. A company that prioritizes the money will certainly do something to get the work done correctly, but the company that considers their work to be art will have a very different approach. For example, when painting a banner, if they have applied red paint to a section and they think that it doesn’t look very good, that perhaps a green color will be more effective, then this company will

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not worry about the extra expense and change the red to green. Whereas a company that prioritizes the cost will be concerned primarily about the wastage this change will create.

Market conditions and competition, however, had made it difficult to establish and maintain standards of quality in banner production. Competition’s downward pressure on the prices of banner contracts had aggravated relationships between companies and had exerted pressures to lower standards of quality and materials. At least in private, owners of the larger, more well-established companies seemed bitter about the behavior of competitors who undercut their prices. In fact, the Ovium Munnetra Sangam—the banner artists’ guild in Chennai—had attempted in the past to standardize rates for banner and cutout production, but without success. I found some evidence to corroborate artists’ assertions that lower rates had tended to drive down the quality of materials and had pushed costcutting shortcuts into the processes of production. The companies that offered the cheapest rates, I observed, also recycled plywood and canvas from previous projects, primed surfaces hastily and thinly, and took little care to protect wet surfaces and paint from sand and grit. Companies that charged higher rates generally used new, better quality materials, and took care to keep surfaces smooth. I also noted that those companies that offered lower prices restricted color selections on the artists’ palette. Artists complained that constraining the color selection made the figures appear relatively flat and lifeless when compared to more carefully crafted works. The owner of J. P. Krishna Arts, who, like Swami Arts, was determined to maintain higher rates, was critical of companies that lowered standards. There are some companies who just do not have the “knack” for making banners. They can never get the “likeness” right. They have no sense of proportion, so the images always look distorted. When the work is complete the “finishing” should be done well, with due thought to the placement of the lettering. The overall effect should be attractive. But at these companies, no one bothers to plan the layout. They set huge lettering almost anywhere in the banner. And every banner that they produce has a uniform border. It does not look good at all. Worse still, these companies will work for any price. If a patron offers two rupees or one rupee per square foot, they accept it. Those banners have no “taste” at all.

It is not unusual in the high-volume South Indian film market for films to fail miserably at the box office and for their independent producers to go bankrupt. In their dealings with newer clients from the cinema industry,

Figure 2.1. Some companies viewed the banner trade as primarily a commercial enterprise. They economized by reusing and patching plywood from previous commissions, or by using a lower grade of paints in producing the image. Jaya Arts banner company, Kodambakkam, January 1991.

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banner company owners insisted upon an advance to cover the costs of labor and materials. Clients from political parties, according to the owner of Jaya Arts, had a reputation that was even worse than film distributors: “[Party public relations people] have the money, but they deceive us in the same way that they deceive the public. They don’t make final payments. And if we are too persistent, they threaten to have us beaten.” In fact, the Ovium Munnetra Sangam functioned as a means for artists to warn colleagues about errant financiers, as well as a means to take collective action against them, usually in the form of a boycott of services. Risk, Reward, and Uncertainty The commissioning of banner advertisements was merely one expenditure of many in a venture that, for a Tamil film distributor, was highly risky, and uncontrollably uncertain, but potentially wildly rewarding. In a free-flowing interview, Narendra Shah, a Chennai-based film distributor, captured the ironic character of these risks and rewards of film distribution in Tamil Nadu, telling me: I may invest ten lakhs [one million rupees] to purchase a film, but some person who spends just a few rupees to see the film and then returns home and spreads the word through his community—a talkative person who tells his family and neighbors, and then the people at his workplace about the film—could very well decide the fate of my investment. He could double my money. Then again, he could totally ruin my business. My job is to figure out what this fellow will tell them, even before he enters the theatre.

Distributors in the Tamil film industry described local cinema audiences as strangely cohesive, but otherwise virtually unpredictable. For example, a distributor (who preferred to remain anonymous) whom I interviewed related the following anecdote concerning the directorial debut of the popular film-music composer and film star T. Rajendar: The very first film that Rajendar directed, Oru Thalai Raagam (Song with a Single Beat, 1980), was purchased by a distributor with forty years of experience. The distributor felt that the film was excellent, but after the first several weeks of exhibition, ticket collection was so poor that he sold the film off to another distributor. After a few weeks the film skyrocketed; it became what we call a “super hit.”

These everyday observations can appear, at first glance, as the superficial reflections of a group of entrepreneurs whose attentions were intrinsically

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fixated on the bottom line, and therefore marginal to worlds of art production. Some scholars, however, believe that the very dynamics of much of contemporary artistic production is embodied in these reflections—in the pressures created by configurations of uncertainty, risk, and reward. Sociologist Paul Hirsh notes that, because of the numerical impossibility of the handful of producers of mass culture (including entertainment cinema) truly understanding the preferences of the many millions of potential consumers, there is a high degree of uncertainty associated with the ultimate response to each cultural product.6 Hirsh theorizes, then, that the unbridgeable uncertainties of audience preferences coupled with the volume of financial investments put at risk in each product, and the ever-present possibilities for windfall profits and fame, propel the evolution of the production of culture industries along schizophrenic tracks, spinning from conservative reaffirmations of the status quo to wildly creative high-risk ventures, and then back again. Competition between producers in an open and capitalized market for culture goods, particularly where the market offers high rewards for success, can be advantageous for consumers. These conditions can stimulate a high volume of production, which can be expected to keep retail prices down, and open access to audiences from lower-income segments of the population. As to which item ultimately attracts the largest audience—which becomes “a hit”—that can appear to the producer of culture goods as illusive and nearly arbitrary. For example, in my discussions with producers of Tamil films, some explained the otherwise inexplicable success of certain entertainment films as the result of infectious faddism or just good timing. Becker asserts, “What culture industries’ audiences think, what really moves them in what ways is something no one knows in such a quick and direct way; in fact, for all devices of audience research, it is something no one knows at all for sure.”7 In such situations selection becomes an avenue by which the mass of consumers, exercising difficult-to-predict behaviors, exert control over the success or failure of a particular product.

Configuring the Audience The audience for banner and cutout advertisements was vast and amorphous, unlike the relatively cohesive groups of artists and financiers. It was the perceptions and values of audiences, however, that were symbiotically linked to the function of banners and cutouts as advertisements, to their popularity and to the livelihood of the artists employed in Chennai’s banner industry. But the behavior and tastes of this group of consumers, upon which the film

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industry was ultimately focused, were clouded in uncertainty. This produced intensely competitive markets for capital and for audience attention within the cinema industry. Film financiers in Tamil Nadu divided cinema audiences into three categories: “A station” (cities), “B station” (towns) and “C station” (smaller towns and villages). The greater metropolitan region of Chennai alone had theaters that were classified as A and B; the former situated along Anna Salai and other central locations and the latter on the outskirts of the city. Films screened in A stations were usually screened, as well, in the B stations but only rarely in a C station location. A film targeted for a rural audience was rarely, if ever, screened in Chennai. The location of the theater determined the content of banner publicity as well as the amount of funds a financier was prepared to invest for the advertisements. Thus, financiers spent most money on the banners for “A station” destinations; cutouts were commissioned for both “A and B stations” but never for a “C station.” Likewise, both financiers and artists, in separate interviews, echoed the theory that advertisements created for theaters situated in the industrial, working-class zone, in the northern edge of the city, should draw attention to the violent episodes in a film, while its romantic interludes be given greater prominence in the advertisements displayed in the city center. Like the financiers, artists believed that the content of the banners should be informative about the cast and the storyline, and that the portraits of the stars should achieve a good likeness of the individual. A majority of the artists with whom I spoke agreed that one of the most effective ways to attract an audience was through the application of color schemes appropriate to the class background of the majority of viewers in a particular location. Distinguishing between, as they characterized audiences, “higher classes” (moneyed people, conversant in English) and “lower classes” (poorer people, speaking only Tamil), these artists claimed that in the banner advertisements for English and Hindi films, directed to the former group, they added “glamour” by using “cool colors,” “pleasant layouts” and “high-class toning.” By contrast, in their advertisements for Tamil films they used colors categorized as “bright,” or “flashy,” or “attractive.” To develop marketing strategies that addressed differences between urban and rural audiences, producers relied on categorical distinctions—in essence, assumptions distinguishing urban from rural film audiences that were broad (and stereotypical) generalizations. People from smaller cities and towns in Tamil Nadu are assumed to be less discerning, and less sensitive to investments in sophisticated advertising. These perceived or imagined differences were probably mediated by differences in audience size, competition, and

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return on investment—and therefore impinged upon the workmanship of banners. In the opinion of the owner of Jayaram Arts, “the Madras public is aware of films. They will think about what they see in a banner. In the rural areas all one needs is to advertise that a picture is being screened. They do not analyze the banner for the content of the film.” This same informant confided, “we reduce the expense in materials and labor that we invest in banners for the [rural] districts by about 25 percent. . . . In the city we are conscious that our banners are set against banners by other companies so we are motivated to put greater effort into our work.” And he, as an artist, was also of the opinion that “sexy scenes” and scenes of horror and violence portrayed in banners—images that would attract urban audiences—frightened rural audiences. According to him, “the ‘ladies’ (in rural locations) will not even enter the theater.” Both artists and financiers believed that increasing the size of banners and cutouts was a tactic that would assuredly evoke the interest and awe of the public. Artists repeatedly expressed the opinion that the more magnificent the spectacle, the greater the likelihood that audiences could be persuaded to see the advertised film. As one banner company owner-artist put it: “When people see that so much money is being spent on publicity, they come to the conclusion that the film must also be very entertaining.” Banner artists encouraged their film and political clients to outmatch one another in creating larger and more extravagant spectacles—talking them into a competition that proved beneficial to their own businesses. An escalating competition over banner sizes had already been waged in Tamil Nadu during the mid-part of the twentieth century. Vasan, the owner of Gemini Studios, garnered a reputation as the “king of publicity” by dramatically increasing the scale of advertising materials. (See chapters 1 and 3.) This, according to Krishnajee, his publicity manager, included financing the first giant cutout, eighteen meters (sixty feet) in height, for the film Bhakta Cheta (Saint Cheta, 1940) early in his career. Likewise, the owner of Mohan Arts, seeking to establish a reputation for his new company, in the late 1950s increased the height of the cutout to twenty-four meters (eighty feet). This was for the film Vanangamudi (The Unvanquished, 1957). The institutional limits to this competition were reached in 1985, when, according to the owner of Chandran Arts, a distributor commissioned his company to create a cutout of the film star Kamal Hasan that was thirty meters (one hundred feet) high. Two weeks after it went up, the structure was pummeled by a severe storm, leaving the cutout leaning dangerously over Anna Salai the next morning. That week, civic authorities instituted a twelve-meter height limit on all film cutouts in the city that remained in

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place until 2002 when, as I discuss in the concluding chapter, cutouts were banned altogether in Chennai city. Distributors and producers assumed that their films would succeed based upon a circumscribed set of categorical “values”—star value, production value, masala value, story value—that these films embodied, and to which the audience responded. And they required their advertisers to focus on these values as the themes of their advertising campaigns. For example, a film that a producer or distributor believed would sell principally because of its star value was one that featured the most currently popular cinema idols. As the owner of Chennai-based Leo International Film Distributors explained to me, “We like to buy into films featuring big stars. They are a safe bet. These days a Rajnikanth film cannot fail. Even if it is a flop, it will run for at least for three days and turn a profit.” Thus, in the marketing campaign leading up to its release, financiers required the names and images of these stars to be the central focus, and they most often commissioned the production of cutouts of the leading male actor. They evaluated the effectiveness of the cutout not only on how well it resembled the actor, but also on whether it successfully visualized the star’s particular “style”—that ineffable quality driving fans to see him. (See chapter 4 for a discussion of “star value.”) Distributors weighed the production value of a film based on the identities and past record of the director, producer, music director, and screenwriter. According to film distributor C. Murugesan, information about a film’s production value “will give us some knowledge of the film even before seeing it or hearing the theme. For example, we know that a T. Rajendar film will have good sets, and that the scenes will be excellent. And a Bhagyaraj film will have a good story.” If a film’s production value exceeded its star value, financiers were likely to commission cutout images of the producer, the director, or even the music director. And larger banners featured portraits of these individuals, while providing only a nominal indication of the hero’s role or the storyline. For a distributor, a film with masala value was one that featured a starstudded mélange of explosive song and dance sequences, love scenes, fights, stunts, gun battles, and chase scenes appealing to the widest possible audience. Distributors new to the cinema business tended to bet on films with masala value. According to Tamil film authority Randor Guy: Tamil cinema has become synonymous with certain kind of ingredients, often in a certain order. If these are absent, the audience is disappointed and may well think, “We paid ten rupees and did not get our money’s worth. We should have chosen an MGR film instead which has a little bit of everything.” Such films are called masala films because every taste bud is activated. It is an uphill

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task to break away from this formula. . . . No one wants to take on the burden of idealism or be innovative.

The masala content of a film was the most common reference in film advertisements, whether in banners or wall posters, or in movie trailers that replayed snippets of action scenes, love scenes, and songs from the soundtrack. In our discussions, Tamil film producer and distributor G. Venkateshwaran argued that contemporary urban audiences in South India were more sophisticated than film financiers gave them credit. Today’s audience, he contended, craved some combination of film production value and story value. Venkateshwaran claimed, “We never make a picture for an artist [film star]. In our studio, we first find a subject and then choose an artist for the character.” Similarly critical of masala films he observed, “Previously, people used to accept formula films in which a hero beat up a villain group in a one-to-one hundred battle. No longer. Nowadays the hero should be more like the common man. You cannot create continuously false images to project the hero as God’s man. [In our films] what a man would really do in his life, the hero does, perhaps with a little exaggeration which the public will accept.” Venkateshwaran maintained that the story value of a film depended, apart from its realism, on whether the theme was current: “[I]t is just like fashion, it is very necessary to forecast the in-thing at the time of release of the picture.” And he cautioned against stories that were “anti-sentiment.” G. Venkateshwaran warned: “Basic Indian sentiment is very vibrant. You cannot kill Indian culture—that’s very important. But you must try to make it modern. You can introduce breakdance, disco or any such thing, but the basic sentiment, between the brother and sister, between the father and daughter, these things are not to be played with.”8 Other producers and distributors I interviewed also confided that their decisions were dictated by the need to respect the “sentiment” of their audience, particularly the female section. The adjective, “anti-sentiment,” sounded the death knell for a film. Thus, maintaining “basic Indian sentiments” in the storyline most often translated to maintaining a conservative subtext—one that did not challenge gender norms or social conventions. As a proponent of story value, Venkateshwaran required that the banner publicity he commissioned captured the essence of the film’s story. Other producers developed their advertising campaigns similarly. Narendra Shah explained, “for a violent film like Chathriyan (Warrior, 1990) about a tough cop, we try to convey the theme through the expression on the hero’s face, his clothing, boots, belt, the stick he holds. Chathriyan is the name of the hero and we try to show his character in the banner.”

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Communicating with the Audience The financial and social gap that distanced film financiers from the working class and poor sectors of their audience did not impede banner artists’ interactions with the public. The wages artists earned placed them squarely in a lower middle-class income group. Yet, like film producers and their distributors, artists relied principally upon preconceptions about audience taste in banners, lacking formal methods by which to survey public response to the advertisements. Banner artists, however, had access to an informal mechanism that provided limited insight into their viewers’ preferences. Nearly all banners and cutouts were customarily signed, featuring the company name, in script, in a lower corner (as a fine artist would sign a canvas), and most included the company’s telephone number discreetly painted in under the signature. This practice, begun by the owner of Chandran Arts with the original intent of attracting prospective customers, proved successful in several ways. Because most banner companies were unlisted in the telephone directory, the inclusion of the company’s telephone number on the banners allowed those outside the film industry to directly access artists. The owner of Chandran Arts recalled that “it was from seeing our phone number that an Indian expatriate film producer from Malaysia called to give us an order. An official at the United States Information Service also contacted us to order a cutout of [their newly elected president] George Bush [senior].” The greatest impact of this practice, however, may have been a closer connection to the viewing audience. Owners of some of Chennai’s leading banners companies—Chandran Arts, Mohan Arts, and J. P. Krishna Arts—related that they regularly received phoned-in comments from the public (most of them appreciative, according to the artists) on their banner production. This direct audience response appeared to be of some importance to individual artists. These “fan phone calls” seemed to enhance their reputation. If clients were unwilling to spend liberally, artists—and particularly the younger generation of banner artists who were working to establish their own style and reputation for excellence—went so far, I was told, as to invest portions of their own salaries to ensure that their banners and cutouts were made from quality materials, particularly those works that were displayed on Anna Salai and other high visibility locations. The owner of Kala Arts explained: We may include extra fittings [of plastic, papier-mâché, and plywood] even if [the clients] do not request us to do so. If the client understands and appreciates our work he will pay us the extra charge. Otherwise he may say that he did not ask us to include all this; that he cannot pay for the extra labor and

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materials. In that case, we reply that it is all right—we are content if the public sees and appreciates the work, and leave it at that.

The feedback that this artist received from the public confirmed the worth of his investment. One of his Anna Salai banners had featured in Ananda Vikatan, a popular Tamil magazine, as well in a few local newspapers, one of which reported that the Kala Arts banner was better than the film itself. A minority of financiers and artists I interviewed were convinced that sexually explicit imagery was the most obvious means to arouse the public’s interested attention. The owner of Jaya Arts bluntly declared: “Sex has greater value!” He continued, “If you have an image of a bommai [a pretty woman] no one will pay any attention to the banner; as they travel along the street they may just glance at it and go on their way. If we make the same banner sexy, people will stand and stare at it with a wide grin on their faces.” The increasing sexual content of cinema advertisements had led to a backlash in regulatory control of street displays of banners and cutouts. Passed in July 1990, a Chennai city ordinance required financiers to obtain approval of their publicity material from the South India Film Chamber of Commerce.9 In fact, there had been similar previous attempts to censor film banners and posters. In 1975, for instance, financiers had attempted to circumvent such a regulation, arguing that the still photographs chosen for the banner designs were taken from footage that had already been approved by the censor board. As the owner of Sai Arts recalled, “the police commissioner’s reply to the distributors was that the image they chose only appeared on the cinema screen for a few seconds so people would soon forget about it, or may not even have quite seen it. Whereas, when you freeze that image, blow it up to huge proportions and display it prominently, it will surely cause traffic jams and accidents.” Hypocrisy in matters of sexuality is endemic to the film industry. On the one hand, the hero and heroine are seldom allowed to kiss. On the other hand, stylized rape scenes are a staple of entertainment cinema. Nudity or sexual intercourse is taboo, yet close-up shots of the heroine’s body are a conventional feature of song and dance sequences. Personnel in the film industry claim they are merely responding to public demand. Saroj Khan, a dance choreographer for Hindi cinema, explains: “In olden days, stars used to perform purely classical dances and they were accepted. Today the taste of the audience has changed and they want to see more of the anatomy.”10 This conviction was shared by certain banner artists, those who regularly violated the censorship regulations for film advertisements until an outcry from the public (primarily “ladies groups” as one artist phrased it) prompted renewed enforcement.

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Figure 2.2. The police regularly censored cinema advertisements by pasting paper over sections of the image deemed offensive by the public. On this banner the first word of the film’s title Aye (Hey!) has been covered in response to a protest from autorickshaw drivers that such a form of hailing was demeaning to them. The Vee-cum-see Theater Complex, Anna Salai, January 1991.

Despite the fact that the police had repeatedly hauled him into court, the owner of Jaya Arts had persisted in covertly accepting orders for what banner artists call “sexy banners.” Unlike their other products, these advertisements were unsigned. The Chennai police department regularly censored these banners by plastering white paper over those sections of the image that its officers found offensive. Other banner companies, when commissioned to paint semi-nude figures, regularly took the precaution of “clothing” the body in dollars—two-centimeter (one-inch) colored plastic disks that, from a distance, resembled sequins—or other decorative additions.

Producer Paradigms and Audience Perspectives This element of my research was restricted to a brief survey of individual opinion, administered to one hundred participants on the street, in face-toface oral interviews. While audience research of this type has been used in academic cultural studies11 the method has been exercised extensively in market research by the private sector.

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The explicit objective of the survey was to use the responses of cinema viewers to reflect upon some of the artists’ and financiers’ principal audiencerelated assumptions—what they believed to be the preferences of Chennai’s film audiences to whom these advertisements were directed. The first part of the survey inquired as to the respondent’s frequency of film attendance and the specific aspects that attracted him or her to Tamil films—thus, providing data with which to reflect on artist and financier characterizations of their audience. The remaining questions of the survey focused on the public’s perceptions and opinions about the aesthetics of banners and cutouts, which respondents viewed almost daily on the main streets of Chennai. The survey questions were designed to allow respondents to reflect on assumptions made by artists and financiers. Discovering public opinion on two principal assumptions was of particular interest. These, which I term the paradigms of banner production, are the “theme paradigm” and the “aesthetic paradigm”—which appeared to be operating assumptions that guided banner artists in their designs and influenced financiers. The theme paradigm encompassed banners and cutouts that played to the star value of films by featuring likenesses of the film’s celebrities. These were generally the most effective advertisements targeting urban filmgoers. The aesthetic paradigm was dictated by the assumption among artists and their clients that the urban, low-income filmgoing public found advertisements that were brighter and more intensely colored to be most attractive, and this audience equated larger and more elaborate banners and cutouts with expensively produced films. While not all films were targeted exclusively at low-income audiences, nor were commissions always directed entirely at big-city audiences, these paradigms were germane to the vast majority of advertising commissions awarded to banner artists, and to the audiences whom I interviewed outside of Chennai’s cinema theater complexes. In the following section I summarize audience responses and quote individual respondents from these interviews. And I reflect upon the depth to which artists and financiers understood their audience and their preferences and responses to advertising. The occupational profile of the majority of the one hundred filmgoers whom I interviewed at nine cinema theater complexes in Chennai in 1991 were a mix of lower middle class, working class and poor. Upper-middle class and the elite segments of Tamil-speaking society also patronized entertainment films, but less frequently, in the 1980s and 1990s, by attending films in theaters, and more typically choosing to view Tamil films on video or DVD in the privacy of their homes. As Randor Guy observed:

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In the old days, when the theater was house-full the car park was also full, whereas that is not the case now. Although the upper classes do not frequent the theaters anymore, [this trend has reversed since 2000 with the construction of upscale theaters] the expensive seats are still always sold out because the average man or woman in Madras will even starve himself just to buy a ticket to see a hit Tamil film.

Cinema was clearly an important element in the lives of the people whom I interviewed. From my sample, 72 percent of the respondents attended between one and five films in a cinema theater each month. And 70 percent answered that they frequently paid to see the same film more than once. Results of the audience survey corroborated some of Chennai’s film producers’ and distributors’ assumptions about the power and attraction of Tamil film stars—or, as industry financiers called it, the “star value” of a film. Based upon the answers of audiences to my survey questions and the free-flowing conversations that ensued, the identities of individual film stars were the principal attractions that brought a large proportion of Chennai’s filmgoers to the city’s cinema theaters. When asked which aspects of the banner advertisements displayed at the theater complex they found most attractive, the star’s image was the second most-cited feature: 26 percent of the respondents mentioned being most impressed by the facial features and poses of the film star. In addition, 54 percent of all interviewees could recall previous banners that had impressed them, and eight out of every ten of these specified that the film star’s image in the banner had been the most attractive aspect of the advertisement. However, I also found that the importance of the film’s star value changed after the initial viewing of the film. The responses to my questions concerning the motivational factors in film attendance indicated that while a film’s star value and story value were both important considerations in an individual’s decision to view a film, each criterion was significant at different stages of the film-viewing experience. When deciding whether or not to view a film for the first time the star value and, or, production value was the primary influential factor for 12 percent of interviewees, rating third, after hearsay (36 percent) and newspaper reviews (16 percent). On the other hand, when queried about the qualities of a film that enticed viewers to return for repeated viewings, 48 percent of the responses suggested that they were interested in the film’s story value, while 34 percent indicated that it was its masala value—the mix of popular music and action scenes—that was responsible for their continued attraction to the film. 8 percent mentioned that they were attracted by the identity of the film’s producer or director—what

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the industry calls production value—while just 6 percent returned because of the star value of a film. Notably, my interviews with the public did not neatly corroborate a number of the aesthetic paradigms adhered to by many banner artists and the financiers of their work. For example, whereas artists and financiers believed that the larger sizes of banners were a most positive asset in advertising and greatly admired by filmgoers, 56 percent of the sample of spectators expressed some type of negative opinion concerning their large size. Several from the former group were most explicit about their disapproval, describing the excessive sizes of advertisements as an extravagance, and a ploy of the film industry to manipulate viewers. And the viewing public was evenly divided on the issue of offensive imagery in banners. While 43 percent of the interviewees complained about the excess of sex and violence in some advertisements, especially those created for Malayalam or English films, 41 percent were unable to recall being offended by obscene imagery in film advertisements (16 percent offered no comment). The large sizes, bright colors, and arresting imagery of film banners clearly caught the eyes of the viewing public. Nearly every respondent made one or more comments about the distractive qualities of banners and cutouts. A majority of the 62 percent of viewers who said that they enjoyed seeing banner advertisements on the city streets, plus a majority of the 18 percent who were critical, also worried that Chennai’s roadside banners overly distracted the attention of drivers and pedestrians. Some respondents claimed that banners were a direct cause of traffic jams and road accidents. And some individuals who said that they enjoyed banners qualified their appreciation with comments suggesting that they might favor this work restricted to preassigned areas, or only if devoid of sexually explicit images. 54 percent of respondents differentiated between advertisements for the cinema and other commercial products. Of this group, more than half (55 percent) favored film advertisements because they were more attractive, more colorful, and changed more frequently. Such distinctions were not surprising since the medium of handpainted banners in the 1990s differed from the enamel paint on metal surfaces and stenciled images of billboard advertisements. And the dramatic imagery and rich colors of cinema banners contrasted sharply with the bland graphics of the billboards. When asked how film advertisements compared with political advertisements, 31 percent of the respondents emphasized that there was no difference. The 44 percent who distinguished between the two forms of advertising were evenly divided: one half of respondents favored film advertisements as necessary publicity or saw the advertisements as being more colorful, and

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Figure 2.3. The scale and brilliant colors of the handpainted cinema advertisements never failed to attract and captivate the viewing public. This image is evocative of the pervasive aural dimension of cinema. Painted by the J. P. Krishna Arts banner company (enamel paint on a wall surface with plywood cutout attachments). Kodambakkam High Road, December 1990.

“more attractive,” while the other half claimed that political advertisements were the “necessary publicity.” Each group saw the least favored type of advertising as a waste of money. I was surprised by this cynicism about the publicity function of the banner and cutout medium. Neither financiers nor artists I interviewed had characterized their audience as skeptical. Nonetheless, audience opinion ran consistent with the assumption expressed by most financiers that, for their additional sizable investments in banners and cutouts, this mode of advertising returned little in the way of marginal profit. Only 6 percent of the public whom I interviewed believed that banner advertisements actually affected their decision to pay to view a specific film.12 Whether this personal view of the impact of film advertisement, or other disgruntled views of the imagery expressed in these interviews, for that matter, were actually realistic appraisals of the return on advertising investments is difficult, and perhaps impossible to judge. Perhaps the most unexpected result of the survey, for me, was the relatively large proportion of respondents who demonstrated an interest in and cognizance of the artistic qualities of banners and cutouts. 54 percent recalled

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specific banner advertisements that they had found attractive. When asked what most attracted them to the banners, 28 percent said they appreciated the artists’ skills, while 26 percent were most attracted to the star’s image, and 12 percent enjoyed the bright colors. A surprising 22 percent of respondents indicated that they knew specific banner artists by name, and could distinguish their work from others, and more than half of these (13 percent of total respondents) actually identified, by name, the banner company whose work they most appreciated. An Uneasy Symbiosis By exposing details of the local context of the medium of banner art, the motives and actions of its practitioners and the objects of its production, I have tried to explore the complex market interactions and interpersonal relationships of this Beckerian art world within which the financial considerations of commerce and the personal considerations of artistic expression were continuously negotiated. For the participants in Chennai’s banner art world, these negotiations reflected an uneasy symbiosis: at times artistically complementary and even creatively synergistic, in other instances restrictive and sometimes mutually antagonistic. For Chennai’s banner companies, it was a risky art world. The livelihoods and careers of its artists were tightly linked to the volatile financial fortunes of the Tamil cinema industry. And (like artists everywhere) these artists were buffeted by the whims, fancies, and business sensibilities of patrons and by competition from other artists. These risks were exacerbated by the insecurities typical of a developing-country setting: a flooded labor market, an inadequate social safety net, and court systems too crowded and dysfunctional to adequately protect small businesses. Yet Chennai’s banner artists appeared willing to endure that risk. And, according to their responses to my interviews, a large portion of their inducement to do so was to maintain a livelihood identified as a skilled and admired profession—one that served as an outlet for their own creativity and that produced works which were publicly viewed and appreciated. I find it difficult to discount banner artists’ dedication to achieving quality and expression in their work. Not unlike other muralists in other parts of the world, excellence in the eyes of Chennai’s banner artists was reflected in brushwork, compositional layout, appropriateness of color schemes, the rendering of depth, and the portraiture’s likeness to portrayed individuals. And they often applied extra effort and materials without recompense in the face of market pressures to do otherwise. The reasons for this were not only to promote their own companies and careers, but, to some extent, for the sake

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of intangibles: to maintain standards of excellence, and to produce novel and experimental works that garnered praise from other artists, colleagues in the film industry and the public. So why, despite the skepticism of the younger generation of producers and distributors, were banners and cutouts such a dominant feature of the urban landscape in Chennai and several other cities in Tamil Nadu? And why did financiers of cinema fund these advertisements? At the time of the survey, and in Tamil Nadu’s contemporary economic and social conditions, there were few if any alternative approaches of mass advertising that the marketplace could test. Distributors dared not attempt to release Tamil films without some type of highly visible on-the-street advertisement. Collectively, the strong visual impact of banners and cutouts served to signal the presence of cinema in the city and to remind the public of the cultural aura, the ideology and escapist glamour of Tamil cinema and the politics that are woven through it. For approximately half a century, these painted advertisements, and the system of art production and finance that made them possible, had been an integral part of the processes by which Chennai’s residents made the cultural texts of Tamil cinema and politics their own.

Notes 1. Howard Becker, Art Worlds (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982), 296, 298. 2. Howard Becker, Art Worlds, 13, 35–36. Aesthetic criteria forged from a collective dialectic between producers and consumers is paradigmatic as well, of the popular art in developing countries. See also Bennetta Jules-Rosette, The Messages of Tourist Art: An African Semiotic System in Comparative Perspective (New York: Plenum Press, 1984), 230. 3. This was unlike the film industry in Bombay that functioned on a minimum guarantee basis, whereby the distributor provides the producer a minimum guarantee that his film will collect a specified amount of money. If the profits (after deducting costs incurred for production, prints, and publicity) are greater than the principal investment, then the producer and distributor have equal share of the money the film makes. However, Madhava Prasad (Ideology of the Hindi Film: A Historical Construction [New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1998], 40–41), notes that the minimum guarantee system made it difficult for producers to make a profit. Exhibitors also had power over the producers because in Indian cities demand for viewing facilities for cinema exceeds supply. 4. The Corporation of Madras leased spaces for billboard display to private individuals or companies who, in turn, rented the area to advertisers. I was informed that

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while there was more money to be made from renting the locations to film advertisers, the rental contracts for cinema advertisements were usually for a maximum of one to three months. Whereas advertisers of other commercial products usually rented the space for a year so their bids were preferred by the leaseholders. 5. The interview was conducted on on November 20, 1990, at the Anand Theater in Chennai. 6. Paul M. Hirsch, “Processing Fads and Fashions: An Organization-set Analysis of Cultural Industry Systems,” American Journal of Sociology 77, no. 4 (1972): 643–44. 7. Becker, Art Worlds, 125. 8. Other financiers provided their own definitions of a good story. C. Murugesan was adamant that “family subjects” were most successful. On the contrary, the owner of Leo International had experienced a “heavy loss” from promoting such “homely themes” and believed that “love stories” were the “main attraction” of the current generation. 9. Journal of the Film Chamber of the South India Film Chamber of Commerce, August 1990. 10. Saroj Khan, “Guest Column,” Screen Trade Information, October 6, 1990 (no page numbers). 11. Virginia Nightingale, Studying Audiences: The Shock of the Real (New York: Routledge, 1996), 145–52. 12. Most respondents (36 percent) relied upon “word of mouth” publicity (the general opinion about a film that circulated in their social circles) when making their selection. The next important source of information about a film was newspaper reviews (16 percent) followed by the star cast (12 percent), wall poster advertisements (8 percent), and film music (7 percent). Only television and magazines rated lower than banners as effective advertisements for cinema.

C H A P T E R

T H R E E



Tamil Cinema: History, Celebrities, Genres

Stylistic characteristics of banner and cutout advertisements for the cinema are determined by the medium of communication, including the availability of the appropriate technology, skill, labor and clientele, the target audience and its social context, and the type of cinema that is advertised. The first two of these factors, pertaining to banner and cutout advertisements for the cinema, were the focus of the previous two chapters. In this chapter I turn to the product that is advertised—Indian entertainment cinema. It would be an oversight to launch into an analysis of the banner and cutout street advertisements that were produced for Tamil films without first reviewing the social history of the great patron of these images: Tamil Nadu’s Tamil-language film industry. Like other regional cinemas in India, the story of Tamil films began in the silent film industry in Bombay, and then was taken up in Madras in the 1930s after soundtrack technology was introduced to filmmaking. At the turn of the twenty-first century, India holds the distinction of being the world’s leading producer of feature films. The nation’s studios produce, on average, about eight hundred films each year. And India is one of only a small collection of countries where, since the 1970s, annual film production has grown rather than declined. India’s cinema production units entertain a domestic audience of approximately thirteen million daily patrons, and the industry’s distributors export films to more than one hundred countries.1 Despite its enormous production volume, India’s film market exhibits several telling imperfections. For example, the viewing facility-to-audience ratio remains

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among the lowest in the world.2 And film production bears a high rate of failure. Approximately 80 percent of all Hindi films are reported as financial losses.3 There is a growing interest in Indian cinema within academic circles, yet Hindi cinema, traditionally regarded as representative of Indian cinema, continues to retain this privileged position in the discourse. Instead, by focusing on the specific history of Tamil cinema I demonstrate that the latter tradition, more than any other cinematic tradition in India, has evolved the most vital connections with political and social developments in the region. The social and production relationships associated with Tamil film at times become indistinguishable from the social and organizational relationships involved in electoral politics. This chapter reviews this relationship from the perspective of the Tamil cinema industry. In chapter 5 I narrate this history from the perspective of electoral politics in Tamil Nadu. Tamil cinema is one of a range of regional language cinemas that comprise the Indian film industry. My survey of Tamil cinema, therefore, is set within the broader context of the history of Indian cinema. My discussion notes three major historical shifts in the development of cinema: the pre-independence era of 1913–1947, the post-independence decades of the 1950s and 1960s, and the contemporary period dating from the 1970s. And in this narrative I introduce key celebrities of Tamil cinema who reappear in subsequent chapters, albeit in primarily political rather than cinematic roles. I end the chapter with a brief discussion of the categorization of Indian films into three dominant genres: experimental, middle and entertainment. The content and stylistic aspects of entertainment cinema are mirrored in banner and cutout advertisements—the topic of the following chapter.

History of Indian Cinema: The Early Years (1913–1946) Cinema made its passage to India on July 7, 1896, arriving just months after Auguste and Louis Lumière gave their first public demonstration of the technology on December 28, 1895, at the Salon Indien in the basement of the Grand Café at 4, Boulevard des Capucines in Paris. When members of Bombay’s European community crowded into the city’s Watson Hotel to view the first films screened in the crown colony, projected by the Lumière cameraman Maurice Sestier, Indians were not among them. The Watson was open only to European patrons. Though excluded from the festivities at the Watson that were advertised with great fanfare in the Times of India newspaper as “The Marvel of the Century” and “The Wonder of the World,” Indians could not be kept from making the medium their own. From 1898 onward Indians

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began to experiment with the new technology, purchase the equipment, and establish film production and distribution companies.4 On May 3, 1913, Dhundiraj Govind Phalke’s feature film, Raja Harishchandra (3,700 ft., black-and-white) premiered at Bombay’s Coronation Cinematograph. Recent research sets the date of the first indigenous production back one year, with the release of the short film Pundalik (12 ft, black-and-white) on May 18, 1912, also at the Coronation. The latter film was a joint venture of N. G. Chitre, P. R. Tipnis, and R. G. Tourne.5 Phalke based his film, Raja Harishchandra, on a well-known story from the classic Hindu epic, Mahabharata. In this film, and in over a hundred other subsequent films, Phalke fired the imagination of his viewers by leashing developments in film technology to the contemporary topics of Hindu revivalism and nationalist ideology. The efforts of Phalke and his contemporaries were soon rewarded by South Asia’s vast and receptive audience. The introduction of the cinematic medium to British India could hardly have come at a more critical juncture in the region’s political history. The development of South Asian cinema, in the hands of indigenous filmmakers, paralleled the development of an Indian national identity in the minds of a handful of South Asian intellectuals6 who would transform this idea to coalesce and organize widespread popular resistance to British rule, and ultimately gain independence for the nation. Cinema effectively accomplished a primary agenda of the independence movement: to ignite the spark of national pride by modernizing and valorizing indigenous cultural and religious traditions. And in so doing, these films established key enduring features of Indian entertainment cinema: screenplay derived from indigenous mythological and historical narratives; filmic structure and acting styles based on a mix of contemporary folk and urban theatrical traditions; and visualizations of sets, costumes and make-up influenced by the hybrid aesthetics of nineteenth-century Indian and Western academic artistic traditions. Unlike Indian classical theater, dance, and music performances—where access had been restricted by class, gender, and caste affiliations—cinema had no Indian cultural heritage. Outside the traditional purview of priestly castes, elaboration of the institutional rules of access to cinema fell to entrepreneurs. By paying a modest fee, anyone could enter a cinema theater.7 Once inside, the ticket price segregated the Indian rich from the Indian poor. In the South Asian context, the arrangement was revolutionary.8 In 1900 an Englishman, Major Warick, opened Chennai’s first permanent theater, the Electric Theater on Anna Salai. By the 1910s several other film exhibitors followed suit in Chennai and in other major south Indian cities. But the

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greatest percentage of audiences in south India, in urban and rural locations alike, were served by traveling or “tent” theaters that periodically toured the country screening popular films. Raghupathy Venkiah, a pioneer of Tamil cinema, first screened films in a tent theater erected in the vicinity of the Chennai High Court. In 1914 Venkiah collaborated with R. S. Prakash to open the first Indian-owned permanent theater in Chennai. Located on Anna Salai, this theater, known as the Gaiety, is still extant.9 The very first films made for an Indian audience were, within a short period, screened as far east as the British protectorate of Burma (now Myanmar, an independent nation) and as far south as British Ceylon (now Sri Lanka, also an independent nation). Their travels and positive reception proved the wide appeal of the cinematic medium and the relative ease of its transportability. From 1913 to the mid-1920s filmmakers experimented with a range of genres, fantasy films, stunt films, films with social themes, and those with religious themes. The latter, known as mythologicals, were based either on national myths—stories familiar to audiences all over the country, such as those from the epics, the Ramayana and Mahabharata—or on local and regional myths.10 The mythological thematic enabled Indian filmmakers to provide their audiences with subject matter unavailable in foreign films. And it probably helped Indian filmmakers survive the competition from Hollywood, and skirt British colonial policies that favored and promoted British films. Historians have argued (and lamented) that the commercial success of the mythological narrative ultimately inhibited Indian filmmakers, dissuading them from exploring other possibilities of the new medium.11 Perhaps that is what happened—but it is also the case that the cinematic renditions of these narratives set in motion decades of competitive experimentation with special effects. Early Indian cinema gave particular emphasis to producing illusions of miraculous and magical incidents. And these, accounts of the time suggest, regularly provoked devotional responses by moviegoers.12 Indian filmmakers were unable to keep up with the technical brilliance of Hollywood’s stunt films. Nevertheless, they produced effects not possible in previous theatrical renditions of the onscreen tales. For example, in the film Draupadi Vastrapaharanam (Disrobing of Draupadi, 1934, screenplay from the Mahabharata epic), director R. Prakash13 managed to create five images of a single actor within an extended series of frames. Similarly, D. G. Phalke’s film, Lanka Dahan (The Burning of Lanka, 1917)—an episode from the Ramayana in which the monkey god Hanuman destroys the city of Lanka with his ignited tail—engineered the spectacle of the monkey god’s figure “be-

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Figure 3.1. Mythologicals (a film genre with religious content) dominated early Indian cinema. A century later the genre continues to survive, though it is less central to the film industry. Spectatorship of such films, a mix of entertainment and spiritual edification, transformed the theater into pilgrimage site. The diorama in this photograph, advertising a mythological film, evoked Sabrimalai, an important focus of pilgrimage located in the mountainous border between Tamil Nadu and Kerala. Vee-Cum-See Theater, Anna Salai, 1992.

coming progressively diminutive as he flew higher and higher in the clouds.”14 Audience response to these films was dramatic. One film exhibitor in Madras reportedly began showings of Lanka Dahan every hour, beginning at 7:00 AM and ending after midnight. When Phalke’s Shri Krishna Janma (Birth of Lord Krishna, 1917) was shown in Madras, an exhibitor noted in delighted astonishment that “where the road is 100 feet broad in front of my theater, the whole road was blocked with traffic.” Both films “remained in circulation for over a decade. When Rama appeared on the screen in Lanka Dahan, and when in Shri Krishna Janma Lord Krishna himself at last appeared, men and women in the audience prostrated themselves before the screen.”15 Cinema generally remained about a decade behind theater in responding to contemporary political trends. Not until the independence movement began to attract a mass popular base—which occurred in 1920 under the charismatic leadership of Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi—did cinematic narratives finally acquire explicitly nationalist subtexts. Just five years previously Gandhi had returned to India from South Africa after having led a coalition

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of Indian immigrants from various social strata and ethnic and religious groups16 to combat the discriminatory policies of the British government in the latter country. As a result he had acquired a national reputation in his home country that no other Indian leader could claim at that time. Initially Gandhi had confined his political activity in India to specific cases of injustices experienced by peasants and laborers. It was only when the British government, in February of 1919, passed the infamous Rowlatt Act depriving Indians of their civil liberties, that Gandhi decided to launch a nationwide satyagraha (passive resistance or noncooperation). By the mid-1920s north Indian filmmakers had tapped into the prevailing atmosphere of emotionally charged patriotism to produce films with themes that focused on national sovereignty and related topics of social and religious reform. Even films with ostensibly mythological or historical subjects were given a subtext of nationalist, revivalist ideology. South Indian cinema took its cue not only from its northern counterpart, but also from highly politicized local theatrical traditions. As early as 1870, theater groups in Tamil Nadu based their performances on social reform themes, critiquing alcoholism, the caste system and the oppression of women.17 Although nationalistic themes were popular in Tamil drama since the 1920s, such subjects began to appear in Tamil cinema only in the early 1930s.18 The delayed response of Tamil filmmakers may be linked to the conflicted political situation in Tamil Nadu. The passions and energies of the populace in this southern state were divided between a desire to be rid of the foreign rulers but, equally, a burning need to combat the injustices of the indigenous caste system. While Gandhi was stirring the hopes of the nation for the termination of British domination, within Tamil Nadu, E. V. R. Naicker, referred to by his followers as Periyar (the great man) had, by 1925, initiated a militant “self-respect” movement demanding the destruction of the caste system. It was only in 1930, when Gandhi began the civil disobedience movement, that the national independence movement decisively, if temporarily, overwhelmed all other political agendas in Tamil Nadu. Symbols of the Indian independence movement were sometimes thrown arbitrarily into the main narrative of films produced during this era. For example, one of the fifty songs featured in the first Tamil talkie,19 Kalidas (1931)—essentially a biography of this famous poet of the sixth century CE— was completely unrelated to this historical figure. Instead, the song referenced the chakra or spinning wheel: a Gandhian symbol that called for popular support of indigenous cottage industries and the boycott of imported British textiles. The popularity of nationalistic themes and musical scores were threatening enough to the colonial government that it prompted

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British administrators to impose film censorship laws (though these proved largely ineffective).20 The Development of Regional Cinemas in the Pre-Independence Era The advent of sound in cinematic technology undercut the competition from British and American films and simultaneously led to the diversification of the Indian film industry into numerous regional cinemas that classified audiences by their linguistic as well as ethnic affiliations. With the establishment of sound studios in Calcutta in 1930, and Madras in 1934, the dependence of the south on northern studios and filmmakers ceased.21 And Madras began to take over the production of films in the four southern languages. This diversification has continued since with one Indian state after another establishing its own film industry. Each regional cinema developed a cadre of stars, narrative trends, and stylistic formulas specifically catered to appeal to local audiences. A survey of Indian cinema conducted in the early 1980s listed films made in twenty-nine languages (including English).22 The original soundtracks of more than 90 percent of entertainment films, however, are in Hindi, Tamil, or Telegu. Notably, India’s languages are spread across several major linguistic groups. Sanskritic languages—including Hindi, Marathi, Gujarati, Punjabi, Kashmiri, Assamese, Oriya, and Bengali—are spoken in the states that stretch across the central and northern portions of the country, from the state of Gujarat in the west to West Bengal and Assam in the east. To the very north, in the Jammu region, and very eastern sections, north and east of Bangladesh, Tibeto-Burmese languages are locally dominant. Dravidian languages are the official languages of the four southern states of India: Tamil Nadu, where Tamil is the official language; Kerala, where Malayalam is the state language; Andhra Pradesh, where Telegu is the state language; and Karnataka, where Kannada is the official language. The centers of production of these regional cinemas are located in the respective state capitals since state and regional boundaries are nearly coterminous with the dominant language groups.23 The Hindi film industry—known as Bollywood (an amalgam of Bombay and Hollywood)—is India’s oldest regional cinema and is centered in Bombay. This city (now known officially as Mumbai; the name was changed in 1996) developed as an important port and center of international commerce during the British colonial period from 1668, when it was granted to the British East India Company. Today Mumbai exists as a coastal enclave of Hindi-speaking, cosmopolitan South Asian culture in the surrounding Marathi-speaking state of Maharashtra. Like Mumbai society, Hindi is the

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language of the Bollywood film industry and of the film dialogue and music soundtracks it produces. And economy and history have conspired to provide Hindi with this role. Hindi is the lingua franca of northern India and thus the key to an expansive and profitable regional cinema with a potential audience in the hundreds of millions. Hindi’s use in Bombay grew in importance after the city received thousands of linguistically varied, mostly Hindu refugees directly following the partition of newly independent India and Pakistan in 1947. In fact, some of the Punjabi and Sindhi families who fled eastward from Pakistan now own controlling interests in a number of Bollywood’s most prominent and productive film companies. The Indian federal government’s early ambitions to establish a national language—which was politically contested and eventually quashed by protests in Tamil Nadu (see chapter 5)—have also had a hand in promoting the Hindi film industry. Hindi instruction, though not currently mandatory, is offered in virtually all of India’s primary and secondary schools. Clearly, the quasi-official status of Hindi as a national language has given the Hindi film industry the power to dub its own products All-India Films. In the past three decades, however, the relationship between Hindi cinema and regional cinemas has become increasingly complex, featuring reciprocal flows of technical and stylistic influence. Regional cinema, while restricted to those conversant in the vernacular, has proved itself (perhaps for the same reason) extremely successful in cultivating a responsive audience. It can be argued that regional films offer a specificity of context and identity that the All-India Hindi cinema has been unable to provide. Hindi cinema, in order to appeal to a national audience, is often deliberately vague about the setting and the ethnicity of the characters.24 Regional cinemas have the luxury to play upon ethnically specific issues, problems, and their causes. Regional cinema also has the flexibility to cater to social and cultural variations in the tastes and tolerances of its target audience. The prevailing opinion within the cinema business is that audiences in Kerala, the state bordering Tamil Nadu to the west, enjoy “a well-told story” and will tolerate a tragic ending. In Tamil Nadu, however, “no fan will let his hero die on screen.”25 According to the stereotype, audiences in the latter state demand “songs, dances, glamour, fights and sex.”26 On the other hand, compared to the audiences for Hindi films the majority of Tamil audiences are considered markedly conservative. Film producers and distributors whom I interviewed in Chennai generally concurred with one distributor’s statement that “in Tamil Nadu, the popular themes are about relationships: mother-child; younger sister-older brother; caring for one’s sister, getting her married; or the

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older sister caring for others in the family; sacrificing for one’s parents. Most films are based on such family themes.”27 Hindi film audiences, however, contemptuously characterize such family stories—those lacking a strong dose of sex and violence—as vegetarian films.28 The packaging of violence to enhance the market value of films is tellingly recorded in a Hindi film banner that I observed in Mumbai during my field research in 1991 that advertised “kidnapping” and “rape” (along with the usual masala ingredients: “fights, love and horror”) to attract viewers and sell tickets. Despite variations in regional tastes, films that are major successes in one language are now achieving financial success in other regional markets. Since the 1990s, big blockbusters—particularly those whose music score achieved wide success—have invariably been dubbed or remade in other languages. This practice, as well as the ongoing migration of stars around the various film industries of the country, is likely to ensure some homogeneity in audience tastes and filmic styles.

History of Indian Cinema: The Post-Independence Era (1947–1967) With Indian independence in 1947, Indian cinema shifted its focus from nationalist themes to urban issues. The film industry’s new focus astutely mirrored the powerful demographic trends that were affecting its audience. South Asia’s urban populations had grown dramatically during World War II, driven simultaneously by population growth and the threat of Japanese invasion in the east. India’s identity as a modern nation became unequivocally bound to urban development at the expense of the rural economy. And when Mohandas K. Gandhi was assassinated in 1948, rural India lost its most articulate advocate.29 The preferential treatment of urban areas was formalized in 1951 with the implementation of Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru’s first five-year plan—an incremental modernization program that focused on large-scale industrialization. By creating employment in industrialized urban zones, Nehru’s program further stimulated rural-to-urban migration, promoting urban population growth and a deepening pool of urban labor. For cinema, this translated to a vast increase in audience.30 Confronted with the complexities of nationhood, cinematic narratives veered away from the depiction of wondrous miracles and incredible stunts to an emphasis on social realism. The new emphasis was well chosen. Since Independence Day, on August 15, 1947, modern India has never suffered a shortage of stark social realities.

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The new government’s rhetoric and promises were now forced to confront the reality of a rapidly growing population—then at about 350 million people—and the conditions of poverty into which the vast majority of these people were born, the illiteracy that circumscribed their lives, and the dismal public health conditions that would prematurely end them. To make matters worse, months of ethnic violence during the subcontinent’s political partition claimed the lives of some two hundred thousand human beings, rendering social and political scars that the country would bear for decades. And then Pakistani troops invaded disputed Kashmir. War between the two young states broke out before the year of their independence could come to a close. National integration invariably became the thematic core of Hindi film narratives of the 1950s.31 Plots rationalized allegiance to the new and synthetic nation-state over the call of religion, regional affinities, and kinship ties. Cinema also sought to explore the great Indian social and political contradictions of the times. Hindi films became studies of the incompatibilities and incongruities afoot when essentially rural people came to lead urban lifestyles, and when traditional values bumped up against the praxis of modern life. Screenwriters synthesized these themes into family dramas—what became known to audiences as “socials.” Despite the pivotal function of cinema in the struggle for independence, India’s intellectuals and statesmen had little use for the medium. Film was, to the nation-state’s elite, an engine of Westernization and social decadence. Cinema was, they noted, fast replacing precolonial forms of entertainment— India’s rich variety of folk theatrical traditions, which they considered art as opposed to cinema’s low-brow culture. At a meeting of film celebrities in 1953, the erudite chief minister of Tamil Nadu, C. Rajagopalachari, vituperated that cinema was “a poison” and that the industry would serve the populace best if it would only self-destruct.32 To nurture and protect the fine arts, the Indian federal government in 1953–1954 established three national organizations: the Sangeet-Natak Akademi (The Academy of Music and Dance), the Lalit Kala Akademi (The Academy for Visual Art), and the Sahitya Kala Akademi (The Academy for Literature). Almost simultaneously, the federal government imposed stringent censorship laws on the cinema industry with the Indian Cinematograph Act of 1952. And it increased the entertainment tax on cinema from 12 percent under the British administration to between 25 and 75 percent.33 Ironically, the most effective ambassador of Indian culture during this era was Raj Kapoor—a Hindi film actor, producer, and director, and one of India’s most successful cultural export products. Hindi cinema, particularly those films that featured Raj Kapoor, commanded an ardent following in a

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wide sweep of countries from North Africa and the Middle East to the Soviet Union. In Iran Kapoor was known as “Agha Raj Kapoora,” and in the Soviet Union as “Tavarish Brodigya,” or “Comrade Awaara,” named after the film Awaara (The Tramp, 1951). Thanks to Kapoor and his contemporaries, the Hindi film industry dominated the film entertainment marketplace in all corners of India during the 1950s and 1960s. The era also marked a period of financial transition for the Bombay film industry. Business shifted from mostly financially self-contained, family-run studios that produced on modest budgets and kept their technicians and actors in their long-term employ to independent producers who sought outside investors for big-budget productions and hired on short-term contracts. Many of these producers were inexperienced in the film business. Hoping for a quick profit they exited the business after producing just one film. The transition from the studios to the independent producers was hastened by a number of factors, including the outmoded business practice of the studios that was based on family connections, the rising expenses involved in film production, particularly with the creation of the star system, and the changing situation of money in Indian society.34 Indian businessmen who had accumulated illegal wealth in the wartime black market found entertainment films to be convenient vehicles for laundering their black money—the term South Asians use to describe unreported profits. Entertainment films continued in this role, as businessmen sought to hide profits from the high-income taxes imposed under Nehru’s version of socialism. The financial connection between the Hindi film industry and organized crime’s black money, the product of illegal businesses, has been a problem for the industry ever since. Post-Independence Tamil Cinema: The Studios During the same period, some 1,300 kilometers south of Bombay, Tamil Nadu’s cinema studios assembled the physical and human capital they would need to articulate a distinct regional identity in the medium.35 As they did, a Tamil political party—the Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (the Dravidian Progressive Federation, or DMK)—maneuvered to project its message of Tamil political nationalism onto the cinema screen, and ultimately into power in the state of Tamil Nadu. (See chapter 5 for a detailed history of the Dravidian movement.) This melding of capital, artistry, ideology, technical expertise, and ethnic identity produced a powerful political product, one more specific and personal than its Bombay Hindi-language counterpart could have afforded to make. A comparison of two films produced in the 1950s—Mother India (1957), a Hindi film, and the Tamil film Avvaiyar (1953)—underscores the

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distinct agendas of Hindi cinema and Tamil cinema. Mother India, reputedly one of the three greatest hits of Indian cinema, is replete with symbols that reference the birth of India as a nation state. It extols a peasant woman’s sacrifice of her son for the benefit of community and for India, blurring any regional or caste identities that could muddle the universality of the state citizenship ideal and its supremacy over other allegiances. In contrast, the Tamil classic Avvaiyar opens with a dedication to “Mother Tamil” and a song of praise to the land of the Tamils. The film celebrates the rich Tamil heritage through its depiction of the miraculous life of Avvaiyar, a legendary poetess who lived sometime between 100 BCE and 250 CE, and whose poems are still taught to children in Tamil Nadu.36 Born of low caste, as were most of the film’s audience, Avvaiyar achieved sainthood by being recognized for her intense devotion to Murugan—a son of the god Shiva, and a popular and revered deity in Tamil Nadu. Though not explicitly political, the radical anti-caste message, a key aspect of the DMK ideology, was nonetheless clear. Much of the success of the Tamil film industry was built on the stability of Tamil Nadu’s film companies. Unlike the failed family-owned studios in Bombay, two large production houses in Madras—Gemini Pictures and AVM Studios—managed to maintain thriving businesses from the late 1940s through the 1960s. They mobilized the capital and expertise needed to challenge the Bombay film industry’s market dominance among Tamil-speakers. They also dubbed soundtracks of their films into other South Indian languages and even the North Indian lingua franca, Hindi, to make forays into other regional markets. The financial stability afforded by the production houses coupled with exciting new content and talent for cinema provided by the active involvement of the DMK, which was formed in 1949, shifted the South Indian film industry into high gear. In 1949, 60 percent of the film production in India was based in the Bombay area and only 11 percent in the Madras area. A decade later Madras claimed 46 percent of the nation’s film production, overtaking the Bombay industry, which had only 38 percent.37 AVM Studios, started in 1945 by A. V. Meiyappan (1907–1979), regularly produced films in four languages: Tamil, Telegu, Kannada, and Hindi. A series of phenomenally successful films in the late 1940s and early 1950s prompted Meiyappan to set his sights on the national market. Two early hits produced by the AVM company tapped into prevailing political trends: Nam Iruvar (We Two, 1947) engaged heavily in Indian nationalist sentiment, while a series of monologues in Parasakthi (Goddess, 1952) replicated the regionalist rhetoric of Tamil leaders. AVM is today one of the major privatesector institutions of Chennai, and the Meiyappan family—which owns the

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conglomerate AVM Group and controls a diverse array of South Indian firms—is currently one of the foremost business families in South India. Located on prime real estate along Anna Salai, Gemini Pictures, which opened in 1941, became one of the city’s better-known landmarks. Its owner, S. S. Vasan (1903–1969; discussed in chapter 1), developed a national reputation for his provincial production company through innovative and aggressive marketing strategies. During the 1950s and 1960s Vasan attempted to make Gemini Pictures a national production house in competition with production studios in Bombay, at that time the hub of the Indian film world. Before it shut down operations in the early 1970s, Gemini Pictures was producing more films in Hindi than in Tamil. As an astute businessman, Vasan closely monitored all aspects of each film produced by his company. At its zenith, Gemini Pictures employed around six hundred professionals, technicians, artists, and workers, with offices in seven metropolitan regions: Madras and Cochin in the south; Bombay, Nagpur, and Hyderabad in the west and central region; and Calcutta and Vishakapatnam in the east. Vasan made his production house virtually self-sufficient by opening an advertising wing and employing stars in long-term contracts. And from 1958 onward the studio had its own full-scale Eastman color laboratory. An author of novels and film scripts,38 Vasan also started a publishing wing that produced the popular magazine Ananda Vikatan (one of the most highly respected banner artists, K. Madhavan, whose influence I discussed in chapter 1, first achieved popular recognition as an illustrator for the magazine) that remains in circulation as a bestselling Tamil-language weekly, outliving Vasan’s film empire. Gemini Pictures’ trademark film was Chandralekha (1948), a historical fiction filmed as a grand spectacle. With dramatic song and dance sequences featuring lavish sets, such as one that depicted hundreds of dancers on gigantic drums set in a vast courtyard, the film caused a sensation nationwide. Gemini translated Chandralekha into several Indian languages and distributed the film to all India’s major cities. Vasan attempted to replicate the Chandralekha formula in subsequent films, even authoring a manifesto titled Pageants for the People, which defended his populist approach to cinema. Post-Independence Tamil Cinema: The DMK Party For Tamil Nadu, the post-independence years were politically charged times. The organization of India’s constitution, the advent of universal suffrage, and the implementation of India’s federal democracy—its elected central parliamentary system and state legislative assemblies—had enormous implications in Tamil Nadu, and arguably much more than in India’s northern states.

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The state was preordained for the rise of ethnic nationalism (a history I discuss in detail in chapter 5). Tamil Nadu was among the first group of Indian states to elect (in 1967) a regional political party to the state government and displace the Congress Party that, from independence on, had dominated the central and all state governments. Unlike the large and politically organized Muslim minorities of India’s northern states, Tamil Nadu’s Muslims were a relatively small minority and remained relatively nonpolitical after independence. The social cleavage between Brahmins and the lower caste majority, however, ran deep through Tamil society. For Tamil nationalists, the confluence of demographics and democracy presented an opportunity to reorganize politics and Tamil society, if only their constituency could be brought together under a Tamil-nationalist vision—a vision that ran somewhat askew of the Indian nationalist vision that the Indian National Congress (now the Congress Party) had used to unite the otherwise fractionalized population against the British. Tamil nationalists of the DMK permeated all ranks of Tamil Nadu’s film studio professionals and staff. The most influential among them were two prominent screenwriters—C. N. Annadurai and Muthuvel Karunanidhi— whose literary abilities and pivotal positions not only garnered them celebrity status in the film world, but also ensured their leadership roles within the party. Both entered the field as theater playwrights. Several of Annadurai’s and Karunanidhi’s most successful plays were later turned into financially successful and artistically notable films. In Velaikkari (Servant Maid, 1948), perhaps Annadurai’s most recognized film, the screenwriter established the thematic of post-independence Tamil nationalist films. In this classic theme, the young peasant hero experiences a series of grave injustices through which the complicity of secular political and religious elites in exploiting the rural poor is revealed to him. The film plays upon religious hypocrisy, denounces all forms of superstition, and exposes caste barriers that oppressively inhibit normal human social interactions.39 As a Hollywood film buff, Annadurai liberally appropriated plots, scenes, events sequences, and even costumes and make-up from American films.40 He was particularly inspired by Robert Riskin’s Depression-era screenplays, such as Mr. Deeds Goes to Town (1936, directed by Frank Capra), which espoused leftist ideals of distributional equity and equality of opportunity. Similarly, Karunanidhi’s Parasakthi (Goddess, 1952) brought him acclaim within the film industry as a screenwriter, and as a leading Tamil nationalist ideologue among DMK party members. Karunanidhi’s screenplay was based on a popular play of the same name by P. Balasundaram, but the film version

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immortalized the narrative as a classic of Tamil cinema and cemented Karunanidhi’s celebrity status. In Parasakthi, Karunanidhi defines the modern Tamil hero as angry, atheistic, and politically committed. The narrative concerns a young woman who is molested by the local temple priest to whom she has appealed for sanctuary.41 Upon rescuing her, the hero launches into a monologue elucidating DMK political philosophy. He castigates the forms of social oppression to which the low-caste Tamil—the likely viewing audience—is accustomed: that of the rich over the poor, and of the Brahmin orthodoxy over the illiterate masses. Film-Star Politicians of Tamil Cinema The films scripted by Annadurai and Karunanidhi were almost exclusively associated with two leading men: Shivaji Ganesan and Marudur Gopalamenon Ramachandran (MGR). By acting in films formatted by Tamil nationalist themes, both actors were to achieve celebrity status.42 By the 1950s the economic power that these two individuals and other major stars wielded

Figure 3.2. Past and present, cinema and politics coalese in this photograph of decorations at Shanti Theater celebrating the one hundredth day of continuous showings of a film starring Shivaji Ganesan. The small cutout images in the foreground depict Shivaji in films from the 1950s. The partially obscured image in the background depicts the star as an elderly figure, the role he played in the film showing at the theater. The strings of paper flags that criss-cross the visual field advertise Shivaji’s position as the head of the Janata Dal political party in Tamil Nadu. December 1990.

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in the film industry was such that they were able to open their own production companies, and/or move into the business of film distribution and exhibition marking the beginning of the star system in the Tamil cinema industry.43 For instance, MGR and Karunanidhi jointly launched Mehkala Pics, a film production company, and Shivaji Ganesan started a family-owned exhibition facility, Shanti Theater, situated in a prime commercial location on Anna Salai. This trend continues to the present with top stars in the industry. Film star Kamalhasan’s production company, Rajkamal Pictures, is but one example. Shivaji Ganesan (1927–2001, born Viluppuram Chinnaiahpillai Ganesan) acquired his stage name from his highly successful lead role in a stage play written by Annadurai titled Shivaji Kanda Indu Rajyam. The play told the story of the Maratha warrior, Chatrapati Shivaji (1627–1680), who fought the Mughals. Indian nationalists of the ninteenth century emblematized Shivaji’s legendary heroism to rally indigenous militancy against British colonialism. But Shivaji was equally a symbol of defiance against caste oppression. An anti-Brahmin movement in Maharashtra state upheld him as a rebellious shudra (low-caste) king whose hard-won accomplishments were laid waste by Brahmin usurpers.44 Ganesan’s role in this play not only established his reputation as an actor, but also brought him into contact with Annadurai and the DMK. Shortly after Ganesan joined the party, he made his debut in cinema as the hero in Karunanidhi’s Parasakthi (1952). The film’s success brought Ganesan acclaim within the Tamil film industry and the Tamil audience, advanced Karunanidhi’s political career and improved the fortunes of AVM Studios. From the mid-1950s onward, however, Ganesan gradually distanced himself from the DMK propaganda program. By accepting roles in mythological films, such as Sampoorna Ramayanam (Eternal Ramayana, 1958), he overtly flouted the DMK’s hard line against organized religion. While career decisions in film did not end his involvement in politics, what he did for political parties was always secondary to cinema. Ganesan continued acting in films until the end of his life. Ganesan’s son Prabhu is currently a prominent Tamil film star, and other family members operate businesses in various parts of Tamil Nadu’s cinema industry.45 When Ganesan strayed from the DMK’s onscreen political positions, MGR (c. 1917–1987) succeeded him as Tamil nationalism’s leading film icon. For most Tamil film critics, MGR’s acting abilities could not match Ganesan’s. But once accepted by the DMK, MGR remained a staunch party loyalist.

Figure 3.3. A wall painting on the façade of a low-income housing complex depicting MGR during his heyday as a dashing, romantic hero of Tamil cinema. A garland of flowers adorns this painting, referencing the ornamentation of icons of deities in Hinduism. Egmore, January 1991.

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Widely considered one of the greatest stars of Tamil cinema, MGR was, in fact, not born to a Tamilian family and not born in Tamil Nadu. His parents were Malayali—the principal ethnic group of Kerala (the state situated along India’s southwestern coast and adjacent to Tamil Nadu)—and he was born in Sri Lanka, where his early childhood was spent in indigent circumstances. His widowed mother migrated to Tamil Nadu and apprenticed MGR, aged six, to a local theater group. Unlike Ganesan’s sudden, explosive entry into stardom, MGR struggled for many years, first in theater and then in small parts in cinema. MGR made his first film in 1936, but achieved celebrity status in the early 1950s. He ended his career as an actor in 1977 to take office as chief minister of Tamil Nadu. During his career, MGR acted in a total of 136 films. Once he began to be cast in lead roles, MGR invariably played the physically invincible, smart and sexually attractive, swashbuckling hero—a secular caricature of the Hindu god Krishna, or a Robin Hood figure. MGR’s most popular onscreen heroes were portrayed as saviors of the poor, the weak and the oppressed—men who flouted corrupt systems. In the 1940s and 1950s most of MGR’s roles were set in mythological or quasi-historical narratives. From the early 1960s the themes of his films shifted to contemporary settings.46 (As I will discuss in chapter 5, MGR’s political success directly followed from his ability to deftly impose the moral personality of these cinematic roles to his off-screen life, and then to his populist political ambitions.)

Contemporary Tamil Cinema (1967–2000) During the 1970s the Tamil film industry succeeded in eroding any vestige of preference for Hindi films among audiences in Tamil Nadu. Until that period Hindi cinema had dominated the film scene in India, molding audience expectations by defining the form and content of the entertainment genre. Indeed, its popularity was such that initially many regional language films were merely dubbed versions or remakes of successful Hindi films. But since the 1970s both the Tamil film industry centered in Chennai and the Telegu industry in Hyderabad have frequently outpaced the production rates of the Hindi industry. As a result, the number of Hindi films released annually in India’s southern states diminished markedly throughout the period. The 1970s began as period of crisis and transition. The heyday of the production houses had ended. MGR and Shivaji were in their latter part of their film careers; MGR had become increasing involved in politics and Shivaji films were no longer a major attraction. The DMK party was now at the helm of the Tamil Nadu government; this was positive for the film industry but it

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also meant that for the time being matters of governance took precedence over political propaganda through cinema. Nevertheless, the confidence in the economic future of the Tamil film industry given the close ties between the financial investments of persons in the newly installed state government and the film industry cannot be underestimated. One of Annadurai’s first legislative initiatives upon ascending to the position of chief minister during elections of Tamil Nadu’s legislative assembly in 1967 was to reduce the entertainment tax on locally produced Tamil-language films, increasing its profit incentive and providing it with yet another local advantage over its Hindi film competitors.47 Annadurai ruled over a unified party. But he died suddenly in 1969, and the state’s chief ministerial position then passed to M. Karunanidhi. Despite Karunanidhi’s continuing involvement in Tamil film production, he apparently grew somewhat less enthusiastic about continuing Annadurai’s program of elevating Tamil film. This may have been because he was distracted by the more pressing task of defending his position as chief minister. Karunanidhi’s succession aroused internal opposition in the DMK. The party fell prey to political schism and organizational fractionation, followed by intense competitive rivalry between the two factions that emerged from the fray. After the party’s break-up, Tamil cinema had become a propaganda machine for Karunanidhi’s political rival, MGR, and former colleagues that opposed the DMK in Tamil Nadu’s legislative assembly. With the state government otherwise preoccupied the Tamil cinema industry had to reinvent itself. This it did by introducing a new genre known as the “neo-nativitiy” film in the mid-1970s.48 The trend, which began with the film Annakkili (1976), continued well into the 1980s. The theme of these films was a return to the rural roots of Tamil culture, an aggrandizement of tradition and an evocation of the sensory ambience of the Tamil countryside. Though the rural thematic had been popular since the 1950s in MGR and Shivaji films, in the 1970s the authenticity of the rural locale was more carefully researched and rendered via the sets, cinematography, costumes, and lyrics. By reaffirming the autonomy of the village, its lifestyle, values, and landscape, these films capitalized on the nostalgia of city dwellers among who were recent migrants from villages still clinging to their rural identities. For this vast audience the rural thematic produced images of an ideal native homeland that was simple and livable, scenic and cultured, and cleaner and more natural than the periurban residence that had become their home. Two young directors, Bharathiraja and his former assistant Bhagyaraj,49 credited with initiating the neo-nativity trend in Tamil cinema, transported their crews to shoot films on location in villages and in the Nilgri

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Hills—Tamil Nadu’s highland countryside. The shootings on location brought Tamil films a cultural and natural specificity that Hindi films were unable to match, on Tamil Nadu’s home soil. The neo-nativity film thus decisively turned the tide of popularity from the Hindi film to Tamil cinema among Tamil Nadu’s filmgoing public. The popularity of the neo-nativity film must also be ascribed to the innovations of a highly talented music director, Ilaiyaraja.50 Tamil film music had long been a composite of Carnatic (south Indian classical), Hindustani (north Indian classical), Western classical, and Indian folk music. Ilaiyaraja’s breakthrough was to incorporate and to make prominent within this pastiche the sounds and rhythms of tribal and folk melodies usually heard only in remote rural areas of Tamil Nadu. The rhythms he produced also aided dance choreographers in more effectively visualizing the musical scores. Ilaiyaraja won the praise of music critics for his ability to pay tribute to the raga (melodic mode of Indian classical music), that forms the basis of many of his compositions, even while drastically editing the raga (traditionally from thirty to eighty minutes in length) to accommodate the much shorter duration of a film song that is between three to five minutes long.51 In previous decades the Tamil film industry had produced talented lyricists yet Tamil film music had been unable to consistently match the quality of music in Hindi films. The new generation of music celebrities, most prominently Ilaiyaraja and Allah Rakha Rahman, best known as A. R. Rahman, decisively changed the situation.52 Both composers write, arrange, and conduct their music for elaborate orchestras comprised of both Western and Indian musical instruments. Compositions by them, which together, number in the thousands, synthesize Indian and Western classical music with a wide range of world music: appropriations from Latin and African musical traditions, Western pop, jazz, and rap. As is typical of media flows within a global economy, the compositions of these Tamil music stars are avidly listened to not just within their home territory but around the world as well, particularly among the South Asian diaspora communities. In the 1970s Tamil filmmakers also revived the social reform agenda that had characterized pre-independence Indian cinema. Social reform, as expressed by directors K. Balachander and Balu Mahendran, highlighted forms of contemporary social oppression, focusing with particular sharpness on the status of women in south Indian society. In fact, the Tamil Nadu government featured one of Balchander’s feminist subjects, Arangetram (Wedding, 1973), as part of its information campaign promoting family planning. Despite the seriousness of the themes addressed, most of these films were produced as musicals with dance and fight sequences, and a cast of major stars.

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The most popular films with social themes of the 1970s, however, aggrandized the hero’s power to bring about social change, to ensure that justice was served and to rescue the downtrodden. In the 1950s and 1960s the glamour of the typical hero, which some analysts refer to as the “romantic hero,” was synonymous with the glamour of the elite classes. The subaltern hero, who has dominated cinematic narratives, in both Hindi and Tamil films, from the 1970s onward, usually has no claim to ancestry or legal means of income. Semi-literate, he is often further burdened with a criminal background. This “angry hero” acquires glamour and legitimacy during the course of the film by dint of his moral superiority and leadership qualities when he overcomes his depressed circumstances and brings to justice his exploitative oppressors.53 This new trend in the characteristics of the hero was initiated by the Hindi film actor, Amitabh Bachchan, in the film Deewar (Wall, 1973). However, as Ranjani Mazumdar cautions, there is no clean break between the “romantic” and “angry” hero types. Bachchan’s fascination for his audience was that though he identified with the lumpen class his mannerisms, carriage, and self-assurance was that of an aristocrat.54 Some scholars have credited Bachchan’s influential interpretation of the hero to MGR’s melodramatic interpretation of heroism in the 1950s and 1960s.55 Bachchan, like MGR, acquired, for a time, an “extra-cinematic authority of the star as mobilizer,” and attempted to run for political office.56 When, on the sets of Coolie (Porter, 1983), Bachchan suffered a near fatal accident, the entire country was galvanized—the media published daily reports of his condition, and Prime Minister Indira Gandhi made time to visit the incapacitated actor. In Tamil cinema it was Rajnikanth who pioneered the angry hero phenomenon. Rajnikanth’s career parallels that of MGR. Born to a poor, working-class family Rajnikanth worked his way from a variety of menial jobs to landing roles as a petty villain in Tamil films in the mid-1970s. In the late 1970s he played the part of a hero unleashing what the popular media described as “Rajni-mania”57 (see chapter 5 for a discussion of Rajnikanth’s forays into the political sphere). Film historian Madhava Prasad posits two explanations for the popularity of the “angry hero” thematic that dominated Hindi cinema in the 1970s and which filtered into Tamil cinema shortly thereafter. He points first to the volatile political situation in India from the mid-1960s through the late 1970s (including the factionalization of the Congress Party, agitational activities of the communist parties and the state of emergency declared by Indira Gandhi in 1975) when a series of political and social groups across the country pressured the Indian government, demanding

Figure 3.4. Cutouts advertising two different films—Nadigan and Dharmadurai. The all-white attire of both heroes signified wealth and status. The larger cutout, on the left (the difference in the sizes of the cutouts is equivalent to the importance of the celebrity) depicts the film star Rajnikanth. The papier-mâché stars and the garland that adorn the cutout celebrate the one hundredth day of continuous showings of the film. Egmore, December 1990.

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that it make good on its professed democratic and socialist policies. The film industry responded to the volatility with stories based on the themes of social and political unrest, although invariably, the tales ended with the dampening of the revolutionary impulse in the interest of the status quo. The second reason for the dominance of social themes was economic: the social thematic was the film industry’s response to challenges from the government to demonstrate “greater social responsibility” in return for a reduction on the entertainment tax.58 The contemporary era has been, by all accounts, the heyday of Tamil cinema, in monetary terms and in the currencies of innovation and accomplishment. Tamil films employ more workers than the Bombay-based industry and Tamil Nadu’s studio facilities are generally regarded as the country’s most advanced by many film professionals.59 The four southern states—Tamil Nadu, Andhra Pradesh, Karnataka, and Kerala—have, since the 1980s, led the list of Indian states with the largest number of theaters (even beating out Maharashtra).60 Successful Tamil films, dubbed into Hindi and other regional languages with increasing frequency, have grown in their all-India popularity and financial return. And Tamil film professionals—directors, musicians, set designers, and stars—have been sought after by Bollywood and India’s other regional film industries, and have won acclaim from their audiences and critics. The most prominent of these professionals is film director Mani Rathnam, whose key innovation was to reduce cinema’s traditional centrality of the star in favor of narratives that resonated with contemporary political issues such as the Indo-Pakistan war being waged in Kashmir (in Roja 1992). Along with his film producer brother, G. Venkateshwaran of G. V. Films, and a film crew that included art directors like the contemporary fine artist Thota Tharani, and music directors such as A. R. Rahman, Rathnam attempted to bring greater naturalism to Tamil cinema. Authenticity in sets and costumes and a sophisticated cinematography of “soft focus, flare filters, back-lighting, seductive camera movement and extensive dissolves,” derivative of Hollywood films and later music videos, characterize Rathnam’s films.61 According to some industry watchers, state government policies underlie these cinematic successes of the Tamil film industry. In 1977, upon the initiation of MGR’s decade-long tenure as chief minister he established a series of subsidies that ultimately boosted the volume of production in the Tamil film industry.62 And over the past two decades, the four southern states have further reduced entertainment taxes charged at the box office on locally produced vernacular-language films.63 While all film industries suffer from the modern transition of entertainment from public spaces into the home, some

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analysts suggest that Hindi films have been hit disproportionately by competition from foreign videos dubbed in Hindi, Hindi-language satellite TV and the ubiquitous video piracy, which began in India during the late 1980s.64 During the 1990s, the Hindi film industry also began to suffer the consequences of having allowed the Bombay criminal underworld to financially underwrite (and launder money through) film production, and for having acquiesced for years to making extortion payments to the mob’s “protection racket.”65 With a relatively more stable history, Tamil cinema has, since the 1990s, matched Hindi cinema in output as well as influence.

Categorization of Indian Cinema by Genre In the historical and social science literature, Indian cinema is generally referenced by three genres that differentiate the patrons of cinema by class and access to education. The most popular and productive of these genres is entertainment cinema, known to critics and fans as masala (in Hindi, “spice”) films, which are sometimes referred to as formula film, populist cinema, or the social. There is, in addition, a middle cinema, otherwise called middle-of-theroad cinema, middle-class cinema, parallel cinema, or other cinema. And last, India’s contemporary filmmakers produce what is known popularly as experimental cinema or art cinema, and which is also termed new cinema by the filmmakers themselves. In the contemporary Indian film industry, it is not uncommon for actors, directors, and cinematographers to move between all these genres, and to find some success in each. All three genres—entertainment, middle, and experimental cinemas—are amply represented in Hindi language films. This is not the case, however, for other Indian languages. For example, the big-budget entertainment film is virtually absent from the Bengali industry. Instead, Bengali cinema has made the largest contribution, perhaps of all Indian linguistic groups, to the country’s experimental genre. Within the Tamil film industry, however, the entertainment genre predominates, although a parallel Tamil-language middle cinema emerged since the early 1980s and continues to grow. Unlike the industry in West Bengal, however, experimental films are rare within the Tamil-language film industry. Experimental Cinema India’s experimental cinema—or new cinema—is characterized by subjective explorations into social issues and manipulations of the cinematic medium for artistic effect. Experimental cinema is dependent on the personal vision of a director, much as entertainment cinema is dependent on the histrionics

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of the star. The roots of this filmmaking genre in India are traced to Satyajit Ray’s Pather Panchali (Song of the Road, 1955). Ray, who struggled to drum up financial support for his work, from private and government sources, took three years to complete the film. Virtually ignored in India, Ray took the film abroad, where it nearly instantly secured acclaim; Pather Panchali premiered at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. And the film and its two sequels (together referred to as the Apu Trilogy) won a series of international awards.66 Unable to ignore the success of Ray’s films and the potential contribution of Indian filmmakers to state building and amassing international prestige at film festivals and other cultural venues, India’s federal and state governments mobilized funds to establish a network of institutions to support indigenous filmmakers. The federally supported Film Finance Corporation (FFC), established in 1960, now provides low interest loans to filmmakers. The Film and Television Institute, established the same year in Pune, Maharashtra, became India’s premier film training center. Experimental filmmakers were united in their opposition to entertainment cinema. But until the late 1960s the mainstream cinema industry paid little attention to these individuals. It was only when Mrinal Sen’s Bhuvan Shome (1969) ran in commercial theaters that this alternative mode of filmmaking was registered by mainstream cinema as a threat. In the same year (1969) the FFC instituted a policy to ensure a high culture alternative to the regressive tendencies of mainstream cinema. And in 1971, the FFC provided its first financial support for the production of what it referred to as “modest but off-beat films of talented and promising persons in the field.”67 The mainstream film industry responded to the threat posed by experimental cinema by denying exhibition outlets for experimental cinema, and by creating their own versions of “serious” cinema in the 1970s, cutting back the fantasy in favor of greater realism. To accommodate these films targeted towards a middle-class market, smaller exhibition halls were included in the layout of the new multiplex theaters built during this period. But mainstream cinema’s version of “serious” cinema downplayed the political content of the narratives and remained invested in the system of charismatic celebrities by continuing to prioritize stars over actors. Middle Cinema The demand from the burgeoning Indian middle class for a cinema that reflected their values and political concerns spurred the growth, in the early 1970s, of an alternative genre, categorized as “middle cinema.” The middle cinema genre operates largely independently of the mainstream film industry

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drawing instead on a professional cadre of graduates of film and drama institutes. In middle cinema the contributions of directors, producers and film technicians as well as actors are equally recognized. Shyam Benegal, a pioneer of middle cinema, directed the low budget film, Ankur (Seed, 1973), the first of a series of films in this genre. Benegal, who started his career filming assignments for Blaze, an advertising company (that financed Ankur), also introduced to the big screen actors and actresses who are now considered among of the best talents in the Indian cinema: Shabana Azmi, Naseeruddin Shah, and Smita Patil (1955–1986), all of whom move easily between the worlds of contemporary urban theater, middle cinema, and entertainment cinema. Several practitioners of middle cinema have used their celebrity status to further their activism in causes such as women’s rights and anticommunalism. A strong realist aesthetic guides the narratives of middle cinema, the design of the sets, lighting, and cinematography, and the acting styles and make-up of the actors. The realism of this genre provides an alternative to, as well as a moral critique of, the artificiality and illusionism of entertainment cinema. Stylistic experimentation with the film medium, while evident, is generally subordinated to the storytelling function of cinema. The narratives of middle cinema are most often based on subjects of peasant unrest, or the complexities and contradictions of the working class and middle-class ethos in contemporary India.68 Middle cinema’s agenda of increasing the awareness of audiences by addressing complex social and political issues found immediate response from among the 100 million to 250 million educated that make up India’s growing upper working-class and middle-class. This has been one of the paradoxes of middle cinema: its leftist messages about the injustices of the system are often most relevant to the poorer sections of the working class but this group is alienated by the realism of these films that discards entertainment elements of song and dance and circumvents the star system. Some historians conflate middle cinema with the experimental genera. The two genres share several concerns and objectives, particularly their dismissal of entertainment cinema as escapist, reactionary, and commercially driven. Stylistically, both middle and experimental cinema genres eschew the song and dance sequences, choreographed fight sequences, and melodrama elements characteristic of the entertainment genre. The stylistic freedoms expressed by practitioners of middle and experimental cinema are largely afforded by their adherence to a modest budget and healthy subsidies from the federal and state governments. That which arguably separates the genres of middle from experimental cinema is their degree of acceptance by distributors and exhibitors. While

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middle cinema films are generally screened in the smaller exhibition spaces of major theater complexes in urban areas, experimental cinema rarely garners similar support from distributors and exhibitors. As a result the audiences for experimental films are, for the most part, the patrons of film schools, film societies and upscale international film festivals. Entertainment Cinema In India, entertainment cinema brings together, in each film, elements of standard film genres—the love story, the action thriller, the musical comedy, the mystery, the horror film—genres that identify Hollywood and European film and circumscribe their audience. While an American audience might consider a Hollywood production that straddles two of these genres as bold and innovative, Indian audiences clearly expect the entertainment film that they paid to view to shift abruptly among all of them during the film’s twoand-a-half to three hours of reel time. If they are to compete for their share of this audience in a market saturated with new releases, producers of entertainment cinema are compelled as well to work into their films number of essential performance elements—a musical score with a minimum of five or six lyrics, choreographed dances, several episodes of violent combat, chase scenes, love scenes, catchy dialogue, and some comedy. These performance elements, which appear unfailingly in one film after the other, are not, in fact, requirements of the narrative. Thus, the narrative in Indian entertainment cinema is but one component of the formula and does not have the preeminent unifying function that it does in Hollywood cinema.69 Entertainment cinema therefore is a combination of two tendencies: the novelistic tendency in the storytelling dimension of the film and the lyrical or poetic tendency in the interruptions of the narrative in the form of the song, dance, and fight sequences. Film scholars theorize the function of these interruptions as mode of release from the strictures of the patriarchal narrative.70 These periodic interludes of escape into fantasy can be extensive; they can consume virtually half of the running time of the film giving this genre the quality of a lengthy melodramatic musical review—a quality that distinguishes it from Western entertainment cinema, and may explain its popularity with other Asian, African, and Eastern European audiences, who are guided by similar entertainment traditions.71 The narratives of Indian entertainment cinema are loosely structured to incorporate stories within stories much like the traditional regional epics— the Ramayana, the Mahabharata—that shift back and forth between tales of feats of daring, recitations of love poetry, passions for power, detailed

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religious instruction, imagery of torture, recitations of earthly wisdom, and graphic descriptions of mortal combat. The main protagonists of such narratives must routinely perform specified functions to satisfy audience expectations. The standard function of the hero in entertainment cinema is to protect a weaker (usually female) figure (his mother, younger sister, or the heroine); the villain’s function is to threaten or violently attack the object of the hero’s attachment, provoking the hero into performing amazing feats of bravery and/or sacrifice. And the heroine’s function is to display the hero’s various powers: his strengths, when he rescues or tames her, and his soft heart, when he romances her. Each entertainment film is released with an ample musical score, one long enough to fill a cassette tape or CD with vocals by popular playback singers, male and female professional studio vocalists, whose songs are lipsynced by onscreen stars.72 There is virtually no contemporary popular music industry in India apart from film music. Film songs, apart from being crucial to the commercial success of an entertainment film, have formed a parallel culture to that of cinema. Cassettes and CDs of a film’s musical score are released well before the film’s premiere as part of the overall promotional strategy. A cheaper alternative to the sound recording is the printed “songbook,” which, ever since the advent of the film soundtrack, has accompanied new releases.73 Although the earliest soundtracked Indian films featured at least fifteen songs per film—and as many as fifty songs—contemporary films include five or six tracks, each running three to four minutes. Indians’ seemingly unquenchable thirst for film musicals derives from several traditions of traveling indigenous musical theater in which the production comprised dialogue, as well as musically accompanied song and dance. To succeed commercially, the entertainment blockbuster also requires orchestrated dance numbers that sometimes function as “dream sequences” within the narrative. These are intricately choreographed for their stars and feature troops of modern dancers or traditional Indian dancers, with multiple costume changes, unusual backdrops and settings (montane pastures, verdant golf courses, and ocean beaches are favorites), and special effects. The camera angles, costumes, and dance steps of the stars ensure the prominence of the hero and heroine. The fight sequences as well are carefully choreographed to highlight the unusual powers of the hero. It is conventional in fight sequences for the hero to single-handedly tackle several foes at once. And “fight composers” are on a constant quest to astonish and delight their audiences with the choice of unusual weapons and unique locations in which to stage the combat. As in

Figure 3.5. A detail of a thirty-meter (one hundred feet) long composition depicting the elaborately choreographed feints and punches of the formulaic “fight scene.” The plywood cutout, attached to the wall surface, works with the illusionism of the image to thrust the scene forcefully into the viewer’s space. The pictorial realism of these images confronts another realism—the destitute conditions of the vast population of homeless who inhabit the city streets. Painted by J. P. Krishna Arts Kodambakkam High Road, December 1990.

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the dance sequences, artificiality characterizes the fight sequences. Choreographers of the fight scene are concerned more with stylization of movement, sound, and facial expression than with creating the illusion of an actual confrontation. For the audience, too, the hero’s incredible feats, his leaps, twists, backflips, and kicks, are of greater interest than where his punches land. The entertainment film industry is therefore comprised of a range of autonomous production units each with its own specialization in dialogue writing, lyrics, fights, dances, or music, and each with its own star system. Together with a cast of celebrity actors and actresses these varied elements comprise the formula, a means of introducing a modicum of predictability in a volatile industry.74 Entertainment cinema is thus formula cinema—and it is referred to as such by critics and reporters in print, and by those who work within the various parts of the South Asian cinema industry itself. Analysts of folk and popular cultural forms have long recognized that the formula functions as a communication device, similar to a language.75 Cinematic formulas serve to ensure the accessibility of the film. Filmmakers, therefore, are cautious about diverging from established conventions as this may cause viewers to misunderstand or even reject the film. Over the past century the masala of the entertainment formula has infused the production and reception of a wide range of contemporary visual cultural forms in India. And the most visually prominent extension of this cinematic culture from the theater to the street was the banner and cutout advertisements. Having set the stage by describing the product, Tamil cinema, I proceed in the following chapter to analyzing the conventions for its representation and marketing.

Notes 1. M. A. Oommen and K. V. Joseph, Economics of Indian Cinema (New Delhi: Oxford and IBH, 1991), 17. See also Sumita Chakravarty, National Identity in Indian Popular Cinema 1947–1987 (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1996), 9; Mira Reym Binford, “Introduction,” Quarterly Review of Film and Video 11 (3, 1989): 1–9; and Vinod Janardanan (Press Trust of India), Expressindia.com, New Delhi, October 9, 2002. 2. Oommen and Joseph, Economics of Indian Cinema, 17. In the early 1980s in the United States there were 16,032 theaters for an annual audience of 1.053 billion viewers. In India, during the same period, there were 6,991 theaters, or less than half the number in the United States, for an annual film audience that was three times as large (3.676 billion).

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3. India Today, May 31, 1988, 38. In 1988, out of a total one hundred Hindi films that were released, eighty were financially unsuccessful. See also India Today, July 31, 1993, 68–69. 4. Tejaswini Ganti, “Centenary Commemorations or Centenary Contestations? Celebrating a Hundred Years of Cinema in Bombay,” Visual Anthropology 11, no. 4 (1998): 402, 403, 408. See also S. Theodore Bhaskaran, Eye of the Serpent: An Introduction to Tamil Cinema (Madras: East West Books Private Ltd., 1996), 1; and Rajadhyaksha and Willemen, Encyclopedia of Indian Cinema, 17. 5. Rajadhyaksha and Willemen, Encyclopedia of Indian Cinema, 225. 6. Sumit Sarkar, Modern India: 1885–1947 (Delhi: Macmillan India Ltd., 1983), 81, 66. Nationalism as a concept entered the discourse of the educated elite from the 1870s onward. 7. Karthikesu Sivathamby, The Tamil Film as a Medium of Political Communication (Madras: New Century Book House, 1981), 17–18. 8. In a Western context as well the conflation of classes in movie theaters produced great consternation among the watchdogs of public morality. See Richard Maltby, “The Social Evil, the Moral Order and the Melodramatic Imagination, 1890–1915,” in Melodrama: Stage, Picture, Screen, ed. Jacky Bratton, et. al. (London: British Film Institute, 1994), 219. 9. Randor Guy, History of Tamil Cinema (Chennai: International Film Festival of India, 1991), limited edition, no page numbers. See also Indian Films Index 1977/78, E-1. For a history of film exhibition in Tamil Nadu, see Bhaskaran, Eye of the Serpent, 1–11, and Stephen P. Hughes, “Policing Silent Film Exhibition in Colonial South India,” in Making Meaning in Indian Cinema, ed. Ravi Vasudevan (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2000), 39–64. 10. Erik Barnouw and S. Krishnaswamy, Indian Film (New York: Oxford University Press, 1980), 90. 11. Bhaskaran, Eye of the Serpent, 12–13. 12. Barnouw and Krishnaswamy, Indian Film, 39–58. See also Rajadhyaksha and Willemen, Encyclopedia of Indian Cinema, 164. 13. Rajadhyaksha and Willemen, Encyclopedia of Indian Cinema, 164–66. 14. Charkravarty, National Identity and Indian Popular Cinema, 22–23. The author quotes J. B. H. Wadia. 15. Barnouw and Krishnaswamy, Indian Film, 15. 16. Sarkar, Modern India, 178, 197–98, 205. 17. Sivathamby, The Tamil Film as a Medium of Political Communication, 212. See also Theodore Bhaskaran, The Message Bearers: The Nationalist Politics and Entertainment Media in South India. 1800–1945 (Chennai: Cre-A, 1981), 85. 18. Bhaskaran, The Message Bearers, 24, 109, 114, 116–18. 19. Bhaskaran, Eye of the Serpent, 42. While the songs in Kalidas were in Tamil, the rest of the dialogue was in Telegu and Urdu. 20. Bhaskaran, Eye of the Serpent, 47. Before the British colonial administration could evaluate the threat from a film score, the songs, with lyrics composed by na-

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tionalist poets, such as Subramania Bharati and Bharatidasan, had been pressed into gramophone records. 21. On March 14, 1931, the first Indian sound film (referred to as the “talkie”), Alam Ara, was produced in Hindi. Later in the same year “talkies” were produced in Tamil (Kalidas), Bengali (Jamai Sashti), and Telegu (Bhakta Prahlada). In 1934, A. Narayanan established Srinivasa Cinetone, the first sound studio in Chennai. 22. T. M. Ramachandran, ed., 70 Years of Indian Cinema (1913–1983) (Bombay: Cinema India-International, 1985). See Sourendu Gupta, “Major Indian Languages,” data from “The Ethnologue Database,” http://theory.theory.tifr.res.in/bombay/history/ people/language (updated July 2000; accessed September 12, 2002). Estimates range from twenty-four to forty-two major Indian languages, each reportedly spoken by more than one million people (out of a total population of one billion in the year 2000). See also Malayala Manorama Year Book (Kottayam, India: Malayala Manorama Press, 1990), 433–34. 23. Fearing ethnic disputes along state borders as well as demands for secession, the Indian government delayed the reorganization of states along linguistic boundaries until 1956. 24. Sumita Charkravarty, National Identity and Indian Popular Cinema, 204. 25. Aside: A Magazine of Madras, June 30, 1989, 23. 26. Indian Express, November 24, 1991, Sunday Magazine section, 1. 27. From my interview with Chintamani Murugesan, film distributor in Chennai. 28. India Today, May 31, 1988, 44. However, Patricia Uberoi (“Imagining the Family: An Ethnography of Viewing Hum Aapka Hain Koun . . . !” in Pleasure and the Nation: The History, Politics and Consumption of Public Culture in India, ed. Rachel Dwyer and Christopher Pinney (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2001), 309–351) noted an increasing preference for “family-oriented” subjects among Hindi film audiences as well. 29. Lloyd Rudolph and Susanne Hoeber Rudolph, Gandhi: Traditional Roots of Charisma (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1967, 1983), 63. 30. Chakravarty, National Identity in Indian Popular Cinema 1947–1987, 66, 68. 31. Chakravarty, National Identity in Indian Popular Cinema 1947–1987, 120. 32. Bhaskaran, Eye of the Serpent: An Introduction to Tamil Cinema, 82. 33. Chakravarty, National Identity in Indian Popular Cinema, 73–79. 34. Prasad, Ideology of the Hindi Film, 39–40. 35. Rajadhyaksha and Willemen, Encyclopedia of Indian Cinema, 25–26. 36. Rajadhyaksha and Willemen, Encyclopedia of Indian Cinema, 308. 37. Barnouw and Krishnaswamy, Indian Cinema, 176. 38. Vasan’s novel, Sati Leelavathi, was created into a film of the same name, directed by the American, Ellis Duncan. This film was MGR’s debut in the world of cinema. 39. Robert Hardgrave, “Politics and the Film in Tamil Nadu,” 291–92. See also Sivathamby, The Tamil Film as a Medium of Political Communication, 26–27. 40. Rajadhyaksha and Willemen, Encyclopedia of Indian Cinema, 43. See also Bhaskaran, Eye of the Serpent, 29–30.

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41. Hardgrave, “Politics and the Film in Tamil Nadu,” 292. See also M. S. S. Pandian, “Parasakthi: Life and Times of a DMK Film,” in Making Meaning in Indian Cinema, ed. Ravi Vasudevan (New Delhi: Oxford University Press), 66. 42. Rajadhyaksha and Willemen, Encyclopedia of Indian Cinema, 92. At the height of their acting careers, both Ganesan and MGR had the power to demand the sole distribution rights in Madras city for their films, and they could bankrupt a producer by causing production delays. 43. Sundar Kaali, “Narrating Seduction: Vicissitudes of the Sexed Subject in Tamil Nativity Films,” in Making Meaning in Indian Cinema, ed. Ravi Vasudevan (New Delhi: Oxford University Press), 168–69. 44. Sarkar, Modern India, 83–84, 163–64. 45. Ganesan’s brother owns a major film production company in Chennai and, as owners of Shanti Theater, situated on a prime, commercial section of Anna Salai, the family continues to distribute and exhibit films. 46. Rajadhyaksha and Willemen, Encyclopedia of Indian Cinema, 174–75. 47. Rajadhyaksha and Willemen, Encyclopedia of Indian Cinema, 43. 48. Kaali, “Narrating Seduction,” 168–90. 49. Bharathirajaa and Bhagyaraj both were from impoverished backgrounds and had migrated from rural locales to the Chennai metropolis to try their luck in the film business. Their firsthand knowledge of village life undoubtedly lent authenticity to their films, and provided unique insight into the hopes and dreams of a large proportion of their audience. 50. William O.Beeman, “The Use of Music in Popular Film: East and West,” Society for Visual Anthropology Newsletter 4, no. 2 (Fall 1988): 12. The remuneration of music directors in Tamil cinema equals that of the highest paid actors. Their importance to the commercial success of a film is attested by the fact that portraits of popular music directors are featured prominently in cinema advertisements. During my field research I photographed a cutout of Ilaiyaraja that was twelve meters (forty feet) high, a publicity medium that is usually reserved for male superstars and political leaders. 51. Bhaskaran, Eye of the Serpent, 47. This standardization of the film song was determined by duration of a 78 rpm gramaphone record—the main technology for recording and playback contemporaneous with the advent of sound in cinema. 52. Of the two music directors Ilaiyaraja is the older (birth date unavailable). Rahman (b. 1966) joined Illayraja’s orchestra as a keyboard player at age eleven, while also accompanying internationally renowned Indian classical musicians such as Zakir Hussain and Kunnakudi Vaidyanathan on performance tours. Ilaiyaraja’s breakthrough film was Annakkili (Annam the Parrot, 1976). By 2002 he had directed the film music score for some seven hundred films in five languages—Tamil, Telegu, Malayalam, Kannada and Hindi. Rahman’s breakthrough film was Roja (1992). By 2002 he had directed the music for over fifty-five films. The music he composed for Mani Rathnam’s film Bombay (1995) sold over forty million albums. Rahman composed the music for Andrew Lloyd Weber’s production, Bombay Dreams, which premiered in London in 2003.

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53. K. Chandrasekhar, “The Amitabh Persona. An Interpretation,” Deep Focus 1, no. 3 (November 1988): 54. See also Prasad, Ideology of the Hindi Film, 133–34. 54. Ranjani Mazumdar, “From Subjectification to Schizophrenia: The ‘Angry Man’ and the ‘Psychotic’ Hero of Bombay Cinema,” in Making Meaning in Indian Cinema, ed. Ravi S. Vasudevan (New Delhi: Oxford University Press), 247. Mazumdar discusses the emergence of a third hero type that she terms the “psychotic hero,” in the mid-1990s, with the release of Daar (1994) starring Shahrukh Khan. Her thesis is that the romantic hero and the psychotic hero are marked by melodramatic excess while the angry hero, by comparison, is marked by restraint. 55. Rajadhyaksha and Willemen, Encyclopedia of Indian Cinema, 81. The reference to MGR was most evident in the Bollywood films directed by Manmohan Desai in the 1970s. Desai repeated the Tamil film formula of the 1950s in which the hero played a dual role—usually that of twins or brothers separated in childhood. On the contrary, Ranjani Mazumdar’s “From Subjectification to Schizophrenia,” 241–43, argues that Bachchan’s style of acting was restrained and non-melodramatic and modeled on Clint Eastwood and Marlon Brando rather than MGR. 56. Prasad, Ideology of the Hindi Film, 158. 57. Rajnikanth’s first role as a hero was in the film Bhairavi (1978). In recognition of this star’s unique impact on contemporary society, in the year 2000 Rajnikanth was awarded the Bharat Bhushan (Ornament of India), the third highest civilian honor conferred by the nation. 58. Prasad, Ideology of the Hindi Film, 121 (footnote text). 59. Robert Hardgrave, “The Celluloid God: MGR and the Tamil Film,” South Asian Review 4, no. 4 (July 1971): 307. Two decades hence a report in the Deccan Chronicle, July 2, 1993, noted Tamil Nadu’s continued dominance in film production. 60. Oommen and Joseph, Economics of Indian Cinema, 52. In 1987 the four southern states had the greatest number of cinema theaters. There were 2,213 cinema theaters in Tamil Nadu and 2,438 in Andhra Pradesh, 1,319 in Karnataka, and 1,389 in Kerala. The only northern state within a comparable range was Maharashtra with 1,103 theaters. See also Bhaskaran, Eye of the Serpent, “Introduction” (no page number listed). In 1996 there were 2,548 exhibition facilities for cinema in Tamil Nadu, of which 213 were semi-permanent and 892 were “touring cinemas.” 61. Rajadhyaksha and Willemen, Encyclopedia of Indian Cinema, 183. 62. Rajadhyaksha and Willemen, Encyclopedia of Indian Cinema, 28. These subsidies may have been responsible for rapid increases in Tamil film production, which rose sharply from 66 films in 1978 to 105 films in 1979. 63. Aside: A Magazine of Madras, November, 15, 1988, 21–22, reported that the entertainment taxes for cinema in Kerala was 17 percent and in Karnataka 22 percent, compared to 57 percent in Tamil Nadu. The Hindu, January 25, 1991, 17, reported that Andhra Pradesh had reduced the entertainment taxes for Telegu (the state language) films, while increasing the taxes for non-Telegu films. Taxes were further reduced for films that were also produced within the state.

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64. India Today, May 31, 1988, 38. J. P. Singhal, a film distributor I interviewed in Mumbai, explained that although the quality of the projection in video parlors was poor, films shown in such places functioned like “extended trailers” enabling patrons to determine whether or not to spend money on theater tickets. 65. Manjeet Kripalani, “Can Bollywood Beat the Mob?” Businessweek Online, International Asian Business section, February 14, 2000. The violence that binds together the labyrinthine slums of Mumbai, the Bollywood film world and international arenas is the subject of several successful Hindi films such as Tezaab—A Violent Love Story (Acid, 1988). 66. The first of a series of awards that Pather Panchali won were the “Best Human Document” (1956) at the Cannes Film Festival, and the President’s Gold and Silver Medals (1955) in New Delhi. Ray was conferred with the American Academy of Filmmaking’s Lifetime Achievement Award, the Legion d’Honneur from France, and the Bharat Ratna (Jewel of India)—the highest civilian honor bestowed on an individual by the Indian government. 67. Rajadhyaksha and Willemen, Encyclopedia of Indian Cinema, 25–27, 154. 68. Prasad, Ideology of the Hindi Film, 119–20. 69. Prasad, Ideology of the Hindi Film, 42–45. 70. Moinak Biswas, “A Couple and their Spaces: Harano Sur as Melodrama Now,” in Making Meaning in Indian Cinema, ed. Ravi S. Vasudevan (New Delhi: Oxford University Press), 128. 71. Shrikanth Prabhu, “Singing in the Rain. An Analysis of Songs in Popular Cinema,” Deep Focus 1, no. 4 (January 1989): 47. 72. Only in the early years of soundtracked films did Indian actors actually sing. Once the technology became available for recording sound separately and later synchronizing it with the image, actors and actresses were chosen solely on the basis of their histrionic talents and their physical appearances. Playback singers, whose voices permeate the soundscape of contemporary India, regularly attain celebrity status equal to that of popular stars. For an extensive discussion on film music in Tamil cinema, see Bhaskaran, Eye of the Serpent, 38–59. 73. Bhaskaran, Eye of the Serpent, 47. 74. Prasad, Ideology of the Hindu Film, 42–49: “This typically fragmented form of the Indian film evolved from the 1930s as a result of a financially unstable and disorganized production sector. The Hindi film industry witnessed an influx of independent producers who left the industry after making one or two films. With profit a motive and a lack of a central production unit, such producers indiscriminately added elements that would ensure the success of the film and they contracted out the production of these elements to various individual operators.”

75. Barthes, Image, Music, Text, 28.

C H A P T E R

F O U R



Cine Signs: The Semiotics of Chennai’s Cinema Banners

Today I snapped photos of a cutout in front of Anand Theater among a group of theatergoers and passersby who, like me, were taking in the amazing details of the menacing image that loomed above them. The painted details of this image are truly frightening: tension flares in each and every painted muscle that courses along the hero’s body—his biceps seem ready to burst; knotted chest muscles bulge beneath his tight fitting clothing; protruding veins course along his forearm, extend across his wrist and spread onto a huge, tightly clenched fist. In the other hand, which is raised threateningly above his head, the hero wields a bloody dagger. On the street, the sidewalk passing the theater funnels viewers directly beneath the standing figure, positioning them as the hero’s fallen enemy, about to receive the deadly thrust of his blade. Field Journal—Chennai, January 1991

The visual products of Chennai’s movie advertisement industry meld their readily identifiable iconography from the boldest performative elements of Indian entertainment cinema: from song-and-dance sequences and fight scenes that Indian cinema has itself drawn from indigenous theatrical traditions, and from moments of heightened melodrama—a convention passed through influences from European and American theater and film. My intention in this chapter is to show how these elements of Tamil entertainment cinema—the indigenous theatrical and the melodramatic—which are the standard vehicles of visual communication in Chennai’s film advertisements, are as well instrumental in producing the industry’s film stars.

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There are two distinct parts to this chapter. In the first, I discuss the emergence and stability of the star phenomenon within Indian cinema by analyzing (1) its indigenous theatrical and melodramatic elements, and (2) its conventions of cinematography, both of which shape the content and style of advertisements that later publicize the film. In the second part of the chapter I analyze stylistic conventions of banners and cutouts, the most visually prominent advertisements among the various types used by the Tamil film industry. These, I show, transferred images that signify “screen stardom” to the extra-cinematic realm of urban streets. This image transference, from screen to street, is central to the thesis of my research, which asserts that screen-tostreet transference using banners and cutouts was a basic instrument of the social and commercial machinery of the Tamil film’s “star system,” which evolved to garner widespread popular recognition and intense appeal (i.e., stardom) for individual actors. Because entertainment cinema in Tamil Nadu evolved within the context of a nationalist political movement, that starsystem machinery—publicity firms, artistic design companies and fan clubs—remained largely indistinguishable from the campaign machinery that populist political leaders used to build and project their own charismatic authority. I begin this chapter with a brief discussion of the phenomenon of the cinema star and the system designed to create and promote film celebrity. It is a necessary introduction, for success in Tamil Nadu electoral politics and profitability in the Tamil film industry—perhaps more so than even the Hollywood film industry—pivots on the star.

What is a Star? To address the fundamental question “What is a star?” I use Barry King’s decomposition of the phenomenon into three discrete aspects (or moments): character, persona, and image.1 In King’s typology, star character references the film role, or type of roles, for which an actor is cast because he or she possesses a particular physical presence or physical attributes. King defines star persona as the public personality assumed by an actor as it has been shaped by film roles he or she has played. To achieve stardom, film actors are pressured by their production companies and publicity agents to sustain a particular character or character type in noncinematic public contexts. Star image, which is typically the product of publicity and celebrity media, references idealized representations of principal film characters that appear in the extracinematic sphere. All three moments of stardom—character, persona, and image—facilitate a slippage (confusion, ambiguity, or blurring) between the

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fiction that is the on-screen character and the reality that is the actor, creating a fantastic aura that ultimately begets the star. Star character, the first moment of this slippage, hinges primarily on an actor’s physical attributes. In film casting, certain physical characteristics and innate behaviors are often more important to the selection criteria of the producer or director than the actor’s histrionic capabilities. The film audience, continuously exposed to the actor’s intimate physical features and involuntary facial movements—repeatedly accentuated by close-up filmography—grows to associate these traits with the character the actor portrays. The actor thus provides a living presence, an authentication to the character.2 This process is often so successful that audiences often find subsequent renderings of the character by other actors to be less real and less satisfying. Star persona, the second moment of confusion between the portrayed and portrayer, occurs over a period of character acting. When an actor is typecast in similar roles in successive films this slippage becomes increasingly fluid; the actor’s persona becomes imbued with the qualities of the characters he or she has portrayed in the cinema. For example, by playing the exemplary hero in several successive films the film actor’s physical attributes become emblematic of specific moral qualities. In Indian entertainment cinema, the tradition of the faultless hero descends virtually unbroken from the first Indian film, Raja Harishchandra (1913), a tale of a king shown to be a model of bravery, altruism, and self-sacrifice.3 Capable of externalizing the moral message of the film upon his person and as part of his personality, the star carries these values from one typecast role to another.4 In the viewer’s mind the star’s persona becomes so entwined with the characters he portrays in the movies that even in extra-cinematic contexts many stars feel compelled to “stay within character”—that is, to continue projecting the general qualities of those typecast roles. Star image, the third moment of star production, is a commodity manufactured and marketed by corporate players in the entertainment-media enterprise; it extends the evolving ambiguity between actor and enacted into the extra-cinematic sphere. The raw materials for this commodity are the physical attributes of the actor, his or her behaviors, and tastes in fashion, which are drawn on to create products and services that are marketed by a secondary network of celebrity media enterprises —fan magazines, newspaper gossip columns, celebrity radio, and television shows.5 These are coupled to the film industry in a web of mutual financial dependency. The tactics deployed are basic to cinema industries worldwide: organizing public appearances and interviews with the star on broadcasting networks, mailing autographed photos

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of the star to fans, and marketing the star’s photographic image through a range of merchandise. The three aspects of the star discussed here—character, persona, and image—produce a seamless continuum between the “reel” and “real.”6 In more ways than one the star is an “absent presence.” Within the theater the star commands the audience’s undivided attention moving them to laughter and tears without being physically present. But as the discussion on persona and image indicated, the “real” star is an equally elusive presence. Dissemblance and fantasy, qualities we associate with the star, have come to characterize the medium of cinema as well. The Systematic Production of Film Celebrity It is hard for us today to de-link cinema from the production of celebrity. Yet in the early years of the medium, in both Hollywood and in India, stars were not dominant in the industry. In Hollywood, the system to produce film stars—to elevate film actors and actresses to the level of social icons— developed over decades during the early years of the American entertainment film industry. At the inception of this industry, the discourse around cinema focused principally on the apparatus rather than the people involved in film production.7 As documentary films yielded to fictional films as the principal cinematic format, around 1908, publicists in the cinema industry attempted to augment interest in the medium by stoking public curiosity about the off-screen lives of film actors. Initially, publicists focused on professional aspects of these individuals, but by around 1916, publicity agents had begun to divulge information to audiences about the personal lives of film actors and actresses. In contrast, the dominance of stars in the Indian cinema industry arose in the 1930s long after American and European film actors and actresses had achieved stardom. The development of the star system in India coincided with the spread, to the subcontinent, of global economic depression, the decline of family-operated film production houses and the proliferation of new independent film producers. The promise of making a quick profit lured independent producers to the industry, often with little knowledge or interest in the cinematic medium. And these independent producers proved more willing than family-owned production houses to pay popular film actors lucrative wages. The independents’ financial investment in actors, combined with their industry dominance fueled intense publicity competition which shifted to high gear in the 1960s, producing a “veritable torrent” of media images of the stars and gossip about them in all languages spoken on the subcontinent, including English.8 This transformation of actors into commodi-

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fied stars—creating “star value”—forever changed the film production equation for Indian entertainment cinema, and has since guided the investment decisions of producers, distributors, and exhibitors (see chapter 2 for a discussion of this phenomenon). The economic dominance of the star within the industry conferred upon the most successful of these individuals the power to determine the structure of the film itself.9 Besides, stars’ insistence that all the mechanisms of the cinematic medium be directed to aggrandizing their image was seldom at odds with the intentions of directors and producers, who were anxious to ensure a good return on their hefty investment in stars’ salaries. All players in the business of entertainment cinema concurred that it was necessary to give maximum prominence to the stars to enhance a film’s “star value.” The following section analyzes the performative traditions that evolved from this objective of focusing attention on the stars.

Performative Elements of Tamil Entertainment Cinema While the film’s narrative elements—the progression of the storyline—tend to constrain directors and actors into advancing the plot and developing its characters, the performative elements can liberate these individuals, providing the audience with interludes during which they can delight in the histrionics and physical attributes of the stars. The emotional intensity of the cutout advertisement described at the beginning of this chapter, for instance, entices viewers with a glimpse of the performative aspects of the film. The enduring appeal of these performative elements for audiences of Indian cinema derive from the hybridization of two traditions, indigenous and Western, of theatrical performance—rasa and melodrama. The formulaic signs and symbols in Indian cinema communicating extreme tragedy, comedy or joy through facial expression, hand gestures or body postures are an adaptation of the melodramatic tradition as it developed in Europe and America in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. This important characteristic of cinema found an indigenous equivalent in the Rasasutra, an ancient Sanskrit primer on the dramatic arts compiled during the second century CE.10 The Rasasutra identifies nine rasas—the basic human emotions—and outlines combinations and permutations of these, providing a theory of expression and movement and a foundation for communication in Indian dance-drama. The hybridization of the dramatic principals of rasa, with those of melodrama has guided the moments of poetry and symbolism in Indian entertainment films for over a century. And, as I demonstrate in the second portion of this chapter, these conventions are foundational to the Indian film advertisement as well.

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Rasasutra Aesthetics Rasa—in Sanskrit meaning juice or flavor—connotes the ineffable qualities of beauty and emotion evoked by an aesthetically satisfying work of art.11 The quality of rasa, however, is not inherent to a work of art; it is a contextually determined experience enabled through the structure of theatrical performance or narrative and the preparedness of the spectator. In the Rasasutra the creation of rasa is likened to a beverage prepared by an expert cook who, by grinding together exact proportions of a panoply of spices and minerals, sets out to evoke a mix of distinct reactions upon the customer’s tongue: sweet, bitter, astringent, sour, salty. Angelica Heckel specifies that, “the significance of the term rasa lies in its character of ‘taste-ability’ (asvadatvam) . . . it is realized completely only when tasted, that is to say when a relationship is established between what is staged and the spectators.”12 Under ideal circumstances, when both the work and the viewer are fully attuned, the spectator’s experience of rasa is akin to a piece of dry wood ignited into flames. If either the performance or the viewer is unsuited to the task, rasa is absent. Rasa, in a performance or work of visual art, is built up through a series of levels of stimulation. The spectrum of nine (nava) rasas available to the artist practitioner include: Sringara (love/the erotic); Hasya (the comic); Karuna (the pathetic); Raudra (the furious); Vira (the heroic); Bhayanaka (the terrible); Bhibhatsa: (the odious); Adbhuta: (the marvellous); and Shanta (the peaceful). In dance-drama, painting, and film, the setting, music, character types, and character behaviors convey these emotions. Though the level of refinement of the well filtered rasa juice and the masala “potboiler” film that includes “spice bases” from a variety of genres may differ, the combination of the ingredients and their reception by the viewer are similar. Theater, the Rasasutra reminds us, originated from a need for an art form that would be accessible to all sections of human society irrespective of caste, class, level of education or aesthetic sensibility. In classical theater, stylized song and dance aided the less educated or unenlightened members of the audience to distance themselves from the dramatic narrative. This was necessary as rasa could be experienced only when the spectator was able to depersonalize the emotions he or she experienced during the performance. By successfully distancing emotions, the viewer could relish them instead of being bound by them, making the experience of rasa a form of vishranti (rest) that was always delightful and never sorrowful. The commercial success of entertainment cinema hinges on recreating the experience of rasa for its own urban audience. Indian entertainment films are created to evoke a broad mixture of emotions in the viewer. The titillating eroticism of song and dance and the fascinating excess of violence in the

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fight sequences ensures viewers a memorable entertainment experience, even when the film’s narrative content is conservative and morally proper. And film actors make full use of conventions of abhinaya—the range of voluntary and involuntary gestures, facial expressions, or eye movements associated with each rasa. In entertainment cinema, the abhinaya of the rasa tradition is reinterpreted and modernized in the context of the Western tradition of melodrama. The Melodramatic Tradition Early Indian cinematic themes, actors, and sets emulated the contemporary, popular hybridized theater of Bombay that mixed local theatrical traditions with conventions of melodrama derived from nineteenth-century European theater.13 European melodrama evolved from the mid-eighteenth century in a context of industrialization, urbanism, modernity, and political unrest. Directed toward a mass proletarian public, variants of the melodramatic form became powerful instruments of mass communication and revolutionary propaganda.14 By inciting public agitation about social, political, or religious corruption melodramatic theater helped to mobilize viewers to action. Melodrama thus tapped into deep anxieties within a society, but at the same time, various mechanisms within this theatrical form allowed for the construction of solutions that were pleasurably reassuring. The first mechanism for reassurance in melodrama was that of a clear, unequivocal message communicated through a series of oppositions—youth and old age, perfect beauty and repulsive deformities, male and female, the enlightened and the depraved, the sublime and the ridiculous, compassion and selfishness. A corresponding series of strong contrasts characterized the stylistic elements of melodrama as well.15 Martin Meisel identifies these as: contrasts of form, communicated through sharply defined chiaroscuro (light and shadow); contrasts of space, communicated through tightly focused, shallow spaces juxtaposed with deeply receding, panoramic settings; contrasts of movement, communicated through the opposition of intense, exaggerated action versus absolute immobility; and, finally, contrasts of time communicated through ongoing, successive actions and the cyclical recurrence of certain events. The extreme oppositions in these visual signs created a deep impression in the viewer’s mind by provoking a strong, emotional response. Often these simple oppositions were inverted or transposed to reveal the complexity of their linkages. In this way the message of the play, while retaining its essential unambiguous clarity, could produce considerable complexity. In the simultaneous simplicity and emotional complexity of its content, melodrama enhanced viewers’ confidence about their innate aptitude

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for the interpretation of visual signs and served to intensify their pleasure in the performance. A second mechanism of reassurance in melodrama was through the dominance of the visual element. To sway a mass audience comprised of literate persons and those with little or no access to education melodrama relied on a heightened capacity of the visual sense. Hence nonverbal communication dominated rhetorical strategies in most melodrama. The intensity of actors’ facial expressions, exaggerated body postures and gestures rendered words or speech impotent and superfluous. It is no wonder that the cinematic medium, which initially was silent, adapted well to the melodramatic mode of theatrical performance. The exaggerated emotions communicated by the actors were mirrored in the emotional, instinctive and instantaneous response of viewers, unmediated by intellectual interpretations of the drama.16 A third mechanism that enhanced the accessibility of melodrama was in the stylization of expression codified as a limited set of conventions.17 The exaggeration and artificiality in the expression of emotion in melodrama enabled viewers to quickly grasp these conventions and enjoy a participatory experience by mimicking the gestures, tones of voice, and expressions of the actors. Gledhill points to “prompt books” published in the nineteenth century for the aid of theater actors that detailed a repertoire of pose, gesture, expression, and movement to correspond with particular emotions and moral states.18 Thus the character’s psyche was externalized and registered visibly on the body of the actor through codified expressions, gestures and poses. This codification of emotions—through expression, movement, and gesture—is strikingly similar to rasa. Christopher Pinney references a set of manuals published in Bengal in the nineteenth century (around the same period as the prompt books that Gledhill discusses) that codified the nine basic Bhav (emotions) as facial expressions. As the audience’s familiarity with codified communication increased so did their enjoyment of the performance. Cinematographic Devices Techniques of cinematography, used in tandem with the performative elements of rasa and melodrama, also helped to focus the audience’s attention on the star. Two types of shots—the tableau and close-up—were used by filmmakers, in India and in Hollywood, to fetishize and spectacularize the star. Both shots derived their power from momentarily stilling the moving image of cinema. A pause in the narrative flow of melodrama, when all movement and sounds were arrested, was referred to as the tableau. In most melodrama the pace of the action builds “like an excited pulse”19 to an apex of intensity, at which point the poses, gestures, and facial expressions of the actors coa-

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lesce and freeze, creating a moment of stillness, like that of a painted image. But the stillness of the tableau did not diminish the excitement of the action; quite the opposite, it provided the opportunity to dazzle or assault the audience with sensation or spectacle and to create a lasting impression through the production of an excess of meaning.20 As a dramatic device the tableau was particularly effective in underlining the moral content of the melodrama by allowing the audience time to reflect on the visualization of the oppositions that structured the narrative, such as, the intersection of good and evil with beauty and ugliness. In the cinema the tableau shot enabled the director to arrest the restless, shifting gaze of the audience and fix it upon the stars’ histrionic intensity. The viewers’ gaze became concentrated and attentive as when viewing a still image. The tableau scenes of European melodramatic theater were transferred to the cinema through the medium of history painting—an artistic style patronized first by a declining European nobility and then by emerging state political institutions from the late eighteenth through the early nineteenth centuries. These large-scale oil paintings were based on the historical and literary themes of melodramas that conveyed popular sentiments of the time, particularly those that were consistent with the political leanings of the state. The sets, lighting, body postures, and facial expressions of actors in contemporary theatrical productions inspired the compositions of history paintings, as did the visual conventions of oppositions—light and dark, focus and panorama, motion and stillness—that governed the staging of melodrama. Fostered by the art academies of Europe, the high-minded virtues of history painting devolved, by the mid-nineteenth century, into sentimental genre scenes set in exotic locations in ancient Greece or Rome. The popularity of these “academic style” paintings, by artists such as Lawrence Alma Tadema, Fredrick Leighton, and Edward Poynter, derived equally from their coy subject matter and the photo-realism of their polished surfaces. Paintings by these artists were widely accessed through print reproductions causing their creators to become household names.21 This influential academic painting tradition in turn informed the “look”—the sets, costumes, and lighting—of the first full-length feature films of pioneers of Hollywood cinema such as Giovanni Pastrone, D. W. Griffiths, and Cecile B. DeMille. In India, a single individual, the artist Raja Ravi Varma, served as the conduit between these three media: popular melodrama of contemporary theater in Bombay, academic style paintings, and the first feature length films produced by Indian filmmakers. Varma, who painted popular themes from Indian mythology, adapted the illusionism of the Western oil painting tradition to his own training in a south Indian visual art tradition. He immersed

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himself in the melodramatic tradition both by studying paintings in the European academic style and from viewing local theatrical productions in the city of Bombay where he resided.22 The backdrops, lighting, and acting styles of this urban theater, a hybrid of Indian folk theater and European melodrama, informed Varma’s compositions.23 When filmmakers such as Dada Saheb Phalke, experimenting with the new medium of cinema, sought to appeal to a mass audience by creating filmic representations of stories from Indian mythology, they turned to Varma’s paintings and prints of these subjects. Using the tableau shot, Phalke and his contemporaries inserted Varmainspired compositions into the motion picture. Thus, film stills from early Indian cinema closely resembled reproductions of Ravi Varma paintings (see the concluding chapter for further discussion of Varma’s influence on the aesthetics of entertainment cinema and its accompanying advertisements). A variation of the tableau, known as iconic stasis, was a full frontal shot that Indian filmmakers employed to suspend time by interrupting the action to momentarily lift the character out of the narrative.24 The device was used consistently in the mythological film genre (see chapter 3 for a discussion of this genre), but was common in films with secular themes as well. Visually, the frontal placement of the figures served to flatten the space while simultaneously presenting the image as iconic and idealized, as in the figural representation of deities. In the iconic stasis shot the star appeared to directly address the viewer. The presence of the other characters in the narrative or the scene and even the limitations of the cinematic medium (in which the actor is only an absent presence) faded into insignificance as the audience focused complete, rapt attention on the star.25 Indian film audiences are adept at such separation of the characters in a drama from the narrative. Viewership of folk theatrical performances commonly engendered such a response from audience members. Anthropologist Stephen Inglis, whose research is based primarily in Tamil Nadu, relates that, in village drama troupes, “actors have described to me how the narrative flow of dramas is occasionally interrupted by members of the audience worshipping the main characters.”26 The close-up, like the tableau, is another common technical device of filmmakers to interrupt the narrative and momentarily separate the star from the progression of the story. John Ellis, writing about Hollywood cinema’s use of the close-up and other star-focused devices, contends that such an interruption of the narrative is a “fetishistic moment . . . when the audience’s appreciation for a star becomes a cultism.”27 The close-up shot provides a perspective of the star that is intimate as well as conducive to a distanced, worshipful gaze. Through the vehicle of the close-up the audience is permit-

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ted to study the details of the star’s face and the contours of his or her body; in everyday life, such depth of familiarity with an individual is revealed only to close, live-in relatives or to an intimate companion. Conversely, as Laura Mulvey has observed, the close-up shot, by rendering a fragmented, diagrammatic representation of the star’s body disrupts the illusion of depth created by the narrative, thus projecting the star as an icon.28 As in iconic stasis, the close-up isolates and lifts the star out of the narrative. Fetishistic moments in Hollywood cinema are limited and constrained by the cinematic narrative. And, Mulvey argues, the close-up, by fragmenting the female figure, works in tandem with the film script to produce the image of woman as spectacle or woman as icon, a phenomenon credited with producing a subjugated female identity. In Indian entertainment cinema, however, the fetishistic fragmentation of the figure via the close-up shot is most evident during the performative interludes of the film—timeless dream sequences, choreographed fights, musical elements or melodramatic soliloquies— during which actors and actresses are equally subject to the fixing and iconization that Mulvey describes. I would argue that the primary intent of the close-up device in Indian cinema is not so much to produce a subjugated identity of the female but to aid in the construction of a cultism around the characters of both the hero and heroine.29 The fetishization of the male body is rare in Hollywood cinema but the films of Rudolph Valentino were a classic exception. The devices deployed in Valentino films to produce a cultism of the male protagonist included close-up shots of the actor’s body and a series of costume changes and manipulations of the script so that his body was partially undressed at some point in the narrative. Like the oneiric song and dance sequences in Indian films with their rapid costume changes and their unconcern for the verisimilitude of space and time, in Valentino films the star’s exotic wardrobe and the exotic locations subverted the development of the narrative while simultaneously creating a shallow, flattened space that was unrealistic and dreamlike.30 Miriam Hansen, in agreement with Mulvey, theorizes that in order to become an erotic spectacle the male protagonist undergoes a “systematic feminization of his persona.”31 But unlike Mulvey, who casts the spectator of Hollywood cinema as a voyeur or a fetishist, Hansen positions the spectator of Valentino films as a participant, an experience that was heightened when Valentino periodically made asides directly to the audience. In Indian cinema as well stars characteristically emote directly to the audience during the performative elements of the film. Significantly, Valentino produced a fan following much like that of MGR and descriptions of fan hysteria upon Valentino’s death—the mass expression of grief at his funeral that included a

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few suicides—are reminiscent of the public outpouring of grief upon the death of MGR (see chapter 7). Indian film advertising articulates off of the moments of tableau, iconic stasis and close-up shots that are richly choreographed into song, dance, and fight sequences, peppering the film with cultish images. These aspects of the cinematography break with the illusion of three-dimensionality produced by the film to present flattened, two-dimensional, cutout forms that are readily translated as painted or printed posters. Banner artists based their images from photographs that were lifted from film footage directed to frame the subject in this way. Reception of these painted film stills was, however, wholly different from the experience of viewing the film. As Roland Barthes has argued, perception of the moving image, available only momentarily (since the standard speed of mainstream cinema is twenty-four frames per second), is mediated by juxtaposition and editing. Interpretation of a particular frame is determined by the shots that precede it and those that follow. The still image, by contrast, stands alone and can be viewed for an indefinite length of time. These different conditions of viewing produce a “spectatorial consciousness” (for the still image) versus a “magical, fictional consciousness” (for the moving image).32 Banner and cutout advertisements were thus representative of cyclical shifts in media: from melodramatic theater to academic painting; from academic painting to cinema; from the moving image to film stills and, finally, from the photographic images of cinema to banner painting. Each successive mode of visual representation derived its popularity by entwining the emotive power of rasa with the unambiguous binaries of melodrama.

Communicative Properties of Cinema Advertisements The primary function of all advertisements is to point unambiguously and powerfully to the product it endorses.33 Perhaps no form of advertising better exemplified this property than Chennai’s towering cinema cutouts and oversized banners. Their scale alone distinguished this medium from other visual cultural forms along the streets of Chennai. Banners and cutouts succeeded when their architecture and design communicated an image that quickly caught the eye, overwhelming the surrounding physical environment and speaking loudly and unambiguously to the viewer. Typically, along Anna Salai, two or three banners—each about thirty meters (about one hundred feet) in length—were juxtaposed. Flush with the facades of buildings, these paintings functioned like murals, temporarily diverting

Figure 4.1. Film banner and cutout images typically contained an overload of signifiers to ensure that viewers would “get the message.” In this banner advertisement for the film Chathriyan the banner artist innovatively painted part of the image, the hero’s raised forearm and fist clutching a knife, on a plywood cutout attachment. This produced a sharp-edged shadow, cast by the weapon’s blade, that moved up and down across the image during the course of the day. Painted by J. P. Krishna Arts banner company. Kodambakkam High Road, January 1991.

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attention from the confusion and squalor of the streets. Erected approximately five meters above ground level, banners forced pedestrians and passengers in vehicles—buses, auto-rickshaws or automobiles—to gaze humbly upward at them or to view them from a distance. Likewise, the towering forms of freestanding cutouts for the cinema awed and distanced viewers even as they heralded the presence of a theater in the vicinity. Reception of the advertisements was instantaneous, occurring in only a matter of seconds; then the viewer had passed. On occasion, particularly striking images held the viewer’s attention for a few additional seconds, leading city officials to blame upswings in the frequency of traffic accidents and pedestrian mishaps along Anna Salai on the distractive qualities of banners. Given these conditions of viewing, film advertisements generally restricted their content to two distinct bits of information: the first conveyed the film’s essentials; the second provided a “hook.” Essentials are a standard feature of all film advertisements, identifying the film’s stars, and calling attention to recognizable and attractive elements of production: the well-known studio, the award-winning director, the innovative producer. This aspect of the advertisement communicates the film’s genre and its relationship to other hit films and cultural phenomena. In the case of Indian film this includes information about the performance elements of rasa and melodrama: the assortment of romance, action, comedy, tragedy, and violence that are the essential ingredients of each Indian entertainment film. The advertising image for Indian films must index these various elements. In banner advertisements, these elements often appeared in small illustrative scenes from the film or portraits of the secondary characters that were physically distributed around the dominant images of the stars. In all types of advertising the most effective hooks are those that become fixed in the viewer’s mind so that he or she can continue to “see” the image or “hear” the message even when not in the direct presence of the advertisement. The hook, however, varies across cinematic traditions. In the case of Hollywood films, the hook is traditionally posed as an enigma—a puzzle, a paradox or ambiguity that can be resolved only upon viewing the film. To produce American movie advertisements, film companies reportedly go to great expense to create highly potent, enigmatic images (Joel Wayne, former vice president of advertising for Warner Brothers, has described this effort as “the single most expensive, angstridden, labor-intensive piece of advertising developed for the movie”).34 Yet, I would argue, this type of hook is inappropriate for Indian entertain-

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Figure 4.2. A typical banner composition included a range of full-figure and close-up portraits of the stars. The scale of each image indicated the importance of the character in the narrative, or the degree to which the film focused upon a particular thematic. The centralized cutout attachment of the figure wielding a blade in this banner advertisement for Dharmadurai promised that violence would dominate the narrative with some secondary comedic elements (indexed by a smaller cutout of the hero as a clownish tramp). The gallery of headshots along the right edge of the banner indicated the range of subsidiary themes and emotions in the script. Painted by Art Land banner company, Anna Salai, Decemeber 1990.

ment cinema, a film tradition that shuns the enigmatic; Indian film is—as Ravi Vasudevan has described it—“singularly indifferent to mechanisms of suspense and surprise, the moral universe of fiction, the figuration of guilt and innocence, is always already known.”35 Relevant to advertising image and design is the fact that a significant proportion of the Indian cinema audience, unlike their American and European counterparts, routinely view Indian films more than once. Thus, the enigmatic hooks seem doubly inappropriate for viewers of Indian cinema. Instead, Tamil film advertisements generally pivoted upon the image of a recognizable film star, that which I discussed in the first section of this chapter as the “star image,” visually referencing his or her most distinguishing physical and stylistic characteristics, often employing angles and poses featured in the star’s magazine and fan-club publicity photographs. In the most memorable banner images the narrative of a particular film faded into insignificance, allowing the star image alone to assume the entire burden of getting the public hooked on the movie.

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Banner artists and their clients interpreted the star image as a convincing likeness of the actor that captured the individual’s personal magnetism and was, at the same time, an idealized representation. Celebrity likeness therefore, was understood to reside not merely in the representation of the star’s physical features, but in an indefinable aura communicated through charismatic personality traits—characteristic gestures, postures and other body language developed during a career of formulaic roles. To communicate this aura, banner artists judiciously combined realism—essential physical characteristics and attitudes of expression, gesture, and pose—with idealism— enhanced and retouched qualities that went beyond the photographic, forging a popularizable cult image. Artists routinely removed wrinkles and other blemishes from the face, lightened the skin color, and enhanced the muscular strength and height of the male body, frequently mixing and matching heads with bodies, and dressing celebrities in the latest local fashions. The owner of Swami Arts banner company recalled that when painting portraits of MGR, “as he continued to act in films during the later years of his life, I removed all the wrinkles on his face, gave him rosy cheeks and made him look like a handsome young man.” This transference of the image of the actor from the screen to the street was pivotal to the production of the star.

Visual Conventions of Banner and Cutout Advertisements Over the past half-century banner artists developed a distinctive iconography for film advertisements. In this section I analyze recurrent themes and stylistic paradigms in the layout and organization of banners, the poses and gestures of figures, their facial expressions and the relationship of text to image in banner and cutout advertisements. My analysis is largely based on a single season’s set of film advertisements displayed on the streets of Chennai (spanning the period from September 1990 through January 1991) in conjunction with forty-nine Tamil entertainment films screened in Chennai during that period. The data presented are the output of a quantitative analysis of ninety-five publicly displayed handpainted advertisements (sixty-five banners and twenty-nine cutouts) that were personally viewed onsite and photographed. I closely followed the banner and cutout advertising campaign for two films, Meeshaikkaran (Man with a Mustache, 1991) and Vijayanti I.P.S. (Vijayanti of the Indian Police Service, 1991). Coincidently, the Mohan Arts banner company created the advertisements for both films. And both films were in the Telegu language, dubbed in Tamil, featuring important stars from the Andhra Pradesh film industry. Meeshaikkaran starred Dr. Rajasekhar (physician turned favorite action hero) and Vijayanti I.P.S. featured Vi-

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jayshanti, famed for her series of action heroine films that revived a popular melodramatic genre of the 1930s dominated by the actress, “Fearless Nadia.” Vijayshanti, who proudly referred to herself the “Amitabh Bachchan of Andhra Pradesh,” and was reputedly the highest paid female actress in Indian cinema in the 1990s.36 Meeshaikkaran’s narrative formula is one of the classic plots of entertainment cinema. The “victim hero” has been wrongfully dismissed from his position on the police force and, as a result, is helplessly sidelined as villains wreak havoc on the community he once protected. In the terror campaign that ensues, the hero’s own wife and child are killed, driving him to turn vigilante, to stalk the criminal network responsible for the atrocities, and to single-handedly eliminate each and every perpetrator. Vijayanti I.P.S. is, in many respects, similar to Meeshaikkaran but with a significant difference in that the gender of the main protagonist is a woman who single-handedly takes on and dismembers a vicious criminal gang. The story is based on the nonfictional account of an Indian female police officer, Kiran Bedi, adapted to an action film formula. The decision to concentrate my analysis of the visual conventions of banner art on the advertisements for Meeshaikkaran and Vijayanti I.P.S. was motivated by access. During my field research these films were showing in several cinema theaters in the city. And fortuitously, the selection of these two films—the first about an action hero, the second an action heroine— provided an opportunity to undertake a comparative analysis of the conventions governing the representation of gender in film advertisements. Case Study 1: The Meeshaikkaran Advertisements Layout and Organization of Banners Since most banners were generally composed of more than one image, their meaning was often narratival (a term Barthes used to indicate that the meaning of an image is “no longer to be found at the level of any one of the fragments of the sequence but at that . . . of the concatenation”).37 In most banners the sequence of the images was not prescribed but was easily discerned by experienced viewers of entertainment film. The horizontal banner for Meeshaikkaran, approximately six meters (twenty feet) in length, comprised three scenes that viewers encountered sequentially. The central and largest image portrayed a half-length torso of the hero in action mode, grimacing fiercely while pointing a gun aggressively toward the advertisement’s viewers. Sweat bronzed his face; his body was clad in a tight-fitting, black, sleeveless T-shirt with white suspenders that revealed his muscled physique. An electronic

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gadget strapped to his waist indicated the hero’s modernity, his toughness, and sophistication. To the left, at a slightly lower level, the hero appeared again in a tableaulike family snapshot posing with a young woman and a child. This long shot view established him as an ideal family man. He was shown laughing as he inclined his body toward his wife while holding his daughter in the curve of his arm. The beautiful woman who captured the hero’s gaze was full of smiles as she demurely lowered her eyes in response. Her hair was loosely arranged in a flowing braid from which tendrils escaped and she was dressed in a richly colored silk sari. Her attire complemented the hero’s delicate, cream-colored silk kurta, a traditional North Indian male attire. The kurta’s fine material and subtle tint precluded strenuous activity, signifying civility and tranquility. Interviewed artists of handpainted banner advertisements placed fashion and accessories second only to facial expression as a means of representing individual character and culture, and in conveying the basic narrative of the film. In this vignette clothing communicated the impression of a harmonious family within which the hero fulfills the traditional duties of affectionate husband and protective father—and because of which he shared a degree of vulnerability with the man in the street (and in the audience). The third section of the banner, equal in size to the family tableau, depicted a close-up of the villain’s face. Though expressionless, viewers familiar with the narrative formulas of Indian entertainment cinema and the conventions of their advertisements would have identified the character immediately merely from his juxtaposition with the other two main protagonists of this film genre: the hero and heroine. To dispel doubts about of the villain’s identity, however, two contextual images framed the view of his face: the first, a colonial mansion on spacious grounds, signifying wealth, that loomed beyond him in the distance; and then a second, painted nearby, a bomb blast indicating violent activity. Banner advertisements depicting this sequence of three scenes were reproduced in numerous theaters around the city where the film was playing that season. When decoded by viewers tuned to the narrow range of plot possibilities common to entertainment cinema, the sequence of scenes revealed the film’s storyline: the villain brings violence upon the hero’s family; the hero seeks vengeance with violence. The prominence given the armed, fearsome image of the hero ensured viewers that the film would spend more screen time portraying action and violence than on the romantic elements of the narrative. Indeed, in some theaters where the space for hoardings was restricted, banner advertisements only displayed the central image of the threatening hero.

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Typically, in handpainted banners, the photo-realistic images were arranged against evenly painted, flat backgrounds.38 Banner artists edited out all the contextual background details of the film stills with a solid color of white and occasionally a bright blue, red, or black (in my sample of sixty-five banners only five banners had illusionistic backgrounds). Only occasionally did artists resort to a symbolic vignette in the background—a butterfly on a flower, sunsets, or lightning bolts to communicate the content of the film. The abstract backgrounds gave maximum prominence to the images, producing an impression that the figures were about to pop out of their frames and float toward the viewer (in some banners figures literally broke through the edges of the banners in the form of cutouts attached to the banner). The tense juxtaposition of flatness and depth, of materiality and immateriality, enhanced the fantastic aura of the images causing them to appear suspended in an infinitely extended space. Pose, Gesture, and Expression The two views of the stars—full-length or half-length figures in action poses or close-up shots of faces—dominated banner compositions. The long shot of the action pose distanced the stars to a fantastic realm of exotic attire and dreamlike spaces while close-up shots, which zoomed onto blood shot eyes or a smiling mouth, thrust the stars out toward the viewers producing a paradoxical intimacy on the public venue of the street. These views corresponded with the two dominant ways that audiences manifest their fascination for the star: the first, an adoring gaze of devotion in which the star is considered a vastly superior being that exists in a distant realm of splendor that the spectator only imagines but to which he or she does not dare aspire; and the second, a closeness or identification with the star expressed in the mimicry of the star’s fashions, poses, gestures, and expressions (see chapter 7 for further discussion of fan behavior). Poses for full-length figures were typically stylized, dramatic, and sexually appealing. The largest banner compositions, thirty meters (one hundred feet) in length, were invariably balanced with a male figure anchoring one end and a female figure on the other end. Adult males projected a confrontational, defiant attitude with hands emphatically placed on the hips, elbows turned outward and legs astride or crossed. Women usually assumed a provocative contrapposto—a pose frequently used in traditional Indian sculpture, where the shoulders and hips are turned in different planes—with one hand on the hip, the head cocked to one side and the chin either boldly raised or tucked coyly into one shoulder. Other action poses used on primary and secondary images usually derived from the song-and-dance or fight and chase sequences in which figures were engaged in throwing a punch, running, riding motorcycles

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and horses, dancing, wrestling another figure, or being restrained by him. Action poses lent dynamism to the composition and were a favorite choice of banner artists and their clients. In my sample of ninety-five advertisements, nearly seven out of every ten images of male protagonists and almost six out of every ten female protagonists were depicted in an action pose. The favored gesture was the thrusting of an index finger or weapon—guns, butcher’s knives, or hunting knives, lathis (a thick stick), and spears—directly at the viewer. Whether accusatory or inclusive the magnetic gesture powerfully shifted the viewer’s position from voyeur to participant. This matched moments during the performative interludes of the film when the actor emoted directly to the audience breaking the illusionary wall between the action on the screen and the audience in the theater. Extreme close-ups of the star’s face and body, enlarged to huge proportions on banner paintings, gazing intensely at the viewer, likewise shattered the invisible barrier between the painted image and the street to powerfully transport the star into the viewer’s space. Publicity designers and banner artists questioned in my interviews credited facial expression as possessing the greatest communicative potential of banner and cutout imagery. The expression on the largest faces on a banner typically conveyed the film’s dominant theme, most frequently explosive rage (conveyed through widened eyes, flared nostrils, and snarling lips) or a sultry sensuality communicated by mysterious smiles and eyes veiled by lowered lashes or sunglasses. Viewers were reminded of the range of secondary emotions in the film—humor, despair, spirituality—through a series of portraits of the minor characters arrayed as a gallery of headshots along one edge of the banner. The array of heightened emotional states in a single banner recalled the injunctions of the Rasasutra. Yet the film advertisement’s dependence on facial expression as the prime register for communicating these emotions diverged sharply from premodern Indian visual art traditions. Traditionally, in Indian visual art, rasa was represented primarily through body postures and hand gestures rather than facial distortions and depictions of negative emotions—rage, sorrow, fear, and pain—were rare. This observation, however, does not apply to the performing arts tradition where facial expression remained a dominant mode of communication. By placing a premium on facial expression the painted banner mirrored the influence of the melodramatic tradition on cinema—of the various regional cinematic traditions in India, Tamil cinema is deemed the most melodramatic—in which extreme emotional states are externalized and orchestrated on face and body of the star.39

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A gigantic cutout, twelve meters (forty feet) square, advertising the Meeshaikkaran film, featured a close-up shot of the star’s face. The disembodied head of the star, rising surreally above the compound wall of the Sangam theater complex on Poonamallee High Road, was the most visually arresting image among all handpainted advertising I surveyed that season. The portrait, painted by Selvam, a “job artist” employed by the Mohan Arts and J. P. Krishna Arts banner companies, was large enough to compete physically (in size) and visually (in color and form) among the surrounding patchwork of buildings, spreading shade trees, power poles, hanging wires, and city buses. The artist’s skillful rendering of glaring bloodshot eyes that impaled the viewer, bared teeth, flared nostrils and a sheen of sweat and blood glistening on the actor’s skin, magnificently conveyed the excessive melodrama of the narrative formula and the abhinaya (histrionic capabilities) of the performer. Signification through Fashion A second cutout of the hero for the Meeshaikkaran film, restrained by comparison in size (twelve meters in height) and drama but also impressive in its

Figure 4.3. In this advertisement for Meeshaikkaran a single, potent image—the intensely melodramatic and spectacular facial expression of the star—carried the entire burden of communicating the content of the film. Media images such as this one extended the function of banners and cutouts beyond the advertisement of a particular film to broadcast the pleasure and fascination of cinema within the urban public sphere. Painted by the artist Selvam for the Mohan Arts banner company. Poonamallee High Road, November 1990.

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photo-realism, depicted the full-length figure of the hero dressed in military gear. This representation of the hero focused entirely on his style, unlike the cutout of his face that focused entirely on his performative abilities. Whereas the hero’s face in the latter advertisement was deeply contorted, in the fulllength cutout his face was smooth and expressionless. Handsome, cool, and distant, his gaze was fixed at some far-off, unidentified point. Nothing in his neutral posture detracted attention from his elaborate and stylish black leather jacket, expensive hiking boots, black leather gloves, and a helmet, items of apparel undoubtedly coveted by poor urban youths, the target audience for “action” films such as Meeshaikkaran. If melodrama was the commodity advertised in the first cutout, in the second cutout it was the charisma of style and fashion. The endorsement of consumer goods and fashions has long been a major function of cinema in Hollywood and in India.40 Film scholars have documented palpable artistic and commercial links between fashion industries and the attire of film stars, especially popular film’s role in launching new trends in clothing styles and other aspects of personal appearance.41 The relationship is symbiotic—cinema aids in the fetishization of consumer goods when stars use brand-name objects or wear designer apparel and accessories within the film. In return, when stars are invited to model for consumer products—most commonly make-up, hairstyles, or clothing—in popular magazines, the cinema industry gains an additional publicity outlet. Fashion is thus instrumental in connecting the film to the extra-cinematic sphere. Stars’ wardrobes traditionally account for a substantial portion of a film’s budget, so there is a direct economic advantage as well when brand name companies provide the outfits at no charge simply to have the star model them in the film.42 A single song-and-dance number may, in some Tamil films, feature several dreamlike shifts between shooting locations—from a cabaret scene to the seashore to the mountains. And these quick shifts allow the actor and actress to model several fashionable styles of attire—from formal wear, to beachwear to casual wear—before the sequence is completed. Archetypical modeling poses for male film stars—hands on hips or in trouser pockets, with feet astride—was second only to aggressive poses. Two cutout advertisements, each twelve meters in height, for the film Dharmadurai (The Morally Upright Big Man, 1990) in which the Tamil superstar Rajnikanth played an illiterate and naive rustic, ignored his film role and instead propagated his cult image through fashion. One cutout depicted the hero in a double-breasted white suit and white patent leather shoes (in the Tamil film world, dressing in white from top to toe was a signifier of wealth, status, and style). With his legs astride, hands on his hips and his lips curled

Figure 4.4. Phallic and powerful, this advertisement for Dharmadurai exploited the star image that the actor Rajnikanth cultivated in a series of film roles, as a villain and as the “angry hero.” An unusual twist in the actor’s body (his lower body is stably positioned with his feet slightly apart facing away from the viewer but his upper body has snapped around to confront the viewer) produced dynamism and emphasized the animal alertness of the hero. The implied movement in this image was unusual because cutouts generally depicted stars in full-frontal poses. Rajnikanth’s snarling mouth, clenched fists, muscular forearms, and immense height intimidate. But his fashionable attire— polished leather boots, blue jeans, black polo, white jacket, watch, sunglasses, and styled haircut—simultaneously fascinates. Painted by Mohan Arts banner company. Abirami Theater, Egmore, December 1990.

in a sneer, he typified the subversive charisma of an actor who began his career as a villain. The paradoxical combination of the subaltern, angry hero image with signifiers of wealth and power helped fix the star as an object of fantasy and desire for the thousands of economically disenfranchised youths who crowded to theaters to repeatedly view this and other Rajnikanth films. A second cutout of Rajnikanth, for the same film, depicted the hero with his black hair slicked back, sporting sunglasses, tight blue jeans tucked into knee-high leather boots, and a skin-tight T-shirt emphasizing his lean, muscular strength. The image was phallic and powerful, signifying the pent-up energy of the action hero.

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In banner advertisements for Tamil films, it was the attire of actresses that provoked the greatest scrutiny of activist groups and censorship from the municipal government.43 While some banners depicted actresses posing like fashion models, twirling to display the details of their clothing, or in backlit close-ups that showed off stylish jewelry and novel hairstyles, more frequently the dress codes of the female protagonists were coopted to communicate the moral values the film endorsed. Fateful seduction, rebellious modernity, and youthful immaturity were visualized through “Western” apparel—tight trousers, shorts, mini-skirts, and revealing blouses or dresses. Conversely, Indian garments and hairstyles commanded respect while communicating innocence, purity, and dutiful awareness of a woman’s role in society.44 Since the heroine was featured much more frequently and prominently in banner advertisements than the vamp (the latter was usually restricted to multifigure compositions) the majority (59 percent) of images of women in the banners I surveyed were depicted in traditional attire—saris, folk-dance or classical-dance outfits, long skirts, and blouses and salwar kameez (a North Indian outfit).45 And all of these women had long hair, traditionally a celebrated aspect of a woman’s beauty. The hair was usually styled—braided, coiled, or knotted—because loosened hair signified a state of undress, grief, or insanity, and short, closely cropped hair signified sickness or sacrifice.46 The Relationship of Text to Image Tamil cinema banners and cutouts typically combined a visually loaded, dominant image with a weakly subordinate text. This relationship between text and image in the advertisements paralleled the subdued role of the verbal component in melodrama. The illiteracy of a proportion of the audience for these advertisements may also have prompted the marginalization of the textual element. The evolution in the size of these advertisements’ dominant image—toward larger and even larger proportions—escalated rapidly as an outgrowth of advertising competition, with each film advertiser attempting to dominate the works commissioned by other advertisers. This process rendered the textual element of banners to a reductive, nearly visually irrelevant relationship with the dominant image; a relationship that is wholly dissimilar from typical Hollywood film advertising images (in which, Ellis notes, the title is significant for it often conveys a message about the film that differs from, or is even in conflict with, the narrative image of the film serving to heighten the film’s enigma for viewers).47 In the Indian context, text merely helped viewers select the correct level of perception (that which Barthes terms “anchorage”).48

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The status of the text in the Meeshaikkaran advertisements exemplified Barthes’s point. By itself the film’s title Meeshaikkaran (Man with a Mustache) did not reveal much since all but one of the heroes in the ninety-five images I surveyed sported a mustache (clean-shaven men were either comedians or villains).49 The title was indicative of the film’s vigilante theme only in conjunction with the image, which depicted the hero sporting a luxuriant mustache with unusually long, pointed tips. Such mustaches were commonly associated with images of mythical and historical Tamilian heroes, and, in the modern period, with high-ranking law officers, army generals, or dashing, Robin Hood–type outlaws. By thus indexing the mustache on the star image the title acquired a deeper signifying capability of communicating the hero’s exceptional virility and powerful social status. Titles appeared prominently along the top or lower edge of the rectangular banner. To catch the eye of mobile passersby and accentuate the visibility of an otherwise subordinate element of the work, banner artists painted these titles in fluorescent yellows and oranges, particularly when using shadowed font styles; much less frequently they lettered in glossy black when the text was positioned over a light-colored background.50 Most title fonts I observed were stylistically subdued. There were, however, notable exceptions, instances when the graphic quality of font styles and accompanying embellishments vied with the dominant image for viewers’ attention. For example, in a banner for a horror film the title’s font—designed as dripping letters— attempted to enhance the impact of the accompanying visuals, which depicted threatening claw-like hands hovering over a small figure of a huddled man. Following Western film advertisement conventions, the use of red hearts floating about a film’s title denoted a romantic comedy. And the scrawling, signature-style scripts for films such as Meeshaikkaran and Chathriyan highlighted the hero’s unflappable individuality and courage, which, in these films, formed the foundation for his personal struggle against institutionalized corruption. Other linguistic communications that typically appeared on Tamil handpainted cinema banners included a list of credits (names of the producer, director, music director and occasionally the distributor) positioned below the titles, generally in a dark blue or black color; and the name and telephone number of the banner company, featured in a lower corner, much like the signature on a painted canvas. Captions, which are common subordinate elements in Western film billboards and in Hindi banners, were a relatively rare feature of Tamil banners and cutouts; when present, these captions for Tamil language films were often written in English. In the Meeshaikkaran banner the caption announced (completely in capital letters), “He is not only a

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hero. He is [sic] one man army.” The remainder of the text on this banner was communicated in Tamil script—and this juxtaposition of English and Tamil, which was a characteristic of Tamil film banners I surveyed (from the 1990s onward), was unlike conventions applied in Hindi film publicity (both banners and posters), which commonly featured romanized Hindi titles. Case Study 2: The Vijayanthi I.P.S. Advertisements Reinforcing Gender Stereotypes The star image, manufactured by cinematic conventions and advertising strategies, is essentially conservative. Its marketability depends on its capability to reinforce societal stereotypes. A comparison of male and female figures in banner publicity will clarify how entertainment cinema confronts a social contradiction and then resolves it by resorting to the stereotype. Frequently, Ellis notes, “it is the figure of a woman or more than one woman around whom disruption and imbalance is concentrated. And it is disruption and imbalance that the film narrative is constructed to work over and resolve.”51 Ellis references Hollywood cinema, but the statement aptly describes Indian cinema as well. The gender imbalance in advertising imagery has an economic subtext as, “male stars have by far the highest ‘value,’ commanding at least double what comparable female stars earn, and a female star’s value is determined largely by which male stars are prepared to work with her.”52 In the banners and cutouts I surveyed, images of males (254) were approximately double that of women (126). Of the twenty-nine freestanding cutouts, all except four exclusively featured a male star. Of the four exceptions two cutouts featured the woman police officer in Vijayanti I.P.S. and the other two cutouts depicted a male and female couple in a close embrace. On the sixty-five banners males likewise dominated the composition in 61 percent of the layouts; 11 percent focused on the female star, and in the remaining 28 percent of banners males and females were equally prominent. Vijayanti I.P.S. was the most popular movie of the season among Chennai audiences when I conducted my field research. Granted, it was the women who crowded the theaters to see this film and who expressed their excitement during the screening with cheers and laughter. But Vijayanti I.P.S. spawned in quick succession that season at least two additional films, Renuka and Seetha Seetha, with a woman police officer as the main protagonist. The film producers and distributors I interviewed had unequivocally characterized Tamil film viewers as deeply conservative (see chapter 2). Why then was a story about a woman protagonist who was professional, independent, au-

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thoritative, who questioned the actions of men, punished them while wearing Western-style clothes, and displayed physical strength and skill far superior to that of the male characters in the film such a phenomenal success? Several studies by anthropologists suggest that in most parts of the country people readily accept and even closely identify with ambivalent and contradictory portrayals of women as both docile and independent as long as these personality types conform to tradition. In the context of the Hindu tradition these contradictions of woman as protector, in the form of goddess and mother, or one in need of protection and from whom respect and servitude are expected, in the roles of sister, wife and daughter, are continually negotiated in people’s daily existence.53 The liberated woman, who flouts convention by choosing not to marry or bear children, or opting for divorce from an abusive husband, is condemned. Aggression and strength in women characters in protecting others or in self-sacrifice, however, is not only acceptable but highly esteemed. In analyzing the series of banner and cutout advertisements for Vijayanti I.P.S. I show how these contradictions in the theme of the powerful female are negotiated and resolved without disruption of the stereotype. The difference in the representations of male and female stars began with the titles of female action films that featured the first names of the protagonist— Vijayanti, Renuka, and Seeta—establishing a relationship of familiarity with the heroine by positioning her as a close acquaintance or even a member of the spectator’s family. The titles of films with a male hero such as Meeshaikkaran (Man with a Mustache), Dharmadurai (The Morally Upright Big Man), Chathriyan (Warrior), and Perum Pulli (Big Fellow), on the contrary, by refusing to identify the individual, produced an aura of mystery that distanced the star from the spectator, placing him with a superior class of beings. An equal number of males and females were depicted in confrontational postures, yet differences in their depiction of aggression were marked. The facial expressions of women, their postures and gestures, were stylized in the conventional mode of classical dance-drama forms such as Bharatanatyam. Unlike the extreme contortion of every facial feature in the cutout portrait of the Meeshaikkaran hero described earlier, the heroine of Vijayanti I.P.S. registered anger and fear merely by raised eyebrows and widened eyes. Her face was not otherwise contorted and her skin was painted an even, golden brown hue. Manipulation of the heroine’s posture on two cutout images of the star, each twelve meters in height, also served to effectively undercut her potential threat. Both cutouts highlighted the actress’s vulnerable femininity even as her police uniform acknowledged her authority. The first cutout depicted the heroine in a peculiarly retreating position instead of the confrontational

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stance common to heroes of action films. And there was an unusual twist to her body, as if in the process of her retreat, something had caused her to turn her upper torso toward the viewer, and direct her gaze upward to some person or object situated at a higher level. The twisted position of her body succeeded in emphasizing her hips and her breasts, while her upward gaze emphasized her vulnerability. Her head, uncovered by a police hat, revealed her long hair sleekly knotted at the nape of her neck. Although she grasped a lathi (a thick wooden stick), the weapon was only partially visible and was pointed toward the ground in a weak, nonthreatening manner. The second cutout of the heroine, though it depicted her in a frontal, aggressive position, was, unusually for a freestanding cutout, a half-length figure ending at the knees. The heroine appeared to be shouting a command at an (invisible) enemy while pointing a gun that she clutched firmly in both hands, yet the oddly amputated image severely depleted the figure’s implied threat. This impression of femininity and vulnerability was repeated in a banner layout for Vijayanti I.P.S. erected at the Sathyam-Santham theater complex, located in the center of the city, a few blocks from Anna Salai. The banner displayed a combination of scenes that informed the viewer of the film’s narrative formula: two images of the heroine wielding a gun, a scene of fiery destruction, a portrait of the villain and a fight scene from the film. In fight scenes, the sequence of the lone protagonist pitted against a group of villains, was a common theme of the choreography. The fight scene for the Vijayanti I.P.S. banner depicted the heroine surrounded by a group of thugs armed with long lathis. Her arms were flung helplessly up in the air, her knees were buckled and she appeared to be succumbing to the attack. The decision, intentional or otherwise, to suppress the heroine’s aggression and emphasize her vulnerability contrasted strongly with the banner composition for another film, Thichetty Govindan (Fiery Govindan, 1990), also on display in the city during that season. The central image on the banner, thirty-three meters in length erected along Anna Salai, depicted a similar scene of the hero surrounded by six or seven opponents armed with lathis. But the similarity between the two banners ended there. The heroine of Vijayanti I.P.S. was centered but helpless, whereas the hero of Thichetty Govindan was in total control of the situation as he deflected his attackers with his own lathi wielded in a martial arts style. The need to ratify conservative social values through stereotypical representations of the female protagonist is paradigmatic of Indian cinema and film publicity. Gandy and Thomas studied the representations of three Indian film stars—“Fearless Nadia,” Nargis, and Smita Patil—from the periods of the 1930s, the 1950s, and the 1980s, respectively. In the construction of

Figure 4.5. This cutout of the actress Vijayshanti as a police officer in Vijayanti I.P.S. was exceptional because, as a rule, female stars did not merit cutout portraits. However, the implied threat in the actress’s gesture and facial expression was severely undermined by an abrupt termination of her body at the level of the knees. Painted by Mohan Arts banner company. Poonamallee High Road, December 1990.

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Figure 4.6. While acknowledging the power of the gun-wielding action-heroine, the banner advertisement for Vijayanti I.P.S. equally emphasizes her vulnerability. The scene on the right side of the banner shows the heroine collapsing under attack from a group of men who surround her. Painted by Mohan Arts banner company. Santham Theater, Anna Salai, December 1990.

each star’s persona they found that “apparently contradictory images of controlled femininity coexist with each image of strength as if to undermine or diffuse its threat.”54 In some filmic narratives the contradiction between submissive domesticity and aggressive physicality or between purity and honor versus the eroticism of female sexuality is resolved by creating a double role for the heroine. In the film Police Lock-up (1992), again featuring Vijayshanti, the actress plays a double role of a police inspector’s docile wife (Vijaya) and an aggressive police officer (Shanti). The resolution of the narrative surprisingly produced an unusual merger of the two personality types.55 In most instances, however, the domestic triumphs over the public, sexualized or aggressive aspects of the feminine. The poster advertisements for the Hindi film Mother India (1957) depicted the heroine, and main protagonist of the film, as vulnerable and helpless in direct contradiction to the screenplay, which positions the heroine as “a spectrum of feminine archetypes . . . Sita [obedient wife and ideal chaste woman]; Savitri [devoted wife]; Radha [lover of Krishna]; Lakshmi [goddess of wealth and good fortune]; Durga and Kali [power and destruction]; Surabai

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[the holy cow] Mother Earth [fertility principle].”56 The posters, however, completely suppressed the complexity of the heroine’s character, especially her aggressive aspects. Nearly four decades separate Mother India and Vijayanti I.P.S. While the publicity images for the more recent film acknowledged the heroine’s law enforcement authority, they successfully suppressed the threatening power implied by this position. In reinforcing the traditional gender hierarchies of Indian society cinema advertisements assured potential viewers that the film’s narrative would be predictable and pleasurable. This chapter has examined the influences of hybridized rasa and melodrama manifested on the huge, handpainted banners and cutouts that dominated the streets of Chennai until the late 1990s. Having evolved, in form, to advertise vernacular entertainment cinema—that is, to draw attention to a film and to build excitement and anticipation with the objective of drawing a larger audience and turning a larger profit—Chennai’s banners and cutouts were an index of the mass appeal of Tamil cinema, its centrality to everyday life and the economic vibrancy of this local industry. My interviews with Chennai filmgoers and the general public suggest that many Tamil film banners achieved what advertisers hoped most for their work: they became iconic—memorable in image and message, even in an urban sea of sights, sounds, smells, activity, and competing images; memorable enough to become the focus of discussions and imitation long after the viewer’s physical encounter with the advertisement. And in mirroring the stylistic trends, modern narratives, and celebrities of contemporary entertainment cinema, the most penetrating of these advertisements were deeply symbolic—drawing upon the details of the audience’s group social history and shared cultural experiences to promote feelings of cultural insidership. The following chapters will trace the historical conditions that made possible the transference of the film star’s aura into the political sphere. I will demonstrate how the political portrait in Tamil Nadu parasitically feeds off the glamorous charisma of the star image as well as the spiritual aura of the religious icon. The slippage between actor, star persona, and star image is replayed in the political sphere. Here the identity of the star persona coalesces with the political persona to create an image of supreme authority.

Notes 1. Barry King, “Articulating Stardom,” in Stardom: Industry of Desire, ed. Christine Gledhill (London: Routledge, 1991), 167–82. 2. Christine Gledhill, “Signs of Melodrama,” in Stardom: Industry of Desire, ed. Christine Gledhill (London: Routledge, 1991), 213.

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3. Iqbal Masud, “The Indian Hero (Past and Present),” India Magazine (December 8, 1987), 83. Scholarly critiques of the messianic hero in Indian popular films focus on the film script’s curtailment of potentially radical elements in the film’s thematic, and its intolerance of the ordinary and real in either character or morality. 4. Gledhill, “Signs of Melodrama,” 215. 5. David Marshall, Celebrity and Power: Fame in Contemporary Culture (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 91. Despite their status as commodities film stars, in Marshall’s view, present a “classless” image. Unlike the elite, whose wealth is associated with birth, education, abilities, talents and intellectual or business skills, the star is an ordinary person who, through luck, became extraordinary. 6. Richard Cordova, “The Emergence of the Star System in America,” in Stardom: Industry of Desire, ed. Christine Gledhill (London: Routledge, 1991), 27. 7. Cordova, “The Emergence of the Star System in America,” 17. 8. Beroze Gandhy and Rosie Thomas, “Three Indian Film Stars,” in Stardom: Industry of Desire, ed. Christine Gledhill (London: Routledge, 1991), 107. 9. In the film Bollywood Calling (2000), a satire on the Indian entertainment cinema industry, the character of the film-star hero is represented as aging and lacking talent but still able to manipulate the entire crew, including the director, as would a puppeteer his marionettes. 10. Angelika Heckel, “Rasa: The Audience and the Stage,” Journal of Arts and Ideas 17–18 (June 1989): 33–42. 11. The term rasa translates literally as sap, juice, liquor, nectar, poison, mercury, taste, flavor, relish, love, desire, and beauty. Symbolic meanings range from the ritually prepared Soma juice to the metaphysical Brahman. 12. Heckel, “Rasa: The Audience and the Stage,” 37–38. Heckel also stresses that the necessity for the intellectual and moral preparedness of the viewer precludes the experience of rasa as “mere sensuality or relish.” 13. Anuradha Kapur, “The Representation of Gods and Heroes: Parsi Mythological Drama of the Early Twentieth Century,” Journal of Arts and Ideas, special issue on Popular Culture, 23–24 (January 1993): 85–107. 14. Peter Brooks, The Melodramatic Imagination. Balzac, Henry James, Melodrama, and the Mode of Excess (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1995, first published 1976). Brooks’s discussion on the association of melodrama with revolution is set in the context of France. Kornelia Tancheva, in “Melodramatic Contingencies: Tendencies in the Bulgarian Drama and Theater of the Late Nineteenth Century,” in Melodrama the Cultural Emergence of a Genre, ed. Michael Hays and Anastasia Nikolopoulou (New York: St. Martin’s Press), 61–79, traces the role of Bulgarian melodrama theater in the production of a nationalistic, revolutionary discourse in that country. And Daniel Gerould, “Melodrama and Revolution,” in Melodrama. Stage, Picture, Screen, ed. Jacky Bratton, Jim Cook, and Christine Gledhill (London: BFI, 1994), 185–98, brings attention to the subversive, agitational, and didactic potential of melodrama within the context of the Russian Revolution.

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15. Martin Meisel, “Scattered Chiaroscuro. Melodrama as a Matter of Seeing,” in Melodrama: Stage, Picture, Screen, ed. Jacky Bratton, Jim Cook and Christine Gledhill (London: BFI, 1994), 65–76. 16. Michael Hays and Anastasia Nikolopoulou, eds., Melodrama the Cultural Emergence of a Genre (New York: St. Martin’s Press), vii–xv. 17. Caroline Dunant, “Olympian Dreamscapes: The Photographic Canvas. The Wide-screen Paintings of Leighton, Poynter and Alma Tadema,” in Melodrama: Stage, Picture, Screen, ed. Jacky Bratton, Jim Cook and Christine Gledhill (London: BFI, 1994), 83. 18. Gledhill, “Signs of Melodrama,” 213. 19. Richard Maltby, “The Social Evil, the Moral Order and the Melodramatic Imagination, 1890–1915,” in Melodrama: Stage, Picture, Screen, ed. Jacky Bratton, Jim Cook, and Christine Gledhill (London: BFI, 1994), 216. 20. Tom Gunning, “The Horror of Opacity: The Melodrama of Sensation in the plays of Andre de Lorde,” in Melodrama: Stage, Picture, Screen, ed. Jacky Bratton, Jim Cook, and Christine Gledhill (London: BFI, 1994), 52. 21. Caroline Dunant, “Olympian Dreamscapes,” 83. 22. Mitter, Art and Nationalism in Colonial India, 1850–1922, 207. 23. Guha-Thakurta, The Making of a New “Indian” Art, 108, 128. 24. For a discussion of iconic stasis, see Prasad, Ideology of the Hindi Film, 18–21. 25. Ravi Vasudevan, “Indian Commercial Cinema,” review article, Screen 31, no. 4 (Winter 1990): 448–49. 26. Stephen Inglis, “Suitable for Framing: The Work of a Modern Master,” in Media and the Transformation of Religion in South Asia, ed. Lawrence Babb and Susan Wadley (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1996). 27. John Ellis, Visible Fictions. Cinema: Television: Video (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1982), 98–99. 28. Laura Mulvey, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” in Visual and Other Pleasures (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1989), 20. 29. Ranjani Mazumdar, “From Subjectification to Schizophrenia: The ‘Angry Man’ to ‘Psychotic Hero’ in Bombay Cinema,” in Making Meaning in Indian Cinema, ed. Ravi Vasudevan (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2000), 247. The author proposes an alternative function for a version of the close-up—the zoom shot—used in Amitabh Bachchan films. By moving quickly between a tightly focused view and a panoramic view of the context the zoom shot allows the filmmaker to bridge the gap between interiority and exteriority, between individual subjectivity and the world at large. 30. Miriam Hansen, “Pleasure, Ambivalence, Identification: Valentino and Female Spectatorship,” in Stardom: Industry of Desire, ed. Christine Gledhill (London: Routledge, 1991), 272–73. 31. Hansen, “Pleasure, Ambivalence, Identification,” 263, 268–69, 277. 32. Barthes, Image, Music, Text, 45, 66. 33. Barthes, Image, Music, Text, 33.

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34. Laurel Graeber, “Movie Posters and the Telegraphic Image,” International Herald Tribune, Hong Kong, August 30, 1991, 9 (reprinted from the New York Times). 35. Ravi Vasudevan, “Shifting Codes, Dissolving Identities: The Hindi Social Film of the 1950s as Popular Culture,” Journal of Arts and Ideas, special issue on Popular Culture, 23–24 (January 1993): 65. Also see Rosie Thomas, “Sanctity and Scandal: The Mythologization of Mother India,” Quarterly Review of Film and Video 11, no. 3 (1989): 15. Thomas describes the Indian film narrative as that which emphasizes “how things will happen, not what happens next; on a moral disordering to be (temporarily) resolved rather than an enigma to be solved.” 36. Lalitha Gopalan, “Avenging Women in Indian Cinema,” in Making Meaning in Indian Cinema, ed. Ravi Vasudevan (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2000), 230. 37. Barthes, Image, Music, Text, 24. 38. Haggard, “Mass Media and the Visual Arts,” 33. Illusionistic backgrounds of Hindi cinema posters of the 1950s and 1960s included signifiers of the protagonists’ class and caste status. The diversification of the audience in the 1970s required greater caste neutrality, resulting in blank backgrounds and the absence of contextual information in poster images. 39. Radjadhyaksha and Willemen, Encyclopedia of Indian Cinema, 137. 40. Charles Eckert, “The Carole Lombard in Macy’s Window,” in Stardom: Industry of Desire, ed. Christine Gledhill (London: Routledge, 1991), 39. The relation between Hollywood and the American consumer industry dates from the 1930s. 41. Jennifer Craik, The Face of Fashion: Cultural Studies in Fashion (New York: Routledge, 1994), 102–3. 42. Charlotte Herzog and Jane Gaines, “Puffed Sleeves before Teatime: Joan Crawford, Adrian and Women Audiences,” in Stardom: Industry of Desire, ed. Christine Gledhill (London: Routledge, 1991), 78. 43. M. S. S. Pandian, “Picture Lives,” in Living Pictures: Perspectives on the Film Poster in India, ed. David Blamey and Robert d’Souza (London: Open Editions, 2005), 59–60. 44. Thomas, “Sanctity and Scandal,” 11. The consistent references to Western culture as a signifier of immorality in Indian cinema is reflective of the medium’s origins during the nationalist period when there was a need to contrast the notion of a “chaste, pristine India” with “a decadent and exotic ‘other,’ the licentious and immoral ‘West.’” 45. In the banners I surveyed, only 21 percent of the female images were clad in Western outfits. By contrast, 46 percent of male images were depicted in suits, trousers and shirts or T-shirts, jeans, and jackets, or a hybrid that combined an Indian style upper garment, the kurta, with jeans, or the reverse, a Western-style shirt with a traditional lungi or veshti. Only 16 percent of males were depicted in Indian-style clothing. When considering these figures it should be noted that in several instances I was unable to determine the dress style as only the faces of the stars were shown. 46. In Tamil Nadu one often sees women from conservative backgrounds with unusually short hair. This is indicative of their recent pilgrimage to Tirupati, a famous

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Vaishnavite shrine located 130 km from Chennai in the neighboring state of Andhra Pradesh, where they tonsure their heads as a sign of renouncing their ego. The largest wig-making factory in India is located at Tirupati. 47. Ellis, Visible Fictions, 91. 48. Barthes, Image, Music, Text, 39. 49. Interestingly, only the south Indian film heroes sported mustaches. In my sample of Hindi film posters and banners, a majority of the heroes were clean-shaven. 50. Fluorescent yellow and orange were the preferred colors for the titles on advertisements for Hindi films and for Telegu films. 51. Ellis, Visible Fictions, 67. 52. Gandy and Thomas, “Three Indian Film Stars,” 109. 53. Susan Wadley, ed., The Powers of Tamil Women (Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University, 1980). 54. Gandhy and Thomas, “Three Indian Film Stars,” 110. 55. Gopalan, “Avenging Women in Indian Cinema,” 232. 56. Thomas, “Sanctity and Scandal,” 16, 21.

C H A P T E R

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The Coalescence of Tamil Nationalism and the Cinema Industry

In 1993 Jayalalitha Jayaram, then chief minister of Tamil Nadu, staged a public fast at a site along the Marina, the major coastal thoroughfare of Chennai. By denying herself food, the chief minister was putting pressure on India’s central government to intervene in Tamil Nadu’s chronic and bitter dispute with the neighboring state of Karnataka over the irrigation waters of the Cauvery River—water that for centuries has sustained commercial irrigated rice production in the interior parts of her own state. The Marina was a fitting site for nationalist political theatrics. The street is punctuated by monuments to ancient and modern heroes of the people of Tamil Nadu: memorials to former chief ministers Annadurai and MGR; a statue of Kannagi, the heroine of the ancient Tamil epic, the Silappadhikkaram;1 and another of Mohandas K. Gandhi, who well understood how fasting could be used to gain a political advantage over stronger opponents. Amid this symbolism Jayalalitha, clad in a silk sari and cape, sat reading books or lay down on a bed shaded by a brightly colored canopy and positioned on a newly constructed podium. Whirring electrical pedestal fans encircled Jayalalitha’s bed, providing some comfort from the oppressive July heat. At the edge of the podium, a team of physicians stood at the ready, as did a retinue of government ministers. Contemporary Tamil film stars made regular appearances during the event, that lasted for eighty hours, paying their respects and volunteering their services to the cause. A news magazine reported that Among the earliest to gauge the potential of [Jayalalitha’s public] fast was the film industry. . . . The cinematic effect of the show was heightened by the 153

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constant blaring of film songs from vintage MGR films. A number which welcomed the arrival of a messiah was played over and over again. . . . The first [Tamil film] star to arrive was Rajnikanth who had an audience with Jayalalitha after an hour-long wait. . . . [Film star] Kamalahasan and several [government] ministers volunteered to join her in the fast but she would hear nothing of it.2

By the second day of the fast the entire state administration had moved to the venue and several ministers spent the night on the lawns surrounding the podium. Each day of the fast, Chennai city buses disgorged crowds of constituents who gathered along the adjacent beach. There several thousand sat, paying homage to their chief minister’s personal sacrifice and catching an occasional glimpse of one of their favorite film stars. And through it all, a portable sound system filled the air with Tamil film and devotional music. Jayalalitha’s use of film celebrities and film scores, references to her own film career and to her portrayal as various Hindu goddesses on the screen, her associations with heroes of the Tamil cinema and her sense of public drama are neither unique nor novel in Tamil electoral politics. Rather, her adept melding of popular film and ethnic politics is the legacy of more than a halfcentury of Dravidian populism—a politic with a history entwined in Tamillanguage filmmaking and Indian electoral democracy. That relationship is the topic of this chapter. An understanding of how the Dravidian movement relied on the performing arts and cinema to spread its ideology and expand its numbers is essential in interpreting the function and symbolism of the political cutout. While recounting the history of Tamil cinema in chapter 3 I introduced some leaders of the Dravidian movement who were major figures in the Tamil cinema industry. In this chapter I describe how these leaders manipulated the medium of cinema to recast themselves in a heroic image. Their involvement in the cinema industry brought about a change in the ideology of the Dravidian movement even as it swelled the number of their constituents and garnered them votes in elections. It was the cult status acquired by political leaders that rationalized their portrayal in the vastly overblown proportions of the cutout. Cutouts, as I noted in chapter 2, were a measure of the social and/or political power an individual commanded. Some banner artists I interviewed claimed that while the public appreciated viewing cutouts of famous stars and great leaders, a cutout of a newcomer to politics or a relative unknown in the cinema would provoke a negative response. For cinema advertisements, therefore, only major film stars were believed to warrant the grandiose publicity of the cutout. Cutouts of political figures often soared to

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twice the height of that of film stars. Why did these individuals merit having such huge numbers of portraits on such enormous scales? How did they acquire their power and stature in Tamil society? This chapter seeks to provide an explanation.

Fashioning the Dravidian Identity One could argue that, in every modern nation-state where an indigenous cinema industry is at work, film and politics have developed intimate connections. It is true; the cinematic medium is conducive to political expression, mass communication, and the development of charismatic personalities who can be readily transformed into candidates and political figures. And it would be misleading to suggest that the rich development and cinematic expression of ideology, the collusion of political parties and filmmakers, and the emergence of political leaders from the film industry is, in some form and degree, novel or strictly unique to Tamil Nadu. It is not. Other social analysts have observed these relationships in state-owned film industries in socialist countries, and in the private film companies of capitalist societies. Such connections span the institutional gap between the industrial world and the developing world, and between autocratic states and those with highly developed electoral democracies. Even within India there are other cinematic traditions—in the Telegu film industry of Andhra Pradesh, in particular—where examples of these relationships continue to emerge. (See chapter 6.) Yet, I will argue, the cinema-politics nexus in Tamil Nadu unquestionably represents the most intimate and vibrant connection of these two institutions in India—and probably the world. And the state’s cinema-politics nexus is an historic outgrowth of institutional processes that evolved during India’s colonial past. The Dravidian movement’s original claim to mass support in Tamil Nadu rested on its opposition to what its leaders represented as an hegemony of local Hindu Brahmins—a group who recognized themselves as elites descended from Aryans who had come to live in the linguistically Dravidian southern states of India. The original articulation of these grievances, and the political movement that sought to bring the Tamil populace to recognize them and resolve them, date back to the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, to a time of particularly intense economic competition between Brahmins and the other Hindu caste groups in the British-controlled Tamil-speaking region, then known as the Madras Presidency.

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Colonial Administrators and Missionaries In the Madras Presidency, Tamil-speaking Brahmin families, whose oral histories describe them to be the descendents of North Indian Aryans,3 traditionally laid claim to the positions of Hindu priests and public scribes. To maintain those claims in the Hindu kingdoms of southeastern India, local Brahmin communities had, for centuries, established and supported exclusive school systems in which their young male offspring were taught Sanskrit, Vedic philosophy, and theology and mathematics. Not surprisingly, when institutions of higher education were established in the colonial city of Madras, Brahmins comprised the largest proportion of enrollments. And when prestigious positions in the fields of law, medicine, and the civil service were made available to Indians working for the British colonial administration, Brahmins were initially the most qualified.4 As a consequence, the economic status and political access of Tamil Brahmin communities grew as the British trade monopoly and taxation became more lucrative, and Brahmins subsidized an expansion of the colonial bureaucracy.5 Other Tamil caste groups, however, found themselves excluded. For nonBrahmins, it proved difficult to overcome their own educational disadvantages, particularly when they also had to deal with Brahmin nepotism and extended ties among Brahmin families.6 Predictably, they grew to resent Brahmin success. And events during the colonial era seemed to only deepen and perpetuate that resentment. Close to the reins of the colonial government and in line to gain even more political power should the British be expelled from India, Tamil Brahmins were among the first to organize for Indian independence.7 Faced with the uncomfortable situation in which their chief Indian advisors in the civil service (almost all of whom were Brahmins) were actively involved in the Indian nationalist movement, the British administration, from 1912 onward, began to cultivate and train other caste groups in an attempt to undercut the Tamil Brahmins’ monopoly on bureaucratic middle management. For example, in Madras the colonial government passed orders in 1917 and 1922 reserving positions in the bureaucracy and admission places in institutes of higher education for “non-Brahmins”—a population defined by the British as all caste Hindu groups other than Brahmins, plus Muslims and Christians, and including Anglo-Indians (persons of mixed European and Indian parentage).8 The system of job and academic reservations found support from Christian missionaries as well. They had long agitated for legal reforms to the Hindu caste system, and had regularly sought converts from its lowest rungs. Christian missionaries were heavily invested in anthropological theories on caste hierarchy. The inequities of the caste system, they believed, justified

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their presence in the colonial territories. Brahmin social dominion, they argued, was the vestige of an ancient Sanskritic culture that had forcibly imposed the caste system upon an originally casteless society of Dravidian peoples in the south. Caste was a means to keep Brahmins apart and guarantee their positions of superiority as the passage of time tended to work to integrate them. As language was the skill most fundamental to their task of conversion, and anthropology a guide to conducting their social and religious missions, a number of Christian missionaries who had come to conduct their work in the Madras Presidency immersed themselves in scholarly investigations of South Indian ethno-linguistic history.9 In A Comparative Grammar of the Dravidian or South Indian Family of Languages (1856), Rev. Robert Caldwell undertook a detailed philological analysis of the common roots of the four principal Dravidian languages—Tamil, Malayalam, Kannada, and Telegu (of which Tamil is the oldest)—indicating that the Dravidian literary tradition had evolved independently of the Sanskritic tradition. Caldwell’s theory that “Sanskrit had been brought to South India originally by Aryan Brahmin colonists”10 was strengthened by G. U. Pope’s translation of the Tiruvasakam, a lengthy poem from the Saiva Siddhanta—a radical religious philosophy that attained prominence on the southern peninsula of South Asia between the fifth and tenth centuries CE. Proponents of this philosophy, the Siddhars, were social reformers who strove to rid their society of hierarchical systems of caste and class and to expunge superstition and ritualism from religion. The Tamil Literary Renaissance Local enthusiasm for the theory of a lost Dravidian culture and its egalitarian heritage sparked a Tamil literary revival in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Sangams (associations, as translated from Tamil), which promoted the study of Tamil history, its language, and literature, mushroomed in urban centers in the Tamil-speaking region. Members rediscovered and publicized hitherto neglected works in Tamil, including the twin epics, Silappadhikkaram and Manimekhalai from approximately 300 CE; the Tirukkural, from 300–400 CE, which has been ascribed to the poet-saint Tiruvalluvar; and the Tolkappiyam, dated to approximately 500 BCE, the earliest extant Tamil grammar. The rediscovery of these texts led to public accusations that Brahmins, in their priestly roles as exclusive interpreters of Sanskrit, had privileged Sanskrit texts—the Ramayana, Vedas, and Puranas— over equally worthy Tamil poetry and philosophy. During this period, some of the more financially endowed sangams, most of which were dependent on the patronage of wealthy benefactors, published

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their own scholarly journals to disseminate literary and historical research articles written by their members. This research became the vehicle for seemingly new and exciting historical theories. But through them ran a less-thanbenign current of ethnic ideology. One local scholar, P. Sundaram Pillai (1855–1897), proposed the thesis that the Ramayana—traditionally interpreted as a battle between the forces of good, personified in Rama, the exiled ruler of Ayodhya in the north, against evil, personified as Ravanna, ruler of the island of Lanka (now the nation of Sri Lanka)—should be read, rather, as a battle between a Dravidian king and a powerful northern invader. The thesis initially shocked devout Hindus and was immediately dismissed by the Brahmin community as heresy. Decades later, however, P. Sundaram Pillai’s interpretation of the classic became a popular cultural vehicle among proponents of Dravidianism.11 And they chose to defile the image of Rama as a symbol of northern cultural and political domination of the southern states.12 This literary revival also laid the foundations for political agitation to advance egalitarian social reform within Tamil-speaking society—which became another ideological facet of the growing Dravidian movement. Tamil revivalist scholars highlighted portions of the rediscovered saintly and secular Tamil texts that powerfully argued against both caste and gender oppression. Their research provided additional support to the basic Dravidian ideological tenet, contending that the pre-Sanskritic Tamil society was fundamentally egalitarian. Thus, the emerging Dravidian political platform of proposed progressive social changes was made indistinguishable from a return to the culturally distant (and perhaps mythical) past. From this perspective, the path to social reform would logically begin with the dismantling of Sanskritic influences on Tamil language and culture. The writings of nineteenth- and twentieth-century Tamil nationalist poets built both upon the glory of the literary Tamil past and the possibilities for an egalitarian future. The most frequently referenced and recited of these poets have been Ramalingaswami (1823–1874), Subramania Bharati (1882–1921), and Bharatidasan (1891–1964). Ramalingaswami preached a simple religiosity devoid of ritual, dogma, and social hierarchy, claiming that “Shiva dances so that caste, religion, principles and other doctrinal differences may all disappear.”13 Similarly, Subramania Bharati, although born into the Smartha Brahmin caste, referred to himself as a Siddhar and vociferously attacked the caste system in his poetry. Bharati’s writings appear intensely patriotic in both the pan-Indian sense and as an ethno-nationalistic Tamilian: advocating the formation of an Indian state, while reserving his deepest feelings for the Tamil land, its people, and culture. Whereas Subramania Bharati stopped short of advocating for any specific political move-

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ment, his disciple Bharatidasan (translated from Sanskrit, servant of Bharati) did not. Bharatidasan wrote initially as a follower of Mohandas K. Gandhi and his nonviolent independence movement. His early poems focused on religious subjects. But in the latter half of the poet’s life, Bharatidasan espoused atheism and became a staunch Tamil nationalist, explicitly identifying Brahmanism as the root cause of repressive social hierarchy in southern India. The works of these poets, written in Tamil and often set to music, became a source of cultural and ethnic pride, extending broadly throughout the Tamil populace, both geographically and in terms of social class. Their lyrics tapped into a strain of passionate spirituality known as bhakti, especially deeprooted in the southern and western regions of India since the seventh century CE. In that period the great epics, the Ramayana and the Mahabharata, previously written and recited only in Sanskrit, were translated into various vernacular languages, making them directly accessible to farmers, artisans, and other lower caste groups. The retellings and interpretations of these stories, an integral part of the bhakti tradition, provoked a literary renaissance in the Tamil language and produced the first literary classics in Telegu, Kannada and Marathi. Like the singer-saints of the bhakti tradition who preceded them, Tamil nationalist poets spoke directly to Tamils of all classes who encountered their poems in a broad range of cultural contexts conveyed in a variety of media and artistic forms. Ultimately, the poetry of these modern ethno-nationalists was adapted for the stage and performed by local drama companies and traveling artists. And many were later adapted for the cinema. Politicians and party workers recited these works at political meetings, and sung them at rallies and protests. And portions of Tamil ethno-nationalist poems appeared in print on the propaganda pamphlets distributed by political parties and social organizations that adhered to the ideology and aspirations of the Dravidian movement.

The Dravidian Movement The Justice Party: The First Step toward Political Organization From about 1917 through 1929, members of the Justice Party—more formally titled the South Indian Liberation Federation—served as standard bearers of Dravidian ethno-nationalist politics. Their political and cultural activities maintained a singular focus: to position South Indian Brahmins as cultural colonialists in Dravidian lands, undercutting Brahmin political power and access to the British colonial bureaucracy. The Justice Party leadership opposed the formation of a multiethnic Indian state, fearing that

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immediate independence promised merely to replace British administrators with a Brahmin-dominated central government, which would then reinstall Brahmins as local officials in the Tamil-speaking region. The Justice Party leadership, while working to eliminate the Brahmins’ position of privilege, was less interested in the larger and more difficult task of dismantling the class hierarchy. The category “non-Brahmin” masked huge disparities in the socio-economic status of the various groups that it included. In fact, most of the party leadership came from very affluent landowning upper-caste non-Brahmin Hindu families, who themselves were a relatively influential and educated minority. They had little interest in working to alleviate the plight of rural and urban laborers and other lower or backward caste groups, who made up a majority of South Asia’s Tamilspeaking populace. Thus, politically, the party remained largely an unthreatening cloister of aspiring elites, rather than a group with serious possibilities of acquiring mass popular support. EVR: The Roots of Dravidian Populism In 1925 a forty-six-year-old Tamil social reformer, E. V. Ramaswamy Naicker (1879–1973, henceforth referred to as EVR), founded the Su Mariyadai Iyakkam (self-respect movement, or SMI). EVR’s political activism was initially channeled through his work as a member of the Indian National Congress, the pre-independence precursor of the Congress Party. He later resigned his membership, however, frustrated by the party’s refusal to speak out strongly against caste discrimination. The party’s intransigence on this issue led EVR to support the non-Brahmin accusation: that powerful Brahmin members of the Indian National Congress had too much to lose from the total elimination of the Hindu social hierarchy, and that they were threatened by discussions of legal action to dismantle caste. Turning to the Justice Party, EVR initially found financial support for his fledgling SMI movement as well as formed affinities with its members as, like them, he too was from a wealthy land-owning caste group. This relationship only lasted until 1930, however, when the harsh conditions that accompanied the global economic downturn exposed the class contradictions in Justice Party’s claims of injustice and caste oppression. Returning from a trip to Europe and Russia in 1932 an ardent Bolshevik, EVR reformulated the slogan of the self-respect movement as “capitalism, superstition, caste distinctions and untouchability must be rooted out.”14 EVR’s rejection of the Hindu social order led him to espouse radical atheism. And while his public rejection of religion alienated many of his former colleagues in the Congress and Justice parties, it struck a chord among low-

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caste poor, urban youths, and students, groups hitherto marginalized by the political process.15 A powerful orator and vocal critic of caste Hinduism, EVR called on Tamils to publicly flout caste restrictions. He regularly organized and led processions of Harijan caste groups—the lowest rung in the Hindu caste hierarchy—to forcibly enter temples from which they had been restricted. He encouraged his followers to engage in intercaste marriages, and instructed them to dispense with the ceremonial services of Brahmin priests. The SMI’s press printed booklets that provided family elders with models and scripts for conducting “self-respect marriages” and priestless funerals (the Dravidian legacy of self-respect marriages remains in practice in Tamil Nadu today). From the early years of the 1940s, a growing sense emerged among India’s educated that the British colonial rule was losing ground, and that the country was moving relentlessly toward independence. And it was apparent that the new state would be governed along the institutional lines of a Western democracy. While the SMI party had developed a popular following, it was originally conceived as a social reform movement, and accordingly, centrally organized. It was not a political machine prepared to mobilize electoral campaigns and put candidates into the legislative councils that had been set up in the Madras Presidency and other British provinces by the colonial government in 1920.16 In a move to capture media attention as his party entered electoral politics, in 1944 EVR renamed the party Dravida Kazhagam—translated from Tamil, the Dravidian Federation (henceforth referred to as the DK). But even as India moved rapidly along a path toward independence and democracy, EVR was suspicious of its ultimate direction. Always a critic of the Indian National Congress, EVR disassociated himself from their antiBritish activities and opposed their demands for an independent unified state of India. Instead, he advocated the division of British India into several independent ethnic states. Publicly applauding the secessionist demands of Muslim parties to form the state of Pakistan, he followed with his own call for the further partition of the southern tip of the subcontinent to form Dravida Nadu—a Land of the Dravidians.17 The demand for a separate and independent homeland based on linguistic commonality was first articulated in 1938, during an anti-Hindustani agitation when there was an attempt to make Hindustani (a mixture of Hindi and Urdu) the lingua franca of the nation.18 The agitation was organized and its demands articulated by Annadurai, EVR’s brilliant protégée. The agitation deftly shifted the politics of the Dravidian movement from an internal conflict between Tamils over caste hierarchies to a broader struggle over the politics of language and identity between the northern and southern states.

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When India and Pakistan became independent on August 15, 1947, without the British considering his own demands for statehood, EVR declared it a day of mourning for the Dravidian south. Annadurai: Performing Dravidian Politics The SMI’s associations with Tamil performing arts began in the early 1940s. Led by Annadurai, a young, energetic, and artistically creative party worker who regularly acted in local theater, youth members of the SMI shaped theatrical performance into a propaganda vehicle for Dravidian ideology. Annadurai wrote, directed, and staged his first major stage play in 1943, Chandrodayam (The Moon Rise), expressly to convey SMI ideology. The play was extremely successful with local audiences. The following year, despite misgivings expressed by EVR, senior members of the party declared political theater an official activity, and worthy of party support. Born into a poor family in a weaver community in Kanchipuram, a city at the center of South India’s silk industry, Canjeevaram Natrajan Annadurai (1909–1969) was a gifted writer who excelled throughout his academic career, ultimately completing a graduate degree in history. While a student he had joined the Justice Party and had stood as candidate for that party in the Madras city elections in 1936. Meanwhile, he immersed himself in labor union activities, editing a trade union journal, Nava Yugam (New Age). And when EVR assembled the SMI, he joined the organization in 1937, claiming that his life’s ambition was to serve the people. Annadurai rapidly rose through the ranks to become one of EVR’s most trusted political writers and senior advisors. A prolific writer of manifestoes, plays, short stories, and novels, Annadurai gained a prominent public persona. In 1949, when Annadurai broke with the DK to pursue a more moderate political philosophy than EVR was prepared to embrace, approximately 75 percent of the DK membership joined Annadurai’s faction.19 Annadurai named his new party the Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (Dravidian Progressive Federation, henceforth referred to as the DMK). At its core, the DMK leadership consisted predominantly of the younger members of the DK, those who had worked with Annadurai to write and stage political theater. From that point onward, there were virtually no constraints to the melding of Tamil popular arts and Dravidian political propaganda. As Annadurai and the entirety of the DMK leadership understood, the performing arts were a powerful tool with which to promote Tamil ethnonationalism. In Tamil Nadu, folk theater companies principally performed works from the classics of Sanskrit literature—the Puranas, Ramayana, and Mahabharata. These classics, which are steeped in Brahmanic Hindu philosophy, had been one of the principal vehicles by which Brahmanic social con-

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ventions were maintained in a mostly illiterate, and largely low-caste Tamil society. And these religious classics had become immensely popular when their theatrical productions were adapted for the cinema. The success of these film renditions of the Hindu classics was not lost on Annadurai. He envisioned a Dravidian ideological theater reproduced on film; in effect, multiplying many times over the communicative power that rural theater troupes could attain. The DMK began working with cinema by adapting Annadurai’s early political plays to the screen.20 According to “Murasoli” Maran (editor of the DMK magazine Murasoli; translated from Tamil as “War Drum”), the earliest of Annadurai’s films were serious financial failures, as they tended to be heavy with Dravidian ideology and light on storyline. Thereafter, Maran indicates, the DMK’s scriptwriters learned to “select a good story and introduce our ideology wherever possible,” mixing entertainment with the party’s agenda.21 By the mid-1950s, leaders in Tamil Nadu’s Congress Party—the regional wing of the national Congress Party that had ruled the state relatively unchallenged since independence—had grown uneasy of the growing popularity of politicized Tamil cinema, the increasing electoral successes of local DMK candidates in the state elections of 1957 and 1962 and especially the party’s successful use of film celebrities in their campaigns.22 Openly contemptuous of cinema, Kamraj, the Congress chief minister of Tamil Nadu from 1954 to 1963, scornfully dismissed the DMK as “a party of clowns and mountebanks.”23 In fact, the government in Madras had attempted to use cinema to serve their own interests by forcing theaters to screen “approved” (government propaganda) films—a move that was overturned in a Supreme Court ruling in 1954. Undaunted, the Congress government in Tamil Nadu again sought to curb the power of the film industry by introducing the Tamil Cinemas (Regulation) Act in 1955, which stipulated that films that provoked public unrest could be banned.24 The Congress party’s attacks on DMK propaganda cinema had little effect. The DMK expanded so rapidly that within twelve years of its founding in 1949, the party became a major contender for leadership in the state assembly. DMK scriptwriters successfully evaded censorship by creating a rich subtext of visual and verbal signs to link the screenplay to party symbolism. They costumed the hero in the red and black of the DMK party flag and named characters with anagrams of DMK leaders’ names. The film Parasakthi (Goddess, 1952), with a screenplay by Karunanidhi, opens with a poem by Bharatidasan that references Annadurai by one of his titles, Arignarar (Learned One).25 Connections with the film industry also bolstered the finances of the DMK. The party’s involvement with the Tamil film industry,

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starting around the time of Indian independence, coincided with a spate of construction of theater buildings in the big cities and an upsurge in the popularity of touring cinemas in rural Tamil Nadu. The commercial success of films based on Dravidian ideology prompted even those who were not politically aligned with the party to emulate DMK-inspired themes and to recruit the actors who had gained popularity under the DMK banner. Successful DMK party members reinvested their finances in the fast growing film industry by starting production companies, establishing studios and opening new theaters. As the DMK grew to become a major contender for power in Tamil Nadu, Annadurai’s use of glamorous spokespersons, a formal policy choice made as early as 1961, began to evoke criticism from the opposition and inspire jealousy and fear among party insiders.26 It was becoming apparent to some officeholders in the DMK that Tamils in the street were losing sight of the concept that screen actors were but the messengers of Dravidian ideology. Films inspired by the ideals of DMK ideology conferred an aura of personal heroism upon stars typecast as the main protagonists. Rather than being accepted as metaphors for DMK political leaders—party regulars who had spent years organizing workers, protesting at temples or campaigning for seats in the legislative assembly—actors who had performed these activities on the screen were being accepted as political leaders. This was particularly true of M. G. Ramachandran (MGR), a male matinee idol whose on-screen oratories and portrayals of Tamil heroes inspired an immense fan club, with membership numbering in the tens of thousands. Convinced that popular stars were crucial to strengthening party membership and electoral support, Annadurai defended his strategy. He once argued that “MGR has a lucky face; all he has to do is show it to the public and the votes come pouring in.”27 Moreover, Annadurai believed that it was possible to maintain a mechanistic relationship between cinema and politics, and for the party to use this medium for propaganda—as it had used political theater—without worrying about the effects that cinema would have on the political machinery. This, it turned out, was an illusion. As politics moved into the sphere of cinema, it became increasingly difficult for Dravidian politics to maintain such distinctions. “Art and politics,” MGR once mused, “are two sides of the same coin.”28 Language as a Political Tool The DMK gradually shifted its propaganda strategy from the populist struggle to undermine local Brahmin power, to a broader ethnic battle pitting Tamil Nadu against the power of India’s federal government. The party ar-

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ticulated Tamil ethno-nationalism by promoting linguistic chauvinism and supporting performing arts that it judged to be expressive of a unique Tamil cultural tradition. DMK political leaders actively promoted efforts to expunge the Tamil language of the Sanskritic words that had drifted into its vocabulary through Hinduism and other contacts with the north. At the same they deliberately adopted an extremely high-flown literary Tamil with the objective of investing status and dignity to the language and putting it on par with “classical” languages such as Sanskrit. The popularity of a DMK leader then became contingent on oratorical skills, specifically a facility for speaking and writing a pure Tamil, devoid of any influence of Sanskrit or descendant languages. Enunciated in chaste Tamil, devoid of Sanskritic words and phrases, and full of stylistic devices— alliteration, simile, hyperbole, and pun—the orator impressed the audience with the beauty and power of Tamil spoken in its purest form. And this style found its way into film scripts and heroic monologues. This oratorical style of sorpozhivu (translated from Tamil as “a rain of words”) was replicated in cinema in the form of a lengthy ideological soliloquy performed by the film’s hero. In the films produced in the 1940s and 1950s, Annadurai and his closest assistant in the DMK, M. Karunanidhi, often scripted the hero delivering this monologue in a courtroom or at the scene of a perpetration of an injustice, or sometimes after its prevention.29 In Hindi films, courtroom dialogue—rather than monologue—weighted the hero’s loyalties to kith and kin against his duties to the nation.30 In Tamil films the courtroom typically functioned as a political podium. The lead actor, in the role of a lawyer or defendant, delivered a half-hour of powerfully emotional monologue while staring straight into the camera’s lens. These monologues created some of the most dramatic moments in early Tamil political films.31 Thus, as film historian Theodore Bhaskaran observed, when Dravidian politics coopted cinema and introduced rules of Tamil-language purity for its screenplays, Tamil film began to be “perceived in literary terms.”32 Likewise, M. S. S. Pandian posits that the public’s awareness of the twin affiliations (in cinema and in politics) of celebrities such as Karunanidhi created an expectation that films scripted by these leaders would be full of political communication. For the audience these were films “to be heard rather than watched.”33 Containing a new and politically meaningful way to express oneself, print versions and gramophone recordings of these screenplays often became bestsellers. Annadurai, Karunanidhi, and V. Nedunchezhian—a former stage actor who was Karunanidhi’s main rival for control of the party after Annadurai’s demise—gained political prominence by transposing the melodrama of film

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scripts onto political platforms. Annadurai claimed that it was the experience of hearing EVR’s public speeches that had drawn him to the Dravidian movement. In his turn, Annadurai, who was venerated as a “god on earth”34 by an adoring populace, also attracted members to the DMK primarily through his oratory. Political scientist Marguerite Ross Barnett’s interviews with the DMK cadre, conducted in the late 1960s, found that the popularity of Annadurai’s oratory rated 10.5 percent, in contrast with his policies, which rated a low 5.1 percent.35 The strategy Tamil ethno-nationalism defused some of the earlier caste parochialism of Dravidian ideology. Yet it maintained the movement’s focus on Tamil identity and the Tamil struggle for recognition and equality with Sanskritic culture. In this political reformulation, foreign Sanskritic cultural oppression descended from a powerful Hindi-speaking political elite in New Delhi, rather than just local Tamil Brahmins. Ultimately, this platform strengthened the DMK’s position in Tamil Nadu as opposition to the ruling Congress Party. The latter had bound itself to the pan-Indianist ideology of ethnic integration. Soon after independence from Britain India’s central government in New Delhi once again attempted to enter into the politics of language. The Nehru government, dominated by intellectuals from the more populous north, saw language as a means to bring some homogeneity to the expansive and diverse country that they ruled. The British colonial administration of India had conducted all official communications in English. In post-independence India, leaders sought to replace this vestige of colonialism, which had largely become the linguistic property of a small, educated Indian elite, with an indigenous language. To national leaders, Hindi, a Sanskritic language spoken across five of the large northern states and in many of the country’s northern and central Indian cities appeared the obvious choice. They issued a government order which stated that on Republic Day, January 26, 1965, Hindi would replace English as the official language of the Indian union, that all government communication would be henceforth be conducted in Hindi and that the language would ultimately become the compulsory medium of education throughout India. This decision bolstered the DMK’s claim of Aryan cultural domination and gave added credence to the DMK political platform. In 1965, when the central government attempted to legislate its language directive, the outrage that gripped the Tamil-speaking population was expressed in riots unprecedented in their scale and intensity, exceeding even the protests in Tamil Nadu staged against the British government during Gandhi’s “Quit India” campaign of 1942.36 Approximately ten thousand people were arrested and

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between seventy to one hundred fifty people were killed. The rest of the country, largely unaware of the history of the Tamil renaissance, was bewildered at the depth of emotion that the language issue provoked in Tamil Nadu—a state that had the reputation of resolving problems in a relatively peaceable manner. The Indian prime minister, Lal Bahadur Shastri, quickly retracted the order, stating that English would continue to be used as an “associate language” in government communication for “an indefinite period” in deference to the “peoples of non-Hindi speaking areas.”37 The issue strengthened the DMK’s appeal throughout the state. During the next state elections in 1967, the DMK routed the Congress Party,38 and Annadurai ascended to the position of chief minister of Tamil Nadu. But Annadurai’s opportunities to enact major social reforms in the state in the wake of this political triumph were short-lived. He remained in office for only two years, during which he suffered from failing health. C. N. Annadurai died of cancer on February 3, 1969. Upon his death, Muthuvel Karunanidhi (b. 1924) assumed leadership of the DMK. Karunanidhi: The Nexus of Cinema and Politics In 1938, Karunanidhi, then age fourteen, left school to serve C. N. Annadurai and the Dravidian movement. Karunanidhi first spent several years training as a writer in EVR’s weekly, Kudi Arasu (People’s Government), at that time the most respected organ for the ideology of non-Brahmanism and the self-respect movement. Already an accomplished journalist by the age of twenty-five, he turned to writing screenplays for Tamil cinema, and was among the majority of the DK leadership that joined Annadurai when he started the DMK faction. Karunanidhi’s literary abilities39 gave him prominence and a public presence as a key proponent of the DMK’s production of political films. Karunanidhi later took on a more public role, participating in protests organized by the DMK. He was among those arrested in the language riots of 1965. As Annadurai’s protégé, Karunanidhi jealously guarded his close relationship with the DMK founder as he matured into the party leadership. But three others who had worked to meld Dravidian politics and Tamil cinema had also won Annadurai’s confidence and friendship. Kannadasan (1927–1981), an accomplished lyricist who produced immensely popular music for Tamil films, was highly placed in the DMK and remained a close professional colleague of Annadurai. Renowned for his oratory, the former stage actor V. Nedunchezhian, like both Karunanidhi and Annadurai, was elemental to the growth and electoral success of the DMK. And lastly there was M. G. Ramachandran (MGR), a screen actor and matinee idol who

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commanded a loyal following of politicized Tamil moviegoers. From the early 1960s onward, Karunanidhi’s relationships with these potential rivals began to strain and deteriorate. The influence of these celebrities from the entertainment world was such that they soon dominated all the leadership positions in the political groups with which they were affiliated. And their rivalries within the artistic sphere were translated into conflicts and factions within the party. For instance, although Karunanidhi was an unusually prolific writer, he could not match Kannadasan’s astounding literary productivity. The latter, apart from writing the lyrics for five thousand film songs, is credited with twentyone novels, ten volumes of religious discourses, and four thousand poems. Given the pivotal role of film music in this cinematic culture, it is significant that Kannadasan wrote the lyrics to the most popular songs in the DMK propaganda films. Furthermore, it is Kannadasan who received most of the credit for having introduced a classical Tamil literary tradition to contemporary film audiences. These talents and Kannadasan’s name recognition with the Tamil public were extremely threatening to Karunanidhi, and he worked to sideline the lyricist. Kannadasan was first among the DMK leadership to fall out with Karunanidhi. After working as a dedicated party member for seventeen years, Kannadasan left the party in 1964 to join the opposition.40 Nedunchezhian, like Annadurai, had a master’s degree and had acquired a reputation as a Tamil scholar—a potent image in a party that, in the opinion of most outsiders, was composed of illiterates, youths, and ruffians. Nedunchezhian held the second most important position in Annadurai’s cabinet and was supposedly Annadurai’s personal choice as his successor. But after Annadurai’s untimely death in 1969, Karunanidhi outmaneuvered Nedunchezhian, by then his only serious rival, for control of the DMK. Karunanidhi’s success was ensured when he managed to gain the support of EVR, the prime living symbol of the Dravidian movement, as well as the two most important matinee idols of the period, MGR and Shivaji Ganesan. Karunanidhi was elected to the post of chief minister of Tamil Nadu in 1969. But it was his relationship with MGR that ultimately derailed Karunanidhi’s ambitions. The two men had been very closely associated since the earliest years of their careers in Tamil cinema. Karunanidhi’s first screenplay, Manthiri Kumari (The Minister’s Daughter, 1950) featured MGR in the hero’s role, and Karunanidhi had invested along with MGR and the latter’s wife, actress V. N. Janaki, to found Mekala Pics, a film company based in Madras. During the power struggle that ensued within the DMK after Annadurai’s demise, MGR’s public campaigning

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Figure 5.1. The DMK party symbol—a stylized image of the rising sun—in the party colors of red and black punctuate this wall mural, the central focus of which is the brilliantly smiling visage of the DMK party leader M. Karunanidhi. Bold stripes of deep orange and gold radiate from Karunanidhi’s face, associating the leader with the lifegiving properties of the sun. As the sun dispels darkness Karunanidhi brings hope to the Tamil populace. The inversion in the scale of the human figure and the landscape communicates the immense, powerful, transformative energy of the DMK leader. Adyar, December 1990.

for Karunanidhi ensured the latter’s victory. In 1970, with the DMK under Karunanidhi’s leadership and the party in control of the state government, Karunanidhi appointed MGR to the position of party treasurer. Threatened by MGR’s popularity with the masses, however, Karunanidhi immediately worked to undermine MGR’s position within the DMK. He attempted to reduce the party’s dependence on MGR’s financial support by, among other measures, repealing the state’s alcohol prohibition laws, an action that MGR strongly opposed on public health grounds (although cynics claimed that MGR’s concern was self-serving, as he was afraid that people would choose to spend their meager income on liquor rather than patronize his films). During the next year, Karunanidhi presented his eldest son, M. K. Muthu, with a senior leadership position in the party and began to groom him as his successor. Certain of the rising power of screen actors in Tamil politics,

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Karunanidhi simultaneously paved the way for Muthu’s career in cinema. Karunanidhi hoped to use films to acquaint the public with his son’s potential as a political leader, and use him to capture a part of the Tamil audience from the now-aging MGR. Clearly, MGR’s power in the DMK lay in his popularity at the box office and his control of a network of rasikar manram— Tamil film fan associations—that spanned the state. In politically charged Tamil Nadu, members of film fan clubs not only attend showings of their star’s latest film, they also run local election campaigns and organize political events (see chapter 7). Undermining MGR’s relationship with his audience threatened the star’s position within the DMK. As Muthu began to garner support from the party, he moved to take control of the network of several thousand MGR fan clubs.41 This move was a costly misjudgment. MGR filed corruption charges in 1972 against the DMK leadership for their misuse of government funds. In fact, Karunanidhi had been known to strengthen his position within the party, even prior to becoming chief minister, with the promise of favors and material rewards.42 As the party’s treasurer, MGR demanded that leaders at all levels of the organization, including party secretaries at the town and district level, reveal their financial assets, the assets of their relatives, and account for their spending of party funds. The action provoked MGR’s dismissal from the DMK. M. G. Ramachandran: The Cult of Film-Star Politicians The path that took MGR to cinematic and political stardom was not easily navigated. First an actor in local theater, MGR broke into Tamil films in minor roles in 1936 at the age of nineteen.43 Still a supporting actor more than a decade later, he worked his way into the DMK political leadership, and then in the mid-1950s assumed the role of press spokesperson for the party. This fortunate move was made possible by the departure of Shivaji Ganesan—a charismatic leading man in Tamil films—from DMK political activities and from propaganda cinema (see chapter 3). With Shivaji out of Dravidian politics, DMK-aligned film companies came to MGR with their leading roles. And as his popularity grew among the Tamil film audience, so did MGR’s political and financial power and prestige. He opened film production companies, purchased cinema theaters, and in his films he manipulated Tamil history and Dravidian political symbolism to bridge that gap between his film roles and Tamil politics. Moreover, MGR lived out his most heroic cinematic roles in his public and private lives.

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On screen, MGR frequently portrayed political figures from Tamil history. These films took on the atmosphere of a political campaign. In the film Nadodi Manan (Wandering King, 1958, which he also produced and directed), for example, MGR played the principal protagonist, a legendary Tamil king. MGR opened the film singing, “O divine Tamil, we bow to you, who reflect the glories of ancient Dravidians.” And when crowned king, MGR outlined a program for his subjects almost straight off of the DMK party platform.44 MGR possessed a talent for projecting his cinematic persona into the streets of Tamil Nadu’s major cities. A year after the release of Nadodi Manan, MGR celebrated his box-office success by staging a symbolic parade through the city of Madurai, an ancient hub of Hindu religious activity and a modern center for research into Tamil history. Posed as the sun god, Surya, and surrounded by crowds of adoring fans, MGR rode down the main street of Madurai atop a horse-drawn chariot draped in brightly colored cloth bearing the emblem of the rising sun—the symbol of the DMK.45 Cut off from political mobility after his dismissal from the DMK, but confident of his popularity on the screen, MGR risked defying Karunanidhi on the political stage. No doubt he was encouraged by the fact that ever since the early 1960s, whenever he appeared on political platforms with the top leadership of the DMK—Karunanidhi, Nedunchezhian, Anbazhagan, and other important cabinet members—audiences would make it impossible for anyone but MGR to speak. MGR organized his own party around the tens of thousands of fans whose political loyalties were virtually inseparable from their appreciation of his acting skills. Naming his new party after Annadurai—the Annadurai Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam, or ADMK—MGR promised to implement “Annadurai’s policies and programs including [alcohol] prohibition.”46 Significantly, when Annadurai’s faction broke away from the DK in 1949, a majority of the party’s leadership and rank and file had followed him. In stark contrast, practically none of the DMK leadership joined MGR’s breakaway faction, as the expectations of his political survival without the backing of the DMK, was very low. In fact, the very next year, and in the year following, the ADMK won sweeping victories in by-elections held in different parts of the state with MGR campaigning to vast crowds of the electorate between his busy film shooting schedule. In 1976, just four years after its formation, the ADMK defeated the DMK in the state elections and MGR was chosen to the position of chief minister. Political analysts attribute the success of breakaway factions within the Dravidian movement to the fact that the primary ideology of the movement,

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that of Tamil nationalism, is easily coopted.47 Breakaway factions can gain legitimacy simply by claiming to be more ethnically nationalist than previous groups. The ADMK victory was also aided by Karunanidhi’s fall out with India’s prime minister, Indira Gandhi. From 1975 onward, Karunanidhi had spoken out against the prime minister’s imposition of national emergency rule. In 1976, Mrs. Gandhi dismissed the DMK government on charges of corruption within the party. That same year, however, the coalition Janata Dal, led by Morarji Desai, defeated Indira Gandhi’s Congress Party in national elections. However, Mrs. Gandhi reemerged triumphant in the federal elections held in 1980. To demonstrate his support for Indira Gandhi’s government, as well as to mute the separatist stigma of the Dravidian movement, in 1980 MGR renamed his party the All India Anna Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (AIADMK). Once installed as chief minister of the state MGR became virtually invincible in elections, and retained his hold on the reins of state power for ten years, from 1977 until his death in January 1988. While functioning as the leader of the main opposition party against Karunanidhi’s government, MGR continued to use film, and even the lyrics of music within that medium, to criticize and cajole his political rival.48 MGR announced his retirement from cinema only after he had defeated Karunanidhi in the polls and ascended to the position of chief minister of Tamil Nadu. Karunanidhi, now out of office, wrote the screenplay for films that openly criticized MGR’s government. In response, an aggrieved and aged MGR, too old to act in a role that would serve his political purposes, announced that he too would write screenplays in retaliation (though, in fact, no screenplays were attributed to him thereafter).49 Of all the Dravidian party leaders, MGR arguably attracted the greatest adulation from the people of Tamil Nadu. More than two million people attended MGR’s public funeral in January 1988. And, according to press reports, thirty-one grief-stricken fans committed suicide on that occasion.50 On January 25, 1988, MGR was posthumously awarded the Bharat Ratna, the nation’s highest civilian honor never before conferred upon a regional leader. Jayalalitha Jayaram: From Costar to Deity The daughter of a moderately well-known film actress, Jayalalitha Jayaram (b. 1948) made her cinema debut at the age of thirteen. She was first cast opposite MGR at age seventeen in the film Aayirathil Oruvan (One in a Thousand, 1965). Her performance in the movie propelled Jayalalitha into star-

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Figure 5.2. A screen-printed paper poster, plastered on a public wall, juxtaposes images of MGR as a revered political leader (clad in the traditional white garments worn by politicians throughout India) viewing himself on screen as a romantic hero. Smaller theaters in the city frequently show reruns of popular classics such as this film, Sangey Muzhangu (1972). Kodambakkam High Road, December 1991.

dom. During the next six years, until 1971, she played MGR’s leading lady in some twenty films. She retired from Tamil cinema in 1977 (returning to make one film in 1980, and another in 1992) about the time that MGR retired to assume the position of chief minister of Tamil Nadu’s state government. In all Jayalalitha appeared in approximately 126 films. It was MGR who most encouraged Jayalalitha’s political career. After founding the ADMK Party in 1970, MGR made plans to introduce his female protégé to party regulars in his tours throughout Tamil Nadu. Senior advisors, however, overruled the idea. Jayalalitha, instead, went to work as a writer for a major Tamil-language satirical political magazine, Tughlak, until in 1981, MGR, whose power was by then well entrenched, enlisted her for a cabinet position, that of propaganda secretary. This time MGR was able to disregard the opposition to his action, but his support of Jayalalitha produced factions, for the first time, within his party. Jayalalitha’s cinematic association with MGR and her effective campaigning helped her to rapidly outcompete members who had advanced from within the party’s ranks. The grievance of senior party members was continually exacerbated by the fact that at all public functions MGR insisted that Jayalalitha receive the same

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deferential treatment as himself. And he forbade any criticism of Jayalalitha from party leadership. At only her second public appearance, a party meeting in a small town of Cuddalore, Jayalalitha, at the behest of MGR, proceeded to the venue of the meeting perched atop a float shaped like a peacock, with “several senior party ministers also on the float but seated at a lower level.”51 In 1984 MGR appointed Jayalalitha to the Rajya Sabha (the House of Lords) providing her with special privileges and extraordinary power as his personal representative in New Delhi in electoral negotiations with Prime Minister Indira Gandhi. Upon MGR’s death a bitter factional struggle ensued in the AIADMK between Jayalalitha and V. N. Janaki, MGR’s wife and one of his many female costars (previous to Jayalalitha’s career). Janaki’s faction of ministers of the legislative assembly (MLAs) won the first round of state elections after MGR’s death. But in just twenty-four days the government was dismissed because the divided AIADMK was unable to garner enough seats in the state assembly. The central government established president’s rule in Tamil Nadu and the crisis precipitated another round of elections in 1989. This time Karunanidhi’s DMK regained control of Tamil Nadu’s state assembly after thirteen years as the opposition party. However, politics brewing around the Sri Lankan civil war, being fought between a Tamil separatist group—the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelum (LTTE)—and Sri Lanka’s military forces, cut short the DMK’s control of the Tamil Nadu assembly. Tamil Nadu’s government, now in Karunanidhi’s hands, had been sympathetic to the cause of the LTTE. India’s central government, however, had not; India’s government, then under the leadership of Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi, supported a unified Sri Lanka and an end to the separatist struggle on the nearby island nation. The prime minister sent an Indian peacekeeping force to the island in hopes of brokering peace. Instead, they were dragged into combat against the LTTE and were later withdrawn. In 1991, an LTTE suicide bomber assassinated Rajiv Gandhi while he was campaigning in Tamil Nadu. In this context, the DMK’s sympathies with the Sri Lankan Tamil minority appeared flagrantly anti-national.52 In elections held later that year, the AIADMK, under the leadership of Jayalalitha Jayaram, routed the DMK. As Tamil Nadu’s new chief minister, Jayalalitha made the most of her film career, hearkening back with references to her onscreen relationship with MGR, and cultivating relationships with the younger generation of Tamil film celebrities. Public events during Jayalalitha’s first tenure as Tamil Nadu’s chief minister took on the trappings of lavish cinematic spectacles. In a bid to garner support for new legislation prohibiting the sale of alcohol in Tamil

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Nadu, she even returned to the cinema to star in the film Neenga Nalla Erukkanu (You All Need to Keep Well, 1992). In the film, Jayalalitha portrayed a Tamil politician engaged in an uphill battle against apathy and corruption, with her eye on what she believes is ultimately best for her constituents, despite the costs to her own career.53 Jayalalitha’s government proved more vulnerable to political scandal than that of MGR. Shaken by evidence of large-scale corruption within the AIADMK, her popularity dropped off. Rumors and press accounts of an eccentric lifestyle, officious behavior, and harassment of journalists who produced critical reports about the leader and her party gradually ate away at her political popularity. In elections in 1996, voters turned the AIADMK out of power in Tamil Nadu’s state assembly, and presented the DMK with a victory. For the third time, Karunanidhi assumed the position of chief minister. During his first weeks in office, Karunanidhi appointed a special tribunal to investigate corruption charges against Jayalalitha. The Directorate of Vigilance and Anti-Corruption, a central government body, charged Jayalalitha and her cohorts with embezzling more than 660 million rupees.54 She was indicted in 1996 and ultimately spent one month in prison. As further evidence of corruption surfaced she was again sentenced in February 2000 to two separate one-year prison terms but served only two months. And a few months later, in October, she received an additional two sentences of three years and two years that effectively barred her from contesting the state elections.55 Karunanidhi meanwhile focused his attentions toward grooming his younger son, M. K. Stalin,56 to step in as his successor. Stalin had already established himself as a leader of the DMK’s youth wing since the late 1980s when he acquired the title of Ilyaya Dhalapathi (translated from Tamil as the “young commander-in-chief”). In the DMK tradition, he sought to manufacture his own image through the entertainment media. Rather than cinema, however, Stalin bet on a shift toward television, as had been the case in the United States and Europe, and had launched his political career acting in daytime Tamil soap operas.57 Once again, the nepotistic tendencies of the DMK party leader led to his undoing. At all DMK events dating from 1989 the cutouts of Stalin were disproportionately larger than those of other DMK members who were senior to him in rank. And during his father’s term as chief minister from 1996 through 2000 Stalin was appointed to the prestigious position of the mayor of Chennai. Other popular political figures, those who had worked their way up through the DMK hierarchy, and those who had accumulated their own local power and patronage,58 balked at Karunanidhi’s attempt to establish his

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son as successor. Within months, party loyalties were split among rival contenders for the head of the party. With the DMK divided,59 Jayalalitha’s AIADMK forced a round of state elections in 2001 and won an overwhelming victory.60 Rajnikanth: A Future Contender? What will Tamil Nadu’s entertainment media generate in the way of future political leaders? The most prominent newcomer is Rajnikanth, the reigning superstar of Tamil cinema. (See chapter 3.) Like MGR before him, Rajnikanth has in place an efficiently organized system of fifty thousand fan clubs across the state, each with a membership of fifteen to twenty-five youths. If Rajnikanth declares himself a candidate for political office, his film fans would constitute a ready-made core political organization ready to campaign. Which party would he choose? The answer to this question is more difficult to fathom. Having achieved celebrity status in cinema, Rajnikanth’s involvement in politics was almost preordained. The film star first expressed his interest in politics in the early 1990s during Jayalalitha’s first tenure as chief minister. Initially a strong supporter of Jayalalitha, Rajnikanth, along with a majority of the electorate, became disenchanted with the AIADMK leader by the mid-1990s, when the evidence of corruption in the AIADMK party, and particularly that of Jayalalitha, began to be reported with increasing frequency in the media. In the 1995 elections Rajnikanth publicly encouraged his fans to support Karunanidhi’s DMK faction against the rival AIADMK. Rajnikanth’s support of Karunanidhi’s faction was undoubtedly instrumental in the DMK’s sweeping victory; one of the most popular features of Karunanidhi’s campaign speeches for that election were his references to Rajnikanth. With Jayalalitha’s return to power in 2001 Rajnikanth displayed his sympathy for one of her key issues, the conflict with Karnataka over the sharing of the waters of the Cauvery River. In October 2002, Rajnikanth undertook a widely publicized nine-day fast appealing for a resolution on the conflict, emulating Jayalalitha’s fast of almost ten years before, described in the opening paragraphs of this chapter. This action by Rajnikanth won the approval and support of every major political party in Tamil Nadu.61 Perhaps the clearest indication of Rajnikanth’s interest in running for political office in Tamil Nadu is the release of two highly publicized films— Baba (Sage, 2002) and Shivaji: The Boss (2007). The thematic of these films, centered on the exposure and reform of political corruption, is far from anomalous in Rajnikanth’s oeuvre. In tandem with his first major intervention in the state elections of 1995 Rajnikanth has regularly inserted political

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nuances in his films. However, with Baba and Shivaji Rajnikanth made a concerted and explicit attempt to emulate the paradigm set by his predecessors, Annadurai, MGR, Karunanidhi, and Jayalalitha, in the deployment of cinema as a powerful tool of political communication. The film Baba, for instance, closes with a suggestion that the main protagonist, played by Rajnikanth, wishes to renounce the world but enters the world of politics out of necessity because of the dearth of good leadership in the state. And in Shivaji the main protagonist, Shivaji, in a single-handed battle with the forces of corruption that seek to deny the populace of Tamil Nadu access to education and health care, has a near-death experience before he emerges again with a new name, M.G. Ravichandran (MGR), to finally vanquish the enemy. The film is wholly postmodern in its pastiche of self-conscious quotations from recent political history and from the classics of Tamil cinema. In dream sequences Rajnikanth mimics the appearance and acting styles of both Shivaji Ganesan and MGR. The film appropriates and restages iconic sequences of Tamil films, such as the dance on drums in S. S. Vasan’s Chandralekha, and the script includes several “in” jokes that reference other Tamil films and film personalities. Shivaji has all the ingredients of the formula that make it a lavish entertainment film that can be enjoyed by audiences globally—but at the same time this subtext of appropriated sequences, asides, and innuendos in the dialog garners a special appreciation and loyalty from informed insiders— a tactic pioneered by Annadurai, Karunanidhi, and MGR. A dialog snippet from Shivaji that produced raucous, jubilant cheers and mirth from the audience was Rajnikanth’s response to the confused villain who demands, “Who are you? Shivaji or MGR?” To wit Rajnikanth, perhaps prophetically, claims, “I am both Shivaji and MGR.” Unlike M. K. Stalin, Karunanidhi’s son and political protégé, who turned to television to carry his image to the masses, Rajnikanth is fully cognizant that television produces celebrity but cinema produces charisma—particularly for those actors who reach the superstar status in the industry—and Rajnikanth is reputedly the highest paid actor in Indian cinema today. The tremendous publicity build-up for Baba and Shivaji indexed Rajnikanth’s political aspirations. When Baba opened simultaneously in India and in Japan (where Rajnikanth has a huge fan following), fans clambered to the top of the cutout advertisements of the star to bathe the images in milk as a sign of their adulation. This action can be interpreted as an anointing of the star as king and deity. In the Indian tradition the making divine of the king was enacted through the year-long Rajasuya62 ritual at the time of his ascension to the throne. Among the most important of the rites that made up the Rajasuya ritual was that of abhiseka (anointing, or bathing) when gods were

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invoked to “quicken” the king with divine powers (and not the coronation, as in the Western tradition). Despite the hype surrounding its production (for example, the film shootings were conducted in secret) Baba failed at the box office. But Rajnikanth’s image as a savior remained untarnished when he made the unprecedented move of reimbursing the losses to distributors who had invested in his film. Shivaji: The Boss, a major box-office success, unlike Baba, was released simultaneously in all the major Indian cities (unprecedented for a Tamil film) and several locations abroad, including Japan, Malaysia, Singapore, the Gulf states, South Africa, the United Kingdom (where it was the first Tamil film to make the top ten list in that country), and the United States (in twentyfour theaters nationwide). The fan frenzy in these locations during the first few weeks of the film’s release was widely reported in the media. For this film as well fans performed a milk abhiseka on cutouts of the star and broke coconuts to ward off evil. Shivaji has the distinction of being Rajnikanth’s one hundredth film (a significant number in the Tamil film industry—see chapter 2) and is reputedly the most expensive Indian feature film to date (with an estimated production cost of $17.5 million). In arranging a series of separate, private screenings of the film for Karunanidhi, Jayalalitha, Amitabh, Bachchan, and the former chief minister of Andhra Pradesh and head of the Telegu Desam party, Chandra Babu Naidu (who promptly extended Rajnikanth membership in his newly formed Third Front political group), Rajnikanth paid his respects to his role models as he made his formal debut in Tamil Nadu politics. In this chapter I have described how the Dravidian movement gained in strength and visibility when its leaders successfully harnessed the power of cinematic celebrities to promote a political ideology of anti-Brahmanism and Tamil nationalism. The biographical analyses of Tamil Nadu’s key political figures reveal a continual, complex mirroring of identity in the realms of the personal (their private lives and biographies), the filmic (their cinematic roles as heroes, heroines, and mythical beings), and the public (their activities in the political sphere). Cultivating the impression that their personal lives and their public roles were identical was particularly crucial for the actor-politicians of Tamil Nadu to convince audiences about their sincerity. A repetition of exemplary, desirable traits in the cinema and in life not only produced and fixed a clearly defined identity for public consumption, it also convinced the mass audience of the authenticity of the image. In the following chapter I will show how these film celebrities turned political leaders wielded the political cutout as an important instrument of propaganda in vi-

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sualizing and fixing their charismatic, iconic images in the urban public sphere.

Notes 1. Several Tamil films are based upon the Silappadhikkaram (Stolen Anklet, c. third century CE), an epic tale of romance, devotion, and revenge. 2. Shaukat Mohammed and M. D. Riti, “Fast Work!” The Week, August 1, 1993, 29. 3. P. Gupta, Anthropometry in India (Royal Statistical Society and the Royal Economic Society, 1966). Statistical studies by Prasanta Chandra Mahalanobis, based upon anthropomorphic measurements, suggest that a large proportion of the genetic history of South Indian Brahmins is similar to that of some North Indian Brahmin groups. 4. Eugene Irschick, Politics and Social Conflict in South India: The Non-Brahmin Movement. 1916–1929 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1969), 284. In 1913, Brahmins comprised only 3 percent of the population of Tamil Nadu but 72 percent of the graduates from Madras University were Brahmins. 5. Eugene Irschick, Tamil Revivalism in the 1930s (Chennai: Cre-A, 1986), 5–7. 6. Washbrook, The Emergence of Provincial Politics, 37. 7. Irschick, Politics and Social Conflict in South India, 45. 8. Irshchick, Tamil Revivalism in the 1930s, 32. See also Washbrook, The Emergence of Provincial Politics, 272. For a detailed discussion on the complexities of caste in social, cultural, and professional life in the Madras Presidency during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, see Washbrook, 125–45. 9. Irschick, Politics and Social Conflict in South India, 275–310. 10. Irschick, Politics and Social Conflict in South India, 279. 11. Rajadhyaksha and Willemen, Encyclopedia of Indian Cinema, 43. For instance, Annadurai (1904–1969), an important leader of the Dravidian movement, wrote the Kamba Rasam, which critiqued the Ramayana for its exaltation of the Aryan race. 12. Aside, April 30, 1988, 23. In 1971, a radical Dravidian party, the DK (Dravida Kazhagam) led a procession in which chappals (slippers) were thrown at the image of Rama. The action was regarded as so inflammatory and offensive to the sentiments of the religious populace that even the atheistic, anti-Brahmin DMK government chose to censor the media dissemination of this event by withholding distribution of the issue of Tughlak, the magazine that had published photographs of the procession. 13. Irschick, Tamil Revivalism in the 1930s, 86. 14. Baker, The Politics of South India 1920–1937, 193. EVR named the party meeting hall that he constructed in Coimbatore (a city to the southwest of Chennai) “Stalin Hall.” He was arrested by the British administration in 1934 for “seditious” publications and activities and was forced to recant his Bolshevik views.

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15. R. S. Perinbanayagam, “Rationality: Tamil Nadu Caste, Politics and Art,” The Drama Review 15, no. 3 (Spring 1971): 208. 16. Baker, The Politics of South India 1920–1937, 1. 17. Barnett, The Politics of Cultural Nationalism in South India, 127. The demand for secession remained a key element of Dravidian politics until 1962 when it was formally abandoned due to the sixteenth amendment to the Indian Constitution, prompted by a border dispute between India and China, which stipulated that “any individual who questioned the sovereignty of India could be penalized—and that the freedom of speech rights would not apply in this case.” 18. Barnouw and Krishnaswamy, Indian Film, 178. See also Barnett, The Politics of Cultural Nationalism in South India, 57. 19. Barnett, The Politics of Cultural Nationalism in South India, 76. One issue that surfaced in the split between the DK and the DMK was that of EVR’s marriage, at the age of seventy-one, to a twenty-nine-year-old woman. 20. Sivathamby, The Tamil Film as a Medium of Political Communication, 213. 21. Hardgrave, “Politics and the Film in Tamil Nadu,” 293. But Bhaskaran (Eye of the Serpent, 32) counters that whereas these films “criticized social evils . . . they did not suggest any agenda of political reform.” 22. Barnett, The Politics of Cultural Nationalism in South India, 90, 118, 125, 158. In 1956 the DMK formally decided to enter electoral competition. Since then Tamil Nadu has had one of the highest voter turnout rates in the country—between 66 and 70 percent in urban areas. 23. Barnouw and Krishnaswamy, Indian Film, 183. See also the party manifesto by V. Nedunchezhian, “Document: The Party and the Artists,” trans. Karthikesu Sivathamby, The Drama Review 15, no. 3 (Spring 1971): 221–23; and Barnett, The Politics of Cultural Nationalism in South India, 79–80. 24. Aside, June 15, 1987, 33–35. See also Barnouw and Krishnaswamy, Indian Film, 216. 25. Pandian, “Parasakthi: Life and Times of a DMK Film,” 66. 26. Barnett, The Politics of Cultural Nationalism in South India, 108. 27. S. H. Venkatramani, “MGR: A Charismatic Reign,” India Today, January 15, 1988, 12. See also Hardgrave, “Politics and the Film in Tamil Nadu,” 302. Hardgrave’s version of this statement attributed to Annadurai is as follows, “when we show his [MGR’s] face, we get 40,000 votes; when he speaks a few words, we get 4 lakhs [400,000].” 28. Hardgrave, “Politics and the Film in Tamil Nadu,” 292. 29. Bhaskaran, Eye of the Serpent, 33. Another device to deliver monologues was to include a “play within a play.” Examples of such films include Rajarani (KingQueen, 1956) by M. Karunanidhi and Annaiyin Anai (Mother’s Command, 1958) by Murasoli Maran. 30. Chakravarty, National Identity in Indian Popular Cinema 1947–1987, 132. 31. Rajadhyaksha and Willemen, Encyclopedia of Indian Cinema, 87. 32. Bhaskaran, Eye of the Serpent, 34, 35, 66.

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33. Pandian, “Parasakthi: Life and Times of a DMK Film,” 73. 34. Barnett, The Politics of Cultural Nationalism in South India, 282. 35. Barnett, The Politics of Cultural Nationalism in South India, 187 and 214. In two surveys conducted in 1968, seven hundred questionnaires were mailed to DMK cadre local-level leaders and 459 were returned. 36. This was when the Congress party had organized nationwide protests against the British proposal to (1) defer granting India independence until after World War II, and (2) partition the subcontinent into the two nations of India and Pakistan. 37. Barnett, The Politics of Cultural Nationalism in South India, 131–36 (quotation on 134). 38. In the 1962 elections Congress secured 138 seats in the legislative assembly while the DMK had 50. In 1967 their positions were reversed; the DMK won 138 seats and the Congress just 47. 39. As of this writing, Karunanidhi has written the screenplays for fifty-seven films, and published more than fifty short stories and commentaries on Tamil literature. 40. Hardgrave, “Politics and the Film in Tamil Nadu,” 290. Also see Bhaskaran, Eye of the Serpent, 52. 41. Barnett, The Politics of Cultural Nationalism in South India, 312. The author cites an article in the Hindu newspaper, October 2, 1972, that estimated that there were eight hundred MGR fan clubs in Tamil Nadu at that time. However, the exact number of clubs cannot be ascertained because a few weeks later, on October 19, 1972, the same newspaper reported MGR’s claim that there he had twenty thousand manrams and rasikar manrams (film-fan clubs). 42. Barnett, The Politics of Cultural Nationalism in South India, 107. Predictably, Karunanidhi’s family members have benefited most from this system. See also Aside, March 31, 1993, 12–13. Of his four sons, Muthu and Stalin were groomed to succeed Karunanidhi; Azhagiri was put in charge of the party organization in the southern districts, including Madurai; only Tamizharasu was not directly involved in politics, preferring to focus on his career as a film actor. The DMK publication, Murasoli, was edited by Murasoli Maran, Karunanidhi’s nephew. Sun TV, the DMK’s propaganda channel, was operated by Maran’s son, and occupied two floors of the DMK headquarters, Anna Arivalayam in Chennai. Another nephew, L. Sornam, was editor of Ilaya Sooryan (Young Sun), the main publication of the youth wing of the DMK. 43. MGR’s birthdate is undetermined—the official birth date is 1917, though some claim it is 1912. 44. Barnouw and Krishnaswamy, Indian Film, 180. See also Hardgrave, “Politics and the Film in Tamil Nadu,” 299. Nadodi Manan was a production of MGR’s company, Emgeeyar Pictures. 45. Indian Express, July 12, 1992, Sunday Magazine section, 1. Annadurai bestowed on MGR the title of Idaya Kanni (Fruit of the Heart), on the occasion of the one-hundredth day of continuous screening of this film.

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46. Barnett, The Politics of Cultural Nationalism in South India, 297. See also Barnouw and Krishnaswamy, Indian Film, 280. 47. Barnett, The Politics of Cultural Nationalism in South India, 247, 302. 48. VAK Ranga Rao, “Film Song and MGR’s Image,” in Impact: MGR and Films. A Study, ed. V. Kesavalu (Chennai: Movie Appreciation Society [Regd.], 1990), 167. 49. Aside, June 15, 1987, 33–35. 50. Pandian, The Image Trap: M.G. Ramachandran in Film and Politics (New Delhi: Sage Publications, 1992), 17. 51. Ira Bhaskar, “The Rise and Rise of Jayalalitha,” Aside, March 15, 1988, 14–16. 52. Aside, February 15, 1988, 42. In fact MGR’s AIADMK had also supported the rise of Velupillai Prabhakaran, the LTTE leader. But MGR had managed to dissociate himself from the LTTE when Rajiv Gandhi sent the Indian peace-keeping force to Sri Lanka. 53. “The Fortnight That Was,” Aside, October 31, 1991, 19. Jayalalitha’s campaign was targeted to attracting women voters by reintroducing prohibition of liquor sales in Tamil Nadu. 54. Frontline—a magazine published by the Hindu newspaper—June 27, 1997. See also Ingrid Widlund, Paths to Power and Patterns of Influence: The Dravidian Parties in South Indian Politics (Stockholm, Sweden: Uppsala), 90. 55. According to the People’s Act of 1951, those convicted in a criminal case and sentenced to a jail term of more than twenty-four months are barred from elections for six years. 56. Baker, The Politics of South India 1920–1937, 193. Stalin was named after Josef Stalin, leader of the Soviet Union. Recall EVR’s Bolshevik associations formed during his trip to Russia in 1932 and his construction of “Stalin Hall” in Coimbatore. 57. In an interview with India Today (July 31, 1990, 144), Stalin, who played the role of a socially conscious youth in a thirteen-part television serial titled Kurunji Malar (based on a novel by Na. Parthasarathy), claimed that “films are no longer a medium to reach people; while TV is right at everybody’s door. I’m not particular about the money it will bring but it will help me politically.” He was proved correct. A news report, “Rising Son Versus Veteran,” Indian Express May 19, 1991, noted that “some people, particularly in the slums, refer to him [Stalin] as ‘Aravindan’ the heroic role he played in the popular tele-serial, Kurunji Malar, a few months back.” 58. Widlund, Paths to Power and Patterns of Influence, 93. 59. Rajat Ghai, “Letters,” Outlook, May 24, 2004, 6. The schisms within the Dravidian party fall mainly along caste lines. The majority of the members of the DMK are Mudaliars; the PMK and MDMK are Vanniyars; the AIADMK are Thevars. The Dalits have organized their own party under the leadership of Dr. S. Krishnaswamy. 60. India Today, May 28, 2001, 22. The AIADMK won 193 seats in the legislative assembly, as opposed to the DMK, which won only 37 seats. Initially Jayalalitha was barred from assuming the position of chief minister on the grounds that she was not a sitting member of the state legislature due to the corruption charges that were still pending against her. She prevailed and was sworn in as chief minister on March 2,

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2002, whereupon she immediately jailed several of the top DMK leadership, including Karunanidhi. 61. S. Anand, “Cleft-Stick Penance: A Riparian Problem makes Filmdom’s Political Divide Apparent,” The World Mirror, An English Fort-Nightly, http://www.the worldmirror.com/m2v21/, October 16–29, 2002. 62. Ananda K. Coomaraswamy, Spiritual Authority and Temporal Power in the Indian Theory of Government, ed. Zellig Harris vol. 22, American Oriental Series (New Haven, Conn.: Kraus Reprint Corporation, 1942), 9. Also see Romila Thapar, A History of India, vol. 1 (London: Penguin, 1966), 54.

C H A P T E R

S I X



The Political Cutout: Celebrity and Cult in Tamil Nadu

For the past two months, party workers have been inundating the streets of Chennai with publicity images of Jayalalitha [Jayalalitha Jayaram, Tamil Nadu’s chief minister] in the guise of the Hindu deities Lakshmi [Vishnu’s consort] and Minakshi [Shiva’s consort]. The images, which range from screenprinted posters to handpainted cutouts, fuse Jayalalitha’s facial features onto iconographic depictions of the goddesses, very much in the style of the sami patam—popular religious prints of deities that hang in Hindu homes and shops throughout the city. One interesting recent development: On the occasion of Jayalalitha’s birthday, AIADMK [All India Anna Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam] propagandists commissioned a series of printed posters depicting their party leader as the Madonna. The posters, which were aimed at capturing votes among Tamil Nadu’s sizable Christian minority, instead sparked a storm of protests from Christian leaders and brought considerable negative media attention to the campaign. Jayalalitha has since distanced herself from the distribution of the posters, which have been removed or pasted-over during the past week. Field Journal—Chennai, February 27, 1995

Political cutouts function as propaganda remaking the film star as leader and deity. Until the turn of the twenty-first century, for every election or major political event, freestanding cutouts of party leaders punctuated important nodal points along the ten-mile stretch of Anna Salai. While the immediate objective of these events may have been a victory at the ballot box, the handpainted cutouts, sometimes towering thirty meters above Chennai’s streets, also served

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Figure 6.1. Reproduced here are two posters depicting Jayalalitha as Minakshi and as the Madonna. In the guise of the Hindu goddess Jayalalitha is richly adorned in silk and gold, she wears a crown upon her head as a symbol of her royal status and she grasps the trident, an attribute of Shiva (Minakshi’s consort). An idyllic landscape view of the famous Minakshi temple in Madurai (an ancient city in Tamil Nadu) appears in the distant background. In the second image, Jayalalitha is a Raphaelesque Madonna clad in a flowing pink gown and blue robe. Crowned as the queen of heaven with the blue surface of the earth her pedestal, she grasps the scepter of royalty in one hand while supporting the Christ Child on the other arm. Dr. Radhakrishna Salai, February 1995. Photograph by K. M. Jacob.

as the instruments of long-term image-building strategies. And despite their physical dominance of the skyline over Chennai’s most crowded districts and along its principal thoroughfares, the city’s array of colossal political cutouts represented only a portion of more extensive promotional campaigns. In this chapter, I document and discuss the activities that publicity agencies, political committees, and political figures in Tamil Nadu initiated to manage the information that was loaded into the political cutout—that is, what the viewer perceived from the symbolic content of the image, its juxtaposition to other imagery and its reference to ideology, mythology, local history, and contemporary events. I discuss how these “image managers” worked to obfuscate the boundaries between the personal life of celebrities, their illusory life on film, and the rarefied imagery of religion and historical

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mythology. And I reflect on how their efforts to augment celebrity stature played out in the art of banners and cutouts that framed Chennai’s public spaces. Politicians implemented several strategies to accomplish this goal including manipulating the content of films, and several populist measures that replicated the good deeds performed by heroes in filmic narratives. I find that their most successful strategies rested fundamentally on localized notions of the dynamics of mass popular appeal (which I discuss under the rubric of charisma) and on conveying an association, using the celebrity image, with traditional symbolic trappings and behaviors of heroic leadership (discussed in this chapter as the semiotics of kingship). In exploring these two politically charged and theoretically challenging topics in South Indian politics, I draw on the insights of scholars who have grappled with them in other contexts. I argue that the loading of celebrity images has contributed to the transfer of political power in Tamil Nadu from image managers—the filmmakers and screenwriters—to charismatic onscreen celebrities. At the close of this chapter I proceed to an analysis of the propaganda images for Jayalalitha Jayaram’s political campaigns and those created during her first tenure as chief minister. I trace the visual production of the image of the leader as celebrity, royalty and deity.1

Blurring Reality and Representation In the modern era, those individuals who have the means to effectively manipulate and manage perception often achieve the greatest success in leadership. This blurring of reality and representation is characteristic of modernity because, “with the advent of a chaotic and diffuse urban culture, the ‘real’ could increasingly be grasped only through . . . representations that feed off and form part of that ongoing reality.”2 One could argue however, that this bit of wisdom was relevant even as early as the third century BCE. The Arthashastra, a manual for rulers attributed to Kautalya, proffers the advice that “the whole of this science [of government and economics] has to do with a victory over the powers of perception and action.”3 Cultivating the perception that their personal lives and public roles were identical was crucial for the actor-politicians of Tamil Nadu to convince audiences about their sincerity. Political analysts have ascribed MGR’s success as a politician to his ability to seamlessly overlap his personal life, his film roles, and his public image as a politician to create a homogeneous identity as a cultural superhero that the public could admire and with which they could identify.4 Understanding the mechanisms for such transference of qualities from

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the screen to reality has obvious applications to commercial entertainment media and advertising, and to political media. In chapter 4 I showed that since its inception, aspects of popular film technique, production, and distribution encouraged viewers to consign qualities of the on-screen hero to the film actor. And I pointed to the network of subsidiary industries spawned by the cinema industry—advertisements, publications, and other consumer goods—that also helped to produce a continuum in the complex relationships between film, fame, charisma, and political fortunes. Numerous incidents in MGR’s private life appeared to mirror the fearless hero on the screen. In 1967, several days before the DMK’s first victory in elections for Tamil Nadu’s legislative assembly, MGR engaged in a pistol duel with M. R. Radha, an actor who had played the role of villain in several of the films in which MGR had played the hero. But unlike the films, the duel went badly for MGR; he received a bullet wound to his neck, leaving him hospitalized in critical condition. The DMK, losing no time and no opportunity to secure sympathy votes, sent their workers onto the streets of Tamil Nadu’s cities to erect poster and cutout images of the film star in bandages. Meanwhile, thousands of loyal fans stood constant vigil outside the hospital in Madras where MGR was convalescing, awaiting news of his condition. MGR emerged victorious in the elections as a member of the DMK majority in Tamil Nadu’s legislative assembly. M. R. Radha, who was also wounded in the duel, was later sentenced to prison.5 MGR’s fantastic success in perpetuating confusion between the actual and the constructed spawned several imitators—most strikingly in the strategies of N. T. Rama Rao (NTR, chief minister of the south Indian state of Andhra Pradesh, 1983–1989). A major star of Telegu cinema, NTR gained celebrity status by being typecast as a deity in mythological films (he was cast as the deity Krishna in a total of seventeen films) and by deliberately encouraging his fans to view him as a living deity. In the film Shri Venkateshwara Mahatyam (The Greatness of Lord Vishnu, 1960), for instance, NTR played the deity of the Tirupati temple (a sacred pilgrimage site in Andhra Pradesh). Subsequently, pilgrims en route to Tirupati stopped outside NTR’s residence in Madras where the actor would publicly receive them.6 When the politically inexperienced NTR campaigned for political office in 1982, his newly formed Telegu Desam (Telegu Nation) party dislodged the veteran Congress Party that had retained control of Andhra Pradesh since independence. As chief minister of the state NTR continued to cultivate the mythical aura he had acquired from his film roles. During the 1991 state elections NTR arrived at a public meeting in full costume of a character he played in a mythological film Bhramarishi Vishwamitra (Sage Vishwamitra, 1990). The film,

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which NTR also directed, was explicitly created as part of his (unsuccessful) election campaign.7 Cinema as a tool of political leaders is most powerful when the star image is elevated to that of an icon. With this transition the image begins to function independently of the individual celebrity. At this point, according to media theorist David Marshall, “the celebrity has actually entered the language of culture and can exist whether the celebrity continues to ‘perform’ or dies.”8 In the context of Tamil Nadu it was MGR who surpassed Karunanidhi and even Annadurai in “entering the language of culture” of modern Tamil society, suggesting that a powerful visual image is more conducive to achieving an iconic status in modern societies than powerful oratory.9 In the cinema and on political platforms MGR compensated for his marked lack of oratorical skills (the real-life duel with M. R. Radha, described above, had left MGR with a permanent speech defect) by nurturing a superhuman image of eternal youth: he played hero to younger and younger heroines throughout his career in the film world. As Puratchi Thalaivar (Revolutionary Leader), MGR sported dark glasses and a white fur cap regardless of the weather or the time of day or night. These accoutrements successfully suppressed all visual signs of age such as thinning gray hair and wrinkles around the eyes. The fur cap, a most unusual headgear for the tropics, was apparently presented by a fan with the intent of protecting the leader from the blistering heat of the noonday sun. Whatever the incidental origins of this attire, its distinctiveness aided viewers in instantly identifying visual representations of the leader regardless of the artistic quality of the rendering.10 Studying the semiotics of the cult image in an Indian context, Daniel Smith notes that despite the advent of new mediums of representation such as photography, the “recognition factors” for the fashioning of icons, “a standard posture; a characteristic gesture; appropriate apparel, whether conventional, or highly personalized—even idiosyncratic; paraphernalia peculiar to a person’s profession or patrimony,” remain unchanged.11 MGR’s iconic status of Makkal Thilagam (Ornament of the Masses) was visualized in thousands of sculpted and painted portraits that were often colored gold. Among the numerous gifts that MGR received from his fans was a self-portrait in the form of a statuette cast in gold.12 And the life-size statue of the leader, erected at a busy intersection of Anna Salai, was shining gold in color, unlike other public statues, which were usually a dark bronze (MGR’s statue was polished every morning to prevent it from becoming tarnished). Likewise, in banner and cutout portraits a vital embellishment of MGR’s representation was in the alteration of the skin color to an unusual golden hue. These material associations with gold both as the precious metal

Figure 6.2. The attributes of the fur cap and sunglasses unmistakably index this temple icon as MGR. Shortly after MGR’s death several groups of his grieving fans and constituents declared their intention to build temples to their leader. One such claim was realized. On the northern outskirts of Chennai a group of AIADMK party workers erected the MGR Ninaivu Alayam to preserve the memory of their leader. Similar to the practices of worship in other shrines, priests daily conducted a short puja, incense was lit, coconuts broken, bells chimed and prasadam (food that is offered to the deity) distributed to passersby, those who stopped to take MGR’s darshan. Choolaimedu, January 1991.

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and the color were intended as direct visual representations of the metaphoric association of MGR as Ponmana Chemmal (Man with a Golden Heart). Apart from an outward manifestation of his inner beauty and goodness, MGR’s golden-hued skin was also perceived as evidence of his clean, wholesome lifestyle—in particular, his well-publicized abstinence from tobacco, caffeine, and alcohol. Party regulars made frequent reference to MGR’s glowing complexion as a sign of their leader’s miraculous agelessness, strength and good health.

Charismatic Leadership Tamil Nadu’s nationalist political parties, while operating from a political platform that sought to overturn religious hierarchy, managed to establish a relationship between their political leader and his or her constituents that bears similarities, in several fundamental ways, to religious worship. I refer to theories of charismatic leadership and traditional Indian kingship that help explain such leader-constituent relationships in Tamil Nadu, finding explanatory value in the symbiosis of political and religious authority that is fundamental to both theories. I argue that this general type of relationship is neither unique to Tamil Nadu nor to India, and I discuss analogous historical examples of leader-constituent relationships in populist politics elsewhere. Charisma—a word etymologically descendent from Greek, meaning “a divine gift”13—was first described in an analytical context by Max Weber as “a certain quality of an individual personality by virtue of which he is set apart from ordinary men and treated as endowed with supernatural, superhuman or at least specifically exceptional powers or qualities.”14 Weber’s characterization of charisma as an “expression of the creativity of the human spirit” drew from Friedrich Nietzsche’s concept of the ubermensch (superman) that celebrated the creative frenzy of the artist or visionary.15As a Dionysian breaker of social, moral, and aesthetic taboos, such an individual possessed the power to challenge and eventually heal (dysfunctional modern society). But Nietzsche’s theory did not distinguish between the good and evil purposes to which power might be directed. Likewise, Weber acknowledged that the potential effects of charisma on society could range from highly beneficial to deeply destructive.16 Weber emphasized that charisma is innate; the quality derives from an individual’s “personal heroism or personal revelation” and cannot be acquired (like a set of skills).17 An individual’s charismatic power, however, can become manifest only through the strength of faith of a group of followers.

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Unless the latter recognize charisma in an individual, the quality remains dormant.18 Charismatic leadership is thus essentially an interactive relation between an individual and a group of followers, wherein the latter’s enhanced perception of the former causes him or her to be extraordinarily influential. In a political context, charisma describes a particular type of governance. In the Weberian typology modes of governance in most human societies fall into one of three dominant systems: legal, traditional, and charismatic.19 None of these are found in their pure form, for each system retains elements and characteristics of the other systems. In a system of legal domination, which is also described as “rational” or bureaucratic, all participants are subject to a set of rules that are historically and culturally defined. No single individual, not even one elected to the highest office, is considered above the law. Traditional domination is a system wherein an individual or a group derives authority on the basis of custom. The lesser officials in such a system are usually intimately connected with the ruler, whether as kin or political allies. In charismatic domination, all authority stems from a single individual who is believed to possess extraordinary powers. Charismatic leaders typically (but not necessarily) gain power and visibility during unstable social conditions, when widespread questioning disrupts existing mores and traditional codes. A charismatic leader is therefore usually a radical whose words and actions challenge a society’s rationality and routine. Possessed with a “mission,” he or she acquires a devoted following through the performance of miracles, revelations or heroic deeds. Weber provided only a rudimentary discussion of the analytical applications of charisma. Other scholars, such as Douglas Madsen and Peter Snow, have taken the theory to task for its lack of specificity about context— conditions, demographics, causes, and effects—arguing that a single theoretical explanation cannot adequately illumine historically and culturally distinct instances of charismatic leadership.20 Another problem in extrapolating this theory to a modern context is that Weber’s description of the charismatic relationship was confined to an individual with a small band of followers where the contact was direct and personal. In the case of stars and politicians in contemporary societies the followers often number in the tens of thousands or millions. In this case the evocation of charisma relies entirely on perception transmitted through mass media such as radio, the cinema, photographs, or television. Most theorists who have commented upon or expanded Weber’s theory concur, however, that in a system of charismatic domination, the personality of the leader, far more than any ideology, is the potent force attracting adherents to the group.21 Because the reverence accorded to an elected politi-

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cal leader by his constituents—perhaps because of the passions released during the election process—is often more exaggerated than in other modern hierarchal relationships, such a leader becomes deified by close supporters. How did leaders of the Dravidian movement intentionally or otherwise fall into this mold of the charismatic leader? One could argue that the mold was historically predetermined by the precolonial political formations and practices in Tamil Nadu that scholars have characterized as “personcentered.”22 Dravidian leaders furthered the person centered historical, cultural orientation of their state not only through the manipulation of entertainment cinema but also by deploying a range of strategies that required their constituents to suspend critical faculties and accept their leaders’ policies and messages solely on the basis on faith. The Dravidian leadership’s political mobilization, which was geared to appeal to a latent cultural ethos of spirituality, was derivative of the indigenous Tamil Hindu tradition of bhakti—from Sanskrit, meaning an intuitive emotional expression of devotion and faith (as opposed to intellectual forms of expression). The term references wandering Hindu and Jain ascetics, who, communicating through poetry and music, from the seventh century onward, built cult followings for radical reforms in religion and society. During the nineteenth century, nationalist leaders revived the tradition of bhakti to communicate their call for social reform. Leaders of the Dravidian movement followed suit deploying this faith-based strategy to attract and convince vast numbers of people about the sincerity of the Dravidian ideology that, as described in the previous chapter, was radical and socially disruptive. Significantly, India’s greatest charismatic leader, M. K. Gandhi, also found in bhakti the most effective means to communicate his ideas. The bhakti tradition was most deep-rooted in the southern and western regions of the country and the religious orientation of Gandhi’s family, natives of the western state of Gujarat, centered on bhakti. As Lloyd and Suzanne Rudolph observe, “the identification with [bhakti] shaped [M. K. Gandhi’s] political style and helped him, in the face of the limitations imposed by illiteracy and the dearth of mass communications, to do what great bhakti teachers for centuries past had done, to reach mass audiences by peripatetic teaching throughout the subcontinent.”23 The adoption of a communication strategy based on emotional identification and belief, and associated with a religious tradition of bhakti was clearly contradictory to the radical atheism espoused by E. V. Ramaswamy Naicker (EVR), the founder of the Dravidian movement. Yet, in 1949, when Annadurai and his cohorts broke away from the EVR’s Dravida Kazhagam (DK) group, they turned from EVR’s program of religious reform that was splitting

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the electorate along caste lines and decided instead to focus the ideology of their faction, the Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (DMK), on linguistic politics, which they believed would unify the Tamil speaking public. This shift in the ideology of the DMK movment was in evidence as early as 1952. Karunanidhi’s screenplay for the film Parasakthi (Goddess, 1952) toned down the atheism of the original play by P. Balasundaram of the DK, to attack corruption within religion rather than the institution of religion itself.24 The sequence or visualization of events in this and other films were often edited to imply a miraculous explanation and so reverse the message of atheism in the theatrical renditions of those narratives. The need to compromise the message was also determined by commercial considerations as when producers or directors either did not share the DMK philosophy or were fearful of alienating parts of their audience. For instance, despite Parasakthi’s radical content, the producer, K. A. Perumal of National Pictures, “ensured that the first day’s shooting began with a traditional puja [worship].”25 Once the DMK’s platform for religious reform was marginalized as a matter of policy, with no strong argument for secularism in place and an overwhelming Hindu leadership and constituency, it became virtually impossible to curb the resurgence of religiosity within the party’s politics.26 When some DMK legislators proposed legislation in support of secularism, a storm of unwelcome media attention forced them to quickly back down. The adoption of a compromising position about religion put leaders of the movement in the difficult position of having to distinguish between blind faith and genuine faith. Besides, the increasing stridency of anti-religious protests by the DMK’s former cohorts in the DK was quickly capitalized on by opposition parties to question the morality of the DMK’s espoused atheism. This forced the DMK leadership to disassociate themselves from the DK, even to the point of claiming to be “a party of believers.”27 Their ambivalence toward secularism resulted in the rationalist leaders of the DMK, beginning with Annadurai, becoming the objects of veneration of poorer sections of their constituencies. It is the very propensity toward religiosity that facilitates the evocation of charisma.28 By the time MGR was elected to the post of chief minister of Tamil Nadu, public displays of religiosity were widely regarded as a political strength, rather than as evidence of a compromising stance by the Dravidian leadership. MGR’s devotion to the goddess Mookambika enshrined in Karnataka, and his pilgrimages to this and other holy sites, was an open, well-publicized fact.29 Under the leadership of Jayalalitha Jayaram, the Dravidian government’s support of religious groups became institutionalized. Jayalalitha implemented the Hindu Temples and Religious Endowments Act to distribute funds for the restoration of tem-

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ples in Tamil Nadu; she started a school for Vedic studies (the Vedas are ancient philosophical texts in Sanskrit); she made frequent stops at temples during her campaign tours; she participated in highly publicized religious festivals, and allowed herself to be deified by sections of her constituency. She even formed alliances with the BJP (Bharatiya Janata Party, or Indian People’s Party), a political party whose leadership has espoused Hindu fundamentalist ideals, and has been accused of seeking to reinstate caste-based hierarchies in Indian society.30 Even Karunanidhi’s faction of the Dravidian party, which had long been fiercely critical of MGR and Jayalalitha for their courtship with religious ideology and religious groups, formed an alliance with the BJP. The trajectory of the Dravidian movement from the first decades of the twentieth century, when it was engaged in a radical critique of organized religion and particularly the caste system, until the present, when an overwhelming affirmation of religiosity, even of the openly fundamental sort, prevails within the party was graphically manifest in two propaganda images displayed prominently in Chennai in January 2000. The first image, a three-meter high by thirtymeter wide (about ten by one hundred feet) banner displayed along Anna Salai depicted a youthful Karunanidhi deep in conversation with an aging EVR. Painted in black and white to resemble an old photograph or a filmstill and thus lend documentary credence to the moment, the banner displayed a caption that praised EVR as the great rationalist. The second image, installed at an equally busy public location—the entrance to the Trade Fair grounds, an important venue for local entrepreneurs as well as for internal tourism—was a massive diorama that recreated the imposing ramparts of an ancient fort set in a hilly landscape peopled by saints and cultural heroes of Tamil Nadu. In the center of this open-air stage set were two gigantic cutouts of Karunanidhi and Atal Behari Vajpayee, head of the BJP party and then prime minister of the country, their hands locked in a close embrace. Political theorist F. G. Bailey identifies three major strategies by which leaders garner a charismatic status, all of which were in evidence in Tamil Nadu.31 First, the leader must espouse a cause that arouses the passions of the populace, demonstrate a deep conviction about the cause, and communicate a visionary goal toward its realization. In the case we are considering here, the powerful Dravidian ideology that developed over a period of several decades fulfilled this criterion. Second, Bailey notes, the leader must explicate the cause in the simplest generalities to appeal to the widest possible audience. The communication must unequivocally identify a common enemy and must be cast in a mode using culturally specific symbols that will appeal to the emotions of listeners

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rather than to their intellect. The Dravidian leadership’s use of commercial cinema as a medium of political communication (discussed in chapter 5) including the unambiguous distinction between good and evil in the melodrama of the film scripts, the rhetorical strategies used within the film and repeated in the public sphere and the use of visual and verbal symbols, appearing within the film and in political speeches, that could be comprehended only by the in-group fulfills this second criterion. Third, charismatic leaders characteristically negotiate a relationship with their mass of supporters that simultaneously evokes the nurturing familiarity accorded to a loved and respected family member, and the reverential admiration reserved for an individual who is perceived to be extraordinarily powerful. Each leader of the Dravidian movement emphasized a bond of kinship with their party members in all their public statements and appearances.32 Annadurai claimed the party as his family—DMK members revered him as Anna (respected older brother) and referred to themselves as thambi (younger brother);33 MGR, who had no offspring, dubbed his party members his children; and Jayalalitha invariably began her speeches with the words: “Blood of my blood brethren. You who keep me alive.”34 In actuality it is impossible for one individual to reciprocate the bond of closeness, loyalty, and love that he or she demands from each member of a mass of followers. While claiming membership in the follower’s immediate family the leader, at the same time, refrains from identification with any particular family, caste, or regional group.35 For instance, Gandhi’s asceticism (discussed in more detail later in this chapter) enabled him to transcend his merchant caste background and simultaneously raise his societal status because asceticism is revered in Hinduism.36 Likewise, MGR was not affiliated with a particular caste or even a particular ethnic group (Malayali or Tamilian) because his films conferred upon him a generic “Dravidian” ethnicity.37 The familiarity generated toward leaders by their claims of kinship with their supporters was, however, held in check both by the visual trappings of the public occasion that was replete with the symbols of kingship (I describe one such occasion in some detail in the next section of this chapter) and the adulatory titles and verses dedicated to these charismatic rulers—which separated the leader from the throng. Bernard Bate’s analysis of the “hierarchical intimacy” (the paradoxical familiarity and distance) in these contemporary forms of address to political leaders notes a historical precedent in the praise poetry dedicated to kings in the precolonial period and the forms of address to deities in bhakti poetry in which the sacred becomes a love object for the worshipper.38

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The Semiotics of Kingship The indigenous tradition of kingship offers a second theoretical perspective from which to understand religiosity, ritual, and imagery in contemporary political practice in Tamil Nadu. In precolonial South Indian society, the spheres of religion and politics were identical. And remnants of this social system continue to resonate in contemporary attitudes to leadership in Tamil Nadu. The philosophies, rituals, and functions of kingship have, to a large extent, shaped the development of civilization in South Asia. Ancient texts of Sanskrit literature39 were instrumental in establishing an enduring tradition of monarchy as the principal form of governance throughout the subcontinent. Despite variations in the concept of kingship at different historical periods and in different regions, key elements of the tradition were continually revived due to the authoritative status of these ancient literary sources. Indian kings ruled by “divine right” claiming to be descendants of the chief gods of the pantheon, Brahma, Shiva, and Vishnu. However, kings themselves were subject to the supreme law, or dharma.40 The practices associated with this system of kingship were prevalent since the establishment of the first republics and kingdoms in the subcontinent, dating from 600 BCE. Even these early records indicate the divine powers of kingship—and the periodical revival of these powers through rituals conducted for important festival events. As kings were believed to be descended from gods, likewise gods were represented as kings ruling over a domain of subjects or devotees. In the region of Tamil Nadu the tradition of kingship is first recorded with the establishment of the Pallava dynasty (sixth through ninth centuries CE). The monarchical system of governance continued with their successors, the Chola dynasty (1000–1200 CE). These rulers followed the prescriptions about kingship and associated rituals described in the ancient Sanskrit texts,41 thereby entrenching the monarchical tradition in South India. As befitting “god-kings,” both the Pallavas and Cholas were the first in a series of great patrons of temple building in the southern region. In fact, the Tamil word for temple, kovil, translates as the house of the king (ko).42 It is difficult for us, immersed in post-Enlightenment systems of knowledge, to comprehend the oneness of religion and politics as experienced by precolonial societies in the subcontinent. From an analysis of the culturally dominant tradition of kingship, as it was practiced in South India from the sixth through the eighteenth centuries, historian and anthropologist Nicholas Dirks concludes that “worship as a form of transaction and a mode of relationship pervades the political process.”43 The period of British colonialism

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and the development of India as a nation state created a schism in the continuity of this tradition. Yet these precolonial notions about kingship have persisted into the present period, penetrating all levels of political culture in India and influencing contemporary expectations about leadership.44 Expressions of authority and the ability to command the labor of others, even at the village level, are based on traditional models of kingship. A king’s primary duties included the protection of territory, preserving the faith and the distribution of largesse including the patronage of religion and the arts. Other functions of a ruler, such as reform of agriculture or redistribution of land and property, were not deemed of similar importance.45 Gift giving, Dirks notes, has been a traditional mark of excellence in a ruler since the precolonial period. Folk ballads celebrated a king’s generosity: “A great king reigns with justice and charity and when he does so prosperity necessarily ensues.”46 And Pamela Price concurs that “at the core of kingly models—monarchical political culture—is the conviction that daily wellbeing or relief from distress is dependent on discrete acts of mercy and generosity from superior beings, human or divine.”47 The unfortunate repercussion of this kingly generosity was that often the economic stability of the realm was compromised. Likewise the populism that accompanies the evocation of charisma severely depletes the modern political leader’s resources of time, energy, and finances that could have been expended instead on governance.48 Material gains to the populace, even if only minor or temporary, must inevitably follow the rhetoric of these powerful siblings and divine protectors, otherwise even charismatic leaders will be rejected by their mass of supporters.49 The Dravidian leadership’s strategy of distributing largesse derived from this precolonial political tradition in which the king’s investment in garnering imperial power was based on his generosity. Their charitable programs were primarily short-term measures such as the distribution of basic amenities of clothing, food, water, or medicines. But in the Indian social system where a majority of the population is destitute, such measures proved an effective populist political strategy. Although the charitable schemes of the DMK government were financed by the state exchequer, to the grateful receiver they appeared to derive directly from the generosity and compassion of the person who instituted the measure. The Dravidian leaders used cinema to disseminate information and aggrandize their acts of generosity by repeating, in a real world context, their scripted actions in the films. When Karunanidhi first came to power in 1970, several of his reform measures were directly derived from the scripts of his most popular films. For instance, the film Parasakthi (1952) had condemned

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the exploitation and oppression of poor women. Karunanidhi therefore provided state allowances for poor women during their pre- and post-confinement periods, allowances for widows in the form of savings certificates, established crèches and orphanages, and created a law that granted daughters legal rights to inheritance of family property. Later, when he returned to power in 1990, Karunanidhi provided free housing for the poverty stricken Adi-Dravidar (translates as “original Dravidians,” denotes former tribal populations) community. The media reported that several beneficiaries of this scheme, associating their good fortune directly with Karunanidhi, included a picture of the leader beside the images of their deities.50 As chief minister of Tamil Nadu, MGR’s numerous populist measures provoked his critics to dub his government dole-raj (kingdom of charity).51 In interviews conducted with the inhabitants of Madurai city Sara Dickey found that “people talked about MGR as if he were a close relative . . . voters would cite his government welfare programs to me side-by-side with his actions in movies as evidence that MGR ‘helps people like us.’”52 One of MGR’s most expensive and controversial schemes was the state government’s provision of a midday meal for children in primary schools throughout Tamil Nadu. A picture of MGR was prominently displayed in every school dining hall that served the free meal, and the recipients, who associated the food with MGR rather than with the state, came to consider it a prasadam (food offered in temples to a god, and then distributed to the devotees).53 Jayalalitha’s tactic of personalizing populist measures was to make the announcement on her birthday. For instance, on the occasion of Jayalalitha’s forty-fourth birthday a news report noted that “the festivities of the state included feeding of the poor; the organization by the AIADMK of a joint [selfrespect] wedding for 44 couples; setting up blood donation and eye camps. . . . As many as 209 prisoners undergoing life imprisonment for offences other than murder or rape will be released. In addition 83 women prisoners sentenced for petty crimes will be released.”54 The festivities for the 1995 World Tamil Conference (an event I will discuss later in this chapter) included a “living” portrait of Jayalalitha orchestrated by hundreds of school children holding up colored flags. The text that accompanied the image was a single word—Nunzhi, understood as a virtue that signifies both the gratitude of the receiver as well as the goodness of the giver. The public responded to the kingly generosity of these leaders by placing their trust in a particular leader rather than in support for a political party. An MGR supporter affirmed that “it was only because MGR sang those songs, spoke those lines [in popular films that espoused DMK ideals] that we believed in them”; critics of MGR angrily denounced the

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AIADMK as “more a fan club than a party. People voted for MGR rather than for any ideology.”55 Populist strategies highlight class conflict in the electoral public. The Dravidian movement found ardent support among the poor but alienated the educated middle and elite classes who denounced the Dravidian leadership as manipulative and narcissistic. Predictably, the English-language media reviewed the bond between Dravidian party leaders and their supporters with a mixture of disdain and fear. This was not without cause for charismatic leaders have been known to orchestrate the “solidarity of the people” into direct political action that is most threatening to those who are not part of the “in-group.” When Jayalalitha announced her displeasure with the central government for its role in arbitrating a dispute between Tamil Nadu and Karnataka, a neighboring state, “violence broke out all over Tamil Nadu. AIADMK workers stopped trains, torched shops and forced buses off the roads. . . . [All tolled] 15 persons set themselves on fire, there was one death. Jayalalitha appealed for calm and the pacifying effect was almost magical.”56 Leftist groups as well, attacked the charitable programs instituted by the Dravidian leaders on the grounds that short-term measures were no substitute for implementation of more permanent land and labor reform policies. It is a fact that land reform has been a low priority of the Dravidian parties since several powerful members of the movement were from the landowning classes themselves. Although the Dravidian ideology brought about the revolutionary formation of a distinctive Tamil identity inclusive of all social classes, the movement failed to follow through with any significant economic reform in terms of the redistribution of wealth and civic resources. Nevertheless, it should also be noted here that the numerous populist measures instituted by the Dravidian leaders over the past four decades have, over the long term, had some positive effects in alleviating the extreme deprivation that grips a majority of the population in India. Relative to the other Indian states, Tamil Nadu, in the first decade of the twenty-first century, is often cited in reports published by international watchdog agencies, as one of the exemplary states of the country with regard to improvements made in a variety of social spheres including increased literacy, improved women’s health statistics, and declining fertility. The state has also been lauded for its initiative in launching innovative and effective AIDS awareness mobilization programs.57 A brief comparison of the populism of the Dravidian leadership with the policies of Juan Peron, president of Argentina from 1946 to 1955, offers striking similarities in political strategies and their effects. Much like the policies of the Dravidian parties that exclusively benefited the working class and poor

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sections of Tamil society, Peron’s constituents were comprised of Argentina’s working classes. Peron interspersed his public speeches with statements such as “you’re dirty and I’m dirty. We’re dirty together,”58 leaving no doubt as to who was his primary audience. By thus bonding with the lower classes, he inspired a virulent hatred among the economic elite of Argentina’s rigidly hierarchical society. Undeterred, and on the initiative of his wife Eva, Peron set in place numerous charitable programs that helped the poor. These included building schools, hospitals, and low-income housing; unionizing labor, increasing wages, and instituting a modern social security system. But Peron failed to take the crucial step of instituting land reform that would have made permanent this redistribution of income. After Peron’s decadelong presidency the elite, who had retained control of the land, were easily able to reclaim lost privileges.59 Peronism in Argentina, much like the Dravidian ideology in Tamil Nadu, provided the poor with a sense of identity without effectively changing their economic circumstances.60 Madsen and Snow, interviewing a lower-level labor leader when Peron was in exile (1955–1973), queried as to why this worker supported Peron despite the fact that his material existence had not changed substantially. The man replied, “Before Peron I was poor and I was nobody; now I am only poor.”61 This socially acceptable paternalism with its rationalization of personcentered behavior ironically legitimized conspicuous consumption on the part of the leader with the conviction that “the king in the beauty and dazzle of his person symbolized the potentialities of wealth for the community as a whole.”62 The king was a symbol of the state and the abstract concept of the kingdom was manifest through the body of the king. These expectations of kingship condoned the amassing of personal wealth to create an aweinspiring spectacle even if this was at the expense of the populace and resulted in the inefficiency of government. Conspicuous consumption by the ruler was further legitimized because, by participating in the rituals of the court, subjects were understood to partake of the royal (or divine) qualities of the king. As Price observes, “in his person, partly through his participation in ritual observances, the king . . . was an auspicious sight [darshan], properly fitted out for his subjects to view.”63 The resurgence of the royal tradition in Tamil nationalist politics was especially evident in the events and practices associated with the celebration of leadership in Tamil Nadu. The following description, reported in the local media, of an event organized by Jayalalitha’s party members shortly after her inauguration as chief minister in 1991, is replete with the symbolism of kingship.

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Ornate welcome arches and cutouts lit up with serial lights lined the 85 km. route from Thanjavur to Nagapattinam . . . the triumphal arches along the way had been sponsored not only by the AIADMK party men but also by government departments like Public Works, Electricity Board, Department of Highways. . . . The maidan [open grounds] for the occasion had to be covered with a pandal [tent] because of rainy weather. Decorated with flowers and serial lights and sprayed frequently with perfume, the pandal is said to have cost Rs. 10 lakhs [then, approximately $25,000]. From the entrance to the dais, a distance of about 30 feet, a thick floral carpet had been created so that the Puratchi Thalaivi [Revolutionary Leader] could walk on flowers.64

This ceremony honoring the chief minister sought to establish her royal and thereby divine status. The same media report continues that at the close of the ceremony, Jayalalitha “was gifted a memento made of 117 sovereigns of gold (for the 117 days of AIADMK regime) by minister Alagu Thirunavukkarasu.” Another gift to Jayalalitha was “a six-foot high silverplated scepter presented by the MLA from Kumbakonam, Ramanathan.” Ananda Coomaraswamy points out that in the Indian context, the scepter (similar to the Accipe sceptrum of Western monarchs) represented the vajra (bolt, or shaft of light) of Indra, the god of the heavens. Possession of the bolt, a solar weapon, made the king divine. Thus the bolt—handled as a scepter—was “the most essential symbol of Kingship as a delegated power.”65 The traditional philosophy of the “god-king,” however, also presented a stringent ideal that rulers were expected to aspire to in order to claim divine powers. A right (sadhu) king was one who ruled according to dharma (the supreme law) and not according to his own inclinations. The ideal ruler mastered self-control—the ability to curb his desires and passions.66 The intent of acquiring self-control was to deplete action of desire; “the composure (samadhi) of the outer rebel and inner leader enables the whole man to rise above the battle even while participating in it.”67 Some sort of abstinence is a prerequisite for the acquisition of special powers in both the Western and Indian contexts. Researching the behavior of charismatic individuals Max Weber found that such persons are prone to experiment with methods of “planned reductions of bodily functioning, such as can be achieved by continuous malnutrition, sexual abstinence, regulation of respiration and the like,” to heighten the awareness of their supernatural powers.68 In the Indian context such methods are part of a centuries-old tradition of sages and mystics who attempted to influence or control the environment through their actions of self-discipline and penance. Aspiration to this ideal, in theory at least if not in practice, was reflected in the

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titles that kings gave themselves—dharma-maharajadhiraja (great king of kings ruling in accordance with the dharma).69 This largely unrealized cultural and philosophical ideal of leadership continues to be venerated in postcolonial India. When M. K. Gandhi, a Western-educated lawyer from the merchant caste in Gujarat, publicly experimented with living according to the ideal of rajadharma, the Indian public bestowed on him the title of Mahatma (Great Soul). Gandhi’s ideal of rajadharma, derived from the Manava Dharmashastra (Law Code, composed between the first and second centuries CE), led to his conviction that a leader’s private morality directly impinged on his public actions.70 In other words, Gandhi believed that it was from his private, personal “experiments in the spiritual field” to acquire self-control (atmasamyama)—a process he documented with unreserved frankness in his book The Story of My Experiments with Truth (1948)— that he had “derived such power as I possess for working in the political field”—his service to the public cause of svaraj (self-rule or political independence) for the nation.71 This is why Gandhi, the post-Enlightenment intellectual-politician, could forthrightly claim with no apparent contradiction that “for me there is no distinction between politics and religion.”72 The Relation between Charisma and Kingship The preceding discussion has noted two important two similarities between the Indian concept of kingship and Weber’s theory of charisma. First, the realization of charisma and the kingly ideal of ruling in accordance with dharma both depend upon the exemplary personal qualities of the heroic individual. And second, both theories of leadership concur that such individuals are endowed with mystical or magical powers that cause them to be perceived as deities and thereby become the focus of a cult following. The two theories dovetail in a third arena—in the philosophies and rituals associated with the transference of leadership authority. This, Weber termed the routinization of charisma,73 suggesting that the extraordinary, divine quality of charisma can be transferred from one individual to another by contact or even merely by association. While the external trappings of social status or affiliation with particular organizations cannot confer charisma, this magical property can be transmitted from one individual to another— somewhat like an inheritance. Weber used this aspect of the theory to explain why one charismatic individual frequently becomes the originator of a chain or succession of charismatic leaders. Weber is careful to distinguish between this mode of the transference of power through personal charisma with the more formal, indirect means of

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transference of authority through political office which he terms hereditary charisma or charisma of office.74 For instance, the system of dynastic rule in monarchical systems of governance, prevalent in both a Western and Indian context, is an example of “charisma of office.” In an Indian context, Weber’s concept of the routinization of personal charisma resonates with a theory about the transference of spiritual authority in Hindu religious belief in which “one embodiment of divinity in Hinduism can, and often does trigger another kind of chain reaction”; the perfect devotee becomes divine.75 Claiming a close association with previous leaders of the movement as a means to gain political legitimacy had long been a standard message in the political campaigns of the Dravidian leadership. Since the Dravidian ideology was crucial to the formation of a contemporary Tamil identity, the leaders associated with the Dravidian movement were the cultural heroes of the modern era. EVR, referred to by the public as Periyar (Big or Great Man), was the first of the Dravidian leaders to gain a mass following. Annadurai gained prominence in the public sphere from his close association with EVR. Later, because of his numerous essays on Dravidian history and ideology, as well as his scripts for the theater and film—all of which were written in ornate, literary Tamil—Annadurai himself became known as Perarignarar (the Great Genius).76 In a society where approximately “41 percent of women and 18 percent of men age 15 to 49 have never been to school,”77 the image of an intellectual is a potent symbol of power. Consequently, most portraits of Annadurai, both posters and statuary, depict him bespectacled, and often immersed in a book. Karunanidhi, MGR, and Jayalalitha each attempted to strengthen their connection to Annadurai by acquiring the former leader’s aura of a scholar.78 However, while Annadurai held a graduate degree in economics and history, neither Karunanidhi nor MGR had completed their school education and Jayalalitha only completed high school. Yet one or more honorary doctorate degrees were conferred on all three leaders, and the requisite title of “Dr.” was prominently displayed in their campaign material.79 Karunanidhi and MGR vied to claim a closer lineage to Periyar and to Anna.80 For instance, during the 1991 state elections Karunanidhi’s party commissioned a giant cutout approximately twelve by twelve meters (forty by forty feet) that depicted a portly Annadurai serving annam (rice) to a youthful Karunanidhi. The symbolism of this gesture of feeding suggested that Annadurai had personally nurtured Karunanidhi’s physical as well as political growth, and that both leaders had found sustenance in the same lifegiving ideology of the Dravidian movement.

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Figure 6.3. A portly Annadurai serving annam (rice) to a youthful Karunanidhi. The nurturing gesture, symbolic of intellectual nourishment, was intended to legitimize Karunanidhi as Annadurai’s natural successor. The cutout, approximately twelve square meters (forty square feet), was painted by Chandran Arts banner company as part of the decorations for a DMK political rally. Marina Beach Road, September 1990.

Jayalalitha, more than any of the other Dravidian leaders, most effectively exploited the routinization of charisma through a series of powerful images created for her election campaigns. Cutler’s “chain of divinity” theory was strikingly visualized in campaign images of Jayalalitha that positioned her as the perfect devotee of MGR whose divine status was already well established. For the 1991 elections, a whole-page advertisement in the local newspapers explicitly indicated this mystical association between Jayalalitha and her mentor. MGR’s aura of divinity radiated upon Jayalalitha who was shown to be receiving the grace with folded hands. The case of Eva Peron presents a striking parallel to Jayalalitha’s garnering of power by association. Emerging from the anonymity of Argentina’s rural poor, Eva gained prominence in the public sphere through entertainment programs aired on the radio. When she became associated with the charismatic Juan Peron as his mistress, and later his wife, Eva positioned herself as the perfect devotee (of Peron) stating that “[N]either my life nor my heart belongs to me, and nothing of all that I am or have is mine. All that I am,

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all that I have, all that I think and all that I feel, belongs to Peron.”81 Through the “routinization of charisma” Eva also gained a charismatic public persona. Once Jayalalitha had won the elections and was installed as chief minister of Tamil Nadu she quickly dispensed with the “MGR prop.” A media report on an AIADMK meeting shortly after Jayalalitha came to power, noticed that while there were 50 cutouts of Jayalalitha there were only a couple of MGR and Annadurai cutouts. On the dais, there was only one huge portrait—that of Jayalalitha—something that would have been proclaimed as blasphemous a year back. In the so-called exhibition on the history of the Dravidian movement there were pictures of Jayalalitha receiving a birthday kiss from her mother Sandhya, many pictures of her participating in government functions and a few stills from her films with MGR. But there was just one color picture of MGR.82

And at the Eighth World Tamil Conference, held in January 1995, in the city of Thanjavur in Tamil Nadu, Jayalalitha’s AIADMK party members went a few steps further. In a bid to establish an even more illustrious lineage for their leader by claiming association with heroes of Tamil history, they commissioned a series of images that indicated their chief minister’s royal ancestry while simultaneously heralding her divine status. Such a tactic, of forging an association with a former glorious period in the culture’s history, is commonly deployed, notes Weber scholar Ann Ruth Willner, by political leaders to acquire an aura of divine authority.83 The World Tamil Conference is a distinguished forum for scholars of Tamil language, history, religion, and culture that was established in 1966, and which has since met periodically in various international locations.84 The choice of Thanjavur as a location for the conference was appropriate as the city’s prominence is rooted in a most illustrious period of Tamil history, the Chola dynasty of the ninth through the eleventh centuries. Thanjavur was the capital of the Chola Empire and the site of famous architectural projects including the Brihadesvara temple. A blitz of banners and cutouts erected at the conference venue sought to establish Jayalalitha’s exemplary ancestry. A large six by three meter (twenty by ten feet) banner juxtaposed the image of Jayalalitha with the Chola king, Rajaraja Chola, patron of the Brihadesvara temple. Jayalalitha’s portrait bust, with a halo encircling her head, was positioned in the left foreground of the banner and was relatively much larger than that of the other figures in the composition. In the background sculptors and builders were depicted in the

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process of constructing the temple. To the right, on a slightly depressed plane, the Chola king was shown directing his queen’s (and the viewer’s) attention to Jayalalitha. In a sweeping teleological vision Jayalalitha emerged as the direct successor of the politically powerful as well as culturally accomplished ancient Tamil hero. Another spectacular image of the chief minister displayed at the conference venue was a gigantic (approximately twenty-four meters, or eighty feet in height) cutout of Jayalalitha in a brilliant blue cape and sari juxtaposed against the cutout of a gold gopuram (temple gateway). The size of the human figure and the architectural representation were almost equal, in effect, causing Jayalalitha to become synonymous with the gateway. The monumental scale of this cutout and its pillar-like form evoked the imposing dvarapala (door-guardian) sculptural reliefs that flank the entrance to the inner sanctum of the Hindu temple housing the icon of the deity. Though dvarapala sculptures are usually just 2.5 meters (seven to eight feet) in height, they appear very large when juxtaposed against the constricted entrance to the sanctum. And dvarapalas are fearsome, even ugly, whereas Jayalalitha was shown smiling as she welcomed the populace into the city. Nevertheless, the scale of the cutout replicated the effect of the door-guardian figure by distancing viewers even as it created a sheltering sense of protection and dependency. In combining the allusion to the dvarapala figures with the gopuram, the designers of this cutout represented Jayalalitha simultaneously as the protector of Tamil religion and tradition, as well as the main entrance to the rich heritage of the Tamil race. The entire significance of the Tamil renaissance, a pivotal aspect of the ideology of the Dravidian movement as well as a source of Tamil cultural pride, was therein appropriated and encapsulated in the person of Jayalalitha.85

Forging an Iconic Image MGR was able to directly translate his film image into politics to attain the iconic status of a cultural hero. As a female costar, primarily an object for erotic contemplation and in need of protection by the hero, Jayalalitha had to transcend her film image to attain the status of a mother goddess, a powerful being who nurtures and protects weak mortals, and who is worshipped as the supreme embodiment of shakti, or power. Motherhood is a revered symbol in the Indian cultural tradition. The narratives of Indian entertainment cinema have contributed much to the continued adulation of the maternal principle. The intensity of adulation, however, turns to extreme castigation of the unmarried female and even of the

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bride who bears no children. How did Jayalalitha, a single female, a film actress by profession, and widely rumored to have been MGR’s mistress or secret second wife, become revered as a divine mother?86 Expectations from females are somewhat different in the case of immortals. Even unmarried goddesses are venerated although they are simultaneously feared for their dangerous, unbridled passion. And of the three greatest “mother” goddesses—Parvati (or Minakshi), consort of Shiva; Lakshmi, consort of Vishnu; and Sarasvati, consort of Brahma—idealized for their nurturing and protection, none bore offspring.87 This may help to explain why Jayalalitha could don the mantle of idealized motherhood without being married or bearing a child. The compassionate, protective, nurturing attitude, mostly closely associated with an idealized motherhood, is, according to political theorist Kathleen Jones, a key ingredient of charismatic leadership. The maternal image distinguishes the charismatic leader from leaders in legal or traditional systems of authority that privilege masculine modes of behavior. In her study of the Weberian typology, which is situated from the perspective of gender, Jones proposes that “to the extent that the ‘gifts of grace’ by which charismatic rulers establish their authority are not limited to exclusively masculine representations, this mode of authority may be more capable of accommodating marks of ‘the feminine’ as indicators of authority.”88 The example of Eva Peron substantiates Jones’s theory. It was Eva, not Peron, who attained an iconic status in Argentina. More than half a century after her death, in 1952, popular printed images of Eva as the Madonna continue to circulate in Argentina; there are shrines to Eva and people regularly claim that she appeared to them in a vision. Even the negative reactions to Eva’s involvement in the political sphere ascribe supernatural powers to her as the “woman of the black myth.”89 Acknowledging that Eva’s power over the populace surpassed his, Juan Peron implied that it was her gender that enhanced her charismatic persona, stating, “One of the greatest forces of women in leadership is that they use the little means [pequenos medios] which are so powerful, something which we do not do because we are men. They take advantage of this, and one should see the strength they have.”90 In his autobiographical self-reflections, Gandhi likened his activities in the political sphere to that of nurturing motherhood. For the Indian people Gandhi was mabap (mother and father).91 It was nursing, Gandhi claimed, that had awakened his maternal instincts and deepened his understanding of leadership.92 From age thirteen through sixteen he nursed his dying father; decades later, in his seventies, he took it upon himself to be like a mother to his grandniece, Manu, who had lost her own mother. It was primarily

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through nursing or actively caring for others that Gandhi found he could overcome his own inhibiting insecurities. According to the Rudolphs, Gandhi’s charisma lay in his self-confidence and his belief in his own potency, and they claim that his experience of these feelings was greatest when he was serving those who were in need. The political tactic of nonviolence, which effectively dismantled the British colonial administration, was inspired by Gandhi’s observations of Indian women’s powers of endurance and passive resistance. While he greatly respected and feared his father it was his deep love for his mother, whose strength and capacity for self-renunciation, that formed the basis of Gandhi’s self-empowering strategies. For Gandhi “non-violence expressed not the impotence of man but the potency of woman.”93 Notwithstanding the courage of passive resistance, it is important to remember that in the Hindu philosophical and religious context the manifestation of active power is not the prerogative of masculinity. In fact, shakti (action and power) is a female principle.94 A woman who realizes her shakti is regarded as invincible and fearful, and is likened to a deity; although, paradoxically, the realization of shakti in mortal women occurs primarily through the penance of marriage and servitude to men, especially the husband.95 Likewise, divine female power is conceptualized as both beneficial, in the case of loving goddesses such as Lakshmi, or devastating, like the goddess Kali and the various Ammans (capricious, malevolent deities of Tamil Nadu).96 Jayalalitha’s strategy of acquiring the potency of a female deity was initiated at the start of her campaign for political leadership. In a series of carefully orchestrated cutout portraits Jayalalitha made her bid to forge an iconic image. From Heroine to Party Leader Aggressive power as an attribute of the female gender may be acceptable in a philosophical and religious context, but in a contemporary Indian social context women who aspire to and attain prominent public office are frequently targets of vicious social criticism. As soon as she moved from the sphere of cinema to that of politics Jayalalitha worked at transforming her media image. The profession of a film actress in an Indian context is traditionally tainted by connotations of immorality. When Jayalalitha campaigned for prominent public office her former association with cinema provided the opposition with plenty of opportunities to question her morality.97 Jayalalitha, however, adroitly transformed this obstacle into an advantage. Quite unlike the flawed reputations actresses acquire in their real lives, the heroine in Indian popular cinema is glorified as unequivocally pure.

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Another defining characteristic of a heroine is her need of protection from the evil designs of the villain. This vulnerability of the heroine aggrandizes the hero’s strength while at the same time placing the heroine in a subservient position to the hero. Jayalalitha manipulated these two dominant connotations of the film heroine in both the imagery and rhetoric of her first campaign for leadership of the state. The images of Jayalalitha that appeared on banners, cutouts, screenprinted posters, and wall paintings from 1989 to 1992, the period when she began actively campaigning for the position of chief minister, continually reminded the public of her glamorous past as MGR’s costar yet placed her in an appropriately subordinate position to MGR. Jayalalitha’s portrait was most frequently displayed in conjunction with that of MGR. Often her body was turned toward her mentor with her hands folded in a gesture of respect and reverence. A 1989 poster, based on a still from the film Thanipiravai in which MGR played the god Murugan and Jayalalitha his consort, emphasized her mythical union with MGR. From the perspective of their fans, MGR and Jayalalitha were associated as a couple since 1964 when they first starred together in a film (but recall that MGR was, in fact, married to another of his costars, Janaki). The message of these publicity images of Jayalalitha was reiterated in her campaign speeches where, much to the chagrin of the press that wanted her to address “real issues,” her refrain was that she “would bring back MGR’s rule.”98 Her critics, while deriding her opportunistic use of MGR’s image, predicted that Jayalalitha’s political position would be rapidly undermined without “the MGR prop.”99 Even more effectively, Jayalalitha exploited the public impression of a film heroine’s vulnerability by casting her political opponent, Karunanidhi, in the role of the evil villain. With MGR dead, she implicitly called on the public to assume the role of the hero and protect her. Perhaps fortuitously for Jayalalitha, a dramatic incident in the Tamil Nadu assembly on March 25, 1990, legitimized her film-based political narrative. This was the period when Karunanidhi was chief minister of Tamil Nadu. Jayalalitha and her party men disrupted an assembly session while protesting against the proposed budget. In the melee that ensued, irate members of Karunanidhi’s ruling party assaulted Jayalalitha by yanking her sari. Jayalalitha immediately took advantage of the opportunity to appear at one public venue after another to demand justice for the dishonor done to her—as a woman who was as chaste and vulnerable as the film roles in which she had been typecast.

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Figure 6.4. Created on the occasion of Jayalalitha’s campaign for the position of chief minister of Tamil Nadu, this cutout depicts her attractive vivacity as well as docility as MGR’s protégée. MGR, clad in a gold kurta, the color he is most frequently associated with because of its symbolic properties, raises one arm in a gesture of victory while standing still in a relatively static position. Whereas Jayalalitha’s demure gesture of namaskaram (the palms of both hands pressed lightly against each other with the hand held against the chest) and modest smile are countered by her confident advance toward the viewer. Anna Salai, October 1990.

An audience listening to Jayalalitha in an Indian context would undoubtedly have associated the narration with a parallel story embedded in their collective memory—the disrobing of Draupadi in the court of Kauravas from the Mahabharata epic.100 Indeed, their memory of the story would have been particularly fresh at this point because episodes of the Mahabharata (created for television by the famous Hindi film producer B. R. Chopra) were then being aired weekly on national television from September 1988 through July 1990. Although the language used was Hindi, the series was avidly viewed and discussed throughout the nation. In the narrative Draupadi, wife of the five Pandava brothers, becomes the property of the rival clan of the Kauravas during a game of dice between her husband, Yudhishtira, and Duryodhana (head of the Kauravas). In the

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presence of her husbands and elders from both clans Duryodhana insults Draupadi by calling her a whore and then orders his brother Dushasana to disrobe her. Enraged at the impotence of her husbands to protect her, and the elders for their silence, Draupadi prays to Lord Krishna. The deity intervenes by granting her an endless sari that miraculously never fully unwinds. Although her honor has been saved, Draupadi vows to wash her hair in the blood of Duryodhana and Dushasana. This incident, then, is a pivotal moment in the narrative because the rivalry between the clans of the Pandavas and Kauravas becomes a declaration of war. Purnima Mankekar’s research on the symbolism of Draupadi in a contemporary Indian context indicates that Draupadi is one of two role models for Hindu women—the other being Sita, the heroine of the Ramayana epic. Whereas Sita is full of humility, obedient, and virtuous—the ideal of traditional womanhood—Draupadi, who will not tolerate the injustice done to her, who fights her oppression and who questions the authority of elders if she perceives it to be flawed, is likened to the modern woman. The (north Indian) women who Mankekar interviewed described Draupadi’s character as “Westernized” because “she did not bow her head.”101 Though the figure of Draupadi points to the vulnerability and victimization of women in a male dominated society she is, simultaneously, as fearful as the goddess Kali in her rage and her desire for the blood of her enemies.102 In the south Indian context (but not in north India) Draupadi is venerated as a goddess with temples and festivals dedicated to her.103 Jayalalitha drew on the potent symbolism of Draupadi when she repeatedly accused Karunanidhi as “the Dushasan who has asked his minions to disrobe her in the Tamil Nadu assembly . . . she dubbed the house unsafe for women and boycotted its sessions since.”104 Jayalalitha was not the first political figure to use the symbolism of Draupadi’s resistance to injustice to rally voters to her cause. Several nationalist poets, including Subramania Bharati (a key influence in the narratives and music of early DMK films), had evoked Draupadi’s spirited defiance as a call to action to Indian men to resist the colonization of their country by the British imperialists.105 Having made full use of the dramatic emotional potential of this incident, Jayalalitha moved away from it in the second phase of her campaign. Draupadi, although fearful in her anger, required divine intervention to protect her from humiliation and dishonor. To become a charismatic leader in her own right Jayalalitha needed to transform her image from one in need of protection into an all-powerful protector of the vulnerable—especially women and the poor. Therefore, shortly after she was elected to the position of chief

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minister in 1992 Jayalalitha dispensed with the subservient vulnerability of the film heroine. From Leader to Deity The difference in Jayalalitha’s cutout portraits created while she was campaigning for chief minister and those created after her election to leadership of the state were striking. The first group of portraits projected a casual grace—Jayalalitha was shown with a full smile on her face, stepping forward, turning or gesticulating, her palms either folded in a gesture of greeting or one arm raised high in a victory gesture. The images emphasized the candidate’s charming femininity. Her hair was tied in a loose knot with strands breaking free. Her attire was most often that of a white sari bordered with red and black stripes—the colors of the party (in most parts of the country white is the traditional color of a politician’s garb). In a few cutouts from this phase Jayalalitha’s saris were richly colored and patterned, serving as a reminder of her former glamorous persona. The expensive silk or nylon fabric was, however, demurely draped around her shoulders. The overall animation of these pre-election images aligned them with cinematic figures that are expressive in face and gesture. Jayalalitha’s cutout portraits, produced between 1992 and 1996, during her first tenure as chief minister, in sharp contrast, were aligned in their imagery with the depiction of deities in the sami patam industry. The cutouts focused on her sovereignty by positioning the leader in a strictly frontal pose. Her figure was almost monolithic; apart from her face, only her clasped hands, held close to her body, were exposed. Occasionally her arm was slightly raised in a gesture of victory or benediction. Above this pillar-like form the full moon of her face appeared, almost expressionless—with just a hint of a smile on her curved lips. Her hair was always tightly pulled back with the knot invisible. The frontality and stillness of her posture produced an impression of authority that was both royal and divine. The masking of Jayalalitha’s gender identity in these portraits produced an impression of androgyny. This was a necessary attribute if these images were to function successfully as signifiers of authoritative power. The role of the heroine had subjected Jayalalitha’s public image to that which Laura Mulvey has theorized as a “masculinist gaze” of power and desire.106 In order that the film spectator’s patriarchal, controlling gaze was transformed into a devotee’s gaze of adoration and worship, Jayalalitha needed to reverse the gender roles between the viewer and herself. Within Hinduism, and particularly within the bhakti tradition, the relationship of the

Figure 6.5. Most propaganda images of Jayalalitha depicted her in white saris, the color traditionally associated with politicians of both genders in India. The brilliant blue of her attire in this cutout served as a reminder of Jayalalitha’s glamorous past as a film star. While drawing attention to Jayalalitha’s feminine charms the colorful sari was carefully draped to completely cover her body, suppressing any interpretation of suggestive sexuality associated with pictures of film actresses. Dr. Radhakrishna Salai, October 1990.

Figure 6.6. Images presenting Jayalalitha as a contemporary icon were ubiquitous during her first term as chief minister of Tamilnadu. This image was created as part of an advertising blitz for the World Tamil Conference held in 1995. The text, “Engum Thamizh, Endrum Thamizh” (Tamil everywhere, Tamil forever), was a conference slogan coined by Jayalalitha’s party. Anna Salai, January 1995. Photograph by K. M. Jacob.

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worshipper to the deity is invariably characterized in gendered terms as that of female (devotee) to male (deity). Banner artists responded to this charge of reining in their subject’s sexuality by emphasizing the weight the leader had gained with her career change. In cutouts that soared to heights of twenty or thirty meters they made no effort to create a flattering representation by reducing the massive bulk of her body. A cape or cloak, an unusual garment that Jayalalitha, upon becoming chief minister, had taken to wearing for every public occasion regardless of the weather, helped to further distance her image from the curvaceous body of a film heroine. The exotic quality of the garment (tailored to match the color of her sari) heightened her enigma while simultaneously functioning as a distinctive visual marker or iconic attribute, much like MGR’s white fur cap and dark glasses discussed at the beginning of this chapter. But the cape, which fell from the leader’s neck to below her hips, served an even more important function of concealing the shape of Jayalalitha’s body and suppressing movement in her figure. In a related example, the seductive beauty of Nargis, a great heroine of Hindi cinema, had to be diminished when she was cast as the main protagonist in the film Mother India (1957) because “the moral strength of the ‘mother’ image requires that the woman’s sexuality is firmly controlled—that her purity and honour [izzat] be unquestionable.”107 Only then could the heroine become deified and idealized as the archetypal mother. The prismatic colors of Jayalalitha’s garments in cutout imagery from the post-election phase—bright reds and peacock blues—combined with the stillness of her posture served to evoke the aesthetics of the sami patam (a connection that was later made explicit in portraits of the leader as a deity, described in the excerpt from my field journal that opened this chapter). The intense hues of Jayalalitha’s attire were unusual for a politician. Banner artists whom I interviewed explained that they typically chose a subdued color palette when painting portraits of politicians. Unlike the clothing worn by film stars, which was usually flamboyant and fashionable, if not trendsetting, politicians were invariably portrayed in conservative, traditional garments: for men—a white veshti (a long cloth wrapped around the legs, and secured at the waist) and white jubba (long shirt); for women—a white sari. One artist even cautioned that using bright colors when painting the image of a politician would cause him to look like a film star. When reproduced as a cutout the monolithic vastness of Jayalalitha’s image was awe-inspiring but could, as well, be interpreted as reassuringly selfsufficient, solid and protective. And Jayalalitha’s titles (that appeared on the

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cutouts) indicated that she encouraged a perception of herself as a nurturing, compassionate, universal mother, an authoritative power in the context of Hindu religion and culture. Apart from her most common title, Puratchi Thalaivi (Revolutionary Leader), Jayalalitha was also referred to as Idhaya Deivam (Goddess of our Hearts), Kaaval Deivam (Goddess of Protection), Adi Parasakthi (the First or Original Goddess), and Thangamana Thalaivi (Golden Leader). Many of her followers simply called her Amma (Mother).108 This chapter opened with a description of poster images of Jayalalitha as a Hindu goddess and as the Madonna. The complex symbolism embedded in this fragment of visual culture speaks to the intertextuality of political portraiture, religious iconic imagery and cinematic persona. It is no wonder that the reproduction of such layered imagery through the spectacular medium of cutouts and banners became a pivotal force in the creation of charisma and sustaining the power of leaders. Having examined the production of charismatic images, in the following chapter I turn to the other side of the equation: to the perception of such images. I propose that the charisma and iconization of stars and leaders is most visible when mirrored in the adulation of fans and followers of these celebrity figures.

Notes 1. Portions of this chapter were originally published in Preminda Jacob, “From CoStar to Deity: Popular representations of Jayalalitha Jayaram,” in Representing the Body: Gender Issues in Indian Art, ed. Vidya Dehejia (New Delhi: Kali for Women Press, 1997), 141–65.

2. Leo Charney and Vanessa R. Schwartz, eds., “Introduction,” Cinema and the Invention of Modern Life (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), 7–8. 3. Coomaraswamy, Spiritual Authority and Temporal Power, 8. 4. M. S. S. Pandian, The Image Trap, 104. 5. Barnouw and Krishnaswamy, Indian Film, 280–81. See also Hardgrave, “Politics and the Film in Tamil Nadu,” 301, for a discussion of the political implications of the incident. 6. Radjadhyaksha and Willemen, Encyclopedia of Indian Cinema, 25. The film, Shri Venkateshwara Mahatyam, directed by P. Pullaiah (1911–1985), inaugurated NTR’s political image of “the living god.” The first mythological film NTR acted in was Maya Bazaar (1957) in which he played the role of Lord Krishna. 7. Sara Dickey, “The Politics of Adulation: Cinema and the Production of Politicians in South India,” Journal of Asian Studies 52, no. 2 (May 1993): 338. 8. Marshall, Celebrity and Power, 17. 9. Marshall, Celebrity and Power, 86–87.

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10. Charles Lindholm, Charisma (Cambridge, Mass.: Basil Blackwell, 1990), 44. 11. H. Daniel Smith, “Hindu ‘Desika’ Figures: Some Notes on a Minor Iconographical Tradition,” Religion 8 (Spring 1978): 58. 12. Aside, June 15, 1988, 35–39. 13. Webster’s II, New Riverside University Dictionary (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1984). See also Marshall, Celebrity and Power, 20; and Max Weber, On Charisma and Institution Building: Selected Papers, ed. S. N. Eisenstadt (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1968), 47. 14. Weber, On Charisma, 48. Weber made this statement in his text, Theory of Social and Economic Organization, 329. Note that Weber’s interpretation and usage of the concept of charisma is dispersed in several essays. The efforts of the editor of this text, S. N. Eisenstadt, in compiling these references in one book is helpful in clarifying Weber’s theory. 15. Lindholm, Charisma, 23. 16. Weber, On Charisma, xx. 17. Weber, On Charisma, 39. See also Bailey, Humbuggery and Manipulation: The Art of Leadership (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1988), 91. 18. Weber, On Charisma, xviii, 48, 19. 19. Reinhard Bendix, Max Weber: An Intellectual Portrait (New York: Doubleday, 1960). 20. Douglas Madsen and Peter G. Snow, The Charismatic Bond: Political Behavior in Time of Crisis (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1996), 5. 21. Lindholm, Charisma, 86. 22. Pamela G. Price, “Kingly Models in Indian Political Behavior: Culture as a Medium of History” Asian Survey 29, no. 6 (June 1989): 559–60. See also Dickey, “Politics of Adulation,” 350. 23. S. Rudolph and L. Rudolph, Gandhi: The Traditional Roots of Charisma, 4, 18. 24. Pandian, “Parasakthi: Life and Times of a DMK Film,” 66, 90. 25. Bhaskaran, Eye of the Serpent, 32. 26. Barnett, The Politics of Cultural Nationalism in South India, 270–74, 291. 27. Pandian, “Parasakthi: Life and Times of a DMK Film,” 91–92. 28. Bailey, Humbuggery and Manipulation, 91. 29. Aside, June 15, 1988, 35–39. In traditional Indian notions of kingship, when the king performs puja (worship) to the deity he himself becomes an object of puja (a deity) to his subjects. It is likely that MGR’s open religiosity contributed to his own deification by his supporters. 30. M. N. Srinivas, “Tamil Nadu Past & Present: Thoughts on Jayalalitha’s Birthday Bash,” Times of India, March 19, 1994, New Delhi edition. 31. Bailey, Humbuggery and Manipulation, 148. 32. Weber, On Charisma, 195. In his discussion on kinship as a means of social organization, Weber notes “in India the development of the principle of clan charisma far surpassed what is usual elsewhere in the world.” 33. Barnett, The Politics of Cultural Nationalism in South India, 165.

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34. The Week, May 5, 1991, 33–35. 35. Bailey, Humbuggery and Manipulation, 86–87. 36. Bailey, Humbuggery and Manipulation, 58. 37. Dickey, “The Politics of Adulation,” 354. 38. Bernard Bate, “Political Praise in Tamil Newspapers: The Poetry and Iconography of Democratic Power,” in Everyday Life in South Asia, ed. Diane P. Mines and Sarah Lamb (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2002), 309–10. The author derives the term “hierarchical intimacy” from the research of anthropologist Lawrence Babb. 39. Romila Thapar, A History of India, vol. 1 (London: Penguin, 1966), 76, 121.These texts include: the Vedas (dating from the period prior to 1000 BCE and onward); the Brahmanas and Upanishads (both composed from 700 BCE onward); the Puranas—particularly the Vishnu Purana (500 BCE–500 CE); the Arthashastra (300 BCE) attributed to Kautalya—minister to Chandragupta Maurya of the Maurya dynasty; the Manava Dharmashastra (Law Code) authored by Manu (the first or second century CE); and the Mahabharata, which includes the Bhagvad Gita (the version that survives dates to first half of the first millennium CE). See also Coomaraswamy, Spiritual Authority and Temporal Power, 1. 40. Coomaraswamy, Spiritual Authority and Temporal Power, 16, 84. In the Rajasuya ritual “the King’s ‘divinity’ is not ‘his own,’ not ‘this man’s’ who sits upon the throne, but that of the principle that overrules him and of which he is, not the reality, but the living image, instrument and puppet.” 41. Thapar, A History of India, 169, 174. See also Nicholas Dirks, The Hollow Crown: Ethnohistory of an Indian Kingdom (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1993), 28–34. 42. Dirks, The Hollow Crown, 258. 43. Dirks, The Hollow Crown, 106 44. Dirks, The Hollow Crown, 54. 45. Price, “Kingly Models in Indian Political Behavior,” 563–64. See also Dickey, “The Politics of Adulation,” 352: “The exchange of material goods for political support is a longstanding element of South Indian political relationships.” 46. Dirks, The Hollow Crown, 134. Dirks explains: “The gift was thus a principal element of statecraft . . . which symbolically and morally linked individuals with the sovereignty of the king” (130). 47. Price, “Kingly Models in Indian Political Behavior,” 571. 48. Bailey, Humbuggery and Manipulation, 148. 49. Madsen and Snow, The Charismatic Bond, 199. 50. The Week, January 20, 1991, 16. 51. Aside, February 15, 1988, 42. 52. Dickey, “The Politics of Adulation,” 356. 53. Pandian, The Image Trap, 104. 54. Times of India, Ahmedabad, February 27, 1992, 4. 55. Aside, January 31, 1988.

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56. The Week, August 1, 1993, 28. 57. Meenakshi Ganguly, “Speaking Her Mind,” Time Magazine Special Edition, “How to Save the Earth,” April–May 2000, 47, reports that Tamil Nadu’s “population growth rate has dropped from 1.5 percent in 119 to 1 percent in 1999, compared with 1.8 percent for India as a whole.” See also the UN report on the Global HIV/AIDS Epidemic (June 2000; UNAIDS/00.13E. Geneva): 13–14, that commended the Tamil Nadu government for its AIDS awareness mobilization campaign, which has significantly reduced the percentage of HIV cases in this state. 58. Madsen and Snow, The Charismatic Bond, 46 59. Madsen and Snow, The Charismatic Bond, 54. 60. Barnett, The Politics of Cultural Nationalism in South India, 251–53. 61. Madsen and Snow, The Charismatic Bond, 150. In Tamil Nadu as well the DMK’s idealist propaganda created an awareness within the masses of their political efficacy. See Peter B. Mayer, “Patterns of Urban Political Culture in India,” Asian Survey 13, no. 4 (April 1973): 400–407. 62. Price, “Kingly Models in Indian Political Behavior,” 561. 63. Price, “Kingly Models in Indian Political Behavior,” 563. 64. Aside, October 31, 1991, 18–20. 65. Coomaraswamy, Spiritual Authority and Temporal Power, 3. The vajra was also a symbol of virility. 66. Coomaraswamy, Spiritual Authority and Temporal Power, 86, references the Arthashastra, which states that “only a ruler who rules himself can long rule others.” 67. Coomaraswamy, Spiritual Authority and Temporal Power, 85. 68. Weber, On Charisma, 276. 69. Thapar, A History of India, 174. The Pallava rulers were the first to use this title. 70. S. Rudolph and L. Rudolph, Gandhi: The Traditional Roots of Charisma, 40. 71. S. Rudolph and L. Rudolph, Gandhi: The Traditional Roots of Charisma, 16, 45. 72. S. Rudolph and L. Rudolph, Gandhi: The Traditional Roots of Charisma, 4. Gandhi made this statement in 1922. 73. Max Weber, On Charisma, xxi. 74. Bendix, Max Weber: An Intellectual Portrait, uses the term “charismatic authority” to describe the transmission of charisma through means of political office. 75. Norman Cutler, “Conclusion,” in Gods of Flesh, Gods of Stone: The Embodiment of Divinity in India, ed. Joanne P. Waghorne and Norman Cutler (Chambersburg, Penn.: Anima Publications, 1985), 165. 76. Barnett, The Politics of Cultural Nationalism in South India, 233–34. The author details some of Annadurai’s political writings, including Aariyamaiyai (Aryan Illusion, 1943), his best-known work on Dravidian ideology (72). See also M. S. S. Pandian, “Parasakthi : Life and Times of a DMK film,” 66. The film, scripted by Karunanidhi in 1952, opens with a poem by Bharatidasan that mentions Arignarar (Learned One), a reference to Annadurai.

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77. The statistic for Tamil Nadu is from the National Family Health Survey—3 (2005–2006), Indian Institute of Population Studies, Mumbai. 78. Barnett, The Politics of Cultural Nationalism in South India, 282–83. 79. Madras Musings, December 14, 1991, 2. Honorary doctorates were conferred on Karunanidhi in 1971 by Annamalai University; MGR in 1983 from Madras University; and Jayalalitha in 1992 by Madras University. 80 . Hardgrave, “The Celluloid God,” 302. 81. Madsen and Snow, The Charismatic Bond, 53. 82. T. N. Gopalan, “The MGR Myth,” Indian Express, July 12, 1992, Sunday Magazine section, Madras edition. 83. Ann-Ruth Willner, The Spellbinders: Charismatic Political Leadership (New Haven, Conn: Yale University Press, 1984), 6. 84. Shaukat H. Mohammed, “Inviting Trouble,” The Week, January 15, 1995, 41–42. In preceding years the conference was held in Kuala Lumpur, Paris, Jaffna and Mauritius, besides Madras and Madurai. See also Vaasanthi, Ajith Pillai, Sudha Tilak, “Jayalalitha’s Jamboree,” India Today, January 31, 1995, 114–19. 85. Bate, “Political Praise in Tamil Newspapers,” 308–9. In the praise poetry dedicated to Jayalalitha, that was printed on posters and published in newspapers, the chief minister was personified as the protective, nurturing state of Tamil Nadu. All parts of the leader’s body were deified, from her feet (as in the worship of a deity’s feet) to her golden tongue that uttered words of good fortune. 86. Dickey, “The Politics of Adulation,” 346, 348. Her constituents sometimes referred to Jayalalitha as anni (elder brother’s wife, MGR being the elder brother). The author found that “the validity of Jayalalitha’s position as anni was never questioned by fan club members. Nor did her own unorthodox conjugal history receive more than the briefest attention during her recent campaign as head of her party.” Dickey also notes that Jayalalitha used her caste status as a Brahmin to counter the stigma of impurity attached to the acting profession, especially for women. 87. Vidya Dehejia, “Encountering Devi,” in Devi: The Great Goddess: Female Divinity in South Asian Art, ed. Vidya Dehejia (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution, Arthur M. Sackler Gallery, 1999), 17–18. 88. Kathleen Jones, Compassionate Authority: Democracy and the Representation of Women (New York: Routledge, 1993), 112. 89. J. M. Taylor, Eva Peron: The Myths of a Woman, Eva Peron (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981, first published in 1979), 1–9, 88. 90. Taylor, Eva Peron, 55. 91. Bailey, Humbuggery and Manipulation, 84. 92. S. Rudolph and L. Rudolph, Gandhi: The Traditional Roots of Charisma, 60–61. 93. S. Rudolph and L. Rudolph, Gandhi: The Traditional Roots of Charisma, 37–38. 94. Sheryl B. Daniel, “Marriage in Tamil Culture: The Problem of Conflicting Models,” in The Powers of Tamil Women, ed. Susan Wadley (Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University, 1980), 79.

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95. Susan Wadley, “The Paradoxical Powers of Tamil Women,” in The Powers of Tamil Women, 160. 96. Susan Wadley, “Women and the Hindu Tradition,” in Women in Indian Society: A Reader, ed. Rehana Ghadially (New Delhi: Sage, 1988), 23–43. 97. M. S. S. Pandian, “Tamil Cultural Elites and Cinema: Outline of an Argument,” Economic and Political Weekly XXXI, no. 15 (1992): 950–55. See also J. M. Taylor, Eva Peron: The Myths of a Woman. The severe criticism about Eva Peron from opposition groups was partly fueled by the fact that she had once been a radio celebrity. 98. C. G. S. Prasad, “From Crest to Trough in Six Months,” Aside, September 30, 1988, 26. 99. T. N. Gopalan, “The MGR Myth,” Indian Express, July 12, 1992, Sunday Magazine section, Madras edition. 100. Bhaskaran, Eye of the Serpent, 4. The popularity of this story among the Tamil populace is attested by the fact that the second feature length film made in Madras was Draupathivasthirabaranam (Disrobing of Draupadi, 1917) by R. Natraja Mudaliar. 101. Purnima Mankekar, Screening Culture, Viewing Politics: An Ethnography of Television, Womanhood and Nation in Postcolonial India (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1999), 246. 102. Hiltebeitel, Alf, “The Folklore of Draupadi: Saris and Hair,” in Gender, Genre, and Power in South Asian Expressive Traditions, ed. Arjun Appadurai, Frank J. Korom, and Margaret A. Mills (Philadelphia: University of Pennsyvania Press, 1991), 397. The author describes the popular Draupadi cult, centered in the South Arcot District in Tamil Nadu, in which Draupadi is believed to transform into Kali every night during the period when she and her husbands were in forest exile. During these nightly wanderings she is believed to devour everything in her path— animals and humans. And during the great war (between the Pandavas and Kauravas) she is believed to roam the battlefield at night consuming bodies (407). 103. Dehejia, “Encountering Devi,” 24. 104. B. Krishnakumar, Sachidananda Murthy and Vincent D’Souza, “Playing It Dirty,” The Week, February 10, 1991, 29, 31. 105. Mankekar, Screening Culture, Viewing Politics, 251. Bharati’s poem on the theme of Draupadi’s disrobing was titled “Panchali’s Vow.” 106. Mulvey, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” 19. 107. Gandhy and Thomas, “Three Indian Filmstars,” 121. 108. Bate, “Political Praise in Tamil Newspapers,” 314. Jayalalitha’s titles hail her as leader of specific groups (for example, the poor), as a reincarnation of famous historical figures, as a deity, as an embodiment of abstract concepts such as history, literature, language, light, the land, statecraft, motherhood, bravery, and love.

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From where I am standing, I see a flame burning steadily on a granite pedestal built along the edge of the tomb interring the ashes of M. G. Ramachandran, the late chief minister of Tamil Nadu. The samadhi [gravesite memorial] of polished black granite is cubic, about two-and-a-half meters on each side, and centered upon an immense circular platform surrounded by curving pillars of concrete that incline inward so that the whole is reminiscent of a giant lotus. The site abuts a broad, sandy beach edging the shores of the Bay of Bengal. It was along this same stretch of beach that the British East India Company, in 1695, sited Fort St. George, their first base for trading in India and subsequently the foothold from which they began the undertaking of colonizing the subcontinent. For about five minutes I panned my camcorder across the seemingly endless stream of men, women, and children moving around the samadhi and then stretching back, behind them, through the formal garden that precedes the site. As they neared the samadhi I could see the crowd strain toward the monument: bodies pressing against each other, hands reaching out to caress its reflective surface. A few people bent forward to press an ear against the stone— listening, perhaps, to the resonance of sounds being carried on the wind: the low beat of the surf and the high pitched exuberance and laughter of playing children, mixed and blown from the beach below. At one point when I focused my camcorder on the flame, I caught people extending their hands so that one palm was momentarily held over the flame—then quickly withdrawn and raised to touch both eyes, one after the other. A few cupped their palm over their mouth, as well. All the while, a

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guard stationed by the flame periodically tapped its stone pedestal with a thick bamboo stick to keep the crowd moving. Field Journal—Chennai, January 17, 2000.

January 17 marks the birthday of MGR. The date usually falls on or near Pongal, the Tamil harvest festival. During the three days of Pongal, schools, corporate, and government institutions throughout the state close up. Tamilian Hindus take that time to pay respect to those aspects of their lives that have provided them with livelihood through the rest of the year. On the first day of Pongal they take darshan (ritualized viewing) of significant sights, on the second day they decorate their cows and beasts of burden, and on the third their tools of trade. In the city of Chennai, Tamil Nadu’s capital, part of the holiday ritual for citizens is taking darshan at MGR’s samadhi (gravesite memorial) and his statue—that is, viewing and revering these memorials to his life. As figurative and the abstract signs of MGR, the statue and the samadhi bracket two important aspects of the leader’s significance for the people of Tamil Nadu. The statue, which stands among a continuous stream of traffic at a major intersection of one of the Chennai’s most important thoroughfares, Anna Salai, marks MGR’s continuing presence in the daily life of the state—for his name is still invoked by both Dravidian parties, reruns of his films continue to be screened in local cinema theaters, and, of course, his unmistakable visage is the subject of innumerable posters, stickers and postcards, and appears on everything along the visual spectrum stretching from small, crudely charcoaled wall graffiti to elaborately handpainted murals. Slightly larger than life size—two-and-a-half meters (almost eight feet) in height—and mounted on a pedestal, the bronze statue is burnished to a pale golden sheen. It depicts the leader wearing his fur cap and dark glasses, with one arm raised, from which two fingers are raised in a V, indicating victory. When the statue was erected in 1990, a fresh garland of red roses and white jasmine was placed daily around the statue’s neck and a vermilion pottu—an artfully applied dot of colored powder—and a smear of sandalwood paste were maintained on its forehead. That daily practice has since ceased. Yet garlands and pottu continue to appear annually as his birthday approaches. During the course of “Hero’s Day,” as it is referred to in the posters and pamphlets that litter the city, hundreds of thousands of fans, devotees, and admirers of MGR pay him homage through a ritualized viewing of both the statue and the MGR samadhi. Devotees of MGR generally start the day with a visit to the statue in the heart of Chennai. The crowd begins to form around the statue only after the police have arrived to divert traffic and pro-

Figure 7.1. Devotees take darshan of MGR on the occasion of his birthday, celebrated annually on January 17. MGR’s statue is burnished to a pale golden sheen much like the thousands of other sculpted and painted portraits of the leader that were often colored gold. These material associations with gold, both as the precious metal and the color, were intended as direct visual representations of the metaphoric association of MGR as Ponmana Chemmal (Man with a Golden Heart). Anna Salai, January 2004.

Figure 7.2. Annually, on the occasion of MGR’s birthday, a makeshift podium is erected around the MGR statue on Anna Salai enabling millions of fans and devotees to take darshan of their leader while circumambulating the statue. January 1991.

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vide security for dignitaries—film stars and officials of the state’s major Dravidian political parties, who show up to pay their formal respects, and to establish and reestablish their association with MGR’s politics and persona. Later in the day thousands from Chennai and surrounding areas travel to the samadhi (on the Marina, a twenty-minute walk from the statue) to gaze at and circumambulate the granite cube that memorializes MGR, after which they partake of food and festivities on the beach that is adjacent. This “gaze in reverence,” which is ritualized in Hinduism as darshan (yet equally apparent, though generally unacknowledged as a formal practice in most other religions, or in secular social and political ceremonies), is the focus of this chapter. In a Hindu religious context, darshan is a basic form of worship whereby the devotee simply gazes upon the deity and in turn, becomes the object of the deity’s gaze. People take darshan of iconic objects, great human beings, and even of the landscape—all things animate and inanimate, believed to be imbued with power. Perhaps the most compelling aspect of this phenomenon, particularly from the perspective of art history and visual culture studies, is the pivotal role of the image and the context specific ways it is seen. As I explain in depth in sections that follow, viewing in the Tamil cultural context can simultaneously be the vehicle for a deeply religious experience and for entertainment. In the Tamil public’s ritualized viewing of monuments erected to MGR, darshan is one vehicle by which MGR’s persona, as constructed by the Tamil film industry and political parties, and imagined by this public, transcends the cultural distance from mortal celebrity to an icon of modern Tamil society. And, I contend, darshan facilitates the opposite pathway: in the popular expression of devotion to “celebrity” purely through the act of spectatorship. This is, by no means, a trivial topic. Channels that allow the mass of society to move back and forth between two constructed worlds—between the symbolic world of religious practice and allegory, on one hand, and the engineered realities of the media and political organizations, on the other—bear upon the social evolution of societies and the political evolution of the state. However, the perceptions of mass society represent only one half of the socio-political equation. Its complement is the dynamic by which society’s political elites compete within these constructed worlds. In populist movements, such as the Dravidian movement in Tamil Nadu, political elites can emerge from the middle and even lower rungs of an otherwise rigid economic and social hierarchy to compete for the power that is the reward of a mass following.

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In this chapter, I examine the interplay of charismatic elites with their mass audience at the nexus of worship and Tamil popular entertainment. This discussion is conducted by examining two complementary and synergistic processes: the first is the creation and amplification of charisma (which was the focus of chapter 6); the second is darshan, the ritualized viewing of celebrities by their devotees, which is an element in charisma’s celebration. The confluence of cinema, public arts, and politics in Tamil Nadu provides an enabling environment for the visual cultural discourse of charisma to open channels that blur the distinction between film star, political leader, mythic hero, and god. These points of confluence, I contend, are of scholarly interest; they are windows revealing specific cultural practices of public perception. Before examining these specific practices, however, I will briefly review the general theories of cinematic spectatorship that I consider most important to this discussion.

Theories of Cinematic Spectatorship The public’s principal source of access to images of cinema celebrities can be divided for the purposes of theorization into two very distinct contexts: conventional theater-bound cinema spectatorship; and extra-cinematic encounters communicated by other media. Theater-bound and extra-cinematic spectatorship have some obvious differences that, in prelude to this discussion, are worth briefly acknowledging. In darkened theaters the gaze of the audience is attentive, transfixed by the images of cinematic celebrities flickering on the screen. Theater-viewed cinema is largely absent of the myriad distractions and interruptions common to televised film and the rapidly evolving home video technologies. Theater viewers have chosen—in fact, have paid for the privilege—to be present before the image and are prepared for, or at least arrive in anticipation of, the visual spectacle in the manner it was intended and produced to be viewed. Outside the theater, and outside the context of television and homeviewed video, images related to the cinema industry are largely static images; that is, they are “still” images that appear on billboards, in magazines and books, on posters, stickers, and in other conventional (and occasionally unimaginable) forms. And it is the viewers who move past these static figures at varying speeds, involuntarily snatching glances, sparing an attentive gaze only at infrequent relaxed moments, when the quality, size, or sheer novelty of the image has out-competed that of all others in view. In this discussion, however, we should keep in mind that the static advertising images are, in specific industrial-country urban settings, now competing with dynamic

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advertising—usually in the form of short bursts of movement communicating emotion and event, as in the big screen digital video technologies, such as the billboards in Times Square, New York. Theater-bound cinema demands basic projection conditions that are virtually universal: a darkened space with a projection booth at one end; at the other end, a screen; and seating in between. Although positioned among other spectators, the viewer is isolated. To view the screen, he or she must turn partially from adjacent viewers, and be seated wholly in the opposite direction from the source of the image, the film projector—a condition unlike most other viewing technologies where one views an image by looking at the technology itself. Thus, the screen image is immaterial: physically disassociated from its medium. Typically, the projection falls onto a wide screen. Its enlarged image saturates the individual viewer’s visual sense and submits him or her to a perspective that he or she shares, at that time, only with other members of the audience. And since film narratives tend to unfold in pseudo-linear chronologies—with flashbacks, dream sequences, and skips and jumps over and through events—spectators also share in a common experience of “cinematic time” specific to that film. Situated within the physical and psychological dimensions of the cinema-theater environment, the audience is led by an illusion of fullness and an “absent presence” of the stars that wholly dissipates when the film stops, enhancing cinema’s fantastic quality. Viewers become absorbed in the cinema experience through the activities of gazing and listening in a darkened, dreamlike space that is communal as well as personal, subjective, and private. These conditions have prompted film scholars to evoke Freudian theories of the gaze, voyeurism, and fetishism to explain the audiences’ experience and fascination. Freud applied these terms to understand neurotic behaviors concerning scopophilia—the obsessive desire to look. Freud’s research traced these neuroses to abnormalities in the development of the individual psyche. While Freud’s critics have argued, often convincingly, that his analyses were consciously culturally and temporally specific—resonant in the modern patriarchal European society of his time—for many scholars of visual media, Freudian theories of the gaze continue to have relevance to the study of cinema spectatorship. Scholars relate these theories both to the spatial conditions in which cinema is experienced, and to the structure of traditions of popular, and particularly Hollywood, filmmaking. Their work asserts that both voyeuristic and fetishistic modes of looking are cultivated by the film’s unfolding narrative and frame-by-frame structure, providing larger-than-life views of film celebrities. “Any act of

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looking in the cinema,” John Ellis contends, “is constituted in the tension between voyeurism and fetishism. This is the specific pleasure and fascination of cinema.”1 The distance maintained between the audience and the screen image, paralleling viewing through a peephole, provides the basis for Freudian theorists’ equation of film spectatorship and voyeurism. While the voyeur finds pleasure in the narrative’s forward movement—in story development, in activity and action—the fetishist, as constructed by theorists applying Freud’s conceptualization of the gaze to cinematic spectatorship, desires to stop the action and become wholly fixated on the person-image of the star. In the voyeuristic dimension of film spectatorship the star is subject to the viewer’s controlling gaze; in the fetishistic dimension the cinematic celebrity possesses and subjugates his or her fan. Thus, the twists and turns of modern cinema’s psychological dynamic are built upon the interplay of the actors’ and spectators’ development of this mutual relationship. Spectatorship in an Indian Context Understanding cinematic spectatorship as a form of scopophilia is enlightening, yet anecdotal evidence about the behavior of audiences watching Indian cinema suggests that the activity of film gazing in India is informed by other traditions of looking as well. In the viewing of Indian cinema the communal, participatory dimension may supersede the individualized, private experience of viewers of Western cinema. Moreover, there is a surprising consistency in the anecdotes from the early history of Indian films to the present. The screening of the first Indian films, which were primarily films focused on Hindu religious stories, prompted religious responses from the viewing audience. As actors portraying deities appeared on the screen, members of the audience prostrated themselves. People broke coconuts and distributed prasadam (food offered to the deity) to other audience members—activities associated with iconic temple worship.2 Although much less common today, such expressions of devotion before the screen image continue. During the late 1980s MGR fans lit camphor and burst firecrackers in the theater during a rerun of the late leader’s films; the thick smoke obscured the screen and the theater had to be evacuated.3 Indian cinema viewers frequently assume the role of an on-screen audience. For example, films with wedding themes prompt audience members to arrive with sweets, which they distribute as a way of partaking in the celebrations taking place on the screen. Theater owners complain of audience members throwing coins at the screen during popular dance numbers,4 a practice that is traditional in a nautch—an indigenous cabaret. And it is not

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uncommon for audience members to dance in the aisles, call out advice to the hero, or curse the villain. Whereas Hollywood producers generally assume that their films will be viewed once and only once by the vast majority of viewers,5 India’s filmgoing audience appears fully prepared to attend multiple showings. Of the sample of the film-going public that I interviewed in Chennai, 70 percent told me that they regularly viewed a film they enjoyed more than once. The formulaic structure of the narrative; the exaggerated signaling of anger, fear, humor, and passion; and choreographic style of Indian film’s dance and fight sequences provide opportunities for the audience to demonstrate their regular attendance, or even pre-release knowledge of the film (since the film music is released well before the film premieres). While, in my experience in theaters in Chennai, typically a minority of the audience actually indulges in these activities, the remainder of the audience seem to me to be respectful and supportive of their behavior, and at the very least tolerant, accepting their fellow audience members’ almost ritualistic participation as an integral part of the cinema-theater viewing experience.6 The closest Western analogy to this viewing practice is Hollywood cult films (Casablanca, Rocky Horror, Blade Runner), and the midnight movie experience—where audiences mimic the stars, recite their lines, insert alternative dialogue, and respond to cues in the film with symbolic activities and individual performances. Timothy Corrigan argues that the evolution of this form of audience participation “afford[s] the viewer an exhibitionist space not a voyeur’s space . . . [and the] repetitious pattern and its referential insignificance . . . comprise the formula which allows an audience to master and perform the film as in an exhibitionist’s stage.”7 Some of the differences separating spectatorship of Hollywood cinema from that of Indian commercial cinema can be explained, as well, by the divergence of their diegesis—the cinematic architectures and narrative structures of their respective filmic traditions (discussed in chapter 4). Of these, iconic stasis, a structural device frequently deployed by Indian filmmakers in the song-anddance sequences, is most conducive to producing a darshanic mode of viewing. In iconic stasis the star turns to a frontal position to engage or address the audience. The intimate, erotic gazes exchanged between the hero and heroine in the song and dance sequences and dream sequences are, instead, directed outward at the individual viewer, who returns the gaze from the privacy of the darkened theater.8 This exchange of gazes between the star and the fan disrupts the scopophilia (both voyeurism and fetishism) that is normally associated with cinematic spectatorship. Unlike scopophilia, in iconic stasis the object offers itself to be viewed. As this object is heroic, transcendent, inimitable in

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every way compared to the spectator, viewership becomes a privilege. Thus the technology of cinema is put in the service of a darshanic gaze.9 Spectatorship Outside the Theater In considering spectatorship in the extra cinematic sphere, I draw upon Walter Benjamin’s concept of the “distracted gaze.” According to Benjamin, the technology of cinema produces a unique mode of perception that is quite unlike the still image in which all sight lines are oriented so as to place the viewer in a privileged position. In the rapidly moving frames of cinema there is no central or privileged viewing position. It is, in this way, distinct from the normative reception of still photography, painting, and sculpture. Instead, in the reception of film, movement, interaction, and event occur, pass and reoccur without the opportunity for close analysis. And, as action on the screen continues, the audience’s abilities to contemplate and reflect upon the fleeting images and their meanings are eroded. Rather than focusing on the compositional qualities of one image the viewer gets adept at scanning meaning from images quickly and in a sequential context. This practice of “inattentive looking” generated by cinema is a condition of modern life. City dwellers, confronted daily by intense, shifting stimuli in their urban environment, cultivate a mode of perception that is fed by quick glances and rapid scans. Paradoxically, Benjamin argues, it is precisely through this mode of looking that people gain their deepest understanding of the culture of modernity of which they are a part. For, he concludes, the truths of modernity embedded in the disjunctures and debris of the cityscape reveal themselves only to the distracted gaze of the flaneur (one who strolls the city aimlessly). The signs of cinema, in their many forms, comprise a substantial proportion of the cultural debris that is currently strewn across our world’s urban landscapes. Discussions on the spectatorship of cinema must, therefore, consider the visualization and discourse of cinema outside the confines of the theater, within the public spaces of the city. This includes advertisements in all formats, and the circulation of gossip about stars by word of mouth and through film magazines. Extra-cinematic spectatorship is also pertinent in rural locations where people may have limited access to cinema theaters. A study conducted in the 1980s determined that a large proportion of the population in Indian villages were familiarizing themselves with indigenous cinema via “gossip centers,” where a fortunate minority who had recently returned from urban centers described, renarrated and reenacted popular films10—an anecdotal hint of the amplification of cinema’s power in South Asia’s public sphere. Through film fans’ mimicry of popular stars’ dress, their

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speech patterns and behaviors, the world of cinematic fantasy takes on a hyperreal presence in modern society.

Fan Subculture “Of course I saw his latest movie. You know that I’m such a big fan!” In this, its everyday context, the word fan seems a rather straightforward expression. And yet it is by no means a simple term when one reflects on its social significance. While manifested in varied cultural forms, in its basic psychology, fan phenomena—evoking images of social cohesion, loyalty, and single-mindedness—are distinctly human, cutting across the world’s cultural landscapes and exerting its power in the marketplace and into politics. What is meant by a fan? The word’s etymology provides a logical starting point for addressing this question. The term fan evolved from the word fanatic, and thus belongs to a family of somewhat demeaning expressions that, in general, describe a spectrum of passionate obsessions and those who indulge in them. This family’s progenitor, the Latin word fanaticus, originally indicated a religious devotee or a temple servant, and only then evolved to describe excessive religiosity—which, in the later Roman era, was considered a form of possession or madness. The word’s modern English origins are located in the eighteenth century, when it was used to identify enthusiasts of fast-paced and somewhat unrefined spectator sports then popular among the British public, particularly boxing and horseracing. These sports enthusiasts were known as fancies; later shortened to fans.11 Through the mid-nineteenth century a rough, masculine connotation clung to this term, evoking a mixture of community and loyalty tinged with excessiveness and frenzy. During the late nineteenth century, the use of the term fan was extended to encompass women in their leisure activities. The term was applied to educated women who spent much of their free time—and perhaps too much of their time—reading novels. The term was extended to female theater aficionados, also dubbed matinee-girls, who seemed to some theater critics of the time more interested in the actors than in the plays.12 It was not much of a leap from this application of the word to the contemporary meaning communicated in the term movie fan, which first appeared in print around 1910, and coincided with the emergence and recognition of cinema celebrities— the stars. In Europe and America, film magazines emerged in the late 1910s and early 1920s, promoting a popular culture that mixed propaganda with hearsay, and fact with fiction; focused on celebrities’ personalities, their triumphs, their tragedies; consciously nurturing and purposefully perpetuating a

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nascent fan culture, and spawning symbiotic media industries that would become as lucrative as the cinema industry on which they fed.13 The behavior of cinema fans in disparate social and cultural contexts is characterized by several basic commonalities engendered no doubt by the nature of the cinematic medium itself, the conditions under which it is viewed, and in the commercial functioning of the cinema industry. Fan identification with the star moves between a private, one-on-one experience while in the direct (cinematic) presence of the star when viewing the film, and a more social experience of expressing this fascination in an extra-cinematic sphere. Outside the theater fans generally express their fascination for stars as a form of worship or as a fantasy.14 When fans perceive the star as unreachable, that is, as both distant and different from themselves, they express their fascination as a form of worship. When fans attempt to imaginatively bridge the gap between their own lives and that of the star’s life, on- or off-screen, they indulge in fantasies about the star. The outward expression and sharing of this fantasy with other fans is communicated through emulating the appearance—attire, mannerisms, gestures, and idiosyncratic speech patterns— of the star. By making available a range of cinema-associated products the cinema industry encourages fans to imagine film celebrities’ lives, to indulge in discussions centering on these cinema elites, to submerge themselves in the star’s persona, and to recreate parts of the illusory film world in which these special beings appear to live.15 These games of pretense may shift between momentary, simple forms of emulation when the fan acts out a game of make-believe and more elaborate imitative behavior when fans master an aspect of the star’s performance and display their own talents at mimicry or when they go even further and make an effort to replicate the physical as well as behavioral aspects of the star and thus actively produce a “new self-image through the pleasure taken in the star-image.”16 To those unmoved by celebrity, the fan’s fascination for the star verges on the pathological. It is easy to disparage fan frenzy as an unfortunate product of an unsophisticated youth. More so than male fans, female fans are likely to be portrayed as sexually obsessed. In fact, the few scholars who have paid close attention to fan culture as an important mode of sociality have argued that fans are not eccentric individuals acting alone, but are often part of a large and vocal collective. As such, fans are vital to the giants of the entertainment industry whose successes and failures impinge on the economy and greatly interest mainstream society. This is why the entertainment industry directs funds to, and makes available commodities for, the growth of fan culture.17 Whereas fans commonly spend considerable portions of their income on tickets, T-shirts, and printed material, they are also, in many ways, partici-

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pants in the cinema industry writ large, involved in aspects of organization and production, including websites, performances, newsletters, political letter-writing campaigns, posters, and other public displays of their collective support, adoration, criticism, or outrage.18 There are, in fact, cases of fans’ direct participation in the industry itself. For example, during the early years of American filmmaking, in the 1920s and early 1930s, thousands of ardent movie-goers authored film scripts and marketed them to the industry. A few were even successful. The practice ceased, however, when plagiarized fan submissions resulted in several producers being sued by the original authors of the narratives.19 Fan Culture in the South Indian Context In their ability to influence film production decisions, Indian film-star fans appear particularly powerful. Their leverage may stem from the multiple, almost ritualistic viewing of films, which amplifies the box-office impact of an Indian film star’s following. Indian film producers are also sensitive to core fans’ mass purchases of locally manufactured peripheral products of cinema, in which film producers are heavily invested: including soundtrack cassettes, song books, film posters, and postcards. And, finally, many Indian fans are organized through local fan clubs, which communicate with, and exert direct pressure on producers, directors, and actors. Thus, while fan power may suit the financial aims of Indian film producers and directors, for Indian film actors and actresses, accumulating a following of fans, whether organized into active fan clubs or not, can be somewhat like riding a tiger. For example, a production of the Hindu religious epic, the Ramayana, was serialized in fifty-two episodes over the course of a year for Doordarshan, India’s national television channel. Through this series, the actress who played the heroine Sita, the virtuous consort of Lord Rama, became immensely popular. Wherever she presented herself in public, many showed her the respect of a religious figure or a temple icon. After the completion of the series, however, news broke that the actress had accepted a role as a seductive heroine in another film with a secular theme. But protests from the public were so vehement that she was forced to decline the offer. As Chiranjeevi, a popular actor in the Andhra Pradesh’s Telegu-language cinema industry, neatly put it, “the man who pays three or four rupees thinks he owns the star and has a right over him.”20 While Chanjeevi’s statement may reflect a film actor’s assessment of a fan’s investment, it is a vast underestimation from the fan’s perspective— omitting investments in time, energy, emotion, and non–box office purchases of cinema-related materials. Through membership and participation

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in fan clubs, whose organization networks often include overseas Indian communities, fans protect their interests through letter-writing, fax campaigns, and now the Internet; public demonstrations; and through their club leaders’ connections with the film industry. Acting en masse, fan club members have boycotted the crucial first week of screening, ensuring the film’s failure. Conversely, fan clubs may exert pressure on theater owners to continue screening a film in order that it complete a milestone fifty- or onehundred-day run. And, as individuals, Indian fans have threatened public suicide and violence to pressure celebrities.21 Tamil Nadu’s film fan association network is purportedly the most organized and extensive in India. However, there is a dearth of statistics, or even extensive qualitative analyses, describing the phenomenon of the rasikar manram (fan association).22 This lack of academic interest is unfortunate, given the network’s political significance.23 In South India, film celebrities regularly write about, or otherwise publicize, their political sympathies, heavily influencing the politics of their following. Male stars typically maintain large fan followings, although it is virtually impossible to determine the number of fans and fan association chapters that are allied with a particular star. In the course of reporting on film celebrities, newspapers, and movie magazines frequently publish figures, but their sources for these statistics are rarely specified. Among the few researchers who have studied fan culture in Tamil Nadu, there is a general consensus that the figures cited by their interviewees—primarily fan club administrators—are highly inflated. These figures vary from a report of two or three thousand club chapters for a single Tamil film star, to over twenty thousand chapters, cited by one of MGR’s publicity ministers.24 The number of members in each local chapter is more easily verified. Researchers found that the average membership varied between ten to thirty fans, though the largest fan associations may have as many as five hundred members. Nearly all fans are male; a female fan is a rare exception.25 And the age of fans is generally between sixteen and thirty years. Most of these young men, the majority of whom have some education, are working-class (e.g., laborers, drivers, and shop and restaurant workers). In Tamil Nadu, each celebrity’s fan association is organized in a hierarchy, with chapters at the village, town, district, and state levels. For example, the headquarters of the Rajnikanth fan association is in Chennai, and the head of the Chennai chapter is the president of the statewide association.26 The current president was hand-picked by the film star himself—which is usually the case in major associations.

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Each local chapter of a fan association selects its own a name, prints its own stationery, and elects a group of office bearers, including a president and a secretary, who are primarily responsible for organizing the club’s activities and communicating this information to other chapters within the same fan association. Every chapter must register with the central body in Chennai, but each functions fairly independently of the others, aside from its assigned duties in relaying information about the star’s schedule, release dates of his latest films, and availability of film stills or tickets. Fan club chapters meet weekly, biweekly, or monthly in public venues in their neighborhood: on street corners, in teashops, or in the office spaces of small businesses, such as cycle-repair or tailor shops. Meeting times are usually in the evenings or on Sundays. Most local entrepreneurs are aware of the fan clubs in their neighborhood, and are acquainted with the members, especially the office bearers. At their club meetings cinema fans spend a major portion of their time discussing the star’s most recent film. All aspects of the film—story line, acting, dialogue, music, choreography, and camera work—are scrutinized and compared with other films in the vernacular, with films in the other Indian languages and with Hollywood films as well. In addition, the larger fan organizations usually program about six to eight events each year for which members volunteer several hours of their free time, even working late into the night. These events are primarily the celebrations for either the opening week of a new film starring their hero, or the film’s fiftieth or one hundredth day of continuous screening. Fans decorate the interior and exterior of the cinema theater with paraphernalia—streamers, banners, posters, graffiti, and cutouts—that is remarkably similar to the preparations for an election or other important political event. At initial screenings of the film, fan club members comprise the most vocal component of the audience—cheering on the star, reciting dialogues, and singing the lyrics. Theater owners I interviewed were generally wary of fan club groupattendance at films. Club members have been accused of being disruptive and of provoking fights with other attendees. In anticipation of trouble, theater managers regularly post private guards in their theaters who, armed with lathis (thick wooden sticks) subdue, if need be, expressions of fan frenzy in the long queues in front of the ticket office or within the theater, both of which are possibilities during the first week of the film. Although film fans have acquired a reputation as volatile trouble-makers and vandals (what South Indians call rowdies), a distinguishing feature of the Indian film fan clubs is a prominent social-service mission. As one fan told anthropologist Sara Dickey: “It [the club] must not be started for the purpose

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of whistling, singing, dancing, and performing. If we start the club, we should work continuously to do good.”27 The archetypal hero in Indian cinema is portrayed as a magnanimous protector of the poor and the down-trodden. Club-sponsored service activities attempt to embody this archetype, solidify the association between this archetype and the club’s focal celebrity, and promote that celebrity’s popularity among the local populace. The social service dimension of the fan associations extends their hero’s achievements from the world of cinema into the real world and enables fans to mimic his idealism through acts of charity. For the fan the star is a protective figure. Most fans express their adoration for the star claiming him as their teacher (vaadhiyar), elder brother (anna), or god. Fans of the actor Rajnikanth expressed their adoration for the star with emotionally charged statements such as “Rajni is my god” and “I will give up my life for Rajni.”28 Representing their respective fan clubs, young men typically organize blood banks to supply government hospitals, contract doctors to conduct eye exams free-ofcharge in slum areas, subsidize exam tutorials for poor children, and organize water distribution and improve sanitation for the poorest of the poor. By performing service to the local community, fans—most of them products of Tamil Nadu’s growing literate working class—earn recognition that distinguishes them from their peers. For those with little education or financial capital at their disposal, such mobility and separation is generally difficult to achieve. As Dickey observes, by emulating their favorite movie hero, fans are afforded an alternative route to social mobility, one acquired through the imagery of film rather than through mimicking the elite classes who control the normative routes of mobility.29 If their hero is involved in politics, by performing social service activities fan club members earn public merit that helps them proceed up the rungs of the party hierarchy. MGR, who found a ready-made party in his fan clubs upon his defection from the DMK in 1976, hailed his fan clubs at the “All World International MGR Fan Club Conference” held in Madurai in 1986 as “the backbone of the party and a necessary link between the party and the people.” Besides gaining visibility in the neighborhood through the social service activities described above, membership in fan clubs provided aspiring leaders with the experience and responsibility entailed in election campaigning, in delivering speeches and training in the “politics of adulation.”30 The Crowd, in Theory As members of a group, fans share a sense of extended kinship, emotions, enthusiasms, and passions. The experience, it appears, produces in the individual an exhilarating sense of possibility. According to Gustave Le Bon, an

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early theorist of crowd psychology, mental unity distinguishes a crowd from the casual presence of a multitude—a large number of people in one place, as, for example, in a railway station or airport. A multitude, however, can be transformed into a crowd when an event unites them.31 The mutual interdependence of the crowd arises from a process of mirroring as individuals reflect or imitate the responses of others. Each individual reflexively mimics the motor movements of those around him or her, and each sees a reflection of him- or herself in the actions of the others.32 In an attempt to move beyond description into an explanation of crowd behavior, Freud, in Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego (1922), theorized Le Bon’s concept of “mental unity” as a “libidinal bond” akin to the pleasurable connectedness humans experience during babyhood. Those who surrender themselves to the experience thereby “lose the sense of the limits of their individuality.”33 A drawback of this mental unity, however, is that the ideology that sways a crowd is generally simplistic, with little room for complexity. This results in a general vilification of the crowd form of social organization from all quarters of society. Like the term fan the word crowd has a derogatory connotation in our society and is often used alternatively with rabble. In fact, the first attempt at producing a theory of the crowd phenomenon was by a criminologist, Scipio Sighele, in La Folla Delinquenta (1891).34 For most social observers, including Le Bon, who identified the modern era as the “age of the crowd,” the phenomenon symbolized the darker, uncontrollable aspects of modernity where, in the arena of world events, the locus of political power had shifted from the hands of the monarch and a hereditary elite to a more tenuous and diffuse form emanating from the masses, but manipulable by a new elite and their communications media.35 To those who observe it, the crowd is threatening. Its moods and emotions are mercurial; to each new image or ideology that surfaces the crowd responds with passionate impetuosity. The mood of a crowd, therefore, can shift momentarily from extreme hostility to docility, from cruelty to heroism.36 Because the group provides anonymity, crowds can make outrageous demands or perform otherwise illegal acts in concert. Credit or blame for actions are transmitted to the entire group so the restrictions of responsibility that each individual bears when acting alone disappears. Heady awareness of its own immunity encourages a crowd to become authoritative, dictatorial, and intolerant. As rational discussion with a crowd is impossible, individuals encountered by the crowd are compelled to do its bidding. In Freudian theoretical construction, this unpredictability of the

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crowd is likened to a dream state. As part of a crowd, individuals participate in events that they would be unable to actuate by themselves, and are thus unable to distinguish between the real and the unreal. And just as our dreams are constructed of a succession of events with little logical connection in the sequence, so too changes wrought by crowd activities tend to be underwritten by an irrational mechanism wherein idea and action are simultaneous—with no space for critical debate or discussion, thus explaining the association between crowds and social instability.37 A crowd needs no rational explanation to proceed from one state of mind to the next. “The power of conquerors and the strength of States,” Le Bon asserts, “is based on the popular imagination. It is more particularly by working upon this imagination that crowds are led.”38 The Crowd in Tamil Nadu’s Cinematic Politics Newspaper accounts provide anecdotal evidence of the powerful mass psychology of crowds at work in Tamil Nadu politics. For example, as Jayalalitha was sworn in publicly as chief minister in 1992, a pair of sycophantic cabinet members prostrated themselves at her feet as they mounted the ceremonial platform to greet her. From that point on, the crowd viewing the ceremony demanded that each minister and dignitary perform a full-length body prostration at the chief minister’s feet as they joined her on the podium. When one hesitated, the crowd shouted “Vizhu Da Amma Kalile!” (Hey you, fall at Mother’s feet!)39 In an analysis of the hagiographical text produced by Jayalalitha’s constituents and fans, Bernard Bate describes the intense energy and enthusiasm generated in the crowd at political meetings by a “vocative” call and response form of chanting of Jayalalitha’s titles (that also appeared on the visual images—cutouts, banners, newspaper advertisements, leaflets—produced for such events). Bate records the progression of one such chanting episode in which “the event organizer at the microphone shouts out ‘O, Doctor Revolutionary Leader’—and the crowd responds, ‘Long Live!’; he shouts: ‘O Amazon Warrior Who Protects Social Justice’—they respond ‘Long Live!’; ‘O Family Deity’—‘Long Live! Long Live! Long Live!’”40 Freud explains the phenomenon of a crowd’s intimidating unanimity as a subliminal substitution of the group ideal (the person of the leader) for the individual ego. The effect is two-fold. First, by sharing a common ego ideal, members of the group identify with each other, suppressing feelings of envy or intolerance that would otherwise separate them. Second, by making the desired object (the leader) part of oneself each member of the crowd gratifies his or her paradoxical wish to submit to the leader and to be in the position of the leader him or herself.41 I contend that these two elements of crowd

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psychology, so important in populist politics, is also the basis for the relationship between fans and cinema celebrities and may explain the social service zeal of fan club members in Tamil Nadu who seek to emulate the exemplary altruism of their hero’s actions in popular films. Just as the iconic cult image of the film star is a crucial element in fostering the adulation of fans, the visual is a dominant element of communication in crowd conditions as well. As Le Bon argues, a crowd tends to think in images and respond most strongly to images.42 Even if the leader or celebrity is physically present at a political event—and is not an absent presence as in the case of the screen image of the film star—the vast numbers of a crowd make a close-up interaction impossible. Yet the mere sight of the leader exerts its power and influence over the crowd, much like a cinematic image evokes a frenzied response from fans. During the year before his death, MGR was so debilitated (probably from successive strokes) that his speech was nearly incomprehensible. Yet he regularly appeared before the public. And although MGR said little at these appearances, he sustained his enormous mass following. In a sense, the image that MGR had constructed of himself during his film and political career, and which his films renewed (for the most popular films were rerun in theaters and on television), was so strong and complete that he no longer needed to address his followers.43 A compelling demonstration of powerful political communication purely on the basis of the leader’s image was afforded by M. K. Gandhi during the national struggle he led against the British imperial rule of South Asia. To rally popular support for the Indian National Congress, Gandhi frequently made long crosscountry train trips. As information of his travels were circulated in the press, crowds gathered at local railway stations en route hoping to catch a glimpse of the renowned freedom fighter. At first Gandhi was deeply reluctant to give into this desire for people to gaze upon him. He believed that this ritual made for an unhealthy relationship between the leader and the masses—a feeling that is reflected, at times, in entries in his diaries.44 But his followers’ demands were so insistent that, despite Gandhi’s own reservations, accommodations were made to view him—often under difficult circumstances, as Pyarelal Nair’s firsthand account would suggest: The journey proved to be as strenuous as many had feared. There were mammoth crowds at all big stations on the way. At places it was like a swarming ant-heap of humanity as far as the eye could reach. The crowd clambered on the roofs of the carriages, choked the windows, broke glass, smashed shutters and yelled and shouted till one’s ears split. They pulled the alarm-chain again

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and again for darshan, making it necessary to disconnect the vacuum brakes. . . . Later in the evening, Gandhiji sat with his fingers thrust in his ears to keep out the shouting when it became unbearable. But when it was proposed to him that the lights be switched off to discourage darshan seekers, he turned out the suggestion by saying that the simple faith of the masses demanded that he should serve them with the last ounce of his energy.45

Gandhi understood that his visible presence was but an opportunity for his followers to express bhakti (simple faith and religiosity). And, he rationalized, to ignore the crowd and continue with his writing or reading did not, in any way, diminish people’s desire to gaze upon him. Though this anecdote is specific to a particular historical moment in the Indian political experience, such a desire—to stare at special people, or at potent images—appears universal. The next section reviews theories about the gaze in a Western context.

The Gaze in Western Tradition and Thought The subject of the human gaze in European culture was most notably examined by Sigmund Freud near the turn of the twentieth century. However, the most in-depth studies on the psychology of gazing and the financial gains that can be returned from it may arguably have been conducted by Western media—the artistry, craft, and industry of visual entertainment and advertising. Increasingly, sophisticated technologies of reproduction have nourished this desire to gaze by making available reproductions of an individual’s visage in a multiplicity of ways. And, observing this phenomenon, scholars have asked themselves why these images should be so prolific and so popular. What conscious or unconscious feedback promotes this desire to look, and return, and look again? Until the Enlightenment in the seventeenth century, Europeans conceived of the human eye as an organ capable not only of receiving light, but of emitting light and other types of signals. Medieval texts suggest that Europeans believed that communicable diseases were transmitted through eye contact, from the infirm to those who were yet uninfected. This belief—what scholars have called the “extramission theory of vision”46—was proposed as early as the fifth century BCE by the Greek philosopher Galen and prevailed through the medieval and Renaissance periods. Anecdotal accounts and folk tales dating from this time period maintain that the interactive nature of the eye was complemented by the world of objects. Various inanimate objects were believed to radiate influential qualities, emotions, powers, or essences. Accordingly, sculpted and painted images

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were capable of returning the devoted viewer’s gaze, of inclining toward or turning away from the viewer. Accounts describe cases where an image is said to have admonished a viewer for his or her sinful thoughts with a gesture (or even a resounding slap on the face). And church records of these periods describe paintings and sculptures having miraculous powers—ascribed with the ability to produce tears or blood in symbolic empathy for those who were suffering, even squirting breast milk to nourish the viewer. Devotional images, many believed, had the capacity to break free of the confines of the picture frame or pedestal and cradle a troubled devotee, or to arouse and render a woman pregnant.47 The growth of secularism and the development of scientific reasoning during Enlightenment quickly undermined intellectual support for extramission and eroded its position in popular belief systems. Physicians who had dissected and studied human eyes and the eyes of nonhuman species reported that this organ was a highly complex and delicate instrument, one with a specific design that was clearly appropriate for light reception and the internal focusing of an image. Johannes Kepler, in 1604, equated the eye with the camera obscura, and thus established the basis for separating the visual sense from the senses for the auditory (hearing) and haptic (touch) senses. As the eye was philosophically and culturally divested of its powers of reaching out to objects, objects were divested of their power to gaze back—to transmit the essences of good and evil. Gradually, the eye and its vision achieved a new cultural position: as a passive instrument of observation associated with truth and with verification. Yet the influence of scientific thought did not totally dislodge popular concepts that extended the gaze into the realm of touch. Fear of the “evil eye,” a belief in the physically destructive capacities of the gaze, spans disparate cultural traditions, descending into popular cultures of contemporary European societies and even, at times, into intellectual thought. For example, Lacan, the primary theorist of the gaze in modernity, acknowledged this “appetite of the eye on the part of the person looking.”48 Even supposedly elevated forms of looking, such as the desire to look at art, Lacan believed reveals nothing more than “the true function of the organ of the eye, the eye filled with voracity, the evil eye.”49 The function of the evil eye is a divisive function, as when the poisonous gaze of envy desires to separate the other from its possessions, the objects of desire.50 The concept of the evil eye is based on an understanding of the eye as the locus of power and energy, radiating outward in all directions. From the perspective of a secular industrialized world, however, we dismiss this idea as mere superstition because the “idea that the eye touches others threatens autonomy and atomism alike.”51

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Though the eye may have been rendered passive and objects safely inanimate, scholars from the nineteenth century onward have struggled to theorize the complexity of perception and the irrational hold that objects continue to exert on the modern self. Freud’s theory of fetishism attempts to explain an individual’s unnatural fascination for a particular object and the animation of that object by the individual. The focus in this theory, however, is not on the interaction between the seeing and the seen, but on the neurosis of the individual: his or her state of mind that is abnormal and in need of repair. The principal post-Enlightenment theories of the gaze—Freudian scopophilia and its development by Jacques Lacan, and Michel Foucault’s theory of societies of surveillance—focus on one side of this visual negotiation: on the seer. As such, the gaze is hegemonic; its interactivity is present only in the unequal exchange between two animate beings. Some theorists have made efforts to counter this trend. Pre-Enlightenment conceptualizations of the object find positive resonance in the creative works of nineteenth- and twentieth-century artists. And the visual theories of Walter Benjamin and Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and much of Jacques Lacan’s later writings, build upon and extensively reference these artistic projects. The relation between one’s body and the objects that surround it, Merleau-Ponty believed, was most strongly experienced by visual artists: “The painter lives in fascination . . . the roles between him and the visible are reversed. That is why so many painters have said that things look at them.”52 This was particularly the case among Symbolists such as Paul Gauguin, Odilon Redon, and Edvard Munch, and the Surrealists in the 1920s and 1930s. Both groups explored and embraced the castigated realms of the irrational and fantastic, directing their art to tap the power of inanimate objects and landscape to return the look of the viewer. Benjamin’s fascination with the interaction between animate and inanimate is evidenced in aphoristic, scattered notes that are a mix of observation, rumination, philosophy, politics, and poetry. In these notes, a record of the author’s wanderings through the modern metropolis of Paris in the 1930s, Benjamin makes provocative references to the power of objects, particularly abandoned common debris, such as a white coat button in a puddle of muddy water or torn bits of advertisement imagery, that look back at the flaneur. Benjamin wrote: “The person we look at, or who feels he is being looked at, looks at us in turn. To perceive the aura of an object we look at its means to invest it with the ability to meet our gaze.”53 Merleau-Ponty argued passionately for an alternative modality of perception, one that portrays “neither the ideal and necessary being of geometry nor the simple sensory event, the ‘percipi.’”54 Merleau-Ponty theorized a haptic

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dimension within the visual sense: a component that apprehends the physical texture and feel of an object. While visual and haptic senses remain separate, their sensory experiences are complexly intertwined by the communication that goes on between them. Vision, Merleau-Ponty asserts, is a chiasmus of what is visible and what is invisible—what we cannot see at the time, but what we know about objects, their texture, and other sides or dimensions that are not present to sight.55 Lacan, however, asserted that the scopic field is split, not between the visible and the invisible, but between the eye and the gaze.56 The former is the physical, phenomenological aspect of sight attached to the conscious, selfreflexive subject; the latter is the “underside of consciousness”57—the psychological aspect of seeing that is part of the “Symbolic phase” in Lacan’s theory of the development of the human psyche. And the scopic field is intersected with gazes not only from other humans but from inanimate objects as well. “The world,” Lacan observed, “is all-seeing, but it is not exhibitionistic—it does not provoke our gaze. When it begins to provoke it, the feeling of strangeness begins too.”58 In one of his lectures Lacan recounted an experience from his early 1920s that, I believe, expands upon this statement. As a young, aspiring scholar of middle-class origins, Lacan was in search of experiences that would temper his intellect and allow him to experience the same physical labor that framed the lives of the working classes—then the vast majority of the European populace: One day, I was on a small boat, with a few people from a family of fishermen in a small port. . . . The fisherman went out in his frail craft at his own risk. It was this risk, this danger, that I loved to share. . . . One day, then, as we were waiting for the moment to pull in the nets, an individual known as Petit-Jean, that’s what we called him—like all his family, he died very young from tuberculosis, which at that time was a constant threat to the whole of that social class—this Petit-Jean pointed out to me something floating on the surface of the waves. It was a small can, a sardine can. It floated there in the sun, a witness to the canning industry, which we, in fact, were supposed to supply. It glittered in the sun. And Petit-Jean said to me—“You see that can? Do you see it? Well, it doesn’t see you!” He found this incident highly amusing—I less so.59

According to Lacan, Petit-Jean had implied that, metaphorically, the floating can was looking at Lacan and at the fishermen; that this artifact of industrial production was the ultimate arbiter of class distinctions, “seeing” these distinctions despite Lacan’s own attempts to obfuscate them. In addressing the psychological effects of the gaze of objects on us, Lacan argues that strongly reflective surfaces—those that direct an inordinate amount of

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light toward our eyes—are the basis of the culturally widespread perception that inanimate objects return the human gaze.60 For Lacan, this anecdote suggests that perception and representation are simultaneous and that the visualization of identity arises from an intersection of gazes: between the subject and light, between appearance and being.61

The Interactive Gaze of Darshan Contexts of gazing—at the cinema screen as a film viewer, at images of film stars as a fan, at images of leaders as a member of a crowd—overlap and intersect in multiple ways. The motivating force for these forms of gazing is people’s desire to look. In the previous section I discussed motivations for the gaze as it has been theorized in Western culture. In this section I focus on theorizations of gazing in an Indian context, specifically the practice of darshan described in the opening paragraphs of this chapter. Devout Hindus believe it is through darshan that the divinity’s power and grace is communicated to the devotee.62 Hindus commonly announce their intentions to visit a temple not with the words “I shall worship,” but by saying “I shall take darshan.” And though a central element of temple worship, darshan is a very mobile concept. Hindus take darshan in a virtually unlimited range of sites: from an intimate space in their own home to the grounds of a spacious, deity-adorned temple complex, to one of the ubiquitous urban sidewalk shrines on the way to the market. Devotees commonly undertake pilgrimages of hundreds of miles to gaze briefly on a deity’s iconic figure. When conditions are appropriate, the simple act of darshan or sight of an iconic image can become an intense spiritual experience. While clearly associated with Hindu religious tradition, in India the practice of darshan has blurred boundaries between the religious and secular. This ambiguity may have been fostered by early Hindu rulers who were themselves invested in blurring the spiritual and physical realms. These monarchs used fictive kinship histories and royal families’ patronage of cults to remake themselves as earthly semi-gods with legendary connections to Hindu deities. Receiving darshan was an acknowledgment of those connections—of deification—and therefore of the spiritual and physical legitimacy of the state. It is little wonder then that formal darshan, though originally associated with Hinduism, later became a standard form of deference to Muslim rulers in India. The court ceremonies of the Mughal emperors included the practice of Jharoka darshan. A Mughal ruler periodically presented himself at a jharoka—a balcony or elevated window, which is a key element in Mughal palace architecture—before the gaze of the public.63

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I argue that aspects of this original religious tradition, of formal darshan, have descended seamlessly into contemporary India as public ritual. Since darshan is a term used to describe an everyday form of worship, the visuality produced by this social and cultural context includes a religious dimension to what would otherwise be understood as a secular activity. For example, while campaigning for the leadership of Tamil Nadu during the run-up to state elections in 1990, Jayalalitha Jayaram—leader of the AIADMK Party, and former leading lady of Tamil films—initiated the practice of appearing daily, at scheduled times, on the balcony of her house to give darshan to large groups who would gather outside. She never spoke, and merely made herself visible. Outside her compound’s gates, a signboard displayed the days and hours at which she would give darshan to her followers, in the way that Hindu temples announce the timings of puja (offerings to a deity).64 And when Jayalalitha won the 1992 elections the state was flooded with images of the leader facilitating her devotees to take her darshan at all times. A member of Jayalalitha’s cabinet declared: “[I]f it is said that the government has a 1000 days, our Puratchi Selvi (Revolutionary Daughter) has 10,000 eyes.”65 The practice of darshan evolves from a deep-rooted indigenous belief system that articulates on the power of sight. This system applies equally to the rarefied abstractions of theology and philosophy as well as everyday ritual practices. As referenced in the Vedas—core Sanskrit religious and philosophical treatises dating to 1500 BCE—darshan translates literally as seeing (in Tamil the word is pronounced daricheena). Other meanings associated with the term are mirror, a view of a religious person or object, or a religious concept. Because Vedic philosophy is foundational to the development of most of the subsequent belief systems on the subcontinent, the philosophy expounded in the Vedas resonates in contemporary local customs and rituals throughout India. Jan Gonda, an accomplished Sanskrit scholar, provides a comprehensive overview of the numerous, albeit scattered, references to the power of the eyes in the Vedas.66 Taken together, these injunctions lay out an extensive and elaborate treatise on the highly refined “language” of the eyes, detailing various methods of seeing: such as glancing, looking directly, looking askance, averting one’s eyes, staring, gazing, and closing one’s eyes. Each mode of seeing—from the flicker of the eyelid to the fixed stare—are believed to have repercussions that are not only emotional but physical and material. Through the eyes the individual absorbs or consumes good and evil essences from the environment. Hence, the Vedas contain elaborate injunctions controlling the activities of the eye during ritual ceremonies, particularly restrictions on one’s

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gaze at auspicious beings and objects, or in certain directions. The Vedas also warn Hindus to avert their eyes from inauspicious objects or beings. Looking at evil, poisonous, or untruthful objects was deemed harmful by the authors of these texts.67 Eye-emitted powers however, were the prerogative of deities, spiritually enlightened humans and icons in places of worship. Auspicious looks from gods, icons, and saints could transmit positive energy, protect, purify, or make divine, while angry glances from these beings could pollute, poison, or destroy enemies. Priests of the South Indian Sivaite community are believed to possess such powers extramission while they conduct religious rituals. By merely casting his eyes on a container of ordinary water the priest is believed to transform it into holy water. As Gonda describes it, “he produces amrta (magical nectar) from the bindusthana—that is, the mystic place charged with power, between the eyebrows.”68 When sculpting, carving, or casting images of deities, the eyes are last detail finished. It is only when the eyes of the image are incised, painted, or affixed that the piece of stone or metal wrought by the artisan becomes imbued with the symbolic power of an icon. Once the eyes of the image are opened, so to speak, it should properly be handled only by priests or other religious designees, and should be seen by devotees only in a ritual context. From this point on, Hindu tradition dictates, the deity is considered to be within the image, and can exchange darshan. While the rituals for awakening temple icons are usually undertaken by Hindu priests, paper chromolithographs of deities—those that frequently grace the space of worship in domestic and commercial interiors (referred to as sami patam elsewhere in this book)—are generally awakened by devout individuals. Of the 117 households that anthropologist Christopher Pinney interviewed in the village of Bhatisuda in Madhya Pradesh, all except one concurred with the procedure described by a woman interviewee, Lila, to make their household image chamatkari (miraculous, full of wonder). “You see those pictures that are seated? [Lila pointed to the images on the wall] Those are paper but by placing them before our eyes [ankh rakna] . . . shakti [energy] has come into them. . . . We take [the pictures] inside and do puja. . . . We entreat the god and the god comes out because the god is saluted.”69 Pinney noted that the villagers he interviewed were indifferent to either the aesthetics of the images or their production—origins in the studios of graphic artists. As far as his interviewees were concerned, they were the originators of the images; they had given the images shakti; it was their power of faith that was able to “seat” the god in the image, in order that they could see and be seen by the deity.

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Gazing upon the iconic image of the deity the devotee is simultaneously exposed to and absorbs the potency of the former’s gaze. The devotee is thus empowered to return the deity’s piercing gaze with an enlightened and enhanced vision. Informants who spoke with anthropologist Lawrence Babb described this enhanced vision quite literally, akin to acquiring the ability to see as if through a telescope. The source of this inner vision is believed to have a physical manifestation in the body as an aperture—the tisra til (third eye)—located at the bindusthana, on the lower forehead at the meeting of the eyebrows. As the exchange of gazes between devotee and deity continues, the inner vision of the former expands to greater and greater spiritual awareness, acquiring protection, knowledge, and then power. According to Hindu religious texts and tradition, with enhanced awareness darshan provides a path to the senses of touch, opening the possibility of physical contact with the icon or saint. This extension of vision to other senses, such as taste, and to commune with the deity’s psyche is clearly indicated in the Vedas: “A prolonged look or fixed regard . . . becomes a means of participating in the essence and nature of the persons or object looked at. . . . The mere act of looking could be regarded as practically identical to touching or grasping.”70 In thus encompassing the senses of both vision and touch darshan is a path to self-realization. Similar metaphysical interactions have been reported with animate beings—spiritual guides or gurus, political leaders, and celebrities —as well as with inanimate objects, such as painted and sculpted icons, photographs and printed posters. Occasionally substances of a religious significance, such as honey, oil, tears, milk, or vibhuti (the ash of burnt cow dung), have been reported exuding from the icon or the portrait. Such anecdotes are often presented by the religiously devout as visible evidence of the power generated by the cycle of gazing.71 This process of empowering inanimate objects to give darshan is not limited to religious images. In a busy commercial section of Chennai, I noticed a makeshift billboard outside a cinema theater that was plastered with multiple copies of cheaply printed paper posters advertising an old MGR film. Approaching the billboard with the intent of photographing it for my collection I was taken aback to find that each of the six to eight images of MGR was adorned with a pottu on the forehead and a real red rose in the lapel of his jacket. By ornamenting the images of MGR, his fan/devotee had not only paid homage to the deceased leader but in so doing he or she had triggered an exchange of gazes and the transfer of aura from the iconic image to those who looked upon it with reverence.72 This instance is just one of many that one could chance upon everyday in India wherein darshan bridges the gap

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between the individual practice of religious devotion and the public practice of spectatorship of visual culture. In the Western cultural context—in the theories of Freud and Lacan—the experience of gazing brings about a form of self-realization that is permeated with desires and anxieties. In the Indian context the process of selfrealization through darshan is ultimately empowering because it occurs through the body of another more powerful and protective being. Visual Hybridity and Fluidity In contemporary India, the nearly ubiquitous practice of darshan continues to inform modes of visuality in the new-media-dominated contexts. Darshan works to dissolve boundaries between the secular space of emerging electronic media, the older traditions of Indian cinema, and puja—the ancient social space of religious worship. Rather than dissipate the power of darshan, cinema’s introduction into India in the early twentieth century added yet another context in which the faithful could experience the divine. Movies based on the religious epics provided devout Hindus with the opportunity to experience the darshan of deities as they are edified by the mythic legends that define those deities.

Figure 7.3. Ornamenting poster images of MGR with a pottu (an artfully applied dot of colored powder on the forehead) and a rose in the lapel of his jacket, the late leader’s fan or devotee triggered an exchange of gazes and the transfer of power from the iconic image to those who looked upon it with reverence. Poonamallee High Road, January 1991.

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In the first decades of the twentieth century, Dada Saheb Phalke’s films based on the Ramayana, Mahabharata, and Puranas were screened in various locations of the country generating frenzy akin to a popular religious festival. These films were sustained by ritual attendance. For example, both Lanka Dahan (Burning of Lanka, 1917) and Shri Krishna Janma (Birth of Lord Krishna, 1917) remained in urban theaters and in traveling cinemas in rural areas of colonial India for over a decade. According to accounts assembled by Barnouw and Krishnaswamy, as Rama came to the screen in Lanka Dahan, and when in Shri Krishna Janma Lord Krishna appeared, members of the audience laid down in the aisles, prostrated before the screen.73 The simultaneity of viewing as entertainment and viewing as darshan continues through the present. When the Ramayana and Mahabharata epics were serialized on television in the late 1980s, families throughout the nation assembled, almost unfailingly, each Sunday morning for two consecutive years (each epic comprised fifty-two episodes). While there can be various interpretations of such levels of devotion to a television series, there is some evidence that Hindu viewers recognized the series as a religious commitment, employing each episode as an opportunity to take darshan of the portrayed deities. During that period, it was not uncommon for reports to surface in the media of important public gatherings, conferences, religious meetings, and weddings being rescheduled around the timings of these broadcasts. Not only do viewers take darshan of these television serials, but darshan is also incorporated into the script of such mythologicals. Films with secular themes, especially those with a political agenda, also emulate the mythological (religious) film genre creating a cult status for the hero by depicting him as the object of darshan.74 For the devout Hindu, the icon is an embodiment of the divine, not merely a visual representation. In fact, a wide range of interpretations of divine manifestation flourish under Hinduism’s emphasis on individual perception, its absence of formal organization and coercive power, and its lack of theological stricture.75 Such wide latitude for variation and modification, I argue, opens a religious space that, in popular Hinduism, allows for a fluid apprehension of divinity in several registers. It is this opening, I contend, that propagates the godly aura that Indian film celebrities and political leaders cast so widely over their society. In particularizing the differences between human interactions in Western religious and Hindu cultural environments, theological scholar Margaret Chatterjee explains that “the holy person [in Hinduism] is not an intermediary but the immediate focus of a kind of decentralized spiritual power.” And, she asserts, “[w]hen religious life is not founded on historic events (the

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prophets, birth of Christ) but on mythic participation in sacred time and space, room is left for foci of religious observance to be built up around historic movements, leaders, and present-day charismatic figures.”76 This, Chatterjee contends, puts respect and reverence in Hinduism on the same plane as worship in religious traditions that evolved from Semitic monotheism. In the Hindu context the souls of great people are worthy of religious homage and spiritual expressions of devotion. What often strikes the casual observer of Tamil popular culture is the relentless exploitation of the fetishistic power of celebrity in Tamil Nadu, both for financial gain and political advancement. What may be missed, instead, is the viewers’ avenues for participation—that is, darshan: a deeply interactive and consciousness-transforming religious ritual of gazing that obliterates barriers between the fan/devotee’s religious, political and cinematic experiences. It is, I argue, this practice that lies at the center of the hybridity of Tamil Nadu’s vibrant popular culture—a social milieu in which politicians, screenwriters, and actors regularly slip from one medium into the other, taking with them artists and promoters of religion, local politics and cinema and recombining their imagery with each and every slippage.

Notes 1. Ellis, Visible Fictions, 99. 2. Barnouw and Krishnaswamy, Indian Film, 15. See also William McCormack, “The Forms of Virasaiva Religion,” in Traditional India: Structure and Change, ed. Milton Singer (Philadelphia: American Folklore Society, 1959), 119–29. 3. This was a firsthand experience of Randor Guy, historian of Tamil cinema, recounted in an interview with the author in Chennai, November 1990. 4. James Killough, “Stars of the Orient,” Taxi: Fashion, Trends and Leisure Living, May 1988, 112. For an analysis of participatory audience behavior during the screening of Indian films, see Lakshmi Srinivas, “Active Viewing: An Ethnography of the Indian Film Audience,” Visual Anthropology 11, no. 4 (1998): 323–53. 5. Ellis, Visible Fictions, 26. 6. Sudhir Kakar, Intimate Relations. Exploring Indian Sexuality (New Delhi: Penguin, 1990), 28. 7. Timothy Corrigan, “Film and the Culture of the Cult,” in The Cult Film Experience: Beyond All Reason, ed. J. P. Telotte (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1991), 31. 8. Woodman Taylor, “Penetrating Gazes: The Poetics of Sign and Visual Display in Popular Indian Cinema” in Beyond Appearances? Visual Practices and Ideologies in Modern India, ed. Sumathi Ramaswamy (New Delhi: Sage Publications, 2003), 309–10. The article discusses the erotic gaze of nazar milana (meeting of

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gazes of lovers) in Indian cinema when the gaze of the lover travels across the body of his beloved, beginning at the feet and moving upward. This simulates or follows the same trajectory of the gaze of darshan when the devotee first worships the feet of the deity and then moves upward to finally meet the deity’s eyes. In Miriam Hansen, “Pleasure, Ambivalence, Identification: Valentino and Female Spectatorship,” in Stardom: Industry of Desire, ed. Christine Gledhill (London: Routledge, 1991), 265, the author points to a similar phenomenon in the films of Rudolph Valentino. 9. Prasad, Ideology of the Hindi Film, 76–77. See also Kapur, “The Representation of Gods and Heroes,” 92, in which the author notes the absence of scopophilia in the frontal gaze. 10. Paul Hartmann, B. R. Patil and Anita Dighe, The Mass Media and Village Life: An Indian Study (New Delhi: Sage Publications, 1989), 123. 11. Kathryn H. Fuller, At the Picture Show: Small Town Audiences and the Creation of Movie Fan Culture (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1996), 120. 12. Henry Jenkins, Textual Poachers. Television Fans and Participatory Culture (London and New York: Routledge, 1992), 15. 13. Fuller, At the Picture Show, 124, 166. 14. Jackie Stacey, “Feminine Fascinations. Forms of Identification in StarAudience Relations,” in Stardom: Industry of Desire, ed. Christine Gledhill (London: Routledge, 1991), 141–63. The author based her analysis of the star-audience relationship on letters of response that she received from female fans in Europe and North America to a series of questions she posed in the news media. 15. Richard Dyer, Stars (London: British Film Institute, 1979), 19–20. Dyer cites Andrew Tudor’s text Image and Influence. 16. Stacey, “Feminine Fascinations,” 156. 17. Jenkins, Textual Poachers, 23, 26–27. See also S. V. Srinivas, “Devotion and Defiance in Fan Activity,” in Making Meaning in Indian Cinemai, ed. Ravi Vasudevan (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2000), 298. 18. Lawrence Grossberg, “Is There a Fan in the House? The Affective Sensibility of Fandom,” in The Adoring Audience: Fan Culture and Popular Media, ed. Lisa Lewis (London and New York: Routledge, 1992), 63. 19. Fuller, At the Picture Show, 126–27. 20. Srinivas, “Devotion and Defiance in Fan Activity,” 303. The author in an interview with the star in Chennai, January 22, 1995. 21. Srinivas, “Devotion and Defiance in Fan Activity,” 303–8. 22. Barnett, The Politics of Cultural Nationalism in South, 312. In a rasikar manram film-fan activities overlapped with political activities. 23. Exceptions are the research of Barnett (cited above); Widlund (cited above); Sara Dickey, “Opposing Faces: Film Star Fan Clubs and the Construction of Class Identities in South India,” in Pleasure and the Nation: The History, Politics and Consumption of Public Culture in India, ed. Rachel Dwyer and Christopher Pinney (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2001), 213–46; and S. V. Srinivas, “Devotion and

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Defiance in Fan Activity” (cited above). Barnett and Widlund refer tangentially to fan activity in their texts. The articles by Dickey and Srinivas focus on the subject of film fans. Dickey’s fieldwork was conducted in the city of Madurai in Tamil Nadu in the mid-1980s and Srinivas’s fieldwork was conducted in the cities of Hyderabad and Vijayawada in Andhra Pradesh in the mid-1990s. 24. Widlund, Paths to Power and Patterns of Influence, 235. The author interviewed R. Trichy Soundarrajan, general secretary of the International MGR Association established in 1974, who estimated that during MGR’s lifetime there were approximately 24,000 manrams with (at least) 25 members each and approximately 26,373 manrams existing to date (that is, in the late 1990s). According to the estimate made by India Today, November 15, 1984, the MGR association had about 15,000 branches with a total of 1.8 million members. 25. Srinivas met only one female fan in the two cites of Hyderabad and Vijayawada. Dickey had a similar experience. Dickey notes, however, that Jayalalitha, although she no longer starred in films, had a fan following. The only female film star with a fan following was Vijayashanti, the Telegu film actress who starred as a police officer in the film Vijayanti I.P.S. (1990—see the discussion of this film in chapter 4), which was a box-office success, particularly with women moviegoers. 26. I conducted an interview with the president of the Rajnikanth fan association, and some fan club members in Chennai, on January 22, 2000. For the interview with the fan club president I was only permitted to take handwritten notes. But I videotaped the interview with the fan club members. 27. Dickey, “Opposing Faces: Film Star Fan Clubs,” 231. 28. This author’s interview with Rajnikanth fans in Chennai, January 22, 2000. 29. Dickey, “Opposing Faces: Film Star Fan Clubs,” 237. 30. Dickey, “The Politics of Adulation,” 362–63. 31. Gustave Le Bon, The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind. A Classic of Sociology with a new introduction by Robert K. Merton (New York: Viking Press, 1960). 32. Robert E. Park, The Crowd and the Public and Other Essays (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1972), 11, 38, 48. 33. Theodor Adorno, “Freudian Theory and the Pattern of Fascist Propaganda,” in The Essential Frankfurt School Reader (New York: Continuum, 1985), 121–22. 34. Park, The Crowd and the Public, 6. 35. Le Bon, The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind, xi. 36. Srinivas, “Devotion and Defiance in Fan Activity,” 37. Le Bon terms this characteristic the crowd’s “mobility.” 37. Park, The Crowd and the Public, 47. 38. Le Bon, The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind, 69. 39. Aside, April 15, 1991, 26. 40. Bate, “Political Praise in Tamil Newspapers,” 313. 41. Adorno, “Freudian Theory and the Pattern of Fascist Propaganda,” 124–25. 42. Le Bon, The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind, 41. 43. Aside, January 31, 1988, 26.

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44. S. Rudolph and L. Rudolph, Gandhi: The Traditional Roots of Charisma, 76. In his diaries Gandhi wrote, “The dharsanvalas’ blind love has often made me angry and . . . sore at heart” (1948), and that “no man is great enough to give it [darshan]” (1919). 45. Srinivas, “Devotion and Defiance in Fan Activity,” 76–77. 46. Teresa Brennan, “Epilogue: ‘The Contexts of Vision’ from a Specific Standpoint,” in Vision in Context: Historical and Contemporary Perspectives on Sight, ed. Teresa Brennan and Martin Jay (New York: Routledge, 1996), 219. 47. David Freedberg, The Power of Images: Studies in the History and Theory of Response (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989). 48. Jacques Lacan, “What is a Picture?” in The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: W. W. Norton, 1978), 115. 49. Lacan, “What is a Picture?” 115. 50. Lacan, “What is a Picture?” 116. “Invidia” (envy) derives etymologically from “videre” (to see). Referenced in Hanjo Berressem, “The Evil Eye of Painting: Jacques Lacan and Witold Gombrowicz on the Gaze,” in Reading Seminar XI: Lacan’s Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, ed. Richard Feldstein, et al., SUNY series in Psychoanalysis and Culture (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1995), 176. 51. Brennan, “Epilogue,” in Vision in Context, 227. 52. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, “Eye and Mind,” in The Primacy of Perception and Other Essays on Phenomenological Psychology, and Philosophy of Art, History and Politics, ed. James M. Edie, trans. Carleton Dallery (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1964), 167. 53. Walter Benjamin, “A Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” in Illuminations: Essays and Reflections (New York: Schocken Books, 1968), 217–51. 54. Merleau-Ponty, “Eye and Mind,” 14. 55. Merleau-Ponty, “Eye and Mind,” 187. 56. Jacques Lacan, “The Split Between the Eye and the Gaze,” in The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: W. W. Norton, 1978), 72. 57. Jacques Lacan, “Anamorphosis,” in The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: W. W. Norton, 1978), 83. 58. Lacan, “The Split Between the Eye and the Gaze,” 75. 59. Jacques Lacan, “The Line and Light,” in The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: W. W. Norton, 1978), 95. 60. Merleau-Ponty also alludes to this phenomenon in “Eye and Mind,” 169: “Artists have mused upon mirrors because beneath this ‘mechanical trick’ they recognized, just as they did in the case of the trick of perspective, the metamorphosis of seeing and being seen which defines both our flesh and the painter’s vocation.” 61. Lacan, “Anamorphosis,” 81.

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62. Diana Eck, Darsan. Seeing the Divine Image in India (Chambersburg, Penn.: Anima Books, 1985), 3. 63. Woodman Taylor, “Penetrating Gazes,” 302. Taylor references Michael Brand and Glenn Lowry, Akbar’s India: Art from the Mughal City of Victory (New York: The Asia Society Galleries, 1985). 64. Ira Bhaskar, “Running Strong,” Aside, March 15, 1988, 13. 65. Kavitha Shetty, “High Handed,” India Today, October 31, 1991, 87. 66. Jan Gonda, The Eye and the Gaze in the Vedas (Amsterdam: North Holland Publishing Company, 1969), 64. 67. Gonda, The Eye and the Gaze in the Vedas, 6. 68. Gonda, The Eye and the Gaze in the Vedas, 45. 69. Christopher Pinney, “Piercing the Skin of the Idol,” in Beyond Aesthetics: Art and the Technologies of Enchantment, ed. Christopher Pinney and Nicholas Thomas (New York and Oxford: Berg Press, 2001), 167. 70. Gonda, The Eye and the Gaze in the Vedas, 20. 71. Lawrence A. Babb, “Glancing: Visual Interaction in Hinduism,” Journal of Anthropological Research 37, no. 4 (Winter 1981): 400. 72. Pinney, “Piercing the Skin of the Idol,” 169. In his research Pinney found that “the dressing of images takes the place of words. Instead of exegesis, instead of an outpouring of language—there is a poetics of materiality and corporeality around the images.” 73. Barnouw and Krishnaswamy, Indian Film, 15, 16. 74. Prasad, Ideology of the Hindi Film, 77. Main Azad Hun (I am Free, 1989), starring Amitabh Bachchan, was made after the actor’s venture into politics was on the wane. The film depicts a climatic scene in which a stadium crowd takes darsan of the main protagonist. 75. Pinney, “Piercing the Skin of the Idol,” 163. The author found that in the village community where he conducted his fieldwork, icons and humans “may be regarded as almost entirely equivalent.” 76. Margaret Chatterjee, The Religious Spectrum: Studies in an Indian Context (New Delhi: Allied Publishers, 1984), 68–69.



Conclusion The Future of Chennai’s Visual Culture

As one travels through the streets of Chennai in the new millennium, it takes some effort to find a single handpainted banner or cutout.1 The turn of the century ushered in a trend for solvent-printed vinyl banners that steadily eliminated the handmade variety from the city’s prime advertising spots. Occasionally, in the compounds of smaller cinema theaters, one might chance upon a small two by three meter (six by ten feet) handpainted banner. Usually roughly painted and unsigned, these are a paltry remnant of the once vibrant banners and cutouts that enlivened the urban landscape during the previous five decades. Cutouts—the two-dimensional human figures that once looked down upon Chennai’s main thoroughfare, Anna Salai—are now totally absent from the urban landscape. In their place are billboards covered by more subdued film advertisements, digitally generated and produced on vinyl. The promoters of local cinema ventured cautiously into the new mode of advertising. Yet within three or four years the displacement became nearly complete. In the initial years of their establishment in Chennai, the production cost of large-scale vinyl printing would not, by itself, make the medium competitive in a market dominated by companies producing handpainted banners and cutouts. In fact, heads of banner companies were, at first, confident that the trend toward vinyl would be reversed once companies began to compare the costs and the product. I will argue, however, effects were at work at this time that would shift the complete calculus in favor of vinyl billboards.2

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In this concluding chapter I examine some of the social, institutional, and economic forces that have precipitated this shift away from the handpainted public advertisement that, since the early 1950s, had been synonymous with Tamil cinema. And I discuss the rapid contraction of competitive visual political publicity in the city, which in the past produced an almost continuous public spectacle, planned and financed by the major political parties.

Painted into a Corner In November 2002, I returned to visit Mr. Mohan and his sons, of the Mohan Arts banner company, whom I had interviewed extensively over the past fifteen years. When I had first visited the studio in the early 1990s, it was located in a small residential neighborhood about a mile distant from Anna Salai. By the end of the decade, Mohan Arts had expanded to a space at least four times larger, located on Dr. Radhakrishna Salai, a major thoroughfare of the city. But by 2002, they had shifted back to a residential neighborhood, this time sharing the space with an automobile repair workshop. On a visit in November of that year, I saw two artists at work painting a lone banner, but little else seemed to be happening. Mr. Mohan, nevertheless, expressed confidence that the commissions would return. It was only a matter of time, he said, since the prices for vinyl were more than three times that of handpainted banners. Besides, the new medium precluded attachments such as “dollars” and cutouts that enhanced the spectacle and attracted the public. In January 2004 I again visited Chennai, meeting with Mr. J. P. Krishna, owner of J. P. Krishna Arts. Along with Mohan Arts, his was one of four top banner companies in Chennai during the 1980s and 1990s. Mr. Krishna had succeeded Mr. Mohan as the president of the Ovium Munnetra Sangam—the Banner Artists Association. J. P. Krishna Arts had also relocated, although from one busy market area to another. The space in the present location was more restricted but two or three artists were at work on a banner for the upcoming Pongal festival and a completed portrait cutout, about four feet in height, of Karunanidhi’s bust was being made ready for transportation to a location on the city outskirts. A German television production unit was on site shooting video of the activity in the studio. The mood of my interviewees, Mr. J. P. Krishna and his son, Mr. J. P. K. Gokulnath, however, was one of dejection. The spark of hope that Mr. Mohan retained had, it seemed, been firmly dampened. The affordability of vinyl banners and strictly enforced government regulations had wrested from a thriving community of figure painters, lettering artists, carpenters, and apprentices—approximately two lakh (two hundred thousand) individuals

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throughout the state—their sole source of livelihood and, for many, their life’s vocation. A young upstart, full of bravado and accomplished in oil painting, J. P. Krishna opened his banner company in 1982. By producing high-quality banners, Krishna immediately raised the level of competition in the field. He invested in new materials for each commission, used quality paints, experimented with alternative venues and types of paint, focused on developing striking compositions and labored over increasing the mimesis of the image. In interviews during the early 1990s, Mr. Krishna had spoken with pride about the complimentary phone calls he received from the public about his work. In contrast, in 2004 Krishna’s son recalled recent disparaging criticism of his trade: “The public thinks that painting is not so special anymore. They say, ‘you are just a painter? You don’t do printing?’ They no longer value our skills.” “What of clients like G. V. Films and Kamal Hasan Films?” I asked, recalling the progressive and influential cinema producers who, in the 1990s, had expressed admiration and respect for the talent of the banner painters.

Figure C.1. Banner artists J. P. Krishna and his son, J. P. K. Gokulnath, at their studio. Both men are bearded because they were undergoing a series of fasts and vows in preparation for a pilgrimage they planned to make to the sacred site of Sabrimalai in the mountains on the border of Kerala and Tamil Nadu. Village Road, January 2004.

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“They are artists, too, after all, and in the field of the arts everyone is attracted to that which is novel. Even they now place greater importance on the printers. Only those who are aware of the difference between the painted image and the printed image are speaking on behalf of the painters.” Before I could clarify who these people were he went on to echo a refrain that I had heard from banner artists in every interview I had conducted in that community: “Ours is a vocation we develop with concentration, focus and discipline. We respect our work; our priorities are not commercial. Over the past twenty-five years we have really developed our technique.” With the art world of banner production in disarray Mr. Krishna had called a meeting of the Ovium Munnetra Sangam a few days prior to my interview with him. Most members of the association were unwilling to shift professions without some protest so they had collectively decided to “petition the government to reinstate our trade and ensure that we can continue our work. Or to give us other work, or suggest alternatives of what we can do. We are hopeful that this will be possible. We have all come together and are speaking in one voice.” But the look of resignation on his face belied his words.

Banners in Vinyl Vinyl is an extremely thick and durable plastic with the density and weight of primed canvas. Pieces of the material, which has a smooth, low-gloss surface, can be joined by heat to create banners of any required size. The print quality on this material is of a very high resolution. With the solvent printing technology currently in use, there are no practical enlargement constraints, given the upper limits in the size of banners that are set by city and state ordinances in Tamil Nadu. And the luminosity of the colors is guaranteed not to fade even under harsh climatic conditions—though allowances are made for India’s subtropical climate. Olive Imaging—at the time a leading vinyl banner producer in Chennai—was providing a one-and-a-half year color guarantee, as compared to the United States, where this media is often guaranteed to last three years. Vinyl advertisements in Chennai first appeared in the mid-1990s but they were the exception. Most advertisements for commercial goods and services were in the standard medium of enamel paints on metal sheets. The scale and quality of the photographic reproduction on the vinyl banners, however, made them strikingly different from the metal billboards. At night the vinyl was brightly lit with a series of spotlights along the top edge, like a painting in a gallery. It was vinyl’s “illuminating property,” Mr. Muzzammil, the owner of Olive Imaging, emphasized (during our discussion), that accounted for its

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Figure C.2. Detail of a vinyl banner thirty meters (one hundred feet) in length advertising the film Jeep. The row of spotlights along the top edge of this banner, similar to the track lights in an art gallery, ensured that the image remained visible even at night. Anna Salai, January 2004.

popularity in the market: “When the light falls on this media it does not absorb, it bounces back. At night it can be lit up. Whereas, if you go for the handpainting, it is good in the afternoon time but at night it cannot be seen. The vinyl has a glossy look at night.” Despite the high price of electricity, advertisers of commercial goods and cinema alike have installed spotlights to illuminate the vinyl banners at night. On the dark city streets, dimly lit by the orange glow from energyconserving street lamps, the colorful cinema banners glitter like brightly colored gems. Advertised as a “wide format digital printing company,” Olive Imaging is a family enterprise much like the banner companies I had visited. The owners of the printing press, however, were relatively more affluent. Mr. Muzzammil, the individual who acquainted me with details about vinyl banners, was in his mid-twenties. Having been denied a visa to attend a management program in the United States, the young Muslim man had taken over the solvent printing section of the family business. The press was started thirtyfive years previously by his father and uncle as a screen-printing and offset

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printing enterprise. That section of the business was still in operation but at a different venue. Having diversified into the most advanced, commercially viable technology in solvent printing, their business was flourishing. Mr. Muzzammil maintained that his company was one of just two large solvent printing presses in the city that shared most of the large commissions from multinational corporations (MNCs). A majority of the vinyl banners for the cinema industry, he said, were printed by one of the several smaller companies in Chennai, operating a single solvent printing press. Located at the end of a narrow alley, in a busy commercial section of the city, Olive Imaging was housed on the top floor of a three storey residential building. The three or four large rooms I saw were separated by glass doors and were air-conditioned. I learned later that the solvent machine required a temperature-controlled environment, no higher than twenty-four degrees Celsius. The first room, a computer lab with rows of computers along three walls, was bustling with young people working at several hubs. The second, smaller room contained the press that was in operation printing bus panels. The third and largest space was under minor construction. I was informed that they were getting the space ready for a new printing machine that would be able to handle vinyl sheets twelve feet in width, unlike the present machine that could only print to a maximum width of five feet. The printing process was initiated when the press received a CD-ROM from the client containing the image to be printed. No design work was done at the press. For individuals or groups working on a low budget, such as college student associations, Mr. Muzzammil made his computers and scanners available so that they could design their banners in-house. Before the print work began assistants at the press used Photoshop software to analyze color values in the image (usually in a .tif format)—the percentage of cyan in a particular hue of green, for instance. This calculation was entered into the printing machine that had a touch screen where specifications of color and size could be modified. But even such sophisticated software had to be supplemented with the accuracy of the human eye because invariably there is a “matching problem,” confided Mr. Muzzammil, “so, I will have to arrive at the right color by trial and error. I will have to increase or lower the densities.” Another set of calculations, using the Prasad software application, was to divide the image into “tiles.” The dimensions of each “tile” in the grid depended on the size of the final image. “Since most banners are one hundred by twenty feet, fifty by twenty feet, ten by twenty feet, and since this machine prints a width of five feet, “ explained Mr. Muzzammil, “I will specify that the dimension of each tile will be sixty inches. So if the image must be a hun-

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dred feet long then it will create twenty tiles. The machine will print each of the tiles separately.” The next step was merely to press a button to start the printing. The solvent printing machine, about seven feet wide and four-and-a-half feet high, was similar in appearance and speed to a personal use printer used to make paper copies. Though noisy in operation, the machine was virtually selfsufficient. Only one individual was stationed in the room to ensure that the material was feeding in and out correctly and that the print quality was sharp. When the vinyl was loaded into the machine it passed over a heating plate, received the print (one color at a time) and emerged at the opposite end, instantly dry. An exhaust vent, placed directly over the machine, sucked up the hot air produced while the press was in operation. Other than cleaning the heating plate and the vents in the cooling fan at the end of each day, the machine required little maintenance. It could be run continuously for a six-month period, after which it was serviced and put back into operation. Every three months the printing jets had to be checked for build-up, but the machine automatically flushed out the old, dried ink at the end of a day’s operation and refueled with fresh inks. The inks were in eight large bottles—a light and a dark version each of cyan, magenta, yellow, and black (CMYK). Mr. Muzzammil assured me that “any color in the world can be reproduced with a combination of CMYK.” When necessary the printed vinyl sheets were transferred to the hot-air seaming machine. The vinyl was delivered in rolls that were three hundred feet in length so the acquisition of the new machine that could print to a width of twelve feet would further reduce the necessity for seaming. All banners, however, required some seaming in that they had to be provided with a hem or “pouch” along the edges. This, for reasons I shall explain, was necessary for the display of the banner—not that the seams were a problem, especially with the latest technique that used a hot air blower to expose the two edges of the material to very high temperatures causing the fibers to melt. A roller on wheels followed, sandwiching the pieces together to create a fusion. The joint, Mr. Muzzammil declared with evident pride, was invisible to the untrained eye and so strong that ripping the pieces apart would be like tearing one’s skin. With the printer’s task complete, the banner was delivered to the hoarding site, rented by the client, for display. Hoarding sites in the city were privately controlled and the individuals responsible for the rental of the sites also had in their employ a team of laborers who installed the banner. Unlike the framework of casuarina wood that was often built anew with each handpainted banner or cutout, these sites had metal frames of fixed dimensions—such as thirty by six

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meters or six by three meters (one hundred by twenty feet; twenty by ten feet). The laborers inserted hollow metal pipes into the pouches on the banner created by the seaming machine. With metal wire ropes they joined the stretched banner to the existing frame so that the surface was “drum-tight,” according to Mr. Muzzammil. If stones or other objects fell on the banner it would just bounce off. Like the handpainted banners, laborers work in the dead of night to change the vinyl banners along the main streets. The set of solvent printing machines cost hundreds of thousands of U.S. dollars to purchase and maintain (prices of new machines vary from $15,000 to $150,000). It is little wonder that my interviewee appeared intent on expending all his energies on cultivating clients who are “not concerned about the money but are concerned about quality and about achieving their objective.” This was an option only for highly stable and prosperous businesses. And Mr. Muzzammil emphasized that he relied on commissions from “MNCs”—multinational corporations—in the technology, telecom, and food industries such as JVC, Hutch, Tata-Indicom, Nestle, and Pepsi, to sustain his printing business. MNC clients used a large percentage of their advertising budget on billboards. At the time, Muzzammil’s biggest MNC clients had commissioned several banners that were being posted in the capital cities of all the southern states. The commissions were part of advertising campaigns that usually ran for several months. Thus, the banners changed every one or two months. Mr. Muzzammil admitted, however, that he was under considerable pressure to ensure that his printing technology met the MNC clients’ exacting standards because, as he put it, “[MNCs] are very particular about the image; if there is any variation in the color, they will not accept it.” Clients from the cinema industry, by comparison, were notoriously unreliable and, in Mr. Muzzammil’s opinion, totally lacking in discernment. “These cine people are superstitious,” he laughed, “if the film fails then they may not return. Also if the film is not successful then our payment is delayed.” I had heard such negative remarks from the banner artists as well— but the latter had even less recourse to recover their money and fewer options for the cine clients were often preferable to the clients from political groups. Mr. Muzzammil believed that, with the exception of well-known celebrities like Kamal Hasan who had acquired a reputation for discernment, “Cine people go blindly for rates; they don’t care about quality.” Such clients were unconcerned about nuances such as the color match between the design and the banner. Their only stipulation about the printed banner was that it “should be better than the painting.”

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The preceding discussion on vinyl banners may help to explain the rapidity with which it has replaced the handpainted banners. Of course, price is a major consideration. Although the cost of a vinyl banner is currently approximately double the price of handpainted banner, there is a greater likelihood of the prices falling than increasing. This is typical of most new media. Like the handpainted variety, vinyl banners are priced by the square foot. Though Mr. Muzzammil resisted quoting a price he charged clients, stating that it all depended on the volume of the order, he confided that in 2000 he charged Rs. 25 per square foot for the vinyl banners (more than three times the price of handpainted banners). During the next two years, the price had dropped to Rs. 20 per square foot and had continued to fall since then. He quickly added that prices were likely to bottom-out at some point, because the basic costs of materials and maintenance of the printing machines were not going to get much lower. The vinyl banner is economical in other ways, particularly in terms of the time spent. I was unable to interview a designer of the new cinema banners, but I presume that the banner designs are created by the companies that design the screen-printed film posters on paper. I had visited two such designers in the early 1990s. Like the banner artists, they cut and pasted film stills, added background, and designed text to create the poster. The only difference was that in the banner the photographic stills were enlarged and handpainted, whereas in the poster they were reproduced by a photo silk-screen process. For the vinyl banner, this design is composed digitally, copied onto a CD-ROM and delivered to the printer. Given the sophisticated software available, it is easy to imagine that, if necessary, the design can be produced in-house by the film production team or by the distribution company. Once the CD is delivered to the printer the banner can be produced in a matter of hours as opposed to the minimum of four to seven days required by the banner artists. And while the owners of handpainted banner companies noted instances when their crews had created banners overnight, this was rare and, they felt that the ultimate product was generally of substandard quality. Whereas, Mr. Muzzammil made certain I understood that, “If you give me the CD, overnight it is ready. If you give me an order for 10,000 square feet, the next day or in two days time it is ready.” And as Muzzammil rightly observed, clients from the cinema industry are always working within tight schedules. “[Clients] don’t think about whether we need to rest,” Muzzammil lamented. “Okay, today the CD is delivered. Day after tomorrow everything should be up. It is a commitment; otherwise the payments are slashed.” Thus, it is clear that the ability to produce large-scale

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advertisements overnight or in just a couple days makes the vinyl banner remarkably attractive to cine and other entertainment advertisers.

The Government’s Hand in Shifting the Media The new medium of vinyl has considerably muted criticism of cinema advertisements. This feature must surely be attractive to advertisers of the cinema since they have greater license to use titillating images for publicity without the danger of provoking protest. In January 2004 I saw an image on a vinyl banner that struck me as particularly erotic, but even after being on display for a few weeks it did not appear to arouse public criticism or censorship. The image, part of a hundred-feet long banner for the film Kovil (Temple), was twenty feet in height and depicted a close-up shot of the torsos of a man and woman in a tight embrace. The woman, facing the viewer, was scantily clad in a North Indian costume of ghagra-choli sans dupatta so that her body from below her breasts to her navel was bare. Eyes closed and neck arched, she was stretched against the body of the man who nestled his face in the curve of her shoulder. I am convinced that a banner painting of a similar image would have aroused vehement protests and censorship. What is the reason for this change in attitude? One could argue that Tamil society has grown more permissive over the past five years. I argue, instead, that the answer lies in the medium. In some respects the vinyl banners are no different from the handpainted variety. The sizes are the same and the compositions remain unchanged: dramatically enlarged close-ups of melodramatic facial expressions, juxtaposed with full-size figures in various poses, dancing, or embracing. Violence and sex remain the banner’s most powerful elements. However, now that cinema advertisements are of the identical medium as other commercial advertisements, they appear less intrusive, and perhaps more in tune with the city’s modernizing urban landscape. Persistent criticism of handpainted banners in the local news media patronized by middle-class consumers was, I believe, directed as much at the vibrant popular aesthetics that they so boldly flaunted and celebrated as at the eroticism or violence of the subject matter of particular banners. These critics were continuing a century-long tradition of invective about advertisements for the entertainment industry. Remarkably similar complaints were made in a distant location and society—fin de siecle Paris—that witnessed a renaissance of the poster advertisement. The rise of the poster in nineteenth-century Paris was made possible

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Figure C.3. The sizes of the vinyl banners were comparable to that of the handpainted variety, but the colors were not as vibrant. Compositional conventions from handpainted banners appear to have passed seamlessly into the design of vinyl banners. In the vinyl banners I sampled, however, I noted a greater tendency to replicate an image multiple times in a single banner. For instance, in this banner advertisement for the film Paramashivan, the close-up of the actor’s face was replicated on the portion of the banner outside the frame of the photograph. Anna Salai, August 2006.

by improvements in printing technology (specifically the development of color lithography), spaces for display (in the circular pasting boards that the city municipality made available along the boulevards) and a wealthy, progressive clientele. To publicize the cabaret, bal, and fête, the entertainment establishments of Montmartre commissioned artists to design posters. The most prolific of these artists, Jules Cheret (1836–1932), became so well renowned that the release of each new poster that he designed was eagerly anticipated and discussed by the public. Contemporary critics in Europe, while they acknowledged that the poster was a sign of the nation’s economic vitality, inveighed against every aspect of the medium.3 They criticized the poster’s intrusive presence in the urban landscape, the barrage of unsolicited messages it assaulted the public with and the poster’s manipulation of the susceptibility of crowds who were seduced by the “blasts” of color and sensationalist subject matter. The poster, these critics held, by appealing to viewers’ basest senses with its decadent imagery, was responsible for evoking and increasing the sensual excesses of the modern urban environment.

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Censorship is not a new phenomenon for banner artists. Yet some element of creative freedom in advertising is critical to a vibrant private-sector economy. Thus, while the Tamil Nadu and Chennai city governments may have moved to regulate the handpainted banner content, they could—until the appearance of vinyl on the scene—only do so within certain bounds. The city government’s strict enforcement of the latest legislation against the banner and cutout medium since 2000 has devastated the industry. In 2000 the city put out a legislation banning cutouts; in 2003 all wall paintings were banned and, while banners were not explicitly prohibited, artists had to contend with numerous obstacles and restrictions to assemble their commissions. The political cutout, always a controversial medium, became irrevocably associated with the depth of corruption uncovered in Jayalalitha’s administration, her conspicuous consumption, and authoritarianism. This association bolstered prior complaints, which had characterized the cutout as a public hazard and a visual blight. This led to the legislation by the Tamil Nadu government, in 2000, banning the display cutouts altogether. The banner too, according to J. P. Krishna, by its close association with the “illegal” cutout, now signals the wasteful expenditures of political groups during elections. A third reason for the shift to vinyl is, I believe, the most inimical to the medium of the handpainted banner and cutout. The handpainted banner, with its brilliant colors, the variations in the quality of its mimesis, its weathering by storms or sunlight, and its untidy framework of casuarina poles knotted with ropes, possesses the stamp of a “handicraft” or indigenously produced good. By comparison, the vinyl banner displays the sleek internationalism of a mass-produced item. Its clean lines and synthetic surfaces exude an aura of modernity. The new medium aligns cinema with financial corporations, technology industries, and communication networks that are the symbols of twenty-first-century power and prestige. However, there are glimpses of the foreboding aspects of modernization in the chemical properties of vinyl. As Mr. Muzzammil indicated, the fabric weathers well: it is water-resistant and extremely strong; flying debris will not tear it. The obvious question is: How can this durable material be properly disposed? Burning vinyl creates a public health hazard; it produces a colorless toxic gas, vinyl chloride (CH2CHCl) (which is also used in the production of polyvinyl chloride [PVC] and other commercially important polymers).4 In the past fifty years, the shift from degradable materials to synthetic materials has precipitated enormous changes in India’s environment. Street vendors, who only a decade ago served tea and coffee in unglazed terra-cotta cups

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that the customer broke after drinking the beverage, now dispense their brews in nondegradable plastic foam cups. Store owners who, not long ago wrapped purchases in brown paper or recycled newspaper bags, now drop those products into thin plastic bags and hand them to the customer. In most of India, services that remove and properly dispose or recycle these plastics have not kept pace with their use. And for that reason, these materials have, in a remarkably short time, become a ubiquitous element of Indian urban and rural landscapes. Further research on the vinyl banners should attempt to document the way this plastic—which does not chemically break down easily or safely—is being disposed of, recycled, or reused.

Mutations in Media and Technology Shifts in media—probably more gradual, but arguably as radical as the shift from handpainted banners to a more mechanized form—occurred within the context of nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century visual art production in India. The caste ancestors of artists in the banner community were buffeted by sweeping changes in demand, state support, and state regulation of their artistry. The media, of course, were very different: stone carving, jewelry crafting, and carpentry (which in itself is testimony to the changes these artists endured, and for some of them, their ability to adapt). The medium of cinema—along with other brash new media of mechanical reproduction, including photography and chromolithography—displaced and destroyed numerous artistic traditions from theater to painting. Scholars who have studied the effect of these new media on the development of Indian art indicate that the process began in the late eighteenth century with a transition in major patronage for the arts from the courts of the Mughal and regional Hindu and Muslim rulers to the British and European colonizers. Artists, who over a couple of centuries had honed to exquisite perfection the wondrous art of miniature painting, had to retrain themselves to satisfy the needs of the new clientele. The indigenous “Company School” evolved to serve the administrative and tourist aspirations of the colonial powers in India. These painters were primarily watercolorists trained in single-point perspective and the depiction light and shade by Western artists with the East India Company. The task of the native painters was to create a comprehensive visual documentation of the country from topographical, architectural and archaeological drawings to flora, fauna, and ethnic groups.5 Their handpainted works preceded and later complemented the extensive photographic documentation of similar subjects undertaken by Westerners.

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The artistic heritage of banner and cutout imagery, however, dates from the second half of the nineteenth century. By this time the Company School painters were gradually being displaced by a host of mechanically reproduced forms of visual art. This spiral of media and technology joined forces with rapidly changing social conditions among the large urban populations of the colonial port cities of Madras, Calcutta, and Bombay. Most members of this population participated, at varying levels of involvement, in an international network of finance and politics. It was primarily the lower- and middleincome members of this globally connected, indigenous urban population that were the main clients and consumers of the new art created with the camera, the cinematograph or the printing press. As each of these new technological or scientific inventions emerged in the European and North American metropolitan centers, it became available in India within the space of a few months. This was the case with cinema (as noted in chapter 3) as also with photography that arrived in India in 1840, a few months after the new technology was demonstrated in Europe. Photography was immediately put to commercial use by Western practitioners in Calcutta.6 A decade later several Indian-run photo studios were in operation in Bombay and Calcutta and by the 1880s there were hundreds of such establishments throughout the subcontinent. Many of these photo studios and small printing presses were run by professionally trained artists, newly graduated from the government art schools established by the British in the metropolitan centers of the empire. Photography, and other forms of printing technologies (including lithography and wood and metal engraving) practiced by the art school graduates, gradually terminated the professional practice of the Company School painters.7 The different printing technologies initially coexisted with a variety of regional painting styles in watercolor, oils, gouache, and tempera. Even the photo studios and printing presses rarely put out “pure” prints; more often than not they were hand-colored and/or painted in varying degrees of skill and haste. The continually improving printing technology, however, gradually captured the market from the painter groups and made their skills redundant. Tapati Guha-Thakurta narrates the plight of one such group of painters— the Kalighat patuas, bazaar artists of Calcutta, who, during the first half of the nineteenth century, churned out a plentiful supply of images by shifting media from ornamental narrative scroll painting in gouache and tempera on cloth to single frame images painted with quick deft strokes in watercolor on paper against blank backgrounds. The satirical subject matter of this bazaar painting, based on current events and social pretensions, held wide appeal for

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middle- and lower-class groups. But by the 1860s and 1870s the Kalighat patuas began to loose their hold on the market, unable to match the competition from hand-colored lithographs of the same subject matter and in the same style that could be made available faster and cheaper though with some loss of nuance in the colors and with heavier outlines.8 Guha-Thakurta and Partha Mitter have each surveyed the emergence, mutations, and disappearance of several such enterprising artists groups in India between the 1850s through the 1920s. By tapping into and molding the aspirations of a population under colonial rule these artist groups collectively set a “new model of urban commercial art.”9 Their style was “modern” in that it adapted the artistic conventions of the Western tradition to Indian subject matter. For their indigenous clientele artists created portraits, social satire, magazine, and book illustrations and religious and mythological images. They freely mixed media—paint and print—as it proved economically expedient. Though the subjects remained standard the media changed continually, putting artist groups out of business or forcing them to retrain. Thus, in the late 1880s chromolithography and oleography subsumed lithography, wood, and metal engraving. The new medium altered the colors, making them more vivid and synthetic, the texture glossy, and the outlines more heavily defined. With the introduction of chromolithography and oleography, the poster swept onto the visual art scene in India. Unlike the entertainment poster that was popular around the same time in Paris, in India it was the religious poster depicting popular Hindu gods that captured the market. However, in both contexts the poster is associated with celebrated artists. In Paris, the names of Cheret and Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec (1864–1901) are synonymous with the entertainment poster. In India, the poster illustrations of deities or mythological episodes from the Hindu epics the Ramayana, Mahabharata, and the Puranas (a compilation of sacred Hindu texts composed in the first millennium CE) will always evoke the name of Raja Ravi Varma (1848–1906—introduced in chapters 1 and 4). Varma’s influence in these areas is far-reaching because he took the important step of using oleography to create inexpensive reproductions of the oil paintings he created for elite clients. The quality of Varma’s depictions of familiar subject matter, far superior in rendition and emotional content to most of his contemporaries, captured the indigenous market for such images that had been developed by the artist groups mentioned previously. Well before his exploration with print media, Ravi Varma acquired notoriety for his dexterity with the medium of oil painting in which he was reputedly self-taught. And, as the medium was still new to artists in India, Varma’s level of skill in capturing mimetic effects possible in oils, attracted a

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lucrative clientele among the elite of India, the colonial administrators, and the Indian nobility. Foremost among the latter were the princely states of Travencore (Varma’s native state), Mysore, and Baroda. To undertake his numerous commissions, Varma traveled throughout India and was for a time based in Bombay. This exposure was important in that it encouraged Varma to evolve a national or pan-Indian ideal for the portraits of men and women he depicted to visualize stories in the Hindu epics and mythology. And he witnessed firsthand the changes that new inventions in printing were affecting upon the professional practice of painters. Ravi Varma’s exploration of oleography was brief and financially unprofitable. In 1892 he purchased a press located in Girgaum on the outskirts of Bombay. The venture was a collaboration with his brother and professional partner, Raja Varma, and two German technicians. The Ravi Varma Fine Art Lithographic Press began operation in 1894 and its products were immediately in high demand. But the Varma brothers were unable to invest adequate time in the operation—they continued to undertake the numerous painting commissions that came their way. The business failed and the press was sold in 1903.10 However brief, this venture had a marked effect on the industry. Consumer demand for religious and mythological posters was proven indisputably to other artist-entrepreneurs. This spurred the establishment of numerous artisan presses producing chromolithographs of Hindu deities setting the foundation of a thriving business that continues unabated into the twenty-first century. In fact, one could justifiably argue that that the pervasiveness and popularity of the religious poster today even supersedes cinema. We see Ravi Varma’s pivotal role in setting the stylistic foundation of a pan-Indian popular visual culture of which banners and cutouts are one offshoot. Oleographic reproductions stylistically altered Varma’s oil paintings, erasing nuances of light and shade present in the originals and intensifying color contrasts. Varma himself, when creating prints of his paintings of Hindu deities, reduced the naturalism of the forms and composition and reintroduced standard iconographic conventions expressly to suit the tastes and expectations of a mass audience. These changes became more pronounced as other presses and designers joined the trade. Now, approximately a century after Varma’s press began operation, contemporary prints of deities have completely reversed the mimetic effects of oil painting. The colors are slightly modulated to indicate curvature and depth, but there is no concession to light and shade whatsoever. Instead, lines are predominant, undulating with equal emphasis around the main figures as well as the myriad ornamental details of the background. The effect is that of a cutout or collaged

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image, an impression that is enhanced by the fact that the artist or designer has devoted only minimal attention to integrating the figure with the setting. These printed posters of religious icons are fantastic and otherworldly but at the same time modern and synthetic because they possess a vibrancy of color that is impossible to achieve with traditional powder colors or vegetable dyes. In this synoptic narrative of the mutations of artistic traditions from the mid-nineteenth century to the present, we see the importance of new technologies and patronage in determining which modes of art production flourish or diminish. It is important to keep in mind, however, that new technologies are embraced only when they satisfy social needs. In a study of vision machines that proliferated in Europe in the nineteenth century— panoramas, dioramas, magic lanterns, kaleidoscopes, zoetropes, phenakistiscopes, stereoscopes, photography, and cinema—Jonathan Crary found that new technologies did not take hold simply by virtue of being available. Consumers moved from one technological device to another when it fulfilled certain needs. For the European public in the nineteenth century the need was for spectacular effects that were “phantasmagoric.”11 When the mechanical operation of a particular device became too evident, it was abandoned in favor of one that conjured up visual images with greater magic. This need of European audiences was a symptom of modernity shared by metropolitan dwellers everywhere. In the Indian context, D. G. Phalke (introduced in chapter 3 as a pioneering figure of Indian cinema) moved from being a professional photographer to taking on the cinematograph machine not merely because of the enhanced mimetic effects possible in cinema. Rather, for Phalke and his enthusiastic audiences, cinema allowed “a new creative intervention that transcends mimesis, opening up a new space of magical conjunctions of the sort which Phalke was to explore in his films from 1913 onwards.”12 Not coincidently, Phalke was a self-taught magician, an interest he shared with another famous pioneer of cinema, George Melies.

Epilogue to an Arts Industry Ongoing mutations in banner art are, to some extent, a result of the handpainted banner’s association with the inherent volatility of the entertainment cinema industry. From its inception, cinema has been emblematic of technological and social change. The rapid evolution of sophisticated visual effects, progress in musical style and the moral evolution in storylines share in, and contribute to, this aura of modernity. And film magazines and film music industries participate in that which Arjun Appadurai terms a “mediascape,” a flow of aural and visual resources between distant and disparate

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locations globe.13 To continue to wield a far-reaching social influence and to be economically viable entertainment cinema and its satellite industries must remain constantly alert to the latest innovations of media, technique, and imagery. Affordability of digital technology in the twenty-first century has finally displaced handpainted banners. This was something the half-tone photo printing technology was unable to do. The screen-printed cinema poster on paper could not match banners in color or size. When video projection becomes affordable, I am certain that vinyl banners will be replaced by video panels, as has happened in Times Square, where most of the billboards are video projections. Cinema advertisers in India are well aware of the power of such ambient video. Since the late 1980s one of the mediums for advertising cinema was that of small television monitors installed in busy public spaces such as railway stations. It appears that banner artists have been undone by the very skill that they prized so highly and trained for so assiduously. Their impressive ability to quickly create mimetic effects on a large surface can now be done by the machine, more effectively, consistently and rapidly than even the most skilled artist practitioner. This was at the heart of the dejection among father and son at the J. P. Krishna Arts Company. Their special abilities and status as artists no longer had validity. They had been rendered socially useless. All artists will rail against such a characterization but the realm of fine art has developed a sophisticated philosophy that turns such marginalization to their advantage. Banner artists, however, have never perceived their activity as “art for art’s sake,” even while acknowledging the special nature of their artistic talent. To exist, their art relies on the approbation of their audience and their clients. “What are the alternatives for banner artists, the aspiring young men who travel to the city from rural areas of Tamil Nadu? How will they find creative outlets for their artistic skill?” I asked J. P. Krishna. Will they take to painting signboards for shops? Could company owners liaison with architects to secure mural commissions for the interiors of office and apartment complexes? What about creating reproductions in oils of well-known paintings? Will they reinvent themselves as still photographers, graphic designers or magazine illustrators? All of these professions need access to training and social networks that are unavailable to the majority of banner artists, with the exception of the sons of company owners. Some of these individuals had transitioned to advertising and still photography even while the banner business was in its heyday in the 1990s.

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Figure C.4. In tandem with the scholarly interest in Indian cinema, contemporary Indian and Western fine artists and gallery owners have commissioned banner artists to paint for them. The staff cafeteria in The Park, a boutique hotel based on the theme of Indian cinema, is decorated with a series of oil paintings by former banner painters. The painting featured here depicts the great heroes of Tamil cinema including Shivaji Ganesan, MGR and Rajnikanth. Nungambakkam High Road, June 2005.

The majority of artists are without such options. “All artists are sitting still,” said J. P. Krishna, “they have no other training.” Apprenticeship in a banner company teaches artists to specialize in letter painting, carpentry, and figure painting, rather than to diversify their skills. And since artists are trained from a young age, many of them receive an abbreviated school education. To apply their skills, the division of labor and network of contacts provided by a banner company is essential to artists. They require a space to work, access to materials and equipment, and the labor of other related groups such as carpenters to complete the work. Some artists have tried to find employment painting sets for the cinema but that trade has its own cadre of professionals and besides, as J. P. Krishna explained, “our training is in the painting of very large figurative subjects; painting cinema sets does not require this skill.” Unwilling to give up their vocation, aware that they possess a unique gift, skills that they have worked hard to develop, artists are waiting for the tide

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of technology to return to painting. At present this appears highly unlikely but not impossible. Vinyl banners still cannot match the spectacular effects and displays of extraordinary artistic prowess evident in the handpainted banners. As my interview with him drew to a close J. P. Krishna said, “but we have faith that the interest in the drawn image will never completely die out so we are waiting for the public’s interest in our profession to return.” His faith was based on his experience of such a reversal occurring in Western countries: “Many people travel from the West to interview us and take films of us working. They have even given us commissions to make banners, big size banners. There [in Western countries] they can create all manner of digital prints so now they treat handpainted images as something special. They want only handpainted images; they are tired of seeing digital printing.” In 2003 the Belgian government had commissioned J. P. Krishna to create a series of fifty paintings, each twenty feet in height and ten to fifteen feet in width. The paintings were portraits of fifty Belgian celebrities arranged in a narrative sequence and were installed in the interior of a large bus terminus in Brussels. “The faces have a lot of expression, some eyes are open wide; others are filled with tears; the mouths are open as if they are talking,” said J. P. Krishna, who had journeyed with his son to Brussels to execute the work. Faced with an unappreciative public and clientele in his homeland, J. P. Krishna said despondently, “Now we sit here hoping to get commissions from those Western sources.” Will patrons in India follow the example of their Western counterparts and prize the handpainted over the machine-made? And will banner artists be able to survive until such a transition occurs if at all? The research of Mitter and Pinney on artistic practices in India during the late nineteenth and the late twentieth centuries, respectively, found instances where painters managed to hold their own in the face of new technology. “Whereas in the West, photography took away the livelihood of painters,” Mitter claims, “the very opposite happened in India. It was oil portraitists who posed a threat to photographers in the last century.”14 Of course, photography and other forms of printing technology finally did succeed in diminishing the economic prosperity of painters. Nevertheless, the status of the painter remained higher than that of photographer. Based on the journal entries of Raja Varma (Ravi Varma’s brother), Mitter surmises that the court photographer to the Nizam of Hyderabad, Deen Dayal, was deeply envious of the popularity and prestige of Ravi Varma when he arrived to paint the royal portrait.15 In India the medium of photography has remained closely entwined with painting. Practices of retouching and over-painting supplement the photograph in both the West and in India. In the latter context, however, the

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consumer demand for the inclusion of painted details in their photographs is such that every large photo studio has several painters in its employ.16 Stylistically too, photographs mimic the painted image. Studying photographs from the 1990s that use montage, multiple exposures and recent technical innovations such as color composite printing, Pinney demonstrates the overlap between these photographic compositions and the stylistic features in printed posters of deities (that are reproduced from paintings).17 Pinney cites another example of competition between media that is instructive to this discussion on changes in technology. Video, when it was first adopted on a wide scale in India in the late 1980s, seemed poised to completely wipe out the art enterprise of photo-studio operators. Despite video’s compelling visual quality and its economic equivalence with photography, by the mid-1990s most consumers had reverted to photography. This was because, in order to be viewed, video was dependent on equipment that was not readily affordable to the clientele that patronized the photo studios. When available, the viewing equipment was much more cumbersome than simply opening an album. Besides, viewing video is a more linear and rigid process than flipping through photographs. And since most customers of photo studios prefer the manipulated image to straight photography, but until the digital capabilities to manipulate the video image become readily accessible, alteration of the photographic image through collage and composite imaging remains a much simpler process.18 Lessons for the Study of Contemporary Art Art historians venture cautiously into uncharted aspects of contemporary art with an awareness that what appears powerfully pertinent in the present era could appear frivolous and incidental in future perspectives. In such calculations art critics—even seemingly the most perceptive and respected of their age—have erred repeatedly. Charles Baudelaire overlooked the skill of his close friend Edouard Manet and, instead, chose to write about the art of Constantin Guys. Guys, Baudelaire was convinced, was the artist most representative of his age and the phenomenon of modernity in France about which Baudelaire wrote so eloquently. As art historians later determined, it was Manet’s work that jumpstarted the first modernist artistic movement that came to be known as Impressionism and that influenced the development of modern art not just in Europe but in countries throughout the globe. In this picture, Guys is relegated to the margins and may not have maintained any position in the historical record were he not the subject of Baudelaire’s writing.

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Nearly every cultural phenomenon undergoes mutation, however imperceptibly. The historical perception of these phenomena often depend on their antecedents—which give them meaning and direction. Whereas, caught in the web of contemporary experience, the rapid mutation of these phenomena may outstrip the researcher’s attempt to characterize and explain them. When I began my field research, banners and cutouts were a well-established art form with trained practitioners competing for orders and establishing new standards of excellence. While photographic technology was used, it was subordinated to the skills of the draughtsman, letter painter, and artist. The medium was paint on canvas—and despite the evident competition with television and screen-printed paper posters, artists were confident that the booming cinema industry would ensure them a permanent livelihood. How will the new medium of solvent printed vinyl affect how we think and write about banner art? Is the half-century-long tradition of handpainted banners and cutouts just one in a series of mutations of cinematic and political culture? These questions did not inform my study of banner art when I initiated the research. Rather, I was initially motivated to bring attention to a thriving, powerful form of public visual art. My agenda was to establish that hybridization and assimilation of global sources by indigenous artists is both a strategy of cultural and economic survival as well as a mode of creative endeavor. But the very process of constant mutation that was foundational to the artistic process I describe here also subsumed my object of study. And the book’s purpose has inadvertently become a historical documentation of a mode of art production that has disappeared as perceptions of cinema and society have shifted. Of what purpose is the historical documentation and interpretation of banner art undertaken in this book? Though perspectives on banner art will surely change as other scholars research this subject, the information conveyed here preserves brief moments of this ephemeral, site-specific art, enabling its inclusion in the discourse on visual culture of cinema and politics in South India. Perhaps Salman Rushdie expresses the function of such undertakings best. Ruminating on the Indian culinary tradition of pickling, he observes: “[T]o pickle is to give immortality, after all: fish, vegetables, fruit hang embalmed in spice-and-vinegar; a certain alteration, a slight intensification of taste, is a small matter, surely? The art is to change the flavour in degree, but not in kind; and above all . . . to give it shape and form—that is to say, meaning.”19

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Notes 1. Portions of this chapter were originally published in Preminda Jacob, “Tamil Cinema in the Public Sphere: The Evolving Art of Banner Advertisements in Chennai,” in Tamil Cinema: The Cultural Politics of India’s Other Film Industry, ed. Selvaraj Velayutham (London: Routledge, 2008), 96–108. 2. For a discussion of the transition to vinyl banners in the Mumbai film industry, see Christopher Pinney, “Notes on the Epidemiology of Allure,” in Living Pictures: Perspectives on the Film Poster in India, ed. David Blamey and Robert d’Souza (London: Open Editions, 2005), 45–54.

3. Marcus Verhagen, “The Poster in Fin-de-Siecle Paris: That Mobile and Degenerate Art,” in Cinema and the Invention of Modern Life, ed. Leo Charney and Vanessa R. Schwartz (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), 103–29. 4. Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry, Toxicological Profile for Vinyl Chloride: Draft for Public Comment, September 2004, available in .pdf format from www.atsdr.cdc.gov/toxprofiles/tp20.html#bookmark10, accessed on January 20, 2006. 5. Mitter, Art and Nationalism in Colonial India, 1850–1922, 14 6. Pinney, Camera Indica, 17. 7. Guha-Thakurta, The Making of a New “Indian” Art, 12. 8. Guha-Thakurta, The Making of a New “Indian” Art, 24. 9. Guha-Thakurta, The Making of a New “Indian” Art, 35. 10. Mitter, Art and Nationalism in Colonial India, 213. 11. Jonathan Crary, Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1992), 132–33. See also Mitter, Art and Nationalism in Colonial India, 17. According to this author, though the printing press and engraving arrived in India in sixteenth century, the technology of printing only took hold of art production in nineteenth century. 12. Pinney, Camera Indica, 93. 13. Arjun Appadurai, Modernity at Large, 31. 14. Mitter, Art and Nationalism in Colonial India, 17. 15. Mitter, Art and Nationalism in Colonial India, 198. 16. Pinney, Camera Indica, 139. 17. Pinney, Camera Indica, 116–18. 18. Pinney, Camera Indica, 122. Likewise, Crary, Techniques of the Observer, 133, attributes the obsolescence of the stereoscope in Europe to the cumbersome nature of the equipment. 19. Salman Rushdie, Midnight’s Children (New York: Penguin, 1991, first published in 1980), 461.



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Index

aaruvam (aptitude), 43–45 Aayirathil Oruvan, 172 abhinaya, 137 Acharis, 41–43 actors/actresses: close-up device on, 124, 126–27, 136, 149n29, 267; commodified, 120–21; morality and, 209; personal lives of, publicity on, 120, 187, 188–91, 190 ADMK. See Annadurai Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam advertising: art industry and, 273–78; art v., 54; banner content in, 11, 67–70, 76, 130, 266; case studies in, 132–47, 137; communicative properties of, 128–32; display of, 4; fashion used in, 134, 137–40; function of, 128; “hook” message in, 130; political, 5, 29, 59, 65, 77; poster, 266–68; spectacular, 49, 56–59; technology and, 269–73; types of, 56–57; word of mouth, 80n12. See also banner(s); banners/cutouts; case studies; cutouts; publicity

aesthetics, 11, 15, 20, 33; artist identity and, 39; film producers’ paradigm of, 74; Rasasutra, 121, 122–23, 136; realism, 105, 106; theory of functional, 53–54, 55–56 Agni Alaigal, 37 AIADMK. See All India Anna Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam All India Anna Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (AIADMK), 172, 174, 175–76, 199, 202; Jayaram’s birthday and, 185, 199; MGR temple erected by, 190 All-India Films, 88 Ananda Vikatan, 46, 48 angry hero type, 101, 114n54 Annadurai, C. N., 94, 99, 161, 162–64, 189, 205, 205; imitation of, 204; Karunanidhi and, 163, 165, 167–70, 204 Annadurai Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (ADMK), 171–72, 173 Annakkili, 99 Anna Salai, 5, 8, 57 Appadurai, Arjun, 14

291

292



Index

apprentices, 23, 28–29, 40 aptitude, 43–45 Apu Trilogy, 105 Arangetram, 100 Argentina, Peronism in, 200–201 art, 3–7, 4, 17n4, 20, 53; commercial, 54, 64, 274; contemporary, study of, 277–78; education, 39; industry of, epilogue to, 273–78; social history of, 14; technology/tradition in, 269–73 art cinema. See experimental cinema Arthashastra, 187 art history, 4, 14, 20, 53–54 artisans, artists v., 38–39 artistic heritage, 40, 270 artistic identity, 37–43; communal, 40–43 artistry: appreciation of, 60–61, 77–78; audience survey and, 77–78; production v., 63, 64, 64 artists: artisans v., 38–39; audience and, 71–73, 77–78; banner, alternatives for, 274, 275, 275; caste of, 41–43; class of, 71; displacement of, 269–73; financiers and, relations between, 59–66; gender and, 22; “job,” 22, 33; lead, 25; master, 26, 34–35, 44–45; physicians v., 39; quality invested in by, 71–72, 78–79; recognition of, 77–78; salaries of, 31, 51n9; senior, 26–27; signature of, 39–40, 73; tradition and, 269–73 Aryans, 156, 166, 179n3 asceticism, 196, 202 attendance, film, 75, 131, 237; fan-club group, 237 attire: celebrity, 138–40; politician, 213, 214 audiences: banners/cutouts, 66–73; celebrities pressured by, 236; communicating with, 71–73; devotional response of, 84, 126; low-

income, 74; narratives submitted by, 235; participation of, 230–32; preferences of, 66; producer views v. actual perceptions of, 73–79; ratio of theaters to, 81–82, 110n2; rural v. urban, 67–68, 74; survey of, 73–79; Tamil, 88. See also spectatorship AVM Studios, 26, 92 Avvaiyar, 91–92 Azmi, Shabana, 106 Baba, 176–77 Bachchan, Amitabh, 27, 101, 178 backward caste, 42 Bailey, F. G., 195 Baker, Christopher, 16 banner(s): artists, alternatives for, 274, 275, 275; businesses, 21–22, 41, 63–64, 64, 257–78; captions in, 141–42; composition in, 12, 24, 33, 37, 46, 47, 131, 135; content of, 11, 67–70, 76, 130, 266; DMK, 169; evolution of, 43–49; facial expression in, 134, 136; fashion used in, 134, 137–40; imagery in, 24, 68, 69–71, 72, 73, 109, 142–47, 145, 270; industry, Chennai’s, 19–52, 66, 257–78; layout of, 24–25, 36, 133–35; location of, 57–58, 79n4; production process beginning of, 24–26; recycled, 53; signature on, 39–40, 73; text-image relationship in, 140–42; transparency/slide projection onto, 25, 26, 45; video projected, 274; vinyl, solventprinted, 13, 257–58, 260–66, 261, 268; violence in, 67, 70. See also case studies; specific films banners/cutouts, 2, 6, 137, 139; as art, 3–7, 17n4; audiences of, 66–73; censorship of, 9, 49, 73, 73, 140; clientele, 56–59, 60, 65, 262, 264; colors in, 26, 33, 34, 51n11, 76–77;

Index

communication properties in, 128–32, 129; conventions of, visual, 132–47; distracting quality of, 130; effectiveness of, 57, 58–59, 77, 128; ephemerality of, 5, 20; financing of, 56, 59–66; handpainted, 26–28, 27, 57, 135, 257, 258–60, 276; installation of, 29–31, 32, 54, 130, 263–64; juxtaposition of, 128; painting of, 26–28; preservation/records of, 40, 51n19; pricing of, 62, 265; production of, 4, 11, 12, 23, 24–28, 63–64, 64; protests against, 49; regulations on, 68–69, 266, 268; size/scale of, 6, 24, 28, 34, 37, 59, 76, 128, 267, 267. See also advertising; case studies; cutouts; specific films Barnouw, Erik, 15 Barthes, Roland, 128 base coat, 34 Bate, Bernard, 196, 240 Beckenbridge, Carol, 14 Becker, Howard, 11, 53–54, 55–56 Benegal, Shyam, 106 Bengal, 104 Bhakta Cheta, 68 bhakti, 84, 126, 159, 196, 242 Bharatanatyam, 143 Bharati, Subramania, 158, 212 Bharatidasan, 158 Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), 49, 195 Bhaskaran, Theodore, 15, 165 bhav, 124 Bhramarishi Vishwamitra, 188–89 Bhuvan Shome, 105 billboards, 264 BJP. See Bharatiya Janata Party black money, 91 Bollywood, 87, 148n9 Bollywood Calling, 148n9 Bombay. See Mumbai



293

Brahmins, 9, 178, 221n86; domination by, British rule and, 156–57, 159–60; hegemony of, 155; Viswakarma, 42 British rule, 83; artistic traditions and, 269–70; Brahmin domination in, 156–57, 159–60 brushes, 28 Bush, George H. W., 71 businesses, banner, 21–22, 63–64, 64; contemporary, 257–78; names of, 21; religion and, 41 captions, 141–42 case studies: Meeshaikkaran advertisement, 132, 133–42, 137; Vijayanti I.P.S. advertisement, 132–33, 142–47, 145 caste, 83, 158, 161, 221n86; artists, 41–43; backward, 42; British rule and, 155–57; non-Brahmin, 3, 16, 156, 160; religion and, 49, 51n23. See also Brahmins; class, social Cauvery River, irrigation waters dispute concerning, 153, 176 celebrities: absent presence of, 229; attire of, 138–40; cinematography devices in production of, 124–28; deification of, 172–76, 185–87, 186, 207–17; fans of, gender and, 236, 254n25; idealization of, 35–36; image, 118, 119–20, 131, 185–87, 186, 189, 208–9; politician, 95, 95–98, 170–72, 189, 190; pressure on, audience, 236; resemblance/likeness of, capturing, 35, 63; temples to, 186, 186, 190; -to-deity transformation, 172–76, 207–17. See also film stars censorship: attire, 140; banners/cutouts, 9, 49, 73, 73, 140; DMK avoidance of, 163; film, 90. See also regulations Chakravarty, Sumita, 15 Chandralekha, 93

294



Index

character, film star, 118, 119 charisma: kingship and, 203–7; leadership, 191–96, 208; Weber’s theory of, 191–92, 204 charity, politicians’, 198–201 Chathriyan, 70, 129, 141, 143 Chatterjee, Margaret, 251–52 Chennai: banner industry in, 19–52, 66, 257–78; renaming of, 16n1; theater in, first, 83; visual culture in contemporary/future, 257–78 Cheret, Jules, 267, 271 chief ministers (Tamil Nadu), 2, 2, 5, 17n10, 103, 210. See also Jayaram, Jayalalitha Chola dynasty, 197, 206 Christ, 251–52 Christian missionaries. See missionaries, Christian cinema, Indian, 81; Dravidian movement use of, 154, 162, 163–64, 165, 168, 170–79, 196; entertainment, 69, 70, 75, 91, 107–10, 118, 121–28, 142; experimental, 104–5; fan subculture for, 233–42; genres of, 104–10; hybridization of Western with, 121; middle, 104, 105–7; postindependence era, 89–98; preindependence era, 82–89; regional, history of, 87–89; satire on, 149n9; spectatorship theories and, 228–33; suspense in Western v., 131; Tamil, post-independence, 91–95; Tamil, pre-independence, 86; traditional bases of, 121–24; worship in context of, 228. See also advertising; banners/cutouts; Tamil cinema cinema-politics nexus, 1–3, 7–10, 15–16, 92, 155; crowds and, 240–42; Karunanidhi’s, 165–70. See also Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam; Dravidian movement

cinematography, 124–28; close-up device in, 124, 126–27, 136, 149n29; iconic stasis device in, 126, 128, 231; tableau device in, 124, 128 civil liberties, 86 civil war, Sri Lanka, 174 class, social, 74, 201; artists’, 71; banner content and, 67–70; film genres and, 104; middle, 106; working, 67–68, 106, 236, 238 clientele, banner/cutout, 56–59, 60, 65, 264; MNCs as, 262, 264; new generation of, 60; politican, 65 close-up, 124, 126–27, 136, 149n29, 267 collaboration, 35 colors, 26, 33, 34, 51n11, 76–77; class and, 67; cool v. bright, 67; Jayaram’s pre/post-election, 216; politician’s attire, 213, 214; solvent printing, 263 commercial art, 54, 64, 274 communal identity, 40–43 communication, 71–73; advertising through properties of, 128–32; fashion used for, 134, 137–40 composition, banner, 12, 24, 33, 37, 46, 47, 131, 135 conflict, painters-financiers compromise and, 59–66 Congress Party, 3, 101–2, 160–61, 163, 241 contemporary art, 277–78 content: banner, 11, 67–70, 76, 130, 266; class and, 67–70; film, 187 conventions, visual: banners/cutouts, 132–47; hearts, red, 141; mustache, 141 corruption, DMK, 175, 268 creativity, 38 crowds, 238–42; cinematic politics and, 240–42; theories about, 238–40 cult films, 231

Index

cults, politician, 170–72 culture: contemporary art and, 278; fan sub-, 233–42; “language” of, 189; visual, 13–16, 48–50, 257–58 cutouts, 102, 139; height of, 30, 30, 59, 68–69; plywood, 109; politician, 12, 30, 154–55, 185–87, 209, 210–11, 211, 214, 215, 268; production process of, beginning, 24–26; scaffolding for, 29, 30; sideview of, 30. See also banners/cutouts dance, 108; drama, 143 darshan, 13, 190, 190; audience prostration as, 251; extra-theater, 228–29; fan subculture and, 233–42; Hinduism and, 227, 251; Hollywood cult films and, 231; interactive gaze of, 246–50; Jayaram’s, 247; MGR, 223–27, 225, 226, 249, 250; populism and, 227; theater context for, 228; visual hybridity/fluidity in, 250–52; Western gaze compared to, 242–46; Western v. Hindu icons in, 251 Deewar, 101 deification: celebrity, 172–76, 185–87, 186, 207–17; Jayaram’s, 185, 186, 206–7, 213–17; MGR, 190; political leaders’, 7, 12–13, 172–76, 190, 206–7, 208, 221n85 deities, 251; celebrities’ transformation to, 172–76, 207–17; in films, 85, 97; painting of, 40, 46, 48, 52n25, 185, 213, 216, 248; posters of, 271–73 Desai, Morarji, 172 designers, 265 devotion. See bhakti dharma, 202–3 Dharmadurai, 102, 138, 139, 143 Dickey, Sara, 14–15, 16, 237–38 Dirks, Nicholas, 197, 198



295

display, advertising, 4 disposal, vinyl banner, 268–69 distributors, film: artistic appreciation by, 60; financing by, 58; genre and, 106–7; risks/rewards of, 65–66 DK. See Dravida Kazhagam DMK. See Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam drama, 86; dance, 143; family, 90; street theater, 45–46. See also melodrama Draupadi, Jayaram incident and, 210–13, 222n102 Draupadi Vastrapaharanam, 84 Dravida Kazhagam (DK), 161, 193 Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (DMK), 3, 9, 16, 30, 59, 167–70; Annadurai’s leadership of, 162–64; charismatic leadership in, 194; contemporary Tamil cinema and, 98–99; corruption in, 175, 268; MGR and, 164, 167, 168, 169, 170–72; party symbol of, 169; post-independence cinema and, 91, 93–95, 96. See also Dravidian movement Dravidian languages, 87 Dravidian movement: Annadurai and, 162–64; charismatic leadership in, 193–96; cinema use by, 154, 162, 163–64, 165, 168, 170–79, 196; EVR and, 160–62; gift giving in, 198; history of, 159–79; identity fashioned by, 155–59; Justice Party of, 159–60; populism of, 160–64, 199–201, 227 Dravidian Progressive Federation. See Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam dream sequence, 229, 231 Dwyer, Rachel, 14, 15 Eakins, Thomas, 26 Ellis, John, 230 emergency, 101 emotions: bhav as, 124; depersonalized, 122. See also rasa/rasas; sentiment

296



Index

employment, film industry impact on, 89, 103 enamels, 34 Encyclopedia of Indian Cinema (Rajadhyaksha/Willemen), 15 English films, 76 enlargement, production process and, 25 Enlightenment period, 243 entertainment cinema, 91, 107–10, 142; masala value in, 69, 70, 75; nationalism and, 118; performative elements of Tamil, 121–28 entertainment tax, 99, 103 ephemerality, 5, 20 epics, 107–8, 157, 158, 235, 271; televised, 235. See also literary renaissance, Tamil Europe, 266–68, 270; melodramatic tradition of, 121, 123–24, 125 evil eye, 243 EVR. See Naicker, E. V. R. exchange rate, rupee, 2002, 31, 51n10 exhibitors, film, 106–7 exhibits, art, 4 exhibits, banners commissioned for art, 4, 17n4 experimental cinema, 104–5 export films, 81 extramission vision theory, 242–43 eye(s): evil, 243; language of, 247; third, 249 facial expression, 134, 136 failure, film, 82, 111n3 family dramas, 90 fans: celebrity gender determining, 236; crowds and, 238–42; film attendance by groups of, 237; gender and, 236, 254n25; MGR, 238, 254n24; social service of, 238; South Indian context for, 235–38; subculture of, 233–42; term evolution, 233

fashion, 134, 137–40 feature films, India’s distinction in, 81 festivals, 23 fetishism, 127, 244 FFC. See Film Finance Corporation fight sequences, 108, 109, 144 film(s): anti-sentiment, 70; attendance of, 75, 131, 237; audience of, 66; audience participation in, 230–32; content of, 187; deities in, 85, 97; distribution of, 58, 60, 65–66, 106–7; English, 76; export, 81; failure rate of, 82, 111n3; feature, India’s, 81; fight sequences in, 108, 109, 144; financing, system of, 57–59, 79n3; first, 82–83; genres of, 84–85, 85, 91, 94–110; Hindi, 87–88, 90–91; Hollywood, 120, 125, 126, 127, 130, 231; languages in, 21, 87–88, 92, 104, 112n23; Malayalam, 76; multiple viewings of, 131, 231; music for, 100, 108; mythological, 84–85, 85, 98, 188–89, 251; narratives in, 107–8, 126–27, 133, 235; nationalism and, 3, 16, 41, 83, 85–87, 90, 91, 118, 158, 201; entertainment cinema context of, 118; neo-nativity, 99–100; producers of, 60–61, 65–66, 73–79; production of, 59, 60, 81, 92; prostration by audience of, 251; release of, 22, 29, 50n4; screening of, 60, 106–7, 237; social, 90; sound in, first, 86, 112n21; special effects in, 84; stills, 24, 27; Tamil Nadu’s top ten, 178; value categories for, 69–71, 74, 75–76, 80n8; worship at start of shooting, 194. See also advertising; cinema, Indian; production Film Finance Corporation (FFC), 105 film industry: Bengali, 104; employment in, 89, 103; hypocrisy in, 72

Index

film stars: character of, 118, 119; King’s theory on, 118–20, 132; MGR/politician cult and, 170–72; politician, 95, 95–98, 190; systematic production of, 120–21, 132. See also celebrities final coat, 27, 28 financing, banners/cutouts, 56, 59–66 financing, film: Mumbai system of, 79n3; producer v. distributor, 58; system of, 57–59 formulaic cinema. See entertainment cinema Freud, Sigmund, 229, 240, 242, 244; Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego, 239 functional aesthetics, Becker’s theory of, 53–54, 55–56 Galen, 242 Gandhi, Indira, 101–2 Gandhi, Mohandas Karamchand, 85–86, 153, 166, 196, 203, 208–9, 241; crowds and, 241–42 Gandhi, Rajiv, 174 Ganesan, Shivaji, 95, 95, 96, 170 gaze, 13, 242–50; interactive, 246–50; masculinist, 213–14; painting and, 244; Western tradition of, darshan compared to, 242–46 Gemini Pictures, 52n26, 59–60, 92, 93 gender, 213–14; artists and, 22; cinematography devices and, 127; fans and, 236, 254n25; Mother India and, 146–47; politics and, 209; stereotype reinforcement, 142–47, 145 genius, 38 genres, film, 84–85, 85, 104–10; entertainment, 69, 70, 75, 91, 107–10, 118, 121–28, 142; mythologicals, 84–85, 85, 98, 188–89, 251



297

gesture, 136 gift giving, 198 goddesses, 208, 209, 212 god picture. See sami patam Gonda, Jan, 247 governance. See kingship; leadership government, Indian, 90, 266–69; Tamil Nadu, 266–69 graph method, 25 Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego (Freud), 239 Guha-Thakurta, Tapati, 14, 270 gurukulam (student-teacher tradition), 29 G. V. Films, 103 hair, women’s, 140–41, 150n46 Hansen, Miriam, 127 Hardgrave, Robert, 16 Harijans, 161 Hasan, Kamal, 68, 264 Heckel, Angelica, 122, 148n12 hegemony, 155, 244 height: cutouts, 30, 30, 59, 68–69; regulations on, 68–69 heroine, Jayaram’s leadership from role of, 209–13 hero-types, 101, 102, 114n54, 148n3; darshan of, 251; DMK use of, 165; MGR playing, 189 Hindi, 87–88, 90–91, 104 Hinduism, 7, 51n23, 227; Western icons v. those of, 251; women and, 143 Hirsh, Paul, 66 history: art, 4, 14, 20, 53–54; Dravidian movement, 159–79; regional cinema, Indian, 87–89; social/art, 14 Hollywood, 120, 126, 127, 130; academic painting influence on, 125; cult films in, 231; spectatorship in, 231 “hook” message, 130

298



Index

Hum, 27 Husain, Maqbool Fida, 49–50 hybridization: rasa/melodrama, 121; Varma’s iconography, 47 hypocrisy, film industry, 72 icon(s): awakening, 248; Western v. Hinduism, 251 iconic stasis, 126, 128, 231 iconography, Varma’s hybrid, 47 idealization, celebrity, 35–36 identity: artistic, 37–43; communal, 40–43; Dravidian, 155–59 image: celebrity, 118, 119–20, 131, 185–87, 186, 189, 208–9; goddess, 208, 209, 212, 221n86; managers, 186–87; maternal, 208, 216; partial, painting only, 129; producers of, 21–22; single/potent, 137; text and, 140–42. See also banner(s); cutouts imagery, banner: artistic heritage of, 40, 270; film values in, 69–71; gender stereotypes in, 142–47, 145; photography basis of, 24; plywood cutouts for 3-D, 109; sexually explicit, 68, 72, 73, 76, 216, 266 Impressionism, 277 independence, 166; movement, 83, 90, 156 India: feature films distinction of, 81; film production in, center of, 92; former prime minister of, 2; independence of, 83, 90, 156, 166; partition, 161–62, 180n17; photography arrival in, 270; prime minister of, 89; southern states of, theaters in, 103; spectatorship in, 230–32; technology/advertising mutations in, 269–73. See also cinema, Indian Indian Cinema (Barnouw/Krishnaswamy), 15

Indian National Congress. See Congress Party Inglis, Stephen, 15, 40, 51n24, 126 innovations, 45 installation, banners/cutouts, 29–31, 32, 57; distance from ground, 130; vinyl banner, 263–64 interactive gaze, darshan as, 246–50 interviews, 21, 43–45, 248; on apprenticeship, 28; oral, 73–79. See also case studies Irschick, Eugene, 16 Jain, Kajri, 15 Janata Dal, 172 Jayaram, Jayalalitha (chief minister, Tamil Nadu), 5, 7, 12–13; Annadurai imitated by, 204; birthday of, forty-fourth, 185, 199; celebrityto-deity transformation of, 172–76, 207–17; corruption in party of, 175, 268; cutouts of, 210–11, 211, 214, 215; darshan of, 247; deification of, 185, 186, 206–7, 213–17; Draupadi and, 210–13, 222n102; fasting of, 153–54; heroine-to-leader, 209–13; inauguration of, 201–2, 240; MGR and, 172–74, 205–6, 207, 208, 210; mistress of MGR, 208, 210, 221n86; religious groups supported by, 194–95; speeches of, 196; titles of, 216–17 Jeep, 261 “job” artists, 22, 33 Jones, Kathleen, 208 Journal of Arts and Ideas, 14 Justice Party, 159–60 Kalidas, 86 Kalighat patuas, 270–71 Kannada language, 87, 92 Kannadasan, 167, 168 Kapoor, Raj, 90–91

Index

Karnataka, 153 Karunanidhi, Muthuvel, 2, 5, 17n10, 94–95, 96, 169, 179n42; Annadurai and, 163, 165, 167–70, 204; charismatic leadership and, 195; charity acts of, 198–99; as chief minister, 210; cinema-politics nexus of, 165–70; Draupadi/Jayaram incident and, 210–11; Parasakthi screenplay of, 92, 94, 163, 194 Kashmir, 103 Kepler, Johannes, 243 Kerala, 87, 98 King, Barry, film-star theory of, 118–20, 132 kingship: asceticism and, 196, 202; charisma and, 203–7; duties of, 198; gift giving in, 198; semiotics of, 187, 197–207; Tamil Nadu tradition of, 197–98 Krishnajee, Mr., 48 Krishna, J. P., 276 Krishnaswamy, S., 15 labor, price of, 31 Lacan, 243, 245 La Folla Delinquenta (Sighele), 239 Lakshmipathy, 43–45 language(s): of eyes, 247; film and, 21, 87–88, 90–91, 92, 104, 112n23; groups of, 87; political tool of, 164–67; Tamil, 21, 92; Telegu, 92 “language of culture,” 189 Lanka Dahan, 84, 85, 251 layouts, banner, 24–25, 36, 133–35 lead artist, 25 leadership: charismatic, 191–96, 208; Jayaram’s transformation to, 209–13; kinship semiotics and, 187, 197–207; modes of governance in, 192. See also kingship; politicians Le Bon, Gustave, 238–39, 241 legal domination, 192



299

Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelum (LTTE), 174 literary renaissance, Tamil, 147–59 location: banner, 57–58, 79n4; theater, 67–68 LTTE. See Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelum Lumière, Auguste, 82 Lumière, Louis, 82 Lutgendorf, Philip, 15 Madhavan, K., 26, 44–45, 93 Madonna, 185, 208 Madras, 92. See also Chennai Madsen, Douglas, 192, 201 Mahabharata, 159, 271 Malayalam films, 76 Malayalam language, 87 males. See men manipulation, perception, 188 Manthiri Kumari, 168 Marshall, David, 189 masala value, 69, 70, 75 masculinist gaze, 213–14 master artists, 26, 34–35, 44–45 mediascape, 273–74 Meeshaikkaran, 23, 34, 137; case study of banner for, 132, 133–42; facial expression and, 136; fashion and, 137–40; gesture and, 136; poses in, 135–36 melodrama, 136, 165–66; revolution and, 123, 148n14; tradition of, 121, 123–24, 125 men: fetishization of, 127; images of women v., number of, 142; mustache on, 141 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, 244–45, 255n60 MGR. See Ramachandran, M. G. middle cinema, 104, 105–7 middle class, 106 Minakshi, 185, 186

300



Index

missionaries, Christian, 156–57 mistress, MGR’s, 208, 210, 221n86 Mitter, Partha, 14, 271, 276 MNCs. See multinational corporations modernity, 89, 187, 273; spectatorship in, 232–33; vinyl banner and, 268 monsoon, 23, 34 monuments, MGR, 223–27, 225, 226 morality, actresses and, 209 motherhood, 146–47, 207–9, 216 Mother India, 146–47 Mughal-e-Azam, 49 Mughal emperors, 40, 246 multinational corporations (MNCs), 262, 264a Mumbai, 4, 16n2, 92; Bollywood and, 87; financing system of, 79n3 music, film, 100, 108 Muslims, 41 mustache, 141 Muthu, M. K., 169–70 mythologicals, 84–85, 85, 98, 188–89, 251 Nadigan, 102 Nadodi Manan, 171 Naicker, E. V. R. (EVR) (“the great man”), 86, 160–62, 166, 193–94; Karunanidhi and, 195 narratives, 107–8, 133; audiencesubmitted, 235; interruptions in, 126–27 nationalism, 83, 85–87, 90; DMK and, 91; entertainment cinema context of, 118; Tamil, 3, 16, 41, 86–87, 91, 118, 158, 201 Nayakars, 41–42 Neenga Nalla Erukkanu, 174–75 Nehru, Jawaharlal, 89 neo-nativity films, 99–100 Nietzshe, Friedrich, 191 nine rasas, 121, 122, 148n11, 148n12

non-Brahmin, 3, 16, 156, 160 NTR. See Rao, N. T. Rama occupation, audience, 74 oil coat, 26 oleography, 48, 271 originality, 37 Oru Thalai Raagam (Song with a Single Beat), 65 outright basis, film financing system, 57 over-painting, 36 Pageants for the People, 48 painting, 26–28, 27; academic, Hollywood influenced by, 125; deity, 40, 46, 48, 52n25, 185, 213, 216, 248; gaze theories and, 244; handpainted banners/cutouts, 26–28, 27, 57, 135, 257, 258–60, 276; individual v. collaborative, 35; over-, 36; partial image, 129; style and, 33–37; Tanjore tradition of, 47; Varma’s oil, 271–73 paints, 34 Pakistan, 161 Pallava dynasty, 197 Pandian, M. S. S., 16 Paramashivan, 267, 267 Parasakthi, 92, 94, 163, 194 Paris, 266–68 partition, 161–62, 180n17 Patel, Divia, 15 Pather Panchali, 105 Patil, Smita, 106 perception, manipulation of, 188 performative elements, Tamil entertainment cinema, 121–28 Peron, Eva, 205–6, 208 Peron, Juan, 200–201, 205–6 persona, celebrity, 118, 119 Phalke, Dhunduiraj Govind (Dada Saheb), 83, 126, 251, 273

Index

photography, 12, 270, 276, 278; imagery basis in, 24; portraiture, 36; stills, 24, 27 physicians, artists v., 39 piecework system, 31, 51n9 pilgrimage, theater as site of, 85, 85 Pillai, P. Sundaram, 158 Pinney, Christopher, 15, 36, 124, 248, 276 plywood cutouts, 109 poets, Tamil, 157, 158–59, 212 Police Lock-up, 146 political advertising, 5, 29, 59, 65, 77 politicians: attire of, 213, 214; charity of, 198–201; clientele as, 65; cutouts of, 12, 30, 154–55, 185–87, 209, 210–11, 211, 214, 215, 268; deification of, 7, 12–13, 208, 221n85; film-star, 95, 95–98, 190 politics: cinema and, nexus of, 1–3, 7–10, 15–16, 92, 155; gender and, 209; language, tool of, 164–67; religious v. secular, 194–95; theaters and, 162. See also cutouts; Dravidian movement; specific parties poor, 74, 201 populism: darshan and, 227; Dravidian movement, 160–64, 199–201, 227 portraiture photography, 36 poses, 135–36 posters: advertising, 266–68; religious, 271–73 post-independence era: DMK and, 91, 93–95, 96; Indian cinema in, 89–98; studios in, 91–93; Tamil cinema in, 91–95 Prasad, Madhava, 15 pre-independence era, 82–89 preservation, 40, 51n19 Price, Pamela, 198 pricing: banners/cutouts, 62; labor, 31; vinyl banner, 265 prime minister, former Indian, 2



301

printing, 263–64, 270 producers, film: artistic appreciation by, 60–61; audience paradigms/perceptions and, 73–79; as banner clientele, 60; financing by, 58; risks/rewards of, 65–66 producers, image, 21–22 production: celebrity, cinematography devices in, 124–28; film, 59, 60, 81, 92; film star, King’s theory on, 118–20, 132; film star, systematic, 120–21, 132 production, banners/cutouts, 4, 11, 12, 20, 24–28; artistry v., 63, 64, 64; painting in, 26–28; process of, beginning, 24–26; workspaces for, 22–24, 23 production value, 69 projection: transparencies/slides, 25, 26, 45; video, 274 prostration, audience, 251 protests, 49, 185 Public Culture (Appadurai/Beckenbridge, ed.), 14 publicity, actors’ personal lives, 120, 187, 188–91, 190 puja (worship), 194 Pundalik, 83 Puranas, 157, 271 quality, 63–64, 64; artists investing in, 71–72, 78–79 “Quit India” campaign, 166 Radha, M. R., 188 Rajadhyaksha, Ashish, 15 Rajagopalachari, C., 90 Raja Harishchandra, 83 Rajendar, T., 65, 69 Rajnikanth, 27, 101, 138, 139, 139, 176–79; Jayaram’s fast and, 154 Ramachandran, M. G. (MGR), 5, 7, 8, 95–98, 97, 173, 176, 177; Annadurai

302



Index

imitated by, 204; charity tactics of, 199–200; chief minister tenure of, 103; darshan of, 223–27, 225, 226, 249, 250; deification of, 190; DMK history and, 164, 167, 168, 169, 170–72; fan club of, 238, 254n24; film-star politician cult and, 170–72; hero roles of, 189; Jayaram and, 172–74, 205–6, 207, 210; mistress of, 208, 210, 221n86; monuments to, 223–27, 225, 226; personal/public life of, merging, 187, 188–91, 190; Valentino compared to, 127–28 Ramalingaswami, 158 Ramaswamy, Sumathi, 14 Ramayana, 157, 158, 179n11, 271; television series of, 235 Rao, N. T. Rama (NTR), 2, 188 rasa/rasas, 121, 122, 148nn11–12; listing of, 122 Rasasutra, 121, 122–23, 136 Ray, Satyajit: Apu Trilogy, 105; Pather Panchali, 105 realism, 105, 106 regional cinema, 87–89 regulations, banners/cutouts: content, 266; corruption and, 268; height, 68–69 religion: banner businesses and, 41; caste and, 49, 51n23; darshan and, 246–50; kingship semiotics and, 197–207; secularism v., political, 194–95; theater site as pilgrimage for, 85, 85 religious posters, 271–73 renaissance, Tamil Nadu’s literary, 147–59 resemblance/likeness, 35, 63, 78 revolution, melodrama and, 123, 148n14 Riskin, Robert, 94 romantic hero type, 101, 114n54 Ross Barnett, Marguerite, 16 rough style, 33

Rowlatt Act, 86 rupees, exchange rate of, 31, 51n10 Rushdie, Salman, 278 salaries, 71; artist, 31, 51n9; labor pricing, 31 samadhi, 223–27, 225, 226 sami patam (deity painting), 40, 46, 48, 52n25, 185, 213, 216, 248 Samsara Sangeetham, 36 Sangey Muzhangu, 173 Sanskrit, 87, 157, 158, 165, 195; pre-, 158 satire, on Bollywood, 148n9 scaffolding, 29, 30 scholarship, 4, 13–15, 17n5, 229; aesthetics, 53–54, 55–56; hero, 148n3; research questions and, 10–13; technology impact on art, 269 scopophilia, 229 screening, film, 60, 106–7, 237 secularism: darshan and, 246–50; Enlightenment period, 243; religion v., political, 194–95 self-realization, 249 self-respect movement (SMI), 160–61, 167 semiotics, kingship, 187, 197–207 senior artists, 26–27 sentiment, 70; anti-, 70 sexuality: banners containing, 68, 72, 73, 76, 216, 266; mother image and, 216 Shah, Naseeruddin, 106 shakti, 38, 207, 209, 248 shed, artist’s, 22–24, 23 Shivaji: The Boss, 176–77, 178 Shri Krishna Janma, 85, 251 Shri Venkateshwara Mahatyam, 188 Siddhar, 158 Sighele, Scipio, La Folla Delinquenta, 239 signature, banner, 39–40, 73 Silappadhikkaram, 153, 157, 179n1

Index

Singh, V. P. (former prime minister of India), 2 singing, 115n72 Sivathamby, Karthikesu, 16 size, banner/cutouts, 6, 24, 28, 34, 37, 59, 76, 128, 267, 267 skill acquisition, 28–29, 39 slide projector, 25, 26, 45 SMI. See self-respect movement Smith, Daniel, 189 Snow, Peter, 192, 201 social films, 90 social history, of art, 14 social service, fan club, 238 solvent printing machine, 263–64 sound, first films with, 86, 112n21 southern states, 103 South India: fan culture in, 235–38; visual culture of, 13–16, 48–50, 257–58 South Indian Liberation Federation, 159–60 special effects, film, 84 spectacular advertising, 49; clientele and, 56–59. See also banner(s); banners/cutouts; cutouts spectatorship, 6, 13; cinematic, theories of, 228–33; fan subculture and, 233–42; Indian context of, 230–32; modern, inattentive looking as, 232–33; outside theaters, 231–33; scopophilia and, 229; theater context, 230–32. See also darshan Sri Lanka, civil war in, 174 Stalin, M. K., 175 stars. See celebrities; film stars star value, 69, 74, 75–76 stereotypes, gender, 142–47, 145 stills, film, 24, 27 story value, 70, 75, 80n8 street theater, 45–46 students, tradition of teachers and, 29 studios: artists’ sheds as, 22–24, 23; post-independence, 91–93



303

style, 33–37 subculture, fan, 233–42 subjugation, close-up device and, 127, 149n29 suicide, 236 survey, 73–79 suspense, 131 symbolism. See semiotics tableau, 124, 128 talkie, 86, 112n21 Tamil cinema: audience, 88; contemporary, 98–104; Dravidian movement use of, 154, 162, 163–64, 165, 168, 170–79; film-star politicians of, 95, 95–98, 190; performative elements of, 121–28; post-independence, 91–95; preindependence, 86; top-ten film in, 178 Tamil language, 21, 92 Tamil Nadu: caste groups in, 156–57; chief ministers of, 2, 2, 5, 17n10, 103, 210; crowds in cinematic politics of, 240–42; film distribution zones of, 58; government of, 266–69; kingship tradition in, 197–98; literary renaissance of, 147–59; poets of, 157, 158–59, 212; pre-Sanskritic, 158; top ten films of, 178 Tamil nationalism, 3, 16, 41, 86–87, 91, 118, 158, 201 Tanjore, 47 Tate Modern, 4, 17n4 tax, entertainment, 99, 103 technology, 269–73 Telegu, 92 Telegu Desam, 178 television, epics on, 235 temples: to celebrities, 186, 186, 190; icons of, awakening, 248 Teru Kuttu (street theater), 45–46 text, image and, 140–42

304



Index

Thai Pusam, 32 theaters: audience-, ratio of, 81–82, 110n2; Chennai’s first, 83; darshan in/outside of, 228–29; location of, 67–68; number of, 81–82, 103, 110n2; pilgrimage sites as, 85, 85; political, 162; spectatorship in, 230–32; spectatorship outside of, 231–33. See also drama theme paradigm, film producers’, 74 theories: Becker’s functional aesthetics, 53–54, 55–56; cinematic spectatorship, 228–33; crowd, 238–40; evil eye, 243; extramission vision, 242–43; Freud’s fetishism, 244; King’s film-star, 118–20, 132; Weber’s charisma, 191–92, 204 Thichetty Govindan, 144 third eye, 249 Thomas, Rosie, 15 Tibeto-Burmese languages, 87 Tirukkural (Tiruvalluvar), 157 Tiruvalluvar, 157 titles, Jayaram’s, 216–17 Tolkappiyam, 157 Toulouse-Lautrec, Henri de, 271 tradition: artistic, 269–73; bhakti, 84, 126, 159, 196, 242; cinema basis in, 121–24; gurukulam, 29; Hindu, women in, 143; kingship, Tamil Nadu, 197–98; leadership, mode of governance, 192; melodrama, 121, 123–24, 125; Tanjore painting, 47; Western gaze, 242–46 transparencies, 25, 45 Uberoi, Patricia, 15 unions, 22, 59, 63 Valentino, Rudolph, 127–28 values, 40, 69–71, 74, 75–76, 80n8 Varma, Raja Ravi, 45, 46, 47, 271–73, 276

Vasan, S. S., 45, 48, 93 Vasudevan, Ravi, 15, 131 Vedas, 157, 195, 247, 249 Velaikkari, 94 Venkateshwaran, G., 103 video projection, 274 Vijayanti I.P.S., case study of, 132–33, 142–47, 145 vinyl banners, 13, 257–58, 260–66, 261, 278; disposal of, 268–69; installation of, 263–64; modernity and, 268; pricing of, 265 violence, banners containing episodes of, 67, 70 visual conventions, 132–47 visual culture: Chennai’s contemporary/future, 257–78; popular, 48–50; study of, 13–16 visual hybridity/fluidity, 250–52 Viswakarma Brahmins, 42 voyeurism, 230 Warhol, Andy, 26 water-coat, 26 Weber, Max, charisma theory of, 191–92, 204 Western cinema, suspense in, 131 Westernization, 38, 47, 90, 269 Widlund, Ingrid, 16 Willemen, Paul, 15 Willner, Ann Ruth, 206 women: attire of, 140; close-ups of, subjugation through, 127, 149n29; hair of, 140–41, 150n46; Hindu tradition and, 143; images of men v., number of, 142; motherhood and, 146–47, 207–9, 216; unmarried, 207–8 word of mouth advertising, 80n12 working class, 67–68, 106, 236, 238, 245 workspace, production, 22–24, 23 worship: cinema context of, 228; film shooting starting with, 194



About the Author

Preminda Jacob is associate professor of art history and theory in the Department of Visual Arts at the University of Maryland–Baltimore County. Her research focus is on the social and political aspects of public visual culture. A secondary research focus is on the history and theory of the art museum. Her research on South Asian visual culture has appeared as articles in journals (including “Between Modernism and Modernization: Locating Modernity in South Asian Art,” published in Art Journal, Fall 1999) and chapters in books (including “Tamil Cinema in the Public Sphere: The Evolving Art of Banner Advertisements in Chennai,” in Tamil Cinema: The Cultural Politics of India’s Other Film Industry, edited by Selvaraj Velayutham, 2008).

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