Book Review: Swarnavel Eswaran Pillai,Madras Studios: Narrative,Genre,and Ideology in Tamil Cinema

The ‘ideological novelty, anchoring the experience of cinema’ that led to a ‘unique socio-political event’ in Tamil Nadu (Prasad, 1991, p. 42), seems to have been confirmed by recent political developments in the state. The entry of Rajinikanth and Kamal Haasan into electoral politics replays the peculiarities of cinema, politics and social mobilisation that were definitive of this film industry in post-independence India. A majority of historical studies on Tamil cinema, until recently, have been about this singularity. Could one untangle alternate historical connections of the Tamil film industry and society? One that would account for the survival of its famous studios beyond the immediacies of churning out cine-political rhetoric and consider their relevance as a question of assiduousness and continuity? Swarnavel Eswaran Pillai takes up this task, aided by his familiarity with modern Tamil history and his dual careers as a trained filmmaker and an academic.

Madras Studios is a compelling inquiry of Tamil cinema, primarily over the period of 1937–1960, with the ambitious objective of establishing the ‘Tamil-ness’ of Tamil cinema. Weaving together several Tamil-language archival sources and textual readings of landmark films, Pillai unpacks in an intricate commentary the intersection of genre films, their local, national and international (Hollywood) sources, and the articulation of ideological messages during three historical junctures. The three moments of late colonialism, the Second World War and Independence of India provide a neat classificatory matrix for situating the regional specificity of Tamil cinema. The book elaborates on five major studios that were pivotal to Tamil filmmaking. Embedded in the film practices of Modern Theatres, AVM, Gemini, Vijaya-Vahuni and Prasad Studios are the influential trajectories of pioneering figures of Tamil (and south Indian) cinema, such as T. R. Sundaram, A. V. Meyippan, S. S. Vasan, M. Karunanidhi, M. G. Ramachandran and L. V. Prasad. Madras Studios expands the existing scholarship on Tamil cinema that has re-examined archival sources (Hughes, 2010, 2013); identified historical moments, the centrality of music and songs, and political contexts of the Madras industry (Baskaran, 1981, 1991); reviewed important films and filmmakers (Randor, 1997); as well as meticulously studied the history of individual studios like the AVM (P. K. Chakravarthy & V. Chakravarthy, 2009). Notably, while Madras Studios concentrates on a specific period of Tamil cinema, it also provides a narrative of continuity, up until the 2000s, and thus posits a re-evaluation and critique of the idea that it is Dravidian politics that marks the singularity of Tamil films.

In describing Tamil filmmaking through the production practices of studios located in and around Madras, Pillai seeks to approximate studio histories of Hollywood that are now standard readings. In the context of Indian studios, and the ‘studio era’ in particular, the homogenising agency of capitalist filmmaking acknowledged in the notion of a ‘classical’ cinema (Bordwell, Staiger, & Thompson, 2003) is discursively inflected by a variety of local factors that eventually informed the formation of regional film industries. The advent of sound is momentous in this sense. Apart from shifting the aesthetic regime of studio-based filmmaking, talkies carved out the rudimentary geographies of multiple language cinemas in India. Madras was the foremost city for filmmaking in south India right up to the 1980s. The Madras-based studios were instrumental in creating a discursive resistance to Hollywood and foreign films but were equally complicit in modelling the studio system along the lines of major studios of the West. In terms of longevity, the studios in Madras have survived numerous upheavals of: infrastructure, technological changes, financial uncertainties and the alternating winds of the political climate. The AVM, for instance, famously produced Sivaji (dir. S. Shankar, 2007) and is the longest surviving studio from the 1940s era. While Pillai claims that the Madras studios came ‘next only to the classical Hollywood studios’ (p. 4), he also argues for the importance of ‘recovering’ (p. 5) the elided aspects of the regional identity of Tamil cinema.

Though there are six distinct chapters, the book is essentially in two parts. The first part deliberates on the studios, while the second part comprising Chapters 5 and 6 is an evaluative account of the continuities and influences of the studio-produced films on more current contexts. For Pillai, each studio details a particular facet of Tamil cinema. The centrality of genre and its attendant production challenges occupy a major part of this narrative and are vital to Pillai’s arguments for Tamil specificity. Pillai highlights intertextuality, where films assimilate certain tropes from theatre, folk performative forms and music. The chapter on AVM and Gemini rethinks Parasakthi (1952) in an exhaustive reading that locates not just Dravidian euphoria but also its discursive importance in constructing iconic elements (star persona, songs and melodramatic frontality), that were variously redeployed by Tamil films in later decades. Pillai proposes that various interconnections of Parasakthi with theatre, music and folk traditions in Tamil Nadu are trans-positioned in the filmic text. The visual space is thus rendered as a theatrical stage for delivering Dravidian rhetoric. But the film is also indicative of how AVM exploited its popularity in the social sphere. Parasakthi, which has been emblematic of the ‘consensus’ of DMK politics, was also significant for the gramophone business and the commercial concerns of AVM (refer Hughes, 2007). In Chapter 4, Pillai elaborates on Vijaya-Vahuni and Prasad studios against the backdrop of violent protests in 1952 for a separate Telugu territory. The imbrication of Tamil–Telugu filmmaking in the city of Madras is part of the larger history of the region. The analysis of Patala Bharavi (1951) and Missiamma (1955) therefore points to the cultural slippages in anointing the ‘DMK film’ as the prototype of Tamil filmmaking. This reading also explicates the disavowal of the north–south divide as played out in the films. The antagonism towards the north, in general, was one of the cornerstones of the Dravidian rhetoric, often repudiating the hegemony of Brahmanical thought and caste hierarchies, and one which was verbally deployed in the DMK film.

The short Chapter 5 emerges as a summative account of how the studio system has persisted in the use of double or triple roles for male stars in films starring Sivaji Ganesan and MGR. Relevance of the ideological rhetoric of the DMK film is attributed to its repositioning in the songs and music of Tamil films, which carry a number of imprints of regionally specific folk and mythological legacies. This chapter in essence becomes a discursive bridge, presenting the disjunctive trajectory of contemporary Tamil films as a dystopia of the present. According to Pillai, the dystopian fallout of the land of plenty and prosperity, which is evoked in Parasakthi, is symbolised in the end of the LTTE conflict in Sri Lanka, whose most gruesome outcome was the death of thousands of Tamil civilians. While this argument suggests a historic rupture of the symbolic and the imaginary, its implications towards situating the violence and gritty realism of present-day Tamil films emerges as a laboured afterthought. For instance, Pillai begins with an elaborate mention of how the ‘Madurai Triumvirate, Bala, Ameer Sultan, and M. Sashi Kumar’ (p. 272) got an assertive dedication in Gangs of Wasseypur, Part I (2012). From here, the account digresses to comment on the vacuity in Bollywood that, as it now emerges, was occupied by a regionalist Hindi cinema. Pillai then moves to an elaborate unpacking of the narratives of Pithamagan, and Naan Kadavul, with a brief mention of Subramaniyapuram, and other films made before and after 2009, the year of the Sri Lankan killings. Abstracting aspects of the narratives as being allegorical of the rupture between Dravidian utopia, and its dystopic aftermath, this discussion rests on bringing out parallels (or their absence) between the 1950s films and recent Tamil cinema. In effect, the more pertinent neoliberal contexts of contemporary new waves in regional industries—which can be accessed for considering violence, and the representation of angry, dispossessed subaltern figures—and technological developments in the Tamil film industry, go unaddressed.

The vernacularisation of film culture after the 1930s in India is enmeshed in a variety of transitory forms and technologies. The role of a narrative form, centred on certain genres like devotional and saint films, fantasies or historical thrillers, is indexical of the wider political ferment of the Indian freedom movement, as well as the capitalising of local performance traditions by the studios. A related concern is that of the feudal characteristic of the Indian studios (P. K. Chakravarthy & V. Chakravarthy, 2009), often dominated by kinship and familial interrelationships (e.g., Prabhat Studios). Indian studios were hardly a copy of the vertically integrated system of Hollywood and were marked, at least until the 1950s, by bilingual and multilingual filmmaking. Tamil cinema too demonstrates these tendencies, and more, when one considers the intersection of cinematic and political practices. Its ‘regional-ness’ therefore asks for a radically different approach than merely identifying the singularity of the studios as catalysing institutions, and some landmark films as containing the internal contradictions of Tamil film history. The interworking, networking and eventual dispersal of south Indian language films in the city of Madras during some historical moments may inform another history. And this history could very well benefit from a consideration of the cultural dialectics of the Madras-based film industry. Nevertheless, Madras Studios is a significant and accessible account of Tamil cinema, not just for studies of the studio era but also for future studies of this film industry.