Voicing the Voiceless

Cinema always represented the society, and any visual representation about ‘not so commonly discussed' topics becomes crucial as they are the image blocks for the future generation. The power of cinema is high among Tamil audience, which is evident from the emergence of two great political leaders who are byproducts of it. It is essential to understand how sexual minorities are represented in a culture-specific society. In India, representation of the third gender was insensitive, and Tamil cinema is no exception. These representations cannot be ignored as ‘just in screen' as screen represents reality. Nevertheless, few fair images are making a significant impact on the audience about transgender. Studying representations about sexual minorities in Tamil cinema is important in today's context, where young minds are exposed to digital platforms. This chapter explains the description of the transgender community in Tamil cinema and analyses its impact on society.

Tamil Nadu Politics and Tamil Cinema: A Symbiotic Relationship?

From the second-half of the twentieth century, a nascent Tamil cinema became increasingly influential in Tamil society and more prominent in political life. The Dravidar Kazhagam, founded by Periyar E. V. Ramasamy in 1944, morphed into the DMK and AIADMK, two dominant state political parties in Tamil Nadu. Through the medium of film, some of its leading lights, C. N. Annadurai, M. Karunanidhi, M. G. Ramachandran and Jayalalitha, cultivated cinema audiences and the voting public in the political ideologies of the Dravidian movement and subsequently became Chief Ministers of Tamil Nadu. The symbiotic relationship between politics and Tamil cinema has meant that political and social commentaries and the assertion of Tamil nationalistic ideas was commonplace in Tamil films. In recent years, Tamil cinema has become the vehicle for raising a wide range of concerns ranging from caste, class and gender and state/nation politics, marking a shift that focusses on everyday politics in the state. In this article, we present a critical survey of the role of Tamil cinema in disseminating particular realities and politics of identity that speak to an essentialised notion of Tamil cultural and linguistic identity, the concomitant disavowal of broader conceptions of Indian-ness or belonging to the Indian nation, as well as the use of cinema to address everyday politics in the State.

“He made me fall at the feet of a woman”: Masculine Anxieties and Dysfunctional Romance in Tamil Cult Film Subramaniyapuram (2008)

Tamil Cinema is “one of India’s largest, most prolific and increasingly significant cinemas” (Velayutham 2008, pp.1-2). Madurai genre in Tamil films is popularly known as 3M films (Murder, Mayhem and Madurai) (Damodaran Gorringe 2017, p.9). Subramaniyapuram (Sasikumar, 2008) is a Madurai film that attained cult status in both the Indian states of Tamil Nadu and Kerala since its release in 2008. A collection of essays on Subramaniyapuram edited by anthropologist Anand Pandian was published in 2013, a rare honour to be bestowed on a Tamil film in recent times. Significantly, the film’s problematic gender narrative—especially the entangled relation between the romantic plot and the masculine “plots”—is not the central subject of exploration of any of the essays in this edited collection, nor has it been discussed in depth in any critical discourse on the film so far. In this article, using Laura Mulvey’s theoretical lens as a point of departure, I argue that the female identity is crucial to the narrative functioning of the various plots of Subramaniyapuram. The film’s ultimate narrative desires, I illustrate, are in affirmation of masculine supremacy, hegemonic masculinity, and the women as femme fatales.

The unemployed hero in Indian Tamil cinema: Perspectives on youth, gender and aspiration

In this article, I explore the portrayal of the information technology (IT) boom in Indian Tamil cinema to think through representations of unemployed youth. Three main questions anchor this article: one, what are the ways in which unemployment is problematized? Two, how are depictions of unemployment (and employment) gendered? How do gendered representations of unemployment feed into dominant tropes of language, given the Dravidian orientation of Tamil cinema? Three, how are these crises resolved, and what imaginaries do they present of relationships between men and women? Through a reading of three recent films that directly or indirectly relate to the IT boom, I offer an analysis of the privileging of certain professions, skills and academic disciplines under capitalism, its effects on employment prospects for youth, as well as its gendered implications. I argue that the films assert a subculture of masculinity that represents the subaltern male’s encounter with the globalizing city and its many transformations – most visibly the feminization of labour represented by the IT industry. Refuting the claim that cinema has positively embraced neoliberal subjectivity and celebrates the entrepreneurial spirit of youth, I show that the ‘unemployed hero’ is constructed as a social conscience to highlight the problems of a globalizing world. Though many aspects of late capitalism are productively critiqued through such consciousness-raising, the breakdown of traditional gendered roles appears as a leitmotif, exposing the gendered nature of anxieties accompanying the IT boom. The remaking and consolidation of masculine identity then becomes a way to manage these anxieties.

Chevalior Sivaji Ganesan’s Tamil Film Songs Not Only Emulated the Quality of the Movie But also Contains Ethical Imports that can be Compared with Ethical Theories – A Retrospective Reflection

This is a research work that discusses the great contributions made by Chevalior Shivaji Ganesan to the Tamil Cinema. It was observed that Chevalior Sivaji film songs reflect the theoretical domain such as (i) equity and social justice and (ii) the practice of virtue in the society. In this research work attention has been made to conceptualize the ethical ideas and compare it with the ethical theories using a novel methodology wherein the ideas contained in the film song are compared with the ethical theory. Few songs with the uncompromising premise of patni (chastity of women) with the four important charateristics of women of Tamil culture i.e. acham, madam, nanam and payirpu that leads to the great concept of chastity practiced by exalting woman like Kannagi has also been dealt with. The ethical ideas that contain in the selection of songs were made out from the selected movies acted by Chevalier Shivaji giving preference to the songs that contain the above unique concept of ethics.