Beyond Bollywood: The Cinemas of South India

By M K Raghavendra

While 'Indian popular cinema', as if by default, has come to mean Bollywood, there are other cinemas in India which are at least as rewarding to study, the largest and perhaps most intriguing among them coming from South India. Tamil, Malayalam, Telugu and Kannada cinemas have their own colourful histories, megastars and political trajectories. This anthology is an attempt to do justice to the bewildering variety there is in the body as a whole and addresses this diversity in the only way deemed possible, which is to open out the study to different approaches, at the same time to get a comprehensive look at South Indian cinema as never before undertaken.

• Language: English
• Publisher: HarperCollins India
• Release date: Jun 10, 2017
• ISBN: 9789352645701

M K Raghavendra

M.K. Raghavendra has authored six volumes of film criticism including three academic works on Bollywood and one on Kannada cinema. He has also authored two books of popular criticism from HarperCollins.

Book preview

BEYOND

BOLLYWOOD

The Cinemas of South India

Edited by

M.K. RAGHAVENDRA

Essays by

ELAVARTHI SATHYA PRAKASH

M.K. RAGHAVENDRA

N. KALYAN RAMAN

MEENA T. PILLAI

HarperCollins Publishers India

CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION

DREAM-WORLD: REFLECTIONS ON CINEMA AND SOCIETY IN TAMIL COUNTRY

Introduction

1. In an Unfree State

2. Beyond War and Freedom

3. Cinema for All

4. Caste in the New Century

5. The Centre Cannot Hold (Any More)

A POLITICAL HISTORY OF KANNADA CINEMA

1. Narrative Conventions in Early Kannada Cinema and Their Significance

2. Kannada Cinema and the Linguistic Reorganization of the States

3. Ambivalence Towards the Nation: 1970–79

4. Trends in Kannada Cinema: 1980 to the New Millennium

TELUGU CINEMA: A CONCISE HISTORY

Introduction

1. The ‘Mookie’ Decade (1921–30)

2. The Coming of Sound (1931–40)

3. The Rise of Formula and the Star System in an Era of Mythologicals (1941–50)

4. Mythologicals, Socials and the Formation of Andhra State: The 1950s

5. The Coming of Colour, James Bond and Other Innovations: The 1960s

6. Populism, Curry Westerns and a New Idiom: The 1970s

7. Middle-of-the-Road Cinema, Comedies and Rise of the New Brigade: the 1980s

8. The Last Decade of the Twentieth Century and Beyond

BEARING WITNESS: MALAYALAM CINEMA AND THE MAKING OF KERALAM

1. Cinema and Modernity in Kerala

2. Early Malayalam Cinema

3. The Era of Melodramatic Socials

4. The New Wave

5. The Rise of Commercial Cinema

INDEX

About the Book

About the Author

Copyright

INTRODUCTION

M.K. RAGHAVENDRA

Mumbai and Chennai

Most of the significant writing on Indian cinema has focused on Hindi popular cinema, or ‘Bollywood’ as it has now come to be called, and this attention is asymmetric in more than one way. In the first place, a majority of the films made in India are not made in the Hindi language and, secondly, the term ‘Bollywood’ presumes that Bombay has been the sole spot where Hindi popular cinema is produced. The figures (for 2012) for the number of films indicate that Tamil cinema occupies the first spot in India and Telugu the second, while Hindi films have actually been relegated to third spot.

As regards the production of Hindi films, Madras (now Chennai) has had a history of making Hindi films and most of the top Hindi heroes of the 1950s and ’60s worked for film production houses there. Dilip Kumar’s Azaad (1955), directed by S.M. Sriramulu Naidu and a remake of the Tamil film Malaikkallan (1954), was a big hit across India, and this is only one instance in a whole range; Aamir Khan’s blockbuster Ghajini (2008), directed by A.R. Murugadoss, is another. There has of late been a series of Bollywood blockbusters, many starring Salman Khan, which originated in languages of the south and were remade in Hindi.

Though this contention introduces an element of subjectivity into the observations, it is also on record that the studios in Madras/Chennai were traditionally run on more professional lines than those in Bombay/Mumbai. This being the case, the question arises as to why Bombay/Mumbai has been considered the centre of film production in India, and the reason may be the concentration of media houses there, which have lavished more attention on that city’s relationship with the glamorous film world.

If this explains the greater amount of attention given to Mumbai over Chennai, another question is why Hindi-language cinema has more serious scholarship dedicated to it than the other-language cinemas. The reason for this is evidently that Hindi mainstream cinema has been a national cinema in a way that regional-language cinemas have not – which is that it has endeavoured to place itself in the position of a non-local cinema within India, by dealing with non-local concerns. One might not, for instance, be questioned if one were to describe Mother India (1957) or Upkaar (1968) or Lagaan (2001) as ‘national’ films because they seem to address issues which are not local, despite concentrating their action in certain parts of north India.

The ‘nation’ imagined by Hindi cinema has always been asymmetric and, if it was once dominated by the ‘cow belt’, it is now increasingly centred on the metropolitan city – usually Mumbai and sometimes Delhi, but rarely Kolkata or Chennai. Still, the sense that Hindi cinema is ‘national’ in a unique way makes it of greater academic interest to those interested in ‘India’, its society and its politics, rather than in specific parts of it. At the same time, the fact that Hindi cinema addresses a larger territory in spatial terms, and needs to do so without causing local annoyance, leaves it bland, without much of the gusto of the regional cinemas. As an instance, the Kannada films of Upendra – such as A (1997) – often display the raw aggression of toilet graffiti and can make genteel spectators apprehensive about what they could be seeing. But there is also a huge amount of variety in south Indian cinema: Malayalam films are more subdued (rather than ‘bland’) and this is because their emotional undercurrents, though deep, are subtler and held in check.

To use semiotic parlance, regional-language cinema is richer than Bollywood in ‘signifiers’ and explicating its tendencies is hence more of a challenge. It can be argued that the regional-language popular cinemas offer greater rewards to the interpretive scholar than the Hindi film because they address local concerns as well as national ones and take overlapping identities – the regional one based on language as well the national one – into consideration in addressing their chosen constituencies. South India complicates matters further because the same directors (who tend to be multilingual) often work in more than one language cinema and understand different constituencies as their own. A Kannada ‘remake’ is not simply a Tamil film’s dialogues translated into Kannada, since the specific concerns of their respective audiences need to be addressed separately. A remake has to tailor itself to meet new representational/social needs specific to another public.

History, Celebration, Social Documentation and Interpretation

The essays in this book are mostly given to popular cinema and, generally speaking, five main strategies are acknowledged in the way the scholar-critic approaches popular culture. The first strategy attempts to find the terms of high culture where you least expect them. The second approach places its emphasis on the aspects of social reality that are unavailable to high art. The third refuses to analyse and opts instead for an enthusiastic study of detail as the foundation for evaluation. In the fourth, the hedonistic approach, the problems with the popular are evaded by concentrating exclusively on the pleasure deriving from it. The fifth method – usually employed by academics partial to psychoanalysis and methods deriving from structuralism or cultural studies – chooses to deal with the division between high and popular culture by dissolving it and declining to differentiate among the objects of study on the basis of such a division. When the purpose of an essay is to grapple with a whole body of cinema, this translates into four main approaches which can be termed historical, celebratory, akin to social document and/or interpretive, with further divisions under them. Interpretation, for instance, could either adopt a theory-down approach (relying usually on psychoanalysis and/or post-structuralism) or be more empirical.

A ‘history’ of cinema, one may contend, is not a chronological listing of films but implies some acknowledgement of causation – linking the categories of films, the generic and thematic choices to the technological advances, policies as well as ground-level developments in the production and distribution of films. A ‘celebration’ often overlaps with a ‘history’ because of its reliance on chronology but, rather than emphasizing causal connections, it dwells on detail in the achievements of the film industry. A ‘social document’ approach might treat cinema as evidence of some kind, possibly of mores and ideologies over a period. An ‘interpretative’ approach has its interest less in cinema as cinema than in the social conventions and transformations that it charts, unwittingly or wittingly. This means that it is likely to be more speculative than the social document approach, even if its interest is in society. Needless to add, it is not easy to keep the four categories apart: a chronological approach is the most cogent one, and to those fascinated by cinema, an element of celebration is unavoidable; one also does not find cinema worthy of celebration unless one has an idea of its ‘meaning’. What it ‘means’ can itself be apparent or covert and needing to be extracted; and the dividing line between the overt and the covert can also become quite indistinct.

The Essays in the Book

The essays in this book provide accounts of only the four best-known cinemas of south India, since there are other smaller cinemas – like those in Konkani, Tulu and the Kodava dialects. Sathya Prakash’s essay, which is the story of Telugu cinema from an aficionado’s viewpoint, looks at it as the biography of the Telugu film industry – the directors, producers and stars as well as the socio-political developments which facilitated film production over several decades. It pays attention to the achievements of the pioneers in the face of difficulties and can hence be termed ‘celebratory’ on this account and in its emphasis on detail. Social issues such as caste, political commitments and persuasions also played a role in Telugu cinema and the essay is sensitive to many of these aspects, as well as to the role of political players in its history – like local rajas and zamindars in the colonial period and elected leaders after 1947. It also does something which many find difficult: it finds a place for the film song, especially the lyrics, in the account, an aspect usually excluded from film study.

Kalyan Raman’s account of Tamil cinema is also a history but rather than seeing cinema in relation to the film industry, he looks at it as cultural/political history in which political movements, the Tamil identity and literature also play a large part. The essay is not neutral to cinema’s social tendencies; it not only has a sense of what it has done socially so far but also of what it should do socially.

Meena Pillai’s emphasis is on documenting Malayalam cinema’s trajectory in relation to the social mores and dominant ideologies in various periods and their transformation. Her essay also pays attention to cinema as a mover in the process of transformation. Since matriliny is a key issue in Kerala, ‘masculinity’ also becomes an ideologically valorized notion in understanding the films. Art cinema in Kerala has a much larger local following than art cinema in the other regions. It sheds light on the arrival of the ‘new wave’ in Malayalam cinema – and the directors that Malayalam cinema has become most famous for – and suggests that unlike in many other milieus, Malayalam art cinema was not the result of an impetus from the centre but grew organically in Kerala out of its literary/artistic movements.

My account of Kannada cinema is, after contrasting its conventions with those of Hindi cinema, interpretation rather than straightforward documentation. It depends on the films available for viewing, since relying on hearsay would defeat the interpretive purpose of the essay. Its interest (like Meena Pillai’s) is in the milieu – but in its actual narrativization of socio-political experience rather than its broad response to change. Its focus is on the local identity – outside that created by the linguistic state – and the shape it dictated to cinema. It sees an ongoing relationship between the ‘region’ and the ‘nation’ – with cinema as an index of the waxing and waning of the identity overlap. Political history is the point of focus more than developments in the film industry. Since it is interpretive, looking at cinema largely as subordinate to political processes, it also differs from Kalyan Raman’s essay in focusing on what cinema has been, rather than on what it should do.

From the above descriptions it will be evident that the approaches adopted by the contributors are markedly different from each other, and, accordingly, they may be devoting different levels of attention to matters than will expected by the reader. Apart from the attention given to stars/films/film-makers, this shows in the amount of detail offered with regard to the film industry and film production. Another way in which the essays might be differentiated from each other is the kind of data they rely on. While at one extremity the writer may rely largely on published writing – usually reports, accounts, biographies and responses by contemporaries more than the evidence of the films themselves – at the other extremity the writer relies primarily on the available film texts – on the presumption that the texts themselves will have much to say about the milieu they address, though it may take some excavation.

To conclude with a word of caution, since the ‘celebratory’ content in each essay differs from writer to writer, readers must not weigh the different bodies of cinema against each other, i.e., suppose that one language cinema is better than another; that would be unfair. South Indian cinema presents an enormous variety and, in that respect at least, the entire book is a celebration, but with each of the contributors choosing to celebrate it in a different way. It may be expected that there will also be notable absences in the essays but this owes to having to deal with four bodies of cinema in one volume.

Dream-world: Reflections on

Cinema and Society in

Tamil Country

N. KALYAN RAMAN

Think now

History has many cunning passages, contrived corridors

And issues, deceives with whispering ambitions,

Guides us by vanities.

—T.S. Eliot, ‘Gerontion’ (1920)

INTRODUCTION

It is well established that cinema is one of the dominant obsessions of the Tamil people. Five of the six chief ministers of the state of Tamil Nadu during the period 1967–2016 had at one time or another worked in the film industry – as scriptwriters, film-makers and actors. Tamil Nadu is home to a flourishing film industry, with Madras (now Chennai) being a top film production centre since before Independence. Of the 1,602 films produced in the country in 2012, 262 were made in Tamil, making the Tamil film industry the biggest in the country, surpassing even Bollywood.¹ Over the years, many accounts have been written about the development of Tamil cinema and its diverse aspects. Most such narratives focus only on the films as given texts and their performance at the box office. Even as an art form, cinema tends to be discussed in terms of the genius of its practitioners. For inexplicable reasons, the audience is always left out of the equation. This is somewhat anomalous since, from a certain perspective, Tamil cinema could not have endured and flourished in the way it has without the enduring passion and support of the people.

Cinema has been primarily a medium of mass entertainment in India and, without a doubt, the public has flocked to the movie theatres primarily for entertainment. However, given that filmic narratives are always embedded in a cultural context, the audiences must have experienced a resonance with the material presented on the screen at least some of the time. It is interesting to explore this question: what were the themes and reflections engaging the wider society that influenced the cultural products of Tamil cinema in discernible ways? What were the limitations that constrained the directions of Tamil cinema at every stage? What were the social aspirations and impulses that helped extend its possibilities? In trying to answer these questions, this essay will seek to place people back at the centre of film history and discuss the continuum of Tamil cinema in tandem with the trajectory of Tamil society as a whole.

While such an attempt is necessary to uncover the continuing connection between cinema and the people, we can also discern below-the-radar phenomena in contemporary society by exploring why certain films were made and received with great enthusiasm at a particular stage in history. Any casual observer of Tamil cinema will find it easy to identify the rise and ebb of particular themes over time. This essay will track such themes more systematically, using available scholarship about historical events and developments to frame the societal context.

The first silent film in Tamil was made in 1916, the first Tamil talkie in 1931. In the period since those milestone events, Tamil country has undergone massive transformations. First, from being a part of a larger territory that constituted Madras Presidency under British rule, it became a state of the republic of India. The second transformation was the formation of the linguistic state of Tamil Nadu in 1956, bringing Tamil people under a distinct political identity. The third commenced with an apparent democratization of politics with the ascendancy of Dravidian parties and the restructuring of social power and influence through state policy. The fourth is the current phase of a neo-liberal economic regime, rapid urbanization, intensified identity politics and a competitive ethos of maximizing personal gratification in a consumer society.

During each of these four historical phases, both individual and society have faced challenges and problems which Tamil cinema has tried to deal with. This essay will seek to explore the mystery of ‘what people bring to the cinema’ during these four broad phases. The style of exploration will be freewheeling, highlighting (as appropriate) general trends, themes, genres and oeuvres of individual actors and film-makers in tandem with corresponding social trends and historical events. As the relationship between culture and cinema is a two-way movement, with cinema reflecting on and influencing culture and vice versa, my attempt will be to foreground the transactions taking place in this movement.

Since Tamil cinema is a vast subject, it is perhaps useful to set down the contours of this project. This essay deals with the narrative content of only those Tamil films that are seen to have an apparent connection with societal trends and events. In that sense, it stays away from ‘entertainment’ cinema that runs the gamut from comedies and god stories to gangster films and superstar vehicles. Similarly, it takes no part in the perpetually ongoing discussion on music, cinematography, framing and composition. Finally, it is not informed by theory, critical or otherwise. The reader will find no references here to André Bazin, Jean Baudrillard, Walter Benjamin, Gilles Deleuze or Jacques Lacan. That said, I hope this essay will give the reader new ways to think about the relationship between cinema and the society in which she lives and watches films.

1

IN AN UNFREE STATE

Sourcing Narratives

Cinema as technology and cultural form entered Tamil Nadu at a particular stage in history and under certain social conditions which shaped its development in the following decades. This was no different from the way cinema made its advent in the West. After initial years of experimentation in the first decade of the last century, cinema exploded on the world mainly in Soviet Russia and America, when both cultures were negotiating accelerated social transformations with the concomitant upheavals, displacements and whole new emerging classes of people who had been recently uprooted.

The early practitioners of cinema had to contend with an unimaginably heterogeneous audience from diverse ethnic, linguistic and class groups whose reality could not be addressed through traditional identity structures. Consequently, identity and collective memory became a major concern for these film-makers; they had to create a common space to include as much of their audience as was possible. A look at the pioneers of cinema in that period – Sergei Eisenstein, D.W. Griffith and Charlie Chaplin – will attest to this contingency. Eisenstein transformed an aborted isolated mutiny on a warship in Odessa in 1905 into an epic of the struggle of the working class as Battleship Potemkin (1925). In the US, D.W. Griffith imagined his country’s emergence from the Civil War of 1861–65 and its onward journey in The Birth of a Nation (1915), and Chaplin created his immigrant ‘Tramp’, an instantly recognizable figure for everyone who had gone through the experience of dislocation and migration due to war or warlike conditions.

With its visual mimesis, the world of cinema was akin to a dream, and what these pioneers of cinema created for their audience at the very beginning was a dream of belonging. What was projected on the screen in a dark theatre gave a sense of belonging to most of their audience. It was a space where they could subsume their potentially antagonistic individual identities as Serb, Russian and Georgian, or Irish, Wasp and Italian, into that of a community. What made this strategy feasible was a pre-existing literary tradition of social narrative that was present in most European cultures. In Tamil country, the situation was different. Unlike Russia, the US and many European nations, the Tamils did not have a well-developed modern literary tradition at the beginning of the twentieth century. The first Tamil novel, Prathapa Mudaliar Charithiram by Vedanayagam Pillai, was published in 1879 and hailed as a classic. Before the end of the century, two other classic novels – Kamalambal Charithiram (1893) by Rajam Aiyar and Padmavathy Charithiram (1898) by A. Madhaviah – had appeared. These novels set a new trend whereby works of prose fiction in Tamil were published and read widely for the first time. The first three decades of the twentieth century saw a deluge of popular novels being written in Tamil for the general reader. ‘Detective stories’ were an especially popular genre. It was but natural that many of these detective stories were either directly translated from or inspired by detective novels written in English, which were then widely available in Madras. The trend of serializing novels in periodicals was also imported from England. Ananda Bodhini and Vivekodhayam were two popular weeklies that published novels in serial form. Naveenagam, Naveenam and Novel were monthlies devoted to serializing novels. Vaduvur Duraiswamy Iyengar, a popular author of ‘detective’ novels, ran a journal – Manoranjan – during 1917–27 specifically for the purpose of serializing his novels. Vai. Mu. Kothainayaki Ammal, a pioneering woman writer of the time, did the same in Jaganmohini, a magazine she edited and published. Some novels of J.R. Rangaraju, another leading exponent of ‘detective’ fiction, were adapted for the stage by drama companies, but it was too early for silent-era films to take advantage of storytelling in the modern sense. Novels by these authors were made into films only after the advent of talkies in 1932. It was not until the establishment of Ananda Vikatan and the entry of ‘Kalki’ R. Krishnamurthi in 1928 that popular modern fiction in Tamil was put on a sound footing in terms of language, style and felicitous narration.²

Thus, in the highly stratified society of that period, where people spent their intimate lives within their own communities, contemporary stories that could promote a sense of belonging on a wider scale were simply unavailable. On the other hand, like elsewhere in India, the Tamil nation had a long tradition of oral storytelling. Tales from the Puranas and the epics were narrated to the audience in a communal setting – typically, temple or village grounds. During annual festivals held at the local temple, tales from Hindu epics were also enacted on stage and presented in street performances such as therukoothu (literally, street theatre). With their profusion of subplots and teeming casts of characters, tales from the Puranas and epics were part of the community’s collective memory. Mythological tales dealt with subjects that were already familiar to the people and capable of invoking strong feelings of religious piety. Presented in a mass entertainment medium like cinema, they could promote a sense of belonging as never before. It is no surprise, then, that eighty-eight out of the 107 films made during the silent-film era in Tamil, which stretched from 1916 to 1932, were based on the Puranas, epics, folk tales or legends of Bhakti saints like Ramdas and Kabir. Some silent films were made around characters and incidents from Tamil epics like Silappadikaram.³

The choice of content helped solve many problems for the nascent industry. During the 1910s, many films were imported from the US and screened. Since these films were available in many prints, they could be rented at low rates. Action sequences and ‘special’ scenes in these American films were far superior to those in domestic films. Therefore, the imported films were hugely popular. Indian film-makers decided that the only sure way to beat such formidable competition and attract local viewers was to film tales from the Puranas.⁴

The first silent film in Tamil was Keechaka Vadham (1916), based on a Puranic tale of divine exploits and made by Nataraja Mudaliar from Chennai. It is said that when Keechaka Vadham was first released in the theatres, viewers were entranced whenever the divine characters appeared on the screen, and offered obeisance as though they were seeing the gods themselves. There were a few who broke ceremonial coconuts and prostrated themselves in front of the screen.⁵

The second film of Mudaliar’s production outfit, India Film Company, was Rukmini Vastrabaharanam (1917). He made two more films, Mahi Ravanan and Markandeyan, in 1919.⁶ Only around twenty-five silent films were made in the next dozen years. By the time the silent-film era ended, a total of 107 films had been made in Madras. Very few films on contemporary subjects were made during this period; among these were Dharmapathini made by A. Narayanan in 1929 and Anathai Penn made by Raja Sandow in 1931.

In terms of technique, since the audience already knew the story, not much attention was paid to the visual language of the films. This was very different from the cinema of the West where the visual arts were going through a period of revolutionary change; in the treatment of modern narratives, set in environments increasingly shaped by technology, the visual grammar of cinema was developed imaginatively to suit the subjects.

Important information and dialogues in silent films were shown as passages written on cards. In a society where literacy was very low, people were appointed to read out these passages to the audience. The emphasis on dialogue in Tamil films, which continues to this day, started from the silent-film era. It was also common during that period to stage events and performances unconnected with the film during the screening in order to attract a large audience. These could be songs, dances, skits, comic sketches or magic shows. It is said that this format of pastiche entertainment was borrowed from the traditional stage dramas of that period and folk performances in the rural areas. This, too, is a tradition that has continued to the present, which is a unique dimension of Indian and Tamil cinema. Actors were frequently drawn from these drama troupes as well.⁷

Before the advent of cinema, traditional art forms and recreational facilities had catered to exclusive sections of society. But cinema was an entertainment form which was mechanically reproduced to facilitate mass distribution and mass exhibition, and therefore could be offered at a low cost to a mass audience. For such reasons, the medium was looked down upon by the upper-caste and educated people in society. However, there was no doubt that a permanent space had been opened up which observed no caste distinction.⁸

Conventions of the Talkies Era

The advent of ‘talkies’, where voices and music were added to the motion picture, did not have an immediate impact on the content of Tamil films. The era of silent films had won popular acceptance for cinema as an entertainment medium. This was carried forward into the age of talkies.

Another contextual factor had a profound influence on the development of talkie films in the initial years. When cinema came to Madras Presidency in the 1920s, the performances of commercial drama companies were the most prevalent form of popular entertainment. These troupes had appeared during the last decade of the nineteenth century and, in just two decades, had popularized drama as a major entertainment form. Soon, many newly established companies were touring the presidency. Their repertoire was quite limited, mostly comprising episodes from Indian mythology. Written as musicals, the plays were mere vehicles for songs, resembling European operas in this respect, and so the actors were required to be singers as well. There grew a corpus of songs which enjoyed popularity on stage, and stage actors often gave independent concerts featuring these songs. Songs used by the drama companies were based on Carnatic music. In addition, they introduced a new strain of music into Tamil Nadu, natya sangeeth (drama music), a kind of Hindustani music appropriated from Marathi drama companies which toured Tamil Nadu at the beginning of the century. Through this strain, Hindustani ragas were assimilated; the resultant synthesis claimed a very large following. Folk songs were also used in these dramas, usually performed by the comedian.

When Tamil talkies emerged as a popular entertainment form in the early 1930s, artistes and others from the stage – playwrights, actors, songwriters, musicians, lighting experts – moved en masse into this new phase of cinema where the advent of sound had created a demand for their talents. Many well-known names from the stage quickly gained screen fame. Thus the talkie cinema in its initial years availed of the pre-existing cultural resources in society, namely, drama troupes and their personnel. It also drew on the collective memory of society in the form of the mythological to establish itself in the popular imagination. Since the prose fiction tradition was yet undeveloped and the widest possible audience which had to be reached was as yet illiterate, the medium was unable to accommodate contemporary social narratives in the initial two decades. When sound-recording facilities were not yet established in Madras, most of the Tamil talkies in the first four years were made in Bombay, Pune and Calcutta.

The Early Talkies

The first talkie made in Tamil was Kalidas (1931), on the life of the gifted Sankrit poet who lived in the fifth century CE in the kingdom of Vikramaditya of Ujjain. Kalidasa was the author of several celebrated classical works that include Abhijnanasakunthalam, Kumarasambhavam and Meghadutam. Legend has it that he was a cowherd married by chance to a princess, who later became endowed with poetic gifts through prayers to the goddess Kali and the blessings of Saraswati, the goddess of learning. Kalidas was made in Bombay, and it featured nearly fifty songs. It was followed by Galavarishi (1932), Harishchandra (1932), Kovalan (1933) and Sita Vanavasam (1934), all tales from ancient times. Next to mythologicals, the most popular subject for the talkie was the lives of saints. Nandanar (1933), the story of an untouchable farmhand who aspired to be a devotee of Lord Shiva, was the first film of this genre,⁹ followed by Siruthonda Nayanar (1934) and Sankaracharya (1939).¹⁰

The first film to be made with a contemporary theme was Kausalya (August 1935), a thriller with a female protagonist. The second social, Dumbachari, adapted from a popular play of the same name, was also released in August 1935. A third, Menaka, also a popular drama, was released in December that year. Dumbachari chronicles the fate of a self-indulgent young man who squanders his inherited wealth on gambling and women. The popularity of the film gave the impetus for the production of more films with contemporary themes, although the bulk of the films continued to be based on mythological subjects. In 1937, only seven of the thirty-seven films produced were on contemporary themes; in the next year, the count was ten.¹¹

However, the main trend in the film industry continued to be the production of musicals with mythological or devotional subjects, with a plethora of songs and fronted by a male star who was both actor and singer. M.K. Thyagaraja Bhagavathar was Tamil cinema’s first superstar and the films starring MKT (as he was known), which appeared for about ten years from the late 1930s, were superhits, running for a year or more in prominent theatres in Tamil Nadu. These films were Pavalakodi (1934), Chintamani (1937), Ambikapathi (1937), Thiruneelakantar (1939), Ashok Kumar (1941), Sivakavi (1943) and Haridas (1944). Each of these films was a musical, with the number of songs ranging from twenty to fifty. The other male singing stars of the era included P.U. Chinnappa, S.G. Kittappa, Honnappa Bhagavathar and T.R. Mahalingam. P.U. Chinnappa starred in Aryamala (1941), Kannagi (1942) and Jagathala Prathaban (1944), all of them period musicals. Among the female singers, M.S. Subbulakshmi – who acted and sang in Sevasadanam (1938), Sakuntalai (1940) and Meera (1945) – K.B. Sundarambal and