11/3/22, 12:25 PM "We must make the government tremble": political filmmaking in the South Indian State of Tamil

Tamil Nadu - Document - Gale Ac…

"We must make the government tremble":

political filmmaking in the South Indian State
of Tamil Nadu
Author: David B. Pratt
Date: Fall 1994
From: Velvet Light Trap
Publisher: University of Texas at Austin (University of Texas Press)
Document Type: Article
Length: 24,763 words

Full Text:
And rain descends
As chalices
Of blood
That Heroes shed

-- M. Karunanidhi, Rain (1)

He routs the tusker with his spear, pulls out

the one from his heart, and smiles.

-- Tiruvalluvar, Tirukkural (2)

Makkal Theerpu Mahesan Theerpu (The people's verdict is God's

verdict).

-- Tamil proverb

NUMEROUS ASPECTS OF ITHU ENGAL NEETHI'S opening initially appear to be impenetrably

enigmatic to Western eyes. The strangeness of these first ten minutes marks the title as a
cinematic practice well outside the norms of classical Hollywood cinema. Yet as cryptic as the
film might seem to as culturally alien an audience as the readers of Western academic film
journals, the questions it raises can be unpacked--its formal and generic otherness to some
degree bridged. In the process, we confront a cinema whose use of such familiar Western
forms as the melodrama, the musical, and the action picture tests many of our most
fundamental generalizations about these genres and that challenges many of our notions of
the relationship between popular and political filmmaking in the Third World.

Our Justice: Exposition

The first shot, like all first shots in Indian films, is of the censor's document approving the film
for public screening. It is followed by the production company's logo displaying the famous
Christian shrine to the Virgin Mary, Velankanni, located on the country's southeastern coast.
This is replaced by a written disclaimer announcing that the film to follow is fiction. For the
next minute we watch and listen as a man in his mid-sixties in front of a wall of books directly
addresses the camera in medium shot. He has on the all-white dhoti preferred by Indian
politicians since Mahatma Gandhi made a social issue out of wearing hand-spun cotton.

https://go.gale.com/ps/i.do?p=AONE&u=googlescholar&id=GALE|A90190298&v=2.1&it=r&sid=AONE&asid=2c23a6e9 1/43
11/3/22, 12:25 PM "We must make the government tremble": political filmmaking in the South Indian State of Tamil Nadu - Document - Gale Ac…

Though he is indoors, he is wearing the dark glasses that carry a certain fashionable elan in
South India. We are told that the film we are about to see was directed by the great director S.
A. Chandrasekharan, and with significant uncertainty the camera tracks backwards and to the
right, simultaneously panning in the opposite direction to reveal a young man to the camera's
left of the speaker. With a clearly audible "blip" on the soundtrack that further marks the film's
indifference to matters of technical sophistication, the film cuts back to just the speaker. (3)

The man in white explains that he was inspired to write the film's screenplay and see it
produced because he is convinced that the state is desperately lacking justice. When the law
doesn't provide justice there must be those who go beyond the law to create their own. He
concludes by invoking the Indian ritual of creating patterns in the dirt outside of the home
from a series of initially placed dots. The speaker says that like those who draw such patterns
he has been constrained by "dots," but he will do what he can within these limits to expose
the hidden but powerful forces that are exploiting the nation. No names are named.

The credits that follow are simple white letters, wiped on and off a red background. They are
accompanied on the soundtrack by a light, "swinging," pop-rock score dominated by a small
chorus of female voices. By using the same few syllables across the entire melody, the singers
suggest nothing so much as the dated pop soundtracks of numerous Anglo-Euro-American
films of the 1960s. The music, which has nothing in common with the rest of the film's score,
ends abruptly with the credits.

Scene 1: A van passes through a wooded area and screeches to a halt. Three men get out.
One of them orders the other two to "bring the dog," and the underlings enter an apartment
building. Their ascension of the apartment's stairs is intercut with brief shots of a young man
seated against a blank white wall that is adorned solely with a calendar featuring the image of
Jesus Christ. Though silently staring off, the man is weeping uncontrollably.

The two thugs suddenly burst through his wall and drag him out of the apartment, down the
stairs, and into the courtyard, where he is thrown to the ground in front of a crowded
semicircle of residents. The man giving the orders pronounces his fate, and as the crying
Christian begs for his life, the leader points a pair of handguns and shoots him several times
in the chest. The crowd watches with complete impassivity, not even clearing out from behind
the victim as the shots are fired. The executioner delivers a speech to the witnesses,
explaining that the dead man filed a complaint with the police about him. He goes on and tells
them that if they have the guts they are perfectly free to go to court to testify about the killing
but that if they do they will meet the same fate.

Scene 2: In a courtroom, a prosecuting attorney lays out a case against a pimp whose
numerous crimes have been shielded through intimidation and murder of witnesses as well
as through bribes to government officials. The prosecutor explains that the man who was
prepared to testify that day about what had been done to his college student sister has just
been executed by "Dynamic Bob." The defense attorney, however, insists that as justice is
blind, the court must hear the testimony of witnesses. Since the prosecuting attorney has no
witnesses, his client should go free.

After the judge agrees, the prosecutor leads a group of followers into a modest, thatch-roofed
village building. There, before pictures of Soviet revolutionary V. I. Lenin and a late politician,

https://go.gale.com/ps/i.do?p=AONE&u=googlescholar&id=GALE|A90190298&v=2.1&it=r&sid=AONE&asid=2c23a6e9 2/43
11/3/22, 12:25 PM "We must make the government tremble": political filmmaking in the South Indian State of Tamil Nadu - Document - Gale Ac…

C. N. Annadurai, he announces that he is quitting his job. Quoting the politician on the wall, he
explains that justice cannot be pursued inside the legal system.

Scene 3: In a series of short sequences, three young male laborers overhear the case being
related. First a wood chopper and then a blacksmith freeze in mid-swing as they listen to
newspaper articles being read recounting the murder of the family of the officer who arrested
Dynamic Bob. Finally a cabby listens to his passengers discuss the case. When the passengers
agree that nothing could be done without witnesses, the enraged driver stops his three-
wheeled auto-rickshaw, throws them out, and knocks both of them to the ground, his blows
represented on the soundtrack by the exaggerated post-dubbed sound effects familiar from
Hong Kong martial arts films. He points out that since there are no witnesses, he is equally
free to beat them in this manner.

Scene 4: In a secluded hilltop locale, the three workers unite and silently perform a ceremony
involving the lighting of candles. After putting on wigs, facial hair, and identical "uniforms,"
they raise their machine guns in a single gesture, all to a non-diegetic instrumental track of
guitar, bass, synthesizer, and brass on top of a rock-funk-disco beat.

Scene 5: The three executioners of the would-be witness are in a large, almost palatial
courtyard containing, among other things, numerous bottles of alcohol. They and several
Western-dressed women are disco dancing to an instrumental version of Michael Jackson's
"Billie Jean." Synthesized sound effects representing machine gun fire interrupt the party as
the bottles of liquor explode in close-up. As the three workers enter the room, the synthesizer
shifts to providing ominous, undulating effects that while clearly nondiegetic would not be
popularly classified as music by any currently existing human culture. The killers run from the
building, followed by the vigilantes. The earlier "theme" music that accompanied the laborers'
transformation starts back up, and the vigilantes get on motorcycles and chase the killers
through the streets to the same courtyard of the original killing. There, with the same group of
residents crowded around, Dynamic Bob and his two friends are kicked and punched into
submission before being summarily executed.

The machine gun wielders then harangue the gathered multitude, telling them that the dead
escaped legal punishment because none of the witnesses would testify. As a result the trio
have been forced to deal out the proper punishment. They compare themselves to candles
providing a small amount of light but insist that no one who escapes the justice of the courts
will escape justice from them. Unlike the original murderers, however, they promise that if
turned in they will accept their punishment. As they ride off, their theme music starts back up,
and the vigilantes sing and dance their way through a musical number whose choreography
and editing are lifted almost directly from Michael Jackson's video Beat It.

So begins Ithu Engal Neethi (Our justice, 1988), a film from the South Indian state of Tamil
Nadu ("Land of the Tamils," formerly Madras State). These opening sequences quickly
establish the title's theme. In the picture that follows, the vigilantes will inflict the single
sentence of "their justice" on the robber of an older woman (they shoot him), a corrupt
medical school admissions officer (they knife him in the belly and publicly hang him), the
ravagers of a wealthy couple (they shoot them in the back), and a high-caste politician-rapist-
murderer played by the son of the famous film villain M. R. Radha, Radha Ravi (they lead a

https://go.gale.com/ps/i.do?p=AONE&u=googlescholar&id=GALE|A90190298&v=2.1&it=r&sid=AONE&asid=2c23a6e9 3/43
11/3/22, 12:25 PM "We must make the government tremble": political filmmaking in the South Indian State of Tamil Nadu - Document - Gale Ac…

mob that bludgeons him tender, sets him on fire, and impales him on the end of a large
spear).

Yet listing such incidents as a child being hurled off a cliff to a skull-crushing death on the
rocks below only conceals the film's radical heterogeneity. Like virtually all Indian films made
primarily for domestic consumption, there are several singing and dancing sequences. While
the first two dance numbers valorize the vigilantes' brand of justice, another acts out romantic
love, a fourth celebrates a student's successful completion of his medical school entrance
exams, and a final one honors rural education (with the teacher leading both children and a
few very late starting seniors in an outdoor song and dance based around classroom lessons
and personal hygiene). Immediately following the opening section, the film introduces an
unsophisticated, flamboyant, criminal-fighting "village girl," played by M. R. Radha's daughter,
Radhika. Prior to her martyrdom at the film's conclusion, this very independent heroine is
used primarily for comic ends. In addition to a slapstick martial arts scene in which she uses
the contents of a kitchen to dispatch two intoxicated male assailants, she has numerous
sequences with a pair of buffoon characters, played by a low-comedy duo familiar from many
other Tamil films.

In brief, the film's two and one-half hours mix up politics, social commentary, graphic violence,
slapstick, family melodrama, romance, farce, martial arts, and song and dance into an
evening's entertainment for the entire family. Many of these elements are of course common
ingredients of the spice mixture popularly known as the "masala film." However, what makes
this particular masala mixture unique to Tamil Nadu is the degree to which its heavy dose of
political content is grounded in the factional realities of South Indian politics.

It is true that in a sense much of Ithu Engal Neethi is simply a string of outrages against which
the heroes can vent their acts of vengeance. In this it is not substantially different from such
politically reactionary American vigilante films as the Dirty Harry or Death Wish series. What
permits us to begin considering the film in other terms is its explicit call for violent mass
action against corrupt representatives of various institutional state apparatuses. The people
are continually called upon--often through literal speeches--to side with the vanguard
vigilantes and take action themselves. From the beginning, the populace is shown to be at
least passively on the side of the vigilantes as they continually fail to turn the latter over to the
authorities even though they have been promised freedom from retaliation if they have
enough faith in government institutions to do so. Separate flashbacks explaining the three
workers' motivations for turning against the law are presented in the form of confessions to
individuals seemingly inclined to see the law enforced. These listeners include the original trial
judge who let Dynamic Bob go free as well as the heroine, who turns out to be an undercover
police agent assigned to ferret out and arrest the vigilantes. In each case, however, the
listeners are won over to the vigilantes' cause.

The level of commitment demanded by the vigilantes increases throughout the film. Toward
the end, the heroine presents the former prosecuting attorney with the incriminating books of
the evil politician-murderer, and when the attorney refuses a bribe to hush them up, the
politician murders him. When the politician and the police set up the vigilantes for the crime,
the heroine lies down in front of the arresting police vehicle. She is joined in this road "roko"
by her two comic foils, followed by everyone assembled for the attorney's funeral. When the
vehicle charges the crowd anyway and crushes a blind woman, the people literally rise up and

https://go.gale.com/ps/i.do?p=AONE&u=googlescholar&id=GALE|A90190298&v=2.1&it=r&sid=AONE&asid=2c23a6e9 4/43
11/3/22, 12:25 PM "We must make the government tremble": political filmmaking in the South Indian State of Tamil Nadu - Document - Gale Ac…

in a spontaneous act of rage attack the police. (4) Following the politician's murder of the
heroine at the film's end, the masses are moved to still greater brutal fury. In the act of mob
violence that results in the politician's bludgeoning and burning, the people demonstrate that
they will insist on justice if they have to carry it out themselves through direct mass action,
and the three heroes turn themselves in to a waiting police vehicle.

However, what is finally most responsible for giving the film a more explicit and highly
charged political resonance than parallel Hollywood vigilante films starring the likes of Charles
Bronson and Clint Eastwood, what unambiguously grounds the film in the realities of South
Indian society and turns its calls for violent mass action against corrupt representatives of
state institutions into something just short of a political manifesto, is the fact that Muthuvel
Karunanidhi, the screenwriter who addressed us at the beginning of the film, was from 1969
to 1976 the chief minister of the 40 million people of Tamil Nadu. And in January 1989,
thirteen years after the central government of Indira Gandhi used the excuse of corruption to
dismiss his fiercely independent government and take control of the state and eight weeks
after Ithu Engal Neethi received its censorship seal from the government of Indira Gandhi's
son, Rajiv, he would be voted back into office.

Class, Orientalism, and the Masala Film

Even though India has a film industry that produced over 900 films last year, the country is
represented in the West by the work of less than a handful of directors, most notably the late
Satyajit Ray. However, Ray's pictures can hardly be discussed as representative of the
entertainment of the majority of even his native West Bengal, where they seldom play outside
of certain Calcutta theaters. Even Western writers interested in the politics of Third World
cinema have uncritically accepted the judgment of India's upper classes and assumed that the
only other area of Indian cinema worthy of attention is the unrepresentative, elitist, "New
Cinema" movement. (5) Thirty years after the first publication of Erik Barnouw and S.
Krishnaswamy's landmark overview, Indian Film, the rich territory of Indian popular cinema
has received, in Rosie Thomas's phrase, little more than "arrogant silence."

Film studies in the West has acted as if the entire output of the subcontinent could be safely
imagined from the contemptuous descriptions that have dominated popular accounts in both
India and the West. These reports invariably dismiss the pleasures of the films in the fashion
of Singin' in the Rain's Lina Lamont talking about bringing a little joy into her audience's
humdrum lives. "It is [a] childlike cinema, made for a childlike audience. The films are shot to a
formula which is undemandingly escapist." "The industry feeds them with dreams to make
them laugh or weep. They believe in these dreams more uncritically than any other audience
in the world. They follow the stars with the attentive love of astronomers. To forget the squalid
reality of his own life, a poor man will visit the cinema practically every day." "This is exactly
what people want, pure escapism ... they want and need some unreality." "Films here are like
hallucinations for most people." "People need glamour, escape, unreality to survive." "India's
poor need escapism to endure their plight." "This make-believe world, on screen and off,
seems crucially linked, somehow, to the dual qualities of endurance and passivity that grip
many Indians." "Indians go to the movies to escape the poverty around them; they are
rewarded with celluloid fantasies." "The excited, noisy crowd that entered the hall three hours
ago leaves utterly subdued, silent, but hugging its dreams as a miser would guard his gold."
"We sell them dreams. They buy them." (6)

https://go.gale.com/ps/i.do?p=AONE&u=googlescholar&id=GALE|A90190298&v=2.1&it=r&sid=AONE&asid=2c23a6e9 5/43
11/3/22, 12:25 PM "We must make the government tremble": political filmmaking in the South Indian State of Tamil Nadu - Document - Gale Ac…

All of these quotes, while from various sources, were distilled out of the only three articles
dealing with the general topic of the Indian film industry to be published in the New York
Times since 1970. The same language of escaping into dreams permeates the bulk of what
comes out of the English-language Indian press, where it serves the ideological ends of class
and caste by culturally marginalizing both product and consumer: The Indians who use this
metaphor to account for the masala film's popularity are, of course, never speaking of their
personal reasons for attending films. Once this language has been imported to the West, it
invariably becomes part of an all-too-familiar Orientalist rhetoric, even when those who
employ it believe they are analyzing a radical instance of postcolonial disempowerment.
Indeed, the notion of fleeing "reality," whether through drugs, meditation, philosophy,
religious rituals, or aesthetic pleasure, has long permeated Western characterizations of the
East.

Yet now that the metaphor of the "dream" is shopworn from nearly a century's worth of use in
both popular and academic discourse on the subject of cinematic pleasure, and now that such
previously dismissed genres as the family melodrama and the musical have been opened up
as key sites of ideological conflict, and now that "spectacle" and "excess" are sources of
academic interest rather than embarrassment, and now that over two decades of Brechtian
political film criticism have encouraged us to question the culturally dominant aesthetic of
naturalism as a construction serving bourgeois ideological ends, and now that thousands of
these films are readily available (albeit rarely subtitled) on video in mom and pop shops in
cities around the United States and England, it is long past time to get on with the task of
looking at the films themselves. What my research has found is a cinematic practice that
rather than being characterized by the metaphor of "escape" directly confronts many of the
political and social realities of South Indian society. What is more, these films contain
numerous elements that at least for Western eyes and ears constitute an "alternative" and in
some ways even "Brechtian" cinematic practice.

The Industry

It is more or less common knowledge that India has one of the most active film industries in
the world. Not only does India's annual production exceed that of any country in the world,
but the industry is variously credited with being between the tenth and the sixth largest in the
country. Unlike so much of the rest of the globe, the Indian market has been able to
successfully marginalize imported American titles. As budgets for American films have
increased, Indian films have maintained modest production values. Indeed, in many ways,
earlier standards have only been lowered to accommodate the fragmentation of the market
that has been a function of several decades of overproduction. With only exceptional
instances of explicit government sponsorship (primarily of the middle-class "New Indian
Cinema" movement), regional production has still managed to monopolize an estimated 93
percent of total screen time.

One of the biggest misconceptions about the Indian film industry is that the mass audience
film and the Hindi film produced in the North Indian city of Bombay are synonymous. Though
Bombay has often been spoken of as if it were the Indian equivalent of Hollywood, the
diversity of cultures and tongues on the subcontinent has prevented a single city from
dominating Indian filmmaking. It is true that filmmaking in South India was very
underdeveloped until the adoption of sound. Between 1935 and 1940, however, production

https://go.gale.com/ps/i.do?p=AONE&u=googlescholar&id=GALE|A90190298&v=2.1&it=r&sid=AONE&asid=2c23a6e9 6/43
11/3/22, 12:25 PM "We must make the government tremble": political filmmaking in the South Indian State of Tamil Nadu - Document - Gale Ac…

began to increase in cities such as Madras (or, more precisely, the neighboring town of
Kodambakkam). The war and the period of transition to independence temporarily retarded
the industry's development, but in the three decades between 1950 and 1980 Tamil-language
films went from 19 to over 140 titles a year. By virtually any measurement, the film industry of
Tamil Naduone of the nation's four primary southern states, located on the eastern coast of
the country's southernmost tip--equals in importance that of any other state of India. The
south currently exceeds the north in capital invested, number of studios, number of films
produced, number of cinemas, number of people employed by the industry, attendance, and
gross income. These figures become only more impressive when measured on a per capita
basis. The population of Tamil Nadu, for example, represents a mere 7 percent of India's total.

While for years Bombay made most of the films for North India, 63 percent of the country's
entire cinematic output is in the four primary languages of South India, a statistic that has
varied little in twenty years. Between 1984 and 1988 a total of 843 films were made in Hindi,
by far the most important primary language in India. On the other hand, 811 were made in
Tamil and 885 in Telugu, the language of the southern state directly north of Tamil Nadu. Of
the 807 Indian films produced in 1987, only 150 were in Hindi. What is even more startling is
that Madras film production has grown so dramatically in recent years that in addition to
making films in Tamil and other southern languages, it produces a substantial percentage of
the nation's Hindi films as well. (7)

While Bombay continues to be an important center for higher-budget films for the North
Indian market, Hindi versions of southern-language films have dramatically influenced the
content of such films. The Madras film industry has been held responsible for recent trends in
Bombay cinema toward an increased flirtation with the politically, violently, and sexually
taboo. Southern actors have become Hindi film stars, and even locations popularized by
southern films have lured Bombay-based filmmakers south. The 1982 Asian Games were
responsible for the dramatic expansion of television coverage in India, and the country is now
estimated to have over 30 million sets and 10 million VCRs (for a population of 844 million).

With the recent rise of video parlors, often showing illegally duplicated prints, the theatrical
film industry has fallen into a period of crisis. However, in spite of regular reports of big losses
and increased distributor selectivity (one-third of the Hindi films produced in 1987 went
theatrically undistributed), there seems to be little decline in the number of films being made.
For decades, all estimates on the break-even rate of Indian films have fallen between 5 and 30
percent. Even those sources that make the highest estimates of this figure concede that the
percentage of actual "winners" is not more than 2 percent. The industry is insulated from this
astonishing rate of financial failure by loose financial practices that attract untaxed and
otherwise illegally obtained "black money" in need of investments in which to hide or be
laundered. The prestige and influence associated with filmmaking as well as the legends of
large profits made on key pictures also attract a steady flow of high-rolling, independent
producers who try their luck, fail, and get out. (8)

Elements of an Alternative Film Aesthetic

Ithu Engal Neethi's two-and-a-half-hour running length reflects recent trends in Indian cinema
to scale productions down from earlier standards of over three hours. Its five dance numbers
reflect the current norm. Though long a source of embarrassment for India's English-speaking,

https://go.gale.com/ps/i.do?p=AONE&u=googlescholar&id=GALE|A90190298&v=2.1&it=r&sid=AONE&asid=2c23a6e9 7/43
11/3/22, 12:25 PM "We must make the government tremble": political filmmaking in the South Indian State of Tamil Nadu - Document - Gale Ac…

middle-class intelligentsia who cringe at the willful disruption of any illusion of a naturalistic
diegesis, musical numbers in general may be more important than ever. Music video
companies are now making movies themselves to insure that their primary product is
properly presented and marketed. (9)

The representatives of India's middle classes tirelessly insist that the subcontinent's masses
are incapable of discriminating between cinematic representation and reality. However, the
masses' insistence that their narratives be abruptly interrupted with songs and dances
suggests that not only do they know the difference but that the entertainment they prefer
rejects an aesthetic based upon a mystification and obscuring of the difference. (10) The
Indian film industry's "playback" system of dubbing over the images of actors with the voices
of professional singers is hardly a secret in the sole possession of the middle classes. The
industry has its own set of playback stars who do the singing for innumerable actors and
actresses and under whose names soundtrack recordings are often marketed. In one of Ithu
Engal Neethi's musical numbers, the camera cuts between each of the three vigilantes as they
are shown "singing" the song on the soundtrack. However, in a moment of sound/image
disjunction that in Western filmmaking would be described as Godardian demystification, the
singer's voice on the soundtrack remains consistent across the three different actors. Within
the aesthetic conventions of Indian cinema this moment is unremarkable.

Nor do the bulk of Indian popular films aspire to a naturalistic soundtrack outside of the
musical numbers. The previously mentioned synthesized sounds that are substituted in the
place of machine gun fire or the exaggerated blows of the fight scenes are examples of the
sorts of nonnatural substitutions that take place across the entire film. In the scene where the
heroine fights off her oversized male attackers, the sound that accompanies the striking of the
bald one's head with a large mallet is clearly the sound of metal striking metal. While such
strategies are to be found in American comedies such as Preston Sturges's Unfaithfully Yours,
Warner Brother cartoons, or the films of Frank Tashlin, Ithu Engal Neethi uses them in its most
dramatic scenes as well. In other cases, a scene's tone is underscored by sound effects that,
while clearly not meant to be understood as music, are also not directly tied to the image
track. Such nondiegetic sounds as the undulations following the vigilantes' destruction of
Dynamic Bob's liquor again recall moments in American films such as the famous wolf whistle
that no one can hear in D.O.A. (1949). But once again the use of this device in Ithu Engal
Neethi is not restricted to comedy. (11) The use of such sound cues to redundantly signal a
scene's tone may be important in a cinema with such abrupt tonal shifts as the Indian masala
film. For example, with no perceptible irony Ithu Engal Neethi cuts directly from a shot of the
dead medical school admissions officer dangling from the end of a rope in a public archway
into a comedy sequence based around an extended political reference to the two women who
at the time of the film's release were running against the screenwriter for the job of chief
minister of Tamil Nadu.

The visual in Indian masala cinema often eschews Western principles of verisimilitude as well.
Ithu Engal Neethi includes a shot of one of the vigilantes hiding inside a closed, free-standing
wardrobe. Though there is presumably no light source in the wardrobe, the shot's lighting is in
no way diminished from bracketing shots of the wardrobe's exterior. Other aspects of Indian
films, though not necessarily subversive of Hollywood codes of naturalism, are even more
responsible for the cinema's radically "other" look to Western eyes. Though the quick zoom is
entirely absent from many Indian films, Ithu Engal Neethi regularly uses it in place of the cut-
https://go.gale.com/ps/i.do?p=AONE&u=googlescholar&id=GALE|A90190298&v=2.1&it=r&sid=AONE&asid=2c23a6e9 8/43
11/3/22, 12:25 PM "We must make the government tremble": political filmmaking in the South Indian State of Tamil Nadu - Document - Gale Ac…

in. Though extreme in its efficiency and functionality, this strategy gives the title a "cheap,"
dramatically non-Hollywood quality.

On the other hand, many elements in Indian cinema stress the ornamental or nonfunctionally
decorative. Highly elaborate wipes involving, for example, an expanding, spinning star pattern
or the segmentation of the image into a series of smaller squares that randomly become the
subsequent image are common in popular postwar melodramas, long after less-involved
versions of the device had virtually died out in their already marginalized place within
American comedies, trailers, and low-budget serials. (12) Other transition devices such as
those signaling dreams or flashbacks are equally strange to Western eyes. Even current
releases contain similarly decorative examples. To highlight a key temporal ellipsis, Ithu Engal
Neethi includes a single such device--in this case, an expanding opaque green dot against a
yellow background.

Ithu Engal Neethi also contains such disruptive "play" with the "materiality" of film as slowed,
speeded, and backwards motion, a stuttering, strobelike pixilation in its action sequences,
image fragmentation, repeated footage, and even negative footage. At one point the narrative
returns from a flashback to the present with a freeze frame of the character narrating the
flashback. His narration continues on the audio track for several seconds before his frozen
image finally "comes alive." Such ruptures in the invisible presentation of a naturalistic
diegesis are hardly extreme. Two-thirds of the way through Ithu Engal Neethi's narrative, a
vigilante's flashback is interrupted with a single intertitle announcing not an intermission or
an ellipsis but simply telling latecomers who directed the film. (The videotape version I have
been using includes a phone number across the bottom of most of the film.)

Much of the film's dialogue is playfully self-reflexive. In the scene introducing the village girl,
the character played by Radhika relates how she was conned by a man who led her on with
the line "you look like an actress." One of her listeners replies, "You do. You look just like that
actress Radhika." Other dialogue contains obvious double meanings pointing outside the
narrative to such actual Tamil Nadu politicians as screenwriter Karunanidhi and his political
arch-rival Jayalalitha.

There are additional cases of "baring the device" to expose the mechanisms of Indian
cinematic narrative conventions. After the two drunken brutes burst in on Radhika, one of the
vigilantes appears from nowhere to defend her. However, our expectations for a fight
between the males is exposed as a filmic convention with ideological implications when the
heroine steps between them and starts pushing around and taking to task her would-be
rescuer for the sexist assumption that she is incapable of taking care of herself. "I know how
this is supposed to go. You are supposed to protect me and then when you are done I am
supposed to fall in love with you for saving me. Well, no, no, no, I'll do it myself!" While not all
of these distracting or reflexive devices or moments can be described as entirely common
within Indian filmmaking, they in no way mark the film as somehow unique. (13)

The Audience

Until only very recently, by far the most popular genre for Indian films in general was what is
called the "social picture." Most analogous to the family melodrama, it deals almost
exclusively with issues of caste, class, patriarchy, and modernization in relation to such quite
real aspects of Indian life as the arranged marriage. Robert Hardgrave and Anthony Neidhart's
https://go.gale.com/ps/i.do?p=AONE&u=googlescholar&id=GALE|A90190298&v=2.1&it=r&sid=AONE&asid=2c23a6e9 9/43
11/3/22, 12:25 PM "We must make the government tremble": political filmmaking in the South Indian State of Tamil Nadu - Document - Gale Ac…

mid-seventies study of film-going patterns in Tamil Nadu found that socials constituted well
over half of Madras's output, dwarfing such famous (and more expensive) alternatives as
historical and mythological films. However, long-running popular television series based on
the most famous of the Indian mythological epics demonstrate that such subjects still have a
substantial audience across India. The most recent development within Tamil cinema,
however, has been the growth of the action film. Of the 172 Tamil films made in 1992, 74 (43
percent) were action-oriented. As India Today--a respected biweekly modeled as an Indian
cross between Time and the Economist--put it, Tamil cinema has "soaked in the era of violent,
explosive death with relish." (14)

Most Tamil films have urban settings and only the smallest minority are entirely rural. Not
surprisingly, Hardgrave and Neidhart discovered that audiences in urban areas are twice as
likely to use their leisure time for film, though no doubt this ratio is also a function of
economics and accessibility. Even so, this gap is very narrow by Indian standards. The
subcontinent has always suffered from a shortage of cinemas relative to the size of its
audience, and through the years rural populations, when exposed to films at all, have often
been forced to rely upon mobile cinemas showing under thatched roofs. Such traveling
cinemas, while rare in most of India, have historically been very common in Tamil Nadu and
the bordering state of Andhra Pradesh, where 40 percent of the country's traveling units are
to be found. This extensive rural penetration has been particularly significant in a state whose
voting population as recently as 1977 was estimated to be only 35 percent urban. (15)

Contrary to popular assumptions about Indian cinema being a product of its audience's
poverty and lack of education, film viewing goes up consistently and dramatically with
increased education, with university graduates attending films the most frequently. While
people with monthly income levels above Rs 1,000 are more likely to consider films as a
primary leisure time activity, there is no substantial variation across most other income levels.
Though film going drops off dramatically after the age of fifty, easily two-thirds of the rest of
the population go more than once a month, with 45 percent of those under thirty attending at
least once a week. Men go somewhat more often than women in the cities but significantly
less often in the country, a phenomenon which Hardgrave and Neidhart see as a function of
the increased level of discontent among rural women. Contrary to the ever-repeated truism
that Indian films serve as an outlet for escape, Hardgrave and Neidhart found that a large
percentage of their respondents claimed to be either satisfied or very satisfied with their lives.
Even among the extremely poor--those earning less than Rs 150 ($20) a month--51 percent
were either satisfied or very satisfied with their lives, though even here the increased
contentment reported by the heaviest film goers could arguably substantiate such truisms.
(16)

The Politics of Dravidian Nationalism

Because the filmmaking of Bombay, like the entire culture of North India, is generally allowed
to stand in for the entire subcontinent, Tamil filmmaking is twice marginalized within Western
cinema studies. Yet the Tamil film industry is properly understood only in its opposition to that
of North India. This opposition reflects the general position of South Indian culture within
India itself.

https://go.gale.com/ps/i.do?p=AONE&u=googlescholar&id=GALE|A90190298&v=2.1&it=r&sid=AONE&asid=2c23a6e9 10/43
11/3/22, 12:25 PM "We must make the government tremble": political filmmaking in the South Indian State of Tamil Nadu - Document - Gale Ac…

The people of South India are separated from those of the north by a history that goes back
millennia. Known collectively as Dravidians, the common ancestry of their twenty languages is
thought to have no relation with any other language group on earth. Dravidian culture is
believed to date to a highly developed civilization located in the Indus Valley of present-day
Pakistan from around 3000 B.C., that is, while Egypt was first becoming unified under a single
pharaoh. At Mohenjo-Daro, archaeologists have reconstructed a large, brick-built city,
complete with wide streets, two-to-three-story buildings, and drainage systems more
sophisticated than anything until Rome. Members of the culture did not seem to have the
extreme social stratification of other ancient civilizations, and their skills in pottery, metallurgy,
and carved ivory were also highly developed. In short, they had a standard of living by many
measurements higher than many Indians today. According to theories initially advanced by
British archaeologists, anthropologists, and linguists, around 1500 B.C. Aryan "invaders" from
the north moved into the Indus Valley, imposing their language, religion (Hinduism), and
caste-based culture. What remained of Dravidian civilization was pushed south.

In the 2,500 years since the alleged invasion, the entire subcontinent has experienced plenty
of cultural intermixing and evolution. The Dravidians of South India, however, continue to see
themselves as entirely distinct from the Aryans of the north, who are still regarded as a
pressuring influence on their identity. Within the Dravidians, Tamil civilization, fanning out
from the Cauvery River basin, has its own rich historical heritage. Such past glories as the
Chola Dynasty have long been celebrated in the arts, including film. While these "historicals"
are often the first genre charged with "escapism," there is no doubt that they have always
served an important role in the preservation of Tamil heritage and identity. (17)

The importance of the Tamil language in the identity of the people cannot be
overemphasized. After independence from England, Indians were immediately faced with the
problem of unifying the country through a common "link" language. Initially there was a
strong movement to make Hindi the second language for all Indians. However, Madras State
led the opposition to this solution, recognizing that it effectively made Hindi the country's
primary language and gave a privileged status to some Indians (from the north)over others
(from the south). Instead, English was selected as the "neutral" unifying second language for
all of India.

The anti-Hindi movement was the focus issue of a mass organization created in 1945 known
as the Dravida Kazhagam (DK). Their founding leader, E. V. Ramaswamy Naicker Periyar, had
left Gandhi's Brahmin-dominated Congress party in the mid-twenties over the organization's
reinforcement of caste segregation. He founded the rationalistic Self-Respect Movement in
1926 to oppose God, religion, Gandhi, Congress, and Brahminism. In the thirties, he
successfully opposed measures to make the teaching of Hindi compulsory in the Madras
Presidency and as early as 1939 advocated the creation of a separate "Dravidanad"
independent of both Britain and North India. The DK continued to advance the social issues of
the Self-Respect Movement such as intercaste marriage and widow remarriage and asked
members to wear black shirts as a reminder of the historical subjugation of Tamil culture by
the north. Upon India's independence in 1947, E. V. Ramaswamy called for a day of mourning
among Tamils because they had failed to achieve independence. Two years later, the seventy
year old married a woman still in her teens. Shocked at this violation of rationalist social
reform principles and frustrated over their leader's continued refusal to allow the DK to
become directly involved in electoral politics, E. V. Ramaswamy's right-hand man, C. N.
https://go.gale.com/ps/i.do?p=AONE&u=googlescholar&id=GALE|A90190298&v=2.1&it=r&sid=AONE&asid=2c23a6e9 11/43
11/3/22, 12:25 PM "We must make the government tremble": political filmmaking in the South Indian State of Tamil Nadu - Document - Gale Ac…

Annadurai, left to form the Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (Dravidian Forward Movement or
Progressive Dravidian Federation--DMK). He brought with him 75 percent of the DK, including
the bulk of its youngest members. (18)

Annadurai--or Anna ("Older Brother")as he was popularly known--was a university-educated

poet and scriptwriter (and occasional actor) for both stage and film. Annadurai and his
followers advocated the purging of the Sanskritic elements associated with the Aryan Hindu
priest caste (the Brahmins) from the Tamil language. Following E. V. Ramaswamy, the DMK
pressed for Tamil Nadu's independence from India until the country's war with China in 1962,
when advocating such a position suddenly became treasonable. A marked increase in popular
support for the movement dates from this policy retreat.

Like many Indian political movements, the DMK advanced a form of socialism. Believing
Brahminism to be a North Indian institution, they countered it with a defiant atheism which
they argued was more rational, more just, and more truly Tamil. They continued to advocate E.
V. Ramaswamy's notion of the "self-respect" marriage as an inexpensive, intercaste alternative
to the financially burdensome, castebound ritual insisted on by the Brahmin priests. Finally,
following Gandhi, they were completely opposed to alcohol, always a heated political issue
across India. (19)

Politics in Film

The DMK attracted many of Annadurai's theater and film co-workers, including actors K. R.
Ramaswamy, S. S. Chandran, M. Gopala Ramachandran (universally known by his initials,
MGR), and, until his defection to the Congress party in 1955, the extremely popular Sivaji
Ganesan, as well as fellow poet, screenwriter, journalist, and occasional actor Muthuvel
Karunanidhi. As early as the twenties, followers of Gandhi's Congress party had used films to
advance a nationalist, anticolonial agenda. Faced with severe censorship under the British,
they made their case allegorically through such genres as the historical epic. The DMK took
advantage of the fact that audiences had been primed by this tradition to look for multiple
levels of meaning in regional films. Indeed, they pushed the trend much further. Their pictures
used de-Sanscritized Tamil in the dialogue, featured Brahmins in the roles of heavies, and
ended in self-respect marriages. Moreover, they began to include lines of dialogue charged
with alternative meanings referring to Tamil nationalism in general and their organization in
particular. (20) For example, the following dialogue between two people lost in a forest would
bring forth ecstatic applause: "Should we turn North?" "No, never! South is much better."
Other allusions to the movement included adopting the red and black colors of the DMK flag
in the clothing of key characters, the use of DMK symbols such as the rising sun, and
references to "elder brother" Anna. According to University of Jaffna professor Karthigesu
Sivathamby, the DMK was able to work their agenda into their films so easily because most of
the studios such as Jupiter and the giant AVM were non-Brahmin owned. As the power of the
studios waned and that of the stars increased, DMK figures such as MGR established their
own production companies. At the same time, many Brahmin exhibitors, like the ruling
Congress party itself, were simply too complacent to be concerned. As the Dravidian
movement caught hold with Tamils, such applause-generating references began to be
appropriated by film producers unconnected to the DMK. Awareness of the political
consciousness of the films' producers was widespread, particularly as stars regularly
appeared at campaign rallies and their thousands of fan clubs (Rasigar Manrams) became

https://go.gale.com/ps/i.do?p=AONE&u=googlescholar&id=GALE|A90190298&v=2.1&it=r&sid=AONE&asid=2c23a6e9 12/43
11/3/22, 12:25 PM "We must make the government tremble": political filmmaking in the South Indian State of Tamil Nadu - Document - Gale Ac…

adjunct political organizations. With all of this extra-textual political activity, it became virtually
impossible not to recognize that the monarch's decree (by one account apparently delivered
in direct address) at the end of MGR's 1958 version of The Prisoner of Zenda, Nadodi Marmon,
was virtually a DMK tract, or to figure out why the DMK flag was flying over shanties in Nam
Nadu (Our country, 1963). Hardgrave and Neidhart's demonstration of a high correlation
between film going and political involvement among Tamil Nadu residents was, by 1975, only
a confirmation of the obvious. (21)

M. Karunanidhi's "epoch-making" Parasakthy/ Parasakti/Parashakti (1952) is an important

example of an extremely influential early DMK title. The film's plot strictly adheres to
conventions of the family melodrama as found in Hollywood films from the same period.
Three prosperous Tamil brothers working in Burma during the early days of the Second World
War attempt to return to Madurai to attend their sister's wedding. The war separates the
three of them, and by the time each arrives back, the sister has not only had a child but has
been reduced to eking out a marginal living from a snack stand. She had no alternative as her
husband was hit by a car on his way to secure medicine for their newborn child and her
father-in-law dropped dead from the shock of the tragedy. Only the younger brother,
Gunasekaran, played by then party member Sivaji Ganesan in the role that would make him a
star, knows who and where she is. However, because he has been reduced to feigning lunacy
to get away with petty theft, he cannot bring himself to reveal his identity to her. Meanwhile,
elder brother has continued to prosper as a judge while middle brother, though presumed
dead for most of the film, has become an amputee and been reduced to begging. The sister
resists the advances of males who offer to take care of her in exchange for sex and, after
failing as a beggar, throws her child off a bridge and jumps in after. She is pulled out of the
water and put on trial for infanticide in front of her elder brother, who after recognizing her
from her story breaks down sobbing on the bench. The baby turns out to have been caught by
a boat passing under the bridge and is restored to its mother without legal objection, and
through further coincidence the entire family is reunited.

Obviously, many of the features of melodrama as isolated by Peter Brooks in his seminal The
Melodramatic Imagination are here in full bloom. The hyperpolarization of good and evil, the
threats to the innocent, the "muteness" of the virtuous, the lost characters found, the hidden
identities, the courtroom revelations, the near impossible coincidences, the rewarding of the
virtuous, and the punishing and/or repentance of the guilty have all been defining features of
the genre since Pixerecourt. (22) However, in the family melodrama of Hollywood, overt
political and social criticism is actively repressed, emerging only in the inability of the form to
fully resolve the contradictions that set the narratives in motion. In Parasakthy, on the other
hand, responsibility for the deplorable conditions the virtuous find themselves in is
continually and explicitly moved from the victims themselves or some sort of fate to political,
economic, and cultural forces and the individuals who benefit from their perpetuation. For
example, characters are repeatedly admonished about focusing exclusively on the plight of
themselves and their loved ones when uncountable numbers of others share the same fate.
When the young widow is aghast at the prospect of being reduced to operating a snack stand,
she is told that "this is the plight of all widows," prevented by Brahminically enforced tradition
from remarriage. In another case, elder brother, who in effect stands in for the nation's ruling
class, kicks a woman begging for food for her child, telling her that he can't be bothered about
her when his own sister has disappeared into the urban underclass. The woman he is kicking
is of course his own lost sister. But what is on the one hand the contrived ironic coincidence of
https://go.gale.com/ps/i.do?p=AONE&u=googlescholar&id=GALE|A90190298&v=2.1&it=r&sid=AONE&asid=2c23a6e9 13/43
11/3/22, 12:25 PM "We must make the government tremble": political filmmaking in the South Indian State of Tamil Nadu - Document - Gale Ac…

melodrama is simultaneously an inverted variation on Golden Rule parables where the

generous are rewarded when strangers they treat charitably turn out to be other than they
appear. In this case the inference that the state's fortunate should treat all of the state's poor
as if they were their brothers and sisters is explicitly drawn out when the youngest brother's
girlfriend tells him that his generous heart isn't guided by a raised consciousness. "You are so
concerned with your sister, but what about other sisters?" She encourages him to take
broader social action by telling him to "stop trying to put out a volcano with a bucket of
water." (Asked how she came by this social awareness herself, his girlfriend replies, "I have an
elder brother.") This is just what middle brother ultimately does on his own by attempting to
organize his fellow beggars. His reply to skeptics is that "we must make the government
tremble."

Though the film lacks any sort of complex or detailed economic analysis, a more community-
focused socialism is repeatedly pointed to as the answer for the economic injustices of
capitalism. For example, when the insanity-feigning younger brother tries to blame himself for
the fact that he has been reduced to stealing food, the woman he has stolen from tells him
that not only is his poverty not of his making but that taking only what he needed from those
who had more than they needed was hardly a crime. At another point in the film, the
youngest son sings a song in praise of the communal approach to food demonstrated by
crows, warning the birds not to emulate the ways of humans. Another song speaks of the
cynical duplicity used by people to attain and retain that which they truly worship, money. In
numerous cases, economic, political, and cultural causes of poverty are presented as
intertwined. For example, in a third song, Gunasekaran pretends to be a king whose subjects
are hungry in a country full of gold. Asked for help, he tells his people that their problems are
not his concern and that they should "go pray to Vishnu on your empty stomachs."

Attacks on religion run through the entire film. The heroine finds herself in debt after the
death of her film script-writing husband because of the expense of the Brahminical wedding
that proceeded it, making the DMK's case that such weddings were one of the means by
which the Brahmin caste maintained economic control over lower-caste Tamils. Another jab at
Brahminically enforced social injustice comes when the younger brother asks, in dialogue that
reflects the alliterative, poetic oratory favored by Annadurai and Karunanidhi as particularly
Tamil, why cows have a place to lie down while the poor do not. He steals food about to be
offered to deities as a sacrifice and shares it with his fellow poor. Before throwing her baby off
of the bridge so that it can go to another world where "there will be no hunger," sister
observes that "the other world is killing people in this world." Prayers in the film are either
never answered or are treated with the bitterest irony. For example, the immediate answer to
sister's prayers to the goddess Parasakthy "to protect me" is the appearance of a Brahmin
priest who tries to rape her while he utters pieties about the goddess. In an equally
contemptuous moment, the youngest son observes that "God's heart is already hardened"
from the millions of previous prayers that have gone unanswered. At the end of the film, he
gets the Brahmin priest to believe that a stone idol is speaking, only to appear from behind it
to announce the near blasphemy that "stone cannot speak. If it could it would have spoken to
protect my sister from you."

While obviously religion is a prime target, the government is hardly exonerated. When the
elder brother--judge tells his sister that "all things fall under the government's domain" she
retorts, "But the government hasn't wanted us," launching into a speech about how all of her
https://go.gale.com/ps/i.do?p=AONE&u=googlescholar&id=GALE|A90190298&v=2.1&it=r&sid=AONE&asid=2c23a6e9 14/43
11/3/22, 12:25 PM "We must make the government tremble": political filmmaking in the South Indian State of Tamil Nadu - Document - Gale Ac…

tribulations have been the result of the social irresponsibility and indifference of the powerful.
The notion of Tamils not being wanted in their homeland is developed from the very
beginning of the film when dialogue is used to draw attention to the fact that the three
brothers had to leave their native land to make a decent living. This point would have been of
particular resonance since historically many Tamils had been forced by economic conditions
to leave for such foreign lands as North India, Ceylon, and the West. And when middle
brother, who spends most of the film in a refugee camp, bemoans the fact that his homeland
has failed to find a place for those that "really" belonged there, the unspoken resentment is
clearly of Dravidians against Aryan Brahmins.

Finally, the film even uses reflexivity to draw attention to its political content. Its closing
moments include documentary footage of Periyar, Annadurai, and Karunanidhi, along with
the state's Congress chief minister, gathered on a dais to address a crowd. This footage is
motivated within the narrative as part of a ceremony honoring the transformation of the elder
brother's estate into an orphanage. However, by making author Karunanidhi a character
within the text, the viewer is further forced to place the fictional events of the narrative
against the specific political and social realities of South India. (23)

Filmmakers in Politics

Ganesan made several other DMK films in which he allowed himself to be the mouthpiece for
the party platform (see Manohara) before leaving to join the Congress party. His film career
altered dramatically as well as he began appearing regularly in the religious mythologicals that
were anathema to the DMK. His place in the DMK's cinematic pantheon was immediately filled
by MGR. MGR's importance in both Tamil cinema and politics is difficult to overstate and thus
requires a certain amount of background here.

Though his career got off to a slow start from extremely modest beginnings, the Ceylon-born
Malayalee evolved into perhaps the most enduringly popular screen actor of South India.
Taking over the job of carefully crafting his own screen persona from DMK scriptwriters like
Annadurai and Karunanidhi, MGR made certain that his character remained a repository of
the party's values. In his films, MGR almost invariably shunned alcohol, respected women
(romantic developments, while often across class and caste, were never initiated by his
character), championed the poor and powerless, and was always victorious. Outside of his
film roles, MGR was known to abstain from alcohol, remained a devoted son to his mother,
and was widely credited with numerous acts of generosity and charity (which he may or may
not have actually performed). For example, after Tamil Nadu was hit by particularly torrential
rains, he presented six thousand raincoats, each emblazoned with the DMK's symbol, to
Madras rickshaw drivers. This not only boosted both the DMK and MGR, but it didn't hurt the
box office of his film Rickshawkaran (1971), in which he played a rickshaw driver. In another
case he donated a lakh rupees ($12,500) for the victims of a fire that swept through Madras
shanties before featuring a similar fire in a subsequent film. The acts of beneficence in
particular reinforced the public's sense that the roles were grounded in the character of the
man and that the films themselves reflected the agenda of a group of socially conscious
people. (24)

The DMK's original atheistic rationalism was primarily anti-Brahmin, and attempts were made
to pull all of Tamil Nadu's non-Brahmin Hindu castes as well as the Christian and Muslim

https://go.gale.com/ps/i.do?p=AONE&u=googlescholar&id=GALE|A90190298&v=2.1&it=r&sid=AONE&asid=2c23a6e9 15/43
11/3/22, 12:25 PM "We must make the government tremble": political filmmaking in the South Indian State of Tamil Nadu - Document - Gale Ac…

communities into their political and cinematic orbit. The state's Christian community is one of
the largest in the country, claiming a lineage dating to Saint Thomas. Legend has it that the
original apostle was practicing missionary work at the Madras district of Mylapore when he
was martyred by Brahmin priests. Christians easily outnumber Muslims (the state's only other
significant population after Hindus), rising in its southernmost tip to almost 40 percent of the
population. A newspaper ad taken out during the 1971 election explicitly makes the party's
appeal: "Your culture, your language, and your identity are safe with the DMK Progressive
Front ... The minorities are our allies. The Muslims and Christians are our kith and kin." (25) In
1969, just before taking office, Karunanidhi wrote and produced a play entitled Esu Nathar on
the life of Christ and plans were made to make it into a film starring MGR in the title role. Only
last-minute objections from the highest levels of the state's Christian community forced the
abandoning of the project. The numerous other attempts to reach this population seem to
have paid off. Christian minister and Tamil Nadu Theological Seminary faculty member C. R.
W. David's book on the cinema of Tamil Nadu, for example, argues that the message of the
films of the Dravidian movement is inherently compatible with Christian values. (26)

As MGR became powerful enough to control his own scripts, he became only more covetous
of his image. Often compared to Fairbanks and Flynn because of his stunt work (which in his
later films he didn't do), his character blended a cocky self-confidence with a self-deprecating
modesty. Though generally treated as dramas, the later pictures in particular have a decidedly
relaxed, upbeat, comic quality to them. MGR's fans were unequally distributed by gender,
education, and class as he found his most devoted followers among women, illiterates, and
the rural poor. And while surveys on the subject indicate that his popularity as an actor was
not as broad-based as DMK defector Sivaji Ganesan, his fans were more devoted, making him
the largest box office draw in the state. MGR countered the charge of producing "escapist"
films by explaining that when he played a peasant fighting privileged royalty the people who
went to his films understood the conflict to also be about the caste system or New Delhi's
unjust domination over South India. As he told Hardgrave, "My roles have been to show how a
man should live and believe." (27)

The DMK's multifaceted use of the star-centered institution of film as a political instrument
began to see dramatic payoffs in the early sixties. The mass rallies Karunanidhi orchestrated
for the 1967 election are alleged to have exploited a sense of spectacle openly derived from
Tamil cinema. Even the party's campaign songs appropriated popular cinema melodies.
Intensive grass roots mobilization by the DMK helped boost voter turnout to 78 percent, by far
the nation's highest. Through Annadurai's charismatic speaking, MGR's tireless campaigning at
numerous mass rallies, and Karunanidhi's strategic alliance with several left-wing parties, the
DMK pulled off a stunning upset victory a mere ten years after contesting their first general
election. This turned out to be a critical turn in the fortunes of the previously all-powerful
Congress party. In Tamil Nadu it has never recovered. In a 1982 by-election, it performed so
disastrously that it had to forfeit the deposit required to eliminate inconsequential parties
from the ballot. (28)

Only one of Chief Minister Annadurai's ten-member cabinet was not from the film industry,
with M. G. Ramachandran winning for himself a seat in the state assembly. Annadurai
immediately dropped all hints of secessionism from the DMK's platform, instead arguing for
confining the central government's power to the realms of defense, foreign affairs, interstate
communications, and currency. The DMK leader served as chief minister for two years before
https://go.gale.com/ps/i.do?p=AONE&u=googlescholar&id=GALE|A90190298&v=2.1&it=r&sid=AONE&asid=2c23a6e9 16/43
11/3/22, 12:25 PM "We must make the government tremble": political filmmaking in the South Indian State of Tamil Nadu - Document - Gale Ac…

he died in February 1969. Though he was apparently not Anna's choice for successor,
Karunanidhi seized the moment and successfully maneuvered himself into the job.
Karunanidhi continued to advance Annadurai's agenda, attempting to make Tamil Nadu, in his
words, the "foremost socialistic state of the country." To this end he enacted agrarian reform
measures limiting family property ownership to fifteen acres of land, nationalized such
businesses as the bus system and the Madras Aluminum Company, initiated the
subcontinent's first slum-clearance/affordable housing program (called by no less a source
than the New York Times "the most effective and far reaching in India"), and advanced various
other "schemes" designed to put the unemployed to work at nondemeaning labor and
provide free medical care to those suffering from the likes of cataract blindness and leprosy.
(29)

Increasingly concerned over the personality cult surrounding MGR and his undue influence
over DMK supporters, Karunanidhi tried (without success) to groom his son M. K. Muthu to
replace the aging MGR in the DMK's cinema pantheon. When Karunanidhi refused to make
MGR a cabinet minister on the grounds that the actor wanted the job while continuing to
make films, MGR countered by using his position as party treasurer to accuse DMK members
of corruption. He was promptly purged from the party. (30)

According to numerous commentators including K. Mohandas, the head of security under

MGR's future government, the actor was encouraged to move against the DMK government by
means of a threatened investigation of MGR's finances by Indira Gandhi, who saw this as a
chance to destabilize Karunanidhi's government and split her Dravidian opposition. MGR
responded according to her plans, launching his own party, called first the Annadurai
Dravidian Forward Movement (ADMK) and then, under threat of the outlawing of regional
parties, the All India Annadurai Dravidian Forward Movement (AIADMK). The Communist Party
India (CPI), aroused over competition from the DMK in trade union activity, allied itself with
MGR, who in turn led numerous mass agitations against the DMK government. In January
1976, during the middle of the so-called Emergency in which the nation's constitution was
suspended, Indira Gandhi used MGR's charges of corruption to dismiss Karunanidhi's
government and set up a judicial investigation (the Sarkaria Commission)--in that order.
According to historian Stanley Wolpert, however, the state government of "Indira's most
outspoken critic" was dismissed by her because "the DMK was thought to have been on the
brink of declaring Tamil Nadu an independent nation, following the precedent set by
Bangladesh." MGR roundly defeated Karunanidhi in the 1977 election but took office only
after his swearing-in ceremony was pushed back to allow him to finish a final movie
undertaken to pay off back taxes. Except during the period when Indira dismissed nine state
governments for "ceasing to reflect the will of the people," the phenomenally popular MGR
held the job until his death on Christmas Eve of 1987. (31)

After his death, a power struggle for control of the AIADMK pitted MGR's wife, Janaki, against
his younger mistress (or "smaller house") Jayalalitha Jayaram. Both had been actresses in his
films during different eras of his career. Janaki first appeared with him in 1950 and Jayalalitha
made her debut fifteen years later. Both presented themselves as MGR's heir on the basis of
their intimacy with the late chief minister. When violence between the two factions spilled
over into a session of the legislature, the central government in New Delhi dissolved Janaki's
short-lived administration and once again ruled the state directly. Believing that the void left
by MGR's death put Congress (I), under the leadership of the popular Rajiv Gandhi, in a unique
https://go.gale.com/ps/i.do?p=AONE&u=googlescholar&id=GALE|A90190298&v=2.1&it=r&sid=AONE&asid=2c23a6e9 17/43
11/3/22, 12:25 PM "We must make the government tremble": political filmmaking in the South Indian State of Tamil Nadu - Document - Gale Ac…

position to make a comeback in Tamil Nadu, elections were strategically postponed until
January 1989. Ithu Engal Neethi was released in November 1988, during the middle of the
campaign to determine who would rule Tamil Nadu.

Ithu Engal Neethi: Reprise

This general background on the politics of Karunanidhi and the DMK helps to open up Ithu
Engal Neethi. Take, for example, the image of Jesus Christ on the first victim's wall. On the one
hand, it reflects an ideology characterized by forgiveness, a value in direct opposition to the
vengeance that is the single motivation of the film's heroes. As a result, it is difficult not to see
the victim's helplessness as in some way a function of the passivity encouraged by his religion-
-the religion that has deified the victim. However, while Karunanidhi's vigilantes pointedly
reject Christian values, they are presented as allies and defenders of the Christian, who, unlike
others in the film, at least has enough dignity to put his life on the line for justice. This seems
of no little significance considering that much of the rest of Ithu Engal Neethi perpetuates
Indian cinema's constant association of things Western with decadence and evil. Other
specifically Christian elements in the film include a reference to "the one who wore the crown
of thorns and ruled the world" during an attempt to get the soon-to-be-martyred attorney to
accept the burden of public office, as well as the shrine to the Virgin Mary in the production
company's logo. All of these references justify the conclusion that the film represents a
further DMK attempt to present itself as allies of Tamil Nadu's Christian community against
Brahmin Hindus. In November 1988, it was particularly important to Karunanidhi to reassert
control over this part of his base after a pair of religion-based parties, the Christian
Democratic Front and a key faction of the Muslim League, decided to link their fortunes with
Congress (I).

It is impossible to dismiss the image of Christ as insignificant--as mere decoration on a wall or

just part of a calendar--since iconography of this sort is consistently used in Tamil cinema not
only to cue audiences to the allegiances of the filmmakers but to reinforce the filmmakers'
attitude toward their characters. For example, the other "icon" in the opening sequence,
besides a statue of blindfolded justice in the courtroom, is the picture of the politician in the
thatched building where the prosecutor resigns. Tamil audiences would immediately
recognize this image as that of DMK founder and former Tamil Nadu chief minister Annadurai.
Even without any other narrative cues, they would know that the image is being used to
position the prosecutor as the voice of the filmmakers within the narrative. Analogies between
the prosecutor's position as a former government official attacking corruption from outside
the government and ex-Chief Minister Karunanidhi himself would be obvious to any Tamil
audience. Like the prosecutor, Ithu Engal Neethi's scriptwriter had himself used resignation
from public office as a form of political protest. In Karunanidhi's case, the DMK chief had
resigned his Assembly seat in 1982 to protest MGR's and the central government's policies
toward Sri Lankan Tamils. It is also quite likely that the resignation of the district attorney
would suggest such incidents as the "lawyers boycott" that threatened the functioning of the
judiciary during MGR's regime.

Other parts of the film intersect with Karunanidhi's biography as well. While in his twenties,
Karunanidhi, like one of the vigilantes in the film who is revealed to be a former teacher, did
community social work that involved educating rural hut dwellers in matters of hygiene. And
like many other Indian politicians, he has been subjected to physical assault by opposition

https://go.gale.com/ps/i.do?p=AONE&u=googlescholar&id=GALE|A90190298&v=2.1&it=r&sid=AONE&asid=2c23a6e9 18/43
11/3/22, 12:25 PM "We must make the government tremble": political filmmaking in the South Indian State of Tamil Nadu - Document - Gale Ac…

party thugs. Such politically manipulated criminal violence plays a part in Ithu Engal Neethi
too. (32)

The film's "road roko" sequence in which the heroine encourages the masses to join her in
lying down in the path of a police vehicle carrying an arrested vigilante also contains layers of
political resonance. Such acts have a long and honored history within Indian political protest,
extending well past independence. The DMK's first famous political act was when Karunanidhi
himself led just such a protest to prevent the town of Kallakkudi from being renamed for the
North Indian capitalist Dalmia then financing the city's industrialization. On July 16, 1953,
thousands watched as Karunanidhi and several others were arrested after they lay down on
the tracks at the Dalmiapuram Station in front of an oncoming train. In the resulting chaos,
police fired on the protesters, killing two volunteers. Prior to the DMK's election victory in
1967, Karunanidhi was incarcerated by the Congress government at least seven times for such
actions as the DMK's 1962 agitation against price rises and their 1963 protest against a revived
attempt to make Hindi the national language. During the periods when he has been out of
power since then, Karunanidhi has continued to get himself arrested for leading similar acts
of mass civil disobedience. (33)

Explicitly religious and political iconographies are not the only elements of mise-en-scene by
which the audience is signaled to read political content into aspects of the fiction. Because the
thatched roof structure in which the prosecutor resigns his position would seem to lack
realism in this context, we are forced to presume other motivations. Indeed, such buildings
are regularly coded in Indian films generally as more "Indian" and more "honest" than, in this
case, the thoroughly "Western" space of the courtroom, where one must address the judge
with the English "Your Honor" rather than in Tamil.

An example more explicitly tied to very specific political issues within Tamil Nadu involves the
shooting up of the whiskey bottles in Dynamic Bob's private dance garden. Everything in this
space, from the Michael Jackson music being danced to, to the colored lights, to the Western-
dressed women, to the general opulence, to Dynamic Bob's name, is coded as modern and/or
Western, that is, un-Indian. However, it is the liquor bottles which the vigilantes specifically
target first. This literal attack on alcohol is repeated in a subsequent scene in a school
admissions office as well as when the heroine defeats her two drunken assailants.

Karunanidhi's position on prohibition is somewhat contradictory. During his original tenure as

chief minister he ended thirty-four years of prohibition to generate tax revenue, only to
unleash a political fire storm led by MGR. He promptly tried to minimize the damage by
restricting liquor sales. MGR completely reversed his own position on prohibition once he took
office. After announcing that it was unenforceable, he began permitting scandalous tax
concessions to Tamil Nadu's key liquor barons, principally one of the state's richest
industrialists, Ramasamy Udayar of Mohan Breweries and Distilleries.

In the months before the January 1989 election, Karunanidhi charged that Congress (I) and the
two AIADMK factions were being heavily financed by money from the liquor lobby. According
to the head of the DMK, bribes going to Tamil politicians and parties from the big liquor
interests had deprived the state government of over Rs 1,000 crore ($662 million) over a
seven-year period. Within this context, the repeated act of shooting up liquor bottles by Ithu
Engal Neethi's vigilantes would have been easy for DMK members of the audience to

https://go.gale.com/ps/i.do?p=AONE&u=googlescholar&id=GALE|A90190298&v=2.1&it=r&sid=AONE&asid=2c23a6e9 19/43
11/3/22, 12:25 PM "We must make the government tremble": political filmmaking in the South Indian State of Tamil Nadu - Document - Gale Ac…

recognize as a reference to Karunanidhi's own attacks on Tamil Nadu's liquor barons and their
control over the state's politics and finances. (34)

Plot elements are also tied to Indian social issues and politics. For example, the second act of
vengeance by the vigilantes is against a loan shark who gives money to a woman in exchange
for the deed to her home so that her daughter can get married. As soon as the mother leaves
the financier's office, she is set upon by his thugs, who steal back not only the loaned money
but some of her own. With this action the film not only scores points against money lenders
but gets to make its case for self-respect marriages. The greedy Brahmin priest set to perform
the ceremony kicks the pleading mother and tries to storm off after he thinks he is not going
to be paid. In a rare act of mercy, the vigilantes who show up with her money and property
deed let him live. This jab at India's priest caste is continued in a sharply satirical scene later in
the picture when the heroine uses the evil politician's superstitious nature to trick him out of
important evidence of his criminal activities. (He thinks a holy woman is blessing him and his
accounts so that the people will believe his campaign lies.)

It is hard to exaggerate the importance of Karunanidhi's long-held anti-Brahminism within

Tamil politics. Karunanidhi's personal resentment of Brahmins runs deep, coming from a
background of poverty, poor education, and low caste. Following the numerous reforms
initiated by him, the 3 percent of the population that are Brahmins have come to think of
themselves as discriminated against, and their own antipathy toward him is often nothing
short of venomous. However, anti-Brahminism has always had its appeal among such castes
as the Nadars, Muddaliars, Gauders, and especially untouchable Harijans at the very bottom
of the caste system that constitute 20 percent of Tamil Nadu's population. (35)

Congress (I)'s leadership in Tamil Nadu came from the landed peasantry and urban elite, and
during the campaign leading up to the 1989 election Karunanidhi repeatedly attacked them
for it, telling audiences that if the former won they would be ruled by a minister who would
not allow Harijans and slum dwellers to enter Fort St. George, the buildings from which the
government was run. Farther down the ballot, both wings of the AIADMK were not only led by
Brahmins but fielded members of that caste for a number of seats. Indeed, chief rival
https://go.gale.com/ps/i.do?p=AONE&u=googlescholar&id=GALE|A90190298&v=2.1&it=r&sid=AONE&asid=2c23a6e9 20/43
11/3/22, 12:25 PM "We must make the government tremble": political filmmaking in the South Indian State of Tamil Nadu - Document - Gale Ac…

Jayalalitha was a convent-raised Brahmin who in numerous ways sought to publicly identify
herself with this aspect of Hinduism. Though Karunanidhi refused to bring up Jayalalitha
directly during the 1989 election, there is no doubt that his continued attack on Brahminism
within the fiction of Ithu Engal Neethi served to target her and the rest of his opponents. (36)

It is also the case that by attempting to confine caste resentment to only the most forward
castes, Karunanidhi papered over deep divisions within the more backwards groups that were
the DMK's traditional base. Karunanidhi tried to further bridge the conflicts between the
state's backward castes by making the central focus of his campaign regional and class issues.
To these ends the DMK attempted to energize its primarily urban base with the teachers, civil
servants, Madras dock workers, industrial laborers, rickshaw pullers, and slum dwellers whose
cause his well-organized party cadres had always espoused. It is surely not coincidental that
the three vigilantes and the various other sympathetic figures in the film such as the would-be
medical student are all given backgrounds drawn from these key demographic groups. (37)

Another of the tentacles of the film's large conspiracy involves a medical school admissions
officer. The melodramatic motivation that generates this plot thread is not only mild within
Indian cinema but is hardly extreme by the Western standards of Magnificent Obsession
(1935/54). An impoverished child befriended by the vigilantes wishes to become a doctor. His
mother died from lack of medical attention in their isolated village and he dreams of
practicing medicine in his village so that he can prevent this from happening to others. His
other motivation is that he wishes to help a blind woman onto whom he has transferred
feelings of protective filial responsibility, a sentiment that in mother-worshipping Tamil society
ennobles him almost beyond measure.

The vigilantes do physical labor and earn enough money for him to take his entrance exams.
After getting nearly perfect marks he goes for an interview at the medical school. The college's
admissions officer reverses his decision to deny admission to the underqualified applicant in
line in front of him after Dad explains that his briefcase has Rs 200,000 ($13,000) in it. This
official then carefully scrutinizes the impoverished child's test scores. Forced to acknowledge
that they are excellent, he asks about the boy's caste. Told that it is backward, the admissions
officer explains that without Rs 100,000 he can't get into this college and that he should try to
get a reserved placed for backwards caste applicants at a lesser state school. The officer
answers the would-be student's pleas by telling him that the son of a rickshaw driver should
remain one himself, and when the boy falls to his knees begging, he kicks him. Despondent,
the boy hangs himself in a public square. A suicide note blaming himself for aspiring to rise
above the caste and class into which he was born is read out loud in direct address to the
camera by the boy's superimposed image. At the end he wills that his eyes be used to restore
sight to the blind woman, causing her to weep openly. The vigilantes find the official laughing
on the phone amidst a stack of money and several open bottles of alcohol. They announce
their presence by shooting the money and liquor off his desk, perform their own style of
surgery, and hang him from an archway so that the public can get a good view. (38)

It is easy to dismiss the incredibility of such a scene, especially given the narrative's suggestion
that it is all a part of a large web of corruption involving politicians, the police, and organized
crime. However, there is a long history of just such charges of academic corruption within
Indian politics which suggests that the conspiratorial net cast in Ithu Engal Neethi is not
merely fantastic plotting motivated by a demand for some sort of narrative unity. For

https://go.gale.com/ps/i.do?p=AONE&u=googlescholar&id=GALE|A90190298&v=2.1&it=r&sid=AONE&asid=2c23a6e9 21/43
11/3/22, 12:25 PM "We must make the government tremble": political filmmaking in the South Indian State of Tamil Nadu - Document - Gale Ac…

example, in March 1986, both the elected chief minister and the appointed governor of the
North Indian state of Maharashtra were forced to resign when it was revealed that medical
school examinations at Bombay University were being altered according to bribes and political
patronage. This particular incident, in which the exams of the chief minister's own daughter
were involved, is only one of numerous cases of an entrenched cross-institutional corruption
that Indians believe permeates politics and academia across the nation. However, details of
plot and mise-en-scene in Ithu Engal Neethi indicate that the film's target is far more precise.
Indeed, Karunanidhi is going after a single college. (39)

Among the places that the millions of rupees made by liquor baron Ramasamy Udayar during
MGR's regime went was the Sri Ramachandra Medical College and Research Institute at Porur,
on the edge of Madras. At the time of the making of the film, a scandal had erupted when it
was revealed that while the private college sat on over 125 acres of government revenue land,
no money had been paid to the state for its use. Quite the opposite, the Tamil Nadu
administration, under Congress (I) rule from the central government, was trying to give the
land to the college's trust managed by Udayar himself. As far as Karunanidhi and the DMK
were concerned, this only supplied further confirmation that with the death of MGR--who
openly gave his blessing to Udayar's college when he laid the institution's foundation stone in
September 1985--Congress (I) had stepped forward to accept the liquor industry payoffs that
had kept the AIADMK so well funded. Indeed, after being elected, Karunanidhi not only
cracked down on the taxing of alcohol, but he took advantage of the fact that the college had
been built on government land and nationalized it. (40)

Obviously, key features of Karunanidhi's script point directly at the controversy surrounding
Ramachandra College. For one, the film is quite specific in its attempt to rouse class and caste
resentment over the politics behind private medical schools rather than issues of political
corruption within state universities. The evil admissions officer's line about the son of a
rickshaw driver remaining a rickshaw driver--a line that virtually summarizes the ideology of
caste at the heart of Brahminism--recalls Karunanidhi's own campaign to reserve a large
percentage of state university seats for members of non-Brahmin and backwards castes so as
to fight Brahmin domination of higher education. But where the connection to the
Ramachandra College in particular is most clearly drawn is in the absurdly unrealistic gesture
of having the admissions officer's desk covered with liquor bottles for the vigilantes to shoot
up. The inclusion of such an element would have brought forth cheers of recognition from
DMK members of the audience familiar with the issue.

Finally, there are the vigilantes themselves. Initially it would seem that they are the most
unrealistic element in the film. Not only is the possession of firearms in India highly restricted
but the arms the vigilantes carry are assault weapons associated with the military. Moreover,
though they are repeatedly shown trying to hide within the general population, their
insistence on paramilitary "uniforms" only serves to expose them. Though such "iconography"
as the assault weapon could be said to be motivated by the action picture genre, the film
makes no attempt to explain how they came into possession of these machine guns. In fact,
Tamil Nadu had members of an army living in its midst-an army that was the final major issue
of the election. The army consisted of Tamil Eelam separatist guerrillas who were ostensibly in
Tamil Nadu as refugees from Sri Lanka but in actual fact were known to be the conduit for
supplies between the Indian mainland and the fighting.

https://go.gale.com/ps/i.do?p=AONE&u=googlescholar&id=GALE|A90190298&v=2.1&it=r&sid=AONE&asid=2c23a6e9 22/43
11/3/22, 12:25 PM "We must make the government tremble": political filmmaking in the South Indian State of Tamil Nadu - Document - Gale Ac…

Sri Lanka's Tamil Eelam separatist cause was ideologically rooted in the identical "primordial
sentiments" of the Tamil/Dravidian nationalist movement that had come to dominate Tamil
Nadu politics through the DK/DMK/AIADMK. The primary difference was that in Sri Lanka, the
Tamil Eelam struggle was directed against a Sinhalese, Buddhist majority. (41) Directly
encouraged by successive Tamil Nadu governments, the rebels received material, financial,
logistical, and spiritual backing from the Indian mainland. So strong was the support for the
"liberation movement" within Tamil Nadu that MGR and Karunanidhi openly aligned their
respective parties with competing rebel organizations--the Ceylon-born M. G. Ramachandran
with the politically stronger and more ideologically committed Liberation Tigers of Tamil
Eelam (LTTE) and Karunanidhi with the more marginal Tamil Eelam Liberation Organization
(TELO). (42) All of this was initially done with not only the acknowledgment of India's central
government but its direct involvement. Certain political writers, including head of state
security Mohandas, have suggested that out of a desire for access to the important Sri Lankan
harbor of Trincomalee, New Delhi attempted to gain control over the movement by directly
training and funding certain rebel groups (particularly TELO) themselves. (43)

This situation changed after the fighting settled into an endless stalemate. In October 1987,
after MGR's stroke dramatically weakened the chief minister politically, Rajiv Gandhi's
government used the recently signed Indo-Sri Lankan Peace Agreement (July 29, 1987) to send
Indian troops (IPKF) to the island to make peace, something the DMK had been advocating for
years. Though ostensibly there to protect Sri Lanka's Tamil community, the IPKF forces soon
began battling with LTTE rebels when the latter refused to disarm. LTTE regarded this
dramatic reversal as an unforgivable betrayal on the part of Rajiv Gandhi. Many Indian Tamils
agreed.

Capitalizing on the political fiasco, Karunanidhi immediately became Eelam separatism's

biggest champion in India, portraying the central government's reversal as not just a political
disaster but an abandonment of the Tamil people. With the death of MGR, LTTE head
Pirabhakaran eagerly sought Karunanidhi's support, announcing that "you alone are the
Tamils' Nambikai Nakshatram [trustworthy start]." Left without an alternative group to back
since Pirabhakaran liquidated TELO leadership in the summer of 1986, Karunanidhi quickly
shifted his allegiance. Within weeks, posters appeared around the state picturing Karunanidhi
and Pirabhakaran together as mentor and protege. (44)

Congress (I) had reason to fear the power of this political alliance. As early as 1981,
Karunanidhi had been arrested for picketing the deputy high commissioner of Sri Lanka. His
incarceration unleashed a wave of violence from his supporters that included instances of
self-immolation, forcing the Tamil Nadu government to release him. When the central
government tried to deport three prominent separatists in August 1985, Karunanidhi again
led a massive demonstration that forced them to back down as well. Pro-Tiger sympathy ran
so strong during the 1989 election campaign that political pressure created by Karunanidhi's
constant agitation on the issue forced the central government to free 15 7 fasting LTTE
members rounded up in Tamil Nadu only weeks before and fly them to Sri Lanka, even though
they presumably rejoined the guerrillas fighting Indian soldiers. (45)

During the 1989 election, the issue was between those who saw Rajiv's policy as forsaking
justice for Tamils and those who thought it was time for LTTE to abandon the dream of a
separate nation. Resentment toward the rebels was building among those concerned with the

https://go.gale.com/ps/i.do?p=AONE&u=googlescholar&id=GALE|A90190298&v=2.1&it=r&sid=AONE&asid=2c23a6e9 23/43
11/3/22, 12:25 PM "We must make the government tremble": political filmmaking in the South Indian State of Tamil Nadu - Document - Gale Ac…

factional violence, criminal activity, and general social disruption that had resulted from
having refugee camps on Tamil Nadu soil. In addition, there was much concern among central
government politicians and conservative Tamils that the revolutionary fervor of the Eelam
movement was in danger of spreading to the mainland, reactivating the DMK's earlier calls for
Tamil Nadu's independence from India. A wave of DMK-linked bombings across the state in
1986 followed by a March 1988 Ariyalur train bombing by the ultraleft, LTTE-linked Tamil
Liberation Army had revived fears that both Karunanidhi and Pirabhakaran envisioned a
single independent Tamil nation linking South India and northeastern Sri Lanka. By
September, Aside magazine was charging that "there seems to be a general move towards
branding LTTE sympathizers `criminal elements,' if not actual threats to India's unity and
integrity. Every major crime in the state is attributed to `Tamil Extremists.'" (46)

Given this context, it is possible to interpret Ithu Engal Neethi as an attempt by the pro-LTTE
DMK to reposition the rebels both on the mainland and in Sri Lanka, not as the source of
lawlessness but as the fighters for "our justice." Such an interpretation makes the film
uncannily prophetic of subsequent political developments in which history repeated itself with
increased ferocity.

During the election, Rajiv attacked the DMK for advocating secession and linked the party to
several prominent acts of political violence. He claimed that some years before, "DMK leaders
had made a vain bid to kill Indira Gandhi, and now close relatives of a person who attempted
to shoot MGR dead are also campaigning for the party." (47)

The second reference shows that the Congress (I) prime minister of India not only was well
aware of how the political-filmic myths of Tamil Nadu intertwined but was fully prepared to
exploit them to his advantage. He was presumably referring to Ithu Engal Neethi stars Radha
Ravi and Radhika and the well-known fact that during the 1967 Tamil Nadu elections their
father, actor M. R. Radha, shot MGR in the neck. Radha, who had played the villain to MGR's
hero in several films, had been a member of the DK and as such had been campaigning for a
rival party. In a matter of a few hours, 50,000 people had assembled in front of the hospital.
MGR recovered enough before the election to campaign from his bed, further galvanizing his
followers. The incident is generally credited with being a major factor behind the DMK's upset
victory and quickly came to play a key role in the MGR myth.

The earlier part of the Indian prime minister's attack was a reference to a demonstration in
Madurai that Karunanidhi himself led early in MGR's reign at which angry, stone-throwing
partisans attacked the vehicle of the woman who had recently dismissed Karunanidhi's
government. Both Indira and traveling companion G. K. Moopanar, the Congress (I) politician
hoping to become Tamil Nadu's chief minister in the January 1989 election, were seriously
injured in the fracas. Indira's life was said to have been saved only by the intervention of the
ruthless police force. When Karunanidhi violated a follow-up ban on demonstrations in
Madras that led to the police firing on the crowd, he and nearly a hundred prominent DMK
members were arrested and many received long prison terms for inciting violence. Director
General of Police Mohandas agreed with Rajiv that "the DMK partymen had attempted to
assassinate Indira Gandhi." (48)

A year and a half after the DMK's 1989 landslide return to power, history began to repeat itself
when Indira's son played a major role in the dismissal of Karunanidhi's second government.

https://go.gale.com/ps/i.do?p=AONE&u=googlescholar&id=GALE|A90190298&v=2.1&it=r&sid=AONE&asid=2c23a6e9 24/43
11/3/22, 12:25 PM "We must make the government tremble": political filmmaking in the South Indian State of Tamil Nadu - Document - Gale Ac…

The charge was that Karunanidhi himself had become treasonously close to the LTTE rebels
who had taken the lives of so many of the nation's IPKF forces. During the election that
followed, however, Rajiv did not get off as easily as his mother. Like the evil politician in Ithu
Engal Neethi, he was reduced to a smoldering corpse at a campaign appearance in Tamil
Nadu. And as in the film, he died confronting a female activist/ martyr. The investigation that
followed revealed his executioner to be a twenty-four-year-old Tamil named Dhanu who set
off a belt of grenades containing plastic explosives after presenting him with a garland of
flowers. The grenades had been wrapped around her torso by a Tiger originally trained in
explosives in Tamil Nadu in 1983 by an Indian intelligence agency, then under the control of
Rajiv's mother. (49) The investigation also alleged that the dismissal of Karunanidhi's pro-LTTE
government was the act that triggered LTTE's decision to go ahead with the assassination and
that the ultimate goal of the Sri Lankan militants and their Tamil Nadu allies was a single
"greater Eelam," independent of both India and Sri Lanka. Charges that high-ranking DMK
officials had been involved in the shielding of those responsible resulted in a "sympathy wave"
(a film industry term appropriated by Indian politics) among the electorate, and Jayalalitha and
her Congress (I) partners were swept into power in a landslide victory that left Karunanidhi the
only opposition DMK seat in the 234-seat Assembly. He promptly resigned and, like the
prosecuting attorney in Ithu Engal Neethi, continued his activism from a position outside of
government. (50)

Conclusion

Ithu Engal Neethi is only a single example of the sort of political use the media are put to in
Tamil Nadu. The 1989 election campaign included the usual giant cut-outs of political leaders
etched with strings of colored lights, the colorful wall posters modeled after film ads, the
film/campaign songs, and the reruns of old pictures starring MGR and Jayalalitha or scripted
by Karunanidhi that played in theaters and video parlors across the state. Congress (I)
distributed 750 copies of an hour-long video cassette entitled Desiya Deepam (National lamp)
that put the party's message into a fictional narrative about the miseries experienced by a
single family over the twenty years since Congress (I) lost control of the state to the regional
Dravidian parties. The film was filled with "blatant references" to Karunanidhi, whose image it
was particularly concerned with destroying, and concluded with a fictional political debate
that was ultimately interrupted by Dravidian party hooligans fearful of the power of Congress
(I)'s message. In addition to the videos, Congress (I) outfitted forty vans with mobile 35mm
projectors and screens and sent them out into the hinterlands to present films on the
achievements of the Congress (I) central government to rural Tamils. Congress (I) also
blatantly exploited their control over the highly politicized national broadcasting system,
Doordarshan. On television screens across the state, Rajiv Gandhi's campaign swings were
given extensive and effusive coverage while Karunanidhi was repeatedly portrayed as the
nation's most corrupt politician.

In the meantime, Sivaji Ganesan released En Thamizh, En Makkel, which he openly advertised
as a satire directed at his former associates, Congress (I). Jayalalitha prepared her own pair of
videos attacking Karunanidhi and his party's policies and made plans to write the screenplay
and star in a biography of MGR. In addition to the half-dozen feature films made in 1988 from
Karunanidhi scripts, the DMK produced a total of three videos, each an hour in length. Copies
of Solvada Cheivom (We shall do what we say), Udamperva Odiva (Dear brother, come and
listen), and Kalaignar Vetri Murasu (The victory of the Kalaignar) were sent to every DMK
https://go.gale.com/ps/i.do?p=AONE&u=googlescholar&id=GALE|A90190298&v=2.1&it=r&sid=AONE&asid=2c23a6e9 25/43
11/3/22, 12:25 PM "We must make the government tremble": political filmmaking in the South Indian State of Tamil Nadu - Document - Gale Ac…

candidate to circulate as they saw appropriate. In addition, party leaders outfitted jeeps and
vans with color television screens that went into the areas recently toured by Rajiv to play the
three films in continuous rotation.

Solvada Cheivom, to take a single example, is constructed around a husband and wife arguing
the respective merits of Congress (I) and the DMK. When the wife praises Rajiv Gandhi for
building huts and visiting the poor, the husband takes her on a tour of Tamil Nadu slums to
show that Congress (I)'s "programs" were only a temporary measure designed for propaganda
purposes. Still not completely convinced, the wife is visited by her educated sister-in-law, who
explains the Bofors arms scandal that had severally damaged the credibility of Rajiv's
administration. At the film's conclusion, the wife finally confesses that she had accepted
money from a Congress (I) member to attend their meetings and give them her vote.

Even within a narrative that contains such an explicitly partisan surface reading, Karunanidhi
still managed to insert a scene containing the sort of secondary meaning his audience reveled
in recognizing. At one point, two women are shown fighting beside a community water pump,
each one charging the other with sleeping with her husband. They are joined by a DMK activist
who attempts to stop their fighting with a message of peace and harmony. It is doubtful
whether a single informed voter in the entire state of Tamil Nadu was incapable of recognizing
that the fighting women--otherwise having nothing to do with the narrative question of
whether the state was better off in the hands of Congress (I) or the DMK--were inserted to
contemptuously characterize the battle between Jayalalitha and Janki for leadership of the
AIADMK as a personal chakkalathi chandai (fight between wife and mistress). In other words,
the other two major parties represented nothing more than an inconsequential sideshow to
the real election, unworthy of being addressed directly. This was part of Karunanidhi's overall
strategy of speaking of Congress (I) as if they were the only other party on the ballot and
telling interviewers that "Jayalalitha is not even worth a comment from me. I just don't take
her seriously enough." Even so, he couldn't resist including in his speeches such references as
"the cock [Jayalalitha's party's symbol] heralds the arrival of the rising sun [the DMK's
symbol]." (51)

Though Tamil Nadu's politics is dominated by personalities from the film industry, being a box
office star has never been a guarantor of electoral victory. Among the film personalities in the
1989 election was Parasakthy star Sivaji Ganesan, who was running for re-election to a seat in
the legislature from his own private Tamizhaga Munnetra Munnani (Tamil Welfare Front),
which he formed after walking out on Congress (I). Ganesan, who allied himself with the ill-
fated Janaki, was dealt a crushing defeat. Unsuccessful in her run for the same seat as
Jayalalitha on Janaki's AIADMK ticket was the extremely popular actress Nirmala, who made
her Tamil film debut in a role opposite the late MGR's mistress. Postelection analysts observed
that many voters showed up at rallies specifically to see certain stars and then voted for a
different party altogether. Immediately after the election, Tamil actor-director-scriptwriter K.
Bhagyaraj announced that as the true heir to the MGR film legacy he would be starting his
own political organization to be called the MGR Makkal Munnetra Kazhagam (MGR People's
Progressive Party). Judging from India Today, press response was openly contemptuous. (52)

The film industry's penetration of Tamil Nadu's politics has been carefully watched by parties
outside the state, and within the last decade it has become a nationwide phenomenon. In
January 1983, Telugu-speaking actor N. T. Rama Rao, representing another regional party

https://go.gale.com/ps/i.do?p=AONE&u=googlescholar&id=GALE|A90190298&v=2.1&it=r&sid=AONE&asid=2c23a6e9 26/43
11/3/22, 12:25 PM "We must make the government tremble": political filmmaking in the South Indian State of Tamil Nadu - Document - Gale Ac…

called Telugu Desam, became chief minister of Andhra Pradesh, the state directly north of
Tamil Nadu. In many ways "NTR" was even more bold in his use of film for political ends, for
even in office he continued to make films which he carefully scheduled for release to
maximize their political impact. (53) The phenomenon has even moved to North India, with
Congress (I) calling upon Hindi actors Sunil Dutt, Amitabh Bacchan, Vijayanthimala, and others
to represent Bombay constituencies in the Parliament. A recent New Delhi election pitted the
BJP's Shatrugghan Sinha against fellow film actor and Congress (I) member Rajesh Khanna in
what the press dubbed "Star Wars." In Tamil Nadu, even the educated classes who have been
aghast at the phenomenon have come to accept it, looking to the film industry as a breeding
ground for future political figures. It is only Tamil Nadu, however, that has seen such an
intensely focused attempt to exploit film as a medium of propaganda. (54)

The intersection of politics and film in India has hardly gone unnoticed abroad, but what
attention it has received has been primarily from anthropologists, sociologists, and political
scientists. Here the work of Robert Hardgrave has been particularly valuable. However, there
has been next to no concern with this aspect of Indian films within film studies in the West. A
June 1987 Film Comment article by J. Hoberman and long-time Indian film critic Chidananda
Das Gupta represents one of the few cases where the topic has gotten any attention at all.
Here again, however, South Indian masala films are "escapist extravaganzas," a "cinematic
opium" that "has become the religion of the masses" forced by inept political leadership to
"subsist on dreams." South Indian filmmaking is thoroughly decontextualized from any larger
cultural background while all political questions are reduced to the election of politicians. This
dual isolation effectively reduces the subject to the politician as superstar, which is explained
as a confusion resulting from an unsophisticated audience's inability to distinguish between
actor and role. This argument, in turn, requires generalizing from all examples of the ludicrous
no matter how apocryphal or anecdotal. Unfortunately, Indian films and politics, like films and
politics anywhere, have their share of the ludicrous. (55) For example, the famously vain MGR
refused to appear in as public a space as a cabinet meeting without dark glasses and a hat to
cover his aging features and balding head. At one point he issued a fiat asking his followers to
tattoo the party's flag on their arms to demonstrate their loyalty and prevent defections. This
trend grew until his name and image were being tattooed not only on arms but foreheads.
(56) In spite of the DMK's original antireligious message, there are many instances where past
religious practices were merely secularized by substituting the "new religion" of the screen.
Very early, for example, parents began naming their children for film stars instead of deities.
After MGR's stroke in October 1984, twenty-six people offered themselves up as sacrifices in
the form of self-immolation, while others merely offered up their own limbs. After his death,
some of his most devoted followers even built a temple for him. According to newspaper
articles, while he was alive, fan club organizers made money by renting to female devotees
mattresses with MGR's life-size, cutout figure attached. In at least one case, the dregs of his
soda bottle were said to have been diluted and distributed by the thimbleful to the faithful as
a sacred Prasadam. (57) Western reports on such phenomena never bother to explain that the
distinction between human and deity in India is nothing like it is in cultures based on Jewish
and Christian traditions. Moreover, while the individuals involved in these acts of devotion are
portrayed as extreme in the Indian press, the Western press invariably represents them as
representative, if only because "freak" stories are the only sort that are run about India. Yet no
matter how bizarre to outsiders or even insiders many of these phenomena are and no

https://go.gale.com/ps/i.do?p=AONE&u=googlescholar&id=GALE|A90190298&v=2.1&it=r&sid=AONE&asid=2c23a6e9 27/43
11/3/22, 12:25 PM "We must make the government tremble": political filmmaking in the South Indian State of Tamil Nadu - Document - Gale Ac…

matter how representative they may or may not be, they do not justify reducing all politics in
Tamil Nadu to film star idolatry.

The use of contemporary political and social issues to fill out or account for aspects of
otherwise shallow or absurd texts has a tradition in South India extending well beyond films.
Not surprisingly, Karunanidhi's quite popular short stories and poetry are also highly
allegorical. An extreme example is the short story "Dust Bin." In this obvious reference to the
famous line by Karl Marx, the narrating dust bin speaks of al! of the things thrown in "my
stomach" such as banana skins, dead rats, the tops to whiskey bottles, victims of infanticide,
and pages from the Aryan Hindu religious text, the Puranas. As his biographer writes,
"certainly having an ax to grind, then, he is no believer in `art for art [sic] sake.' ... Art and
drama are to him only the instruments for popularizing his Party's ideals." (58)

Karunanidhi's address at the beginning of Ithu Engal Neethi, a strategy he has adopted for all
of his recent releases, not only forces viewers to read the narrative against current Indian
politics but focuses interpretations through the prism of the DMK's party platform. Faced with
the threat of central government censorship, he has consistently worked within an allegorical
tradition that encourages viewers to look for a second level of meaning. Indeed, by openly
speaking of being constrained in what he can show, Karunanidhi expressly insists that the
viewer engage the film beyond its primary level of meaning and in the process creates the
oxymoron of the explicit subtext. While some of the interpretations I have presented may
seem too extreme to those unfamiliar with the divisiveness of India's polarized politics, there
can be no doubt that he is encouraging viewers to read in what was for him quite literally
unspeakable.

The most immediate constraint on what he could say without the reasonable doubt of
political allegory or fictionalization would have been the central government's film censor
board. According to the Cinematograph Act of 1952, "a film shall not be certified for public
exhibition if, in the opinion of the authority competent to grant the certificate, the film or any
part of it is against the interests of the sovereignty and integrity of India, the security of the
State, friendly relations with foreign States, public order, decency or morality, or involves
defamation or contempt of court or is likely to incite the commission of any offense." This
language was designed to be invoked against any film that directly encouraged the sort of
revolutionary separatist activity the DMK has flirted with off and on since its initial formation.
(59)

The outrage that such authorially forced radical readings might be expected to inflame in
conservative Congress (I) supporters would be muted by the circumscribed demographics of
the film's audience. Because of the polarization of Tamil Nadu political factions, the potential
audience for Ithu Engal Neethi included few whose politics were not sympathetic to
Karunanidhi's. The most devoted AIADMK followers of Jayalalitha or Congress (I) loyalists
would no more be found at one of his films than at one of his rallies. This excluded from his
audience base a large percentage of the population, since even in victory the DMK polled no
more than a third of the electorate in 1989, substantially less than the combined total for the
two AIADMK factions and Congress (I)(51 percent).

The shrinkage of Karunanidhi's audience base is not entirely attributable to factional politics.
The nearly tenfold growth in the annual output of the Tamil film industry during the forty

https://go.gale.com/ps/i.do?p=AONE&u=googlescholar&id=GALE|A90190298&v=2.1&it=r&sid=AONE&asid=2c23a6e9 28/43
11/3/22, 12:25 PM "We must make the government tremble": political filmmaking in the South Indian State of Tamil Nadu - Document - Gale Ac…

years since Parasakthy has resulted in a fragmentation of the market and a marginalization of
any given film's potential influence. Whereas in the early postwar years the broadness of the
audience for the relatively few Tamil language films being made virtually guaranteed a film's
success, recent levels of overproduction have now practically insured the opposite. In
Karunanidhi's case, there continue to be interests willing to either support or otherwise
influence DMK policy through the funding of his films. Moreover, Karunanidhi's followers
remain a substantial audience pool that can be relied upon as surely as the fans of any actor-
star outside of those in the class of M. G. Ramachandran. By the 1989 election, Aside
magazine was calling the former chief minister "the most sought after writer today." During
1988 alone Karunanidhi scripted over half a dozen films, including Paasa Paravaigal, Puyal
Paadum Pattu, Ore Raththam (which starred Karunanidhi's son Stalin in his first film role), and
Kaavalukku Gettikaran. Paasa Paravaigal even enjoyed a so-called hundred-day run in its
Madras release, the industry's standard measurement of whether a film is a major success.
Ithu Engal Neethi opened simultaneously at the Raj and Padman theaters in Madras and
played at the former for at least five weeks and at the latter for eleven, evidence that it was a
modest success. Indeed, Karunanidhi's followers are even loyal enough to have justified the
1987 release of Kalaignarin Thiraikkaviyangal, a compilation title made up of scenes from
various Karunanidhi-scripted films. (60) Finally, Ithu Engal Neethi was modestly budgeted even
by the standards of South India. It is clearly more important to Karunanidhi that he release a
continual flow of quickly made, low-budget, topical titles rather than increase "production
standards" to compete with even the higher end of the masala market. In accepting these
limitations, Karunanidhi has been able to continue making films in spite of the considerable
decline in their influence over the last forty years.

The forty years since Karunanidhi began writing scripts have seen a change in the deployment
of political content as well. Because the DMK was still only a "social movement" when
Parasakthy was made in 1952, the film dealt with cultural issues within Tamil society on a very
general level. Once the DMK became a viable political party with a very specific platform
contending for control of the state against named opponents, Karunanidhi's narratives
became much more sharply focused on the immediate political issues of the day. Instead of
remaining general sociopolitical allegories, they have often become something just short of
political romans a clef, with audiences cued to look for references to specific politicians and
the most current political controversies.

The DMK's exploitation of allegory for political ends might suggest such Western national
cinemas as Czechoslovakia in the sixties. However, even such extreme cases as Jan Nemec's O
slavnosti a hostech (A report on the party and the guests, 1966) fail to provide an adequate
model for comparison. Since the DMK's formation, most of its social and political agenda has
been openly acknowledged. On the other hand, the allegorical tradition in eastern Europe had
to be built without the benefit of a public platform against which audiences could match the
films. The comparative freedom in which the Dravidian parties and their filmmakers operated
allowed them to begin inserting their agenda in more or less full view of the central
government's censorship board. Moreover, even when an allegorical level of meaning might
be antithetical to the politics controlling the board, the board itself always operated under
constraints unknown to Soviet block censorship institutions. In such cases, because the
indirection of the films' revolutionary or otherwise unacceptable content required a minimum
level of interpretation, completely aware review panels felt compelled to permit the titles safe
passage onto theatrical screens across Tamil Nadu.
https://go.gale.com/ps/i.do?p=AONE&u=googlescholar&id=GALE|A90190298&v=2.1&it=r&sid=AONE&asid=2c23a6e9 29/43
11/3/22, 12:25 PM "We must make the government tremble": political filmmaking in the South Indian State of Tamil Nadu - Document - Gale Ac…

This is not to suggest that there were never attempts to censor Tamil films on political
grounds. Because the majority of the references were designed to be easily decodable, the
films were a constant source of irritation for M. G. Ramachandran. As a result, the late chief
minister put pressure on distributors and exhibitors not to handle, in the words of India
Today, "Karunanidhi's powerful film scripts lampooning the AIADMK government." When that
failed, MGR attempted to stop them by giving the state government the power to censor films
that were critical of political officeholders. Thus MGR initiated the Tamil Nadu Cinema
Regulation (Second Amendment) Bill, banning the exhibition of films deemed derogatory to
legislators and allowing for the imprisonment of the producers and directors of any such
films. Though the bill was passed by the Assembly in May 1987, the state's appointed
Congress (I) governor refused to sign it into law, seeing it as a dangerous expansion of state
powers that in a more restricted form were the prerogative of only the central government.
(61)

Ithu Engal Neethi is part of the recent cycle of Tamil pictures which are known in the video
shop I rented it from as "revolutionary films." They include Poruthathu Pothum, Malathy
M.A.B.L., Ethuthanda Sattam, and Karunanidhi's most recent movie, Madurai Meenakshi.
Director and DMK loyalist S. A. Chandrasekharan, called by Aside the "Ketchup King" of Tamil
cinema for the violent content of his films, is as closely associated with the cycle as
Karunanidhi, though there are numerous writers and directors working within it such as
actor/director and sometime DMK party member T. Rajender. Most of the titles I have seen
are equally heterogeneous vengeance narratives in which a frustrated member of the legal
apparatus such as a policeman or a lawyer is forced to take the law into his own hands.
Ethuthanda Sattam climaxes during a courtroom scene when a police officer, realizing that his
testimony against a criminal is pointless, takes out his service revolver and shoots first the
criminal and then, for good measure, the fleeing judge.

It is clear that the films discussed in this paper represent instances of perhaps the most
politicized cinema in the world. Factional loyalties divide the industry so that artists with
conflicting political convictions generally avoid working with one another. Conflicts, however,
do occur. Prior to the 1989 election, DMK follower S. S. Chandran tried to make fun of
Jayalalitha and MGR in a film he was acting in only to run afoul of fellow actor Ramarajan.
Though friends, Ramarajan had recently joined Jayalalitha's wing of the AIADMK and wanted
to introduce some lines of his own into the script indicating his allegiance. Ramarajan's
importance to the film as the hero apparently decided the matter for the producers. Gossip
sources reported that the incident finished off the two actors' friendship. (62)

Many actors pressed into attending the rallies of Congress (I) and the AIADMK freely admit
that their convictions are no deeper than the money the parties pay them to attract crowds. It
is also generally assumed that should actors pick the winning party they will avoid tax
investigations. However, according to Aside, the actors associated with DMK are as a rule far
more committed.

On the whole, the actors in the DMK show a lot more involvement in the
party and are slightly more politically mature than those in other parties.
They are all fiercely proud of their leader, ... have been members of the
DMK for a long time now, and are absolutely committed to campaigning for
the party when the elections are announced. Unlike the newer star entrants
to the other parties, they have no specific monetary aspirations in
connection with their political work and most don't really expect to be
given any position of power even if the party wins. (63)
https://go.gale.com/ps/i.do?p=AONE&u=googlescholar&id=GALE|A90190298&v=2.1&it=r&sid=AONE&asid=2c23a6e9 30/43
11/3/22, 12:25 PM "We must make the government tremble": political filmmaking in the South Indian State of Tamil Nadu - Document - Gale Ac…

Yet while numerous Tamil filmmakers and politicians of various factions have sought to
appropriate the mantle "revolutionary" (MGR, for example, insisted that he be referred to as
the Tamil people's puratchi thalaivar, or "revolutionary leader"), the question remains whether
the films are truly best thought of as a revolutionary cinema--a contemporary version of
Soviet or Cuban agitprop.

From the standpoint of film form it is certainly a counter-practice to classical Hollywood

cinema and many of its codes of realism. Though traditionally approached as a defect, Indian
cinema's explicit and quite conscious rejection of Western conventions of verisimilitude
arguably make it our most concrete example of a "Brechtian" national cinema--if such an
entity is not an inherent contradiction. There are obviously difficulties in exporting such
categories as "Brechtian" or even "melodrama" outside of Western culture that I have no
interest in minimizing. These issues will, however, have to be the subject of further work to be
built on other recent attempts to put Indian popular film in a cultural context broader than
classical Hollywood cinema.

Is the politically inflected cinema of Tamil Nadu truly revolutionary from the standpoint of
content? Tamil Nadu has two active, albeit minor, communist parties, both often allied with
Karunanidhi's DMK against other more conservative parties such as Congress (I) and the BJP.
However, the thesis of Marxist leader P. Ramamurti's book on the subject of Tamil politics is
that the entire Dravidian movement, while purportedly leftist, has in fact deflected attention
and support away from the fight against capitalism. According to Ramamurti, the Dravidians
settled for a merely splintering and divisive politics that substituted a struggle against caste
and region in the place of a struggle against class. This thesis, which has basically been the
party's assessment since the DMK began instituting its populist "schemes," is not without
merit. However, the position of the Communist Party India (CPI [M]) should not be used as a
benchmark for measuring "revolutionary" social change. The party has long been Brahmin-
dominated and over the years has repeatedly taken the position of going slow on reversing
caste inequality. (64)

In his book on the M. G. Ramachandran phenomenon, M. S. S. Pandian argues the party line
from the position of Gramscian Marxism. Pandian believes that the cult of personality
surrounding MGR was a form of fascism--a literal national socialism--and that the leader
betrayed his ignorant followers at every turn. Though Pandian's analysis dramatically raises
the level of the discourse surrounding MGR and his films, it is once again shockingly
contemptuous of the masses in whom he presumably wants to ultimately place power. Like
Das Gupta and Hoberman, Pandian seizes on any example no matter how extreme to make
his case that the millions who voted for MGR were on the most literal level incapable of
distinguishing between film and reality. This thesis is apparently irresistible among India's
English-speaking elite, even when the Western values they claim to embrace are those of
European revolutionaries like Marx and Gramsci. (65)

Though there is once again insufficient space to do justice to Pandian's actual analysis of the
films of MGR, I believe that it is possible to historically refer to many aspects of many of the
early films as "revolutionary" from the standpoint of challenging dominant social values.
Karunanidhi's most recent films have only upped the revolutionary ante in their advocation of
violence in the very real battle against quite literal institutional state apparatuses. The fact
that Karunanidhi himself may have wielded such apparatuses in a similarly corrupt and

https://go.gale.com/ps/i.do?p=AONE&u=googlescholar&id=GALE|A90190298&v=2.1&it=r&sid=AONE&asid=2c23a6e9 31/43
11/3/22, 12:25 PM "We must make the government tremble": political filmmaking in the South Indian State of Tamil Nadu - Document - Gale Ac…

repressive fashion does not alter the message of his films--that the violent actions of an elite
minority targeted against specific individual representatives of state institutions can stir the
mass action required for political change. However, even if we wish to withhold the title
"revolutionary" because the change these films advocate is something short of systemic, it is
undeniable that they are far from merely escapist daydreams. In innumerable ways, they
directly reflect and participate in the political and social conflicts that divide one of the most
violent nations on earth. (66)

NOTES

I would like to thank my Tamil friends R. Dhamodaran of Priya Imports, film actor R. Ganesh, Y.
G. Mahendra and his acting troupe, S. R. Ashokkumar of the Hindu, and Mrs. Y. G.
Parthasarathy, all of whom tirelessly answered my endless questions. Matthew Bernstein and
Robin Blaetz commented on early drafts while Thomas Thangaraj did all of these things and
translated the films. Finally, a special note of gratitude to Marie Hansen and gang at Woodruff
Library's interlibrary loan office for their performance of endless miracles.

(1.) M. Karunanidhi, Poems, trans, and ed. Krishna Srinivas (Madras: Poets Press India, 1989)
20.

(2.) Tiruvalluvar, Tirukkural, trans. K. S. Srinivasa Iyengar (Calcutta: M. P. Birla Foundation,

1988) line 774.

(3.) Karunanidhi's introduction to Madurai Meenakshi is formally even stranger as it mixes up

shots of the scriptwriter directly addressing the camera with profile views of him addressing
the previous shot's off-screen camera.

(4.) Actually, the uniformed officers the crowd attacks are explained to be thugs dressed up as
police, but this would have been understood as merely inserted as a necessary
accommodation to the government's censorship board.

(5.) For a pair of prominent examples of books on postcolonial politics in Third World cinema
that all but completely ignore trends in Indian popular cinema in favor of discussions of the
new cinema movement, see Roy Armes, Third World Film Making and the West (Berkeley: U of
California P, 1987) and John D. H. Downing, ed., Film and Politics in the Third World (New York:
Praeger, 1987). For a critical assessment of the Tamil Film industry from a variety of elitist
voices within or on the edges of the industry, see Jayabharathi, ed., Indian Films and Film
World (Madras: Jwala, 1976).

(6.) Erik Barnouw and S. Krishnaswamy, Indian Film (New York: Oxford UP, 1980); Rosie
Thomas, "Indian Cinema: Pleasures and Popularity," Screen 26.3-4 (1985): 117; Don Moraes,
"Bombay: Wealth, Shantytowns, Speakeasies, Movie Aristocrats, Intellectuals, Admen and
Death on the Trains," New York Times 11 Oct. 1970: vi, 34; Bernard Weinraub, "Bombay: Poor
Find Escape in Films," New York Times 7 May 1973: 52; Khushwant Singh, "`We Sell Them
Dreams,'" NewYork Times 31 Oct. 1976: vi, 4. For an anthropological study of Tamil filmgoing
that embraces the metaphor of escape, see Sara Dickey, "Accommodation and Resistance:
Expression of Working-Class Values through Tamil Cinema," Wide Angle 11.3 (1989): 26-32.

(7.) For background statistics on the Indian and Tamil film industries across the period covered
in this paper, see Uma da Cunha, "India," in Peter Cowie, ed., Variety International Film Guide
https://go.gale.com/ps/i.do?p=AONE&u=googlescholar&id=GALE|A90190298&v=2.1&it=r&sid=AONE&asid=2c23a6e9 32/43
11/3/22, 12:25 PM "We must make the government tremble": political filmmaking in the South Indian State of Tamil Nadu - Document - Gale Ac…

1992 (London: Cromwell Press, 1991) 204-07; John A. Lent, The Asian Film Industry (Austin: U
of Texas P, 1990) 229-52; S. Muthiah, ed., A Social and Economic Atlas of India (New York:
Oxford UP, 1987); Armes 121; "Appendices," in Indian Cinema Superbazaar, ed. Aruna Vasudev
and Philippe Lenglet (New Delhi: Vikas, 1983) 322-45; Robert L. Hardgrave, Jr., "The Celluloid
God: M.G.R. and the Tamil Film," South Asian Review 4.4 (1971): 307; M. A. Oommen and K. V.
Joseph, Economics of Film Industry in India (Gurgaon, India: Academic Press, 1981); Rikhab
Dass Jain, The Economic Aspects of the Film Industry in India (Delhi: Atma Ram and Sons,
1960); M. Rahman, "Good Times, Bad Times: The Hindi Film Industry," India Today 31 May
1988: 80-88. Even allowing for their dates of publication, the statistics in these sources are not
always consistent.

(8.) Madhu Jain, "Cinema Tums Sexy," India Today 15 Nov. 1991: 50-56; Saritha Rai, "Ooty:
Celluloid Charms," India Today 30 Nov. 1991: 157. For background on South Indian filmmaking
before sound, see S. T. Bhaskaran, "Silent Cinema in the South," Cinema Vision India 1.1
(1980): 60-66.

(9.) Amit Agarwal, "Movies for Music's Sake," India Today 31 Jan. 1993: 94.

(10.) The historical antecedents for the song and dance in Indian theatrical traditions are
impossible not to notice. According to Richard Armando Frasca, "the first truly modern theater
form of Tamilnadu" was the icai natakam, or musical drama. A late nineteenth-/early
twentieth-century development away from the oral, rural folk traditions of the terukkuttu, it
adapted the earlier eight-hour street performances to the proscenium stage and in the
process replaced elements of ritual with entertainment. Frasca goes so far as to suggest that
the work of the icai natakam's most famous composer/writer/director, Sankaradas Swami,
represents the direct "progenitor" of modern Tamil cinema. Richard Armando Frasca, The
Theater of the Mahabharata: Terukkuttu Performances in South India (Honolulu: U of Hawaii
P, 1990) 59. For more on music in South Indian films, see S. Theodore Baskaran, "Music for the
Masses: Film Songs of South India," in Second International Conference on Indian Ocean
Studies (Perth: W Australia Perth Building Society, 1985).

(11.) There are famous examples in American cinema of directors electronically altering sound
effects used in dramatic scenes such as Hitchcock's toying with bird noises in The Birds. Even
in such celebrated instances, however, the disparity between the sound used and what would
be acceptably natural is hardly as dramatic or as foregrounded as such instances in Indian
cinema. Ithu Engal Neethi's music and effects were "directed" by Ilaiyaraja, universally
considered to be Tamil filmdom's musical genius. In the thirteen years leading up to Ithu Engal
Neethi, Ilaiyaraja had been responsible for the soundtracks to over 450 films. See Seetha K.
and Akila R., "Troubled Genius," Aside 16-28 Feb. 1989: 12-21.

(12.) The star and square examples come from Manthiri Kumari (1950), a Karunanidhi-scripted
DMK film starring MGR.

(13.) While all of the males in the film are presented as intimidated by Radhika's clearly
aggressive personality, the threatening quality of such transgressive behavior as her
suggestion that she simultaneously take all three vigilantes as husbands does not prevent the
three from dreaming of making love to her. Even so, Radhika does not become romantically
attached to any of them. Robin Blaetz is not particularly impressed with Radhika's
independence, pointing out that the narrative still seems to have no position for her at the
https://go.gale.com/ps/i.do?p=AONE&u=googlescholar&id=GALE|A90190298&v=2.1&it=r&sid=AONE&asid=2c23a6e9 33/43
11/3/22, 12:25 PM "We must make the government tremble": political filmmaking in the South Indian State of Tamil Nadu - Document - Gale Ac…

end except a very graphic and prominent martyrdom. On the other hand, as Matthew
Bernstein points out, martyrdom is something she shares with most of the film's characters.
Though at least one writer on Bombay cinema (Raghunath Raina, "The Context: A Socio-
Cultural Anatomy," in Vasudev and Lengtet, Indian Cinema Superbazaar) claims that the death
of the hero represents a particularly unsatisfying narrative closure in Hindu traditions, there is
certainly ample evidence of such endings in Tamil folk tales.

It should also be mentioned that the late 1980s saw a cycle of Indian films involving the
character of the independent policewoman, spawned by the nationwide fame of the
controversial Delhi officer Kiran Bedi. Bedi, who became a legend in 1977 after she fought off
a sword-wielding male with only a lathi (police truncheon), was making national news in 1988
for her confrontations with striking Delhi lawyers. More than one of the screen's police
heroines of the period had the first name "Kiran."

Finally, though all of the various Dravidian administrations are generally conceded to have
significantly advanced women's rights, AIADMK candidate Jayalalitha was successfully laying
claim to the feminist mantle with younger women voters. (This in spite of having announced
that her decision after the death of MGR had been between committing sati and entering
politics.) Thus Radhika's character may have been part of an attempt by Karunanidhi to
restake his claim to this part of the electorate.

For background on Bedi, see Raj Chengappa, "Battle for Prestige," India Today 30 Apr. 1988:
84-87; David Devadas, "In the Dock," India Today 15 June 1988: 48. For a discussion of the
subgenre of the female action film, in which "the strong, self-willed, often revengeful Indian
woman who knows her mind and won't tolerate injustice ... dominates the screenplay, with or
without well-known heroes in tow," see M. Rahman, "Women Strike Back," India Today 15 July
1988: 124-26. For a very popular example of the cycle, see the Hindi title Zakhmi Aurat (1988),
about a raped policewoman who organizes other victims into vigilante castrators

(14.) Salil Tripathi, "Epic Spin-offs," India Today 15 July 1988: 150-51; Vaasanthi and M.
Kalyankumar, "Arms and the Men," India Today 30 Apr. 1993: 72-73; Robert L. Hardgrave and
Anthony C. Neidhart, "Films and Political Consciousness in Tamil Nadu," Economic and Political
Weekly 11 Jan. 1975: 27-35. Hardgrave and Neidhart's figures have no doubt been dated by
the rise of television, but while many of the numbers may now need to be scaled back, I
assume that the general patterns they revealed have not seen any dramatic reversals. For
articles on the politics behind the broadcasting of the religious serials "Ramayan" and
"Mahabharata" over national television, see Madhu Jain, "The Second Coming: The Serial's
Extension Is Politically Motivated," India Today 31 Aug. 1988: 155; Madhu Jain, "The
Propaganda Ploy," India Today 31 Oct. 1988: 40-42.

(15.) Chidananda Das Gupta, The Painted Face: Studies in India's Popular Cinema (New Delhi:
Roli, 1991) ix-x, 199-200; Hardgrave and Neidhart 27-35; Vasudev and Lenglet 324-25. In the
years leading up to the 1989 election, Tamil Nadu's urban population experienced dramatic
growth. By 1984, 53 percent of the state's residents were living in cities. See Abraham Eraly,
"The Next Chief Minister?" Aside 16-31 Jan. 1989: 10-11.

For a study of the relationship of politics to North Indian cinema-going patterns, see Daniel
Melnick, "Intensive Politicization Episodes: Movies, Melas, and Political Attitudes in a North
Indian District," American Behavioral Scientist 17.3 (1974): 444-46. Among other things,
https://go.gale.com/ps/i.do?p=AONE&u=googlescholar&id=GALE|A90190298&v=2.1&it=r&sid=AONE&asid=2c23a6e9 34/43
11/3/22, 12:25 PM "We must make the government tremble": political filmmaking in the South Indian State of Tamil Nadu - Document - Gale Ac…

Melnick's study revealed the incredible statistic that without the mobile cinemas of the South,
77 percent of the adult male villagers he interviewed in 1968 claimed to have never seen a
film.

(16.) Hardgrave and Neidhart 27-35.

(17.) For evidence of the importance of Mohenjo-Daro and the Aryan "invasion" on Tamil self-
identity and the ideological underpinnings of the current Dravidian movement, see A. P.
Venkateswaran's address to the 1988 International Tamil Conference in N. Seevaratnam, The
Tamil National Question and the Indo-Sri Lanka Accord (Delhi: Konark, 1989) 11; S.
Lakshmirathan Bharati, History and Growth of Rationalist Movement in Tamil Nadu (Madras:
Indian Rationalist Association, 1974); C. N. Annadurai, Ariyamayai (Aryan illusion)(Trichy:
Dravidappani, 1954), excerpts translated and quoted in Marguerite Ross Barnett, The Politics
of Cultural Nationalism in South India (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1976) 72-73; M. Karunanidhi,
"The Tamils, Past and Present," Times of India Weekly 27 Feb. 1972: 8, quoted in Charles
Anthony Ryerson, "Meaning and Modernization in Tamil India: Primordial Sentiments and
Sanskritization," Ph.D. diss., Columbia U, 1979, 197-98. (For a revised version of this
dissertation, see Charles Ryerson, Regionalism and Religion: The Tamil Renaissance and
Popular Hinduism [Madras: Christian Literature Society, 1988]) North Indian film critic
Chidananda Das Gupta points out that the "Aryan Invasion" theories of various British
scholars served British imperialist interests by keeping Indians divided against each other.

(18.) Ryerson chap. 4; Barnett chap. 4. Ithu Engal Neethi director S. A. Chandrasekharan not
only includes a portrait of E. V. Ramaswamy on the lawyer's wall, but cuts into a close up of it.
For accounts of E. V. Ramaswamy and the early years of the Dravidian Nationalist movement,
see Anita Diehl, E. V. Ramaswami Naicker-Periyar: A Study of the Influence of a Personality in
Contemporary South India (Sweden: Scandinavian U Books, 1977); K. Nambi Arooran, Tamil
Renaissance and Dravidian Nationalism 1905-1944 (Madurai: Koodal, 1980).

For more on the politics of language in India, see Jyotirindra Das Gupta, Language Conflict and
National Development: Group Politics and National Language Policy in India (Berkeley: U of
California P, 1970) and Robert L. Hardgrave, Jr., "The Riots in Tamilnad: Problems and
Prospects of India's Language Crisis," Asian Survey 11.8 (1965): 399-407.

For dramatic evidence of the Dravidian movement's early atheism, see E. V. Ramaswami, The
Ramayana: A True Reading (Trichy: Periyar Self-Respect Propoganda Institution Publications,
1959, 1972). Though EVR concedes that "all Tamils except the Muslims and Christians are the
devout followers of Ramayana," he insists that "the original Ramayana contains nothing
appreciable, nothing divine, nothing moral to be learnt and followed and nothing that would
stand to reason" (2-3). This hostility within the Dravidian movement to such a fundamental
component of Indian culture makes the DMK films an interesting test case for the southern
applicability of Vijay Mishra's argument that the "Bombay film" reflects a narrative paradigm
derived from Sanskrit epics, that is, "the grand Indian metatext" of the Mahabharata and the
Ramayana. See Vijay Mishra, "Towards a Theoretical Critique of Bombay Cinema," Screen 26.3-
4 (1985): 133-46, and Raghunath Raina, "The Context: A Social Cultural Anatomy," in Vasudev
and Lenglet 3.

(19.) For tributes to and hagiographies of Annadurai, see A. P. Janarthanam, ed., The Anna
Sixtieth Birthday Souvenir (Madras: Janarthanam, 1968); A. P. Janarthanam, ed., The Anna
https://go.gale.com/ps/i.do?p=AONE&u=googlescholar&id=GALE|A90190298&v=2.1&it=r&sid=AONE&asid=2c23a6e9 35/43
11/3/22, 12:25 PM "We must make the government tremble": political filmmaking in the South Indian State of Tamil Nadu - Document - Gale Ac…

Commemoration Volume (Madras: Janarthanam, 1969); T. C. Sivaswamy, Anna: Leader of the

South (Madras: Poompukar, 1968); Sagar Ahluwalia, Anna--The Tempest and the Sea (New
Dehli: Young Asia Publications, 1969); A. S. Venu, Anna and the Crusade (Madras: Nakkeeran
Pathippagam, 1987). For speeches of Annadurai, see A. K. Moorthy and G. Sankaran, eds.,
Assembly Speeches of Anna/Felicitation Addresses of Anna/ Inaugural and Presidential
Addresses of Anna (Thanjavur, Tamil Nadu: Anna Publishing House, 1975). For accounts of the
DMK's early years, see Robert L. Hardgrave, Jr., The Dravidian Movement (Bombay: Popular
Prakashan, 1965); P. Spratt, D.M.K. in Power (Bombay: Nachiketa, 1970); K. S. Ramanujam, The
Big Change (Madras: Sundara Prachuralayam, 1967); K. S. Ramanujam, Challenge and
Response: An Intimate Report of Tamil Nadu Politics 19671971 (Madras: Sundara
Prachuralayam, 1971). For background on the intersection of anti-Brahminism and Tamil
nationalism, see R. Suntharalingam, Politics and Nationalist Awakening in South India, 1852-
1891 (Tucson: U of Arizona P, 1974); Eugene F. Irschick, Politics and Social Conflict in South
India: The Non-Brahman Movement and Tamil Separatism, 1916-1929 (Berkeley: U of
California P, 1969); C. J. Baker and D. A. Washbrook, South India: Political Institutions and
Political Change 18801940 (Delhi: Macmillan, 1975); Indhu Rajagopal, The Tyranny of Caste:
The Non-Brahman Movement and Political Development in South India (New Delhi: Vikas,
1985; K. Nambi Arooran, Tamil Renaissance and Dravidian Nationalism 1905-1944 (Madurai:
Koodal, 1980).

(20.) For background and antecedents for the DMK's mixture of film and politics, see S.
Theodore Baskaran, The Message Bearers: The Nationalist Politics and the Entertainment
Media in South India, 1880-1945 (Madras: Cre-A, 1981).

(21.) Barnouw and Krisbnaswamy 177-83; Robert L. Hardgrave, Jr., "politics and the Film in
Tamilnadu: The Stars and the DMK," Asian Survey 13 (1973): 288-305; Robert L. Hardgrave, Jr.,
"When Stars Displace the Gods: The Folk Culture of Cinema in Tamil Nadu," Essays in the
Political Sociology of South India (Delhi: Usha Publications, 1979) 92-124; Karthigesu
Sivathamby, The Tamil Film as a Medium of Political Communication (Madras: New Century
Book House, 1981). Sivathamby also finds it very significant that the cinema was one of the
only places in Indian society where there was no caste discrimination. One was seated solely
according to one's ability to pay.

For a study of film fan clubs and their relationship to politics, see Sara Dickey, "The Politics of
Adulation: Cinema and the Production of Politicians in South India," Journal of Asian Studies
52.2 (1993): 340-72.

(22.) Peter Brooks, The Melodramatic Imagination: Balzac, Henry James, Melodrama, and the
Mode of Excess (New York: Columbia UP, 1985). For an attempt to isolate narrative structures
and mechanisms within the Hindi film melodrama of the fifties that distinguish it from
Western examples, see Ravi Vasudevan, "The Melodramatic Mode and the Commercial Hindi
Cinema: Notes on Film History, Narrative and Performance in the 1950s," Screen 30.3 (1989):
29-50, and Wimal Dissanayake, ed., Melodrama and Asian Cinema (New York: Cambridge UP,
1993).

(23.) In late September of 1988, the DMK hosted a massive Madras rally for the launching of
the National Front, a coalition of left-leaning, anti-Congress (I) parties from across India. When
DMK film director and Karunanidhi relative Amirtham was observed by Aside reporters

https://go.gale.com/ps/i.do?p=AONE&u=googlescholar&id=GALE|A90190298&v=2.1&it=r&sid=AONE&asid=2c23a6e9 36/43
11/3/22, 12:25 PM "We must make the government tremble": political filmmaking in the South Indian State of Tamil Nadu - Document - Gale Ac…

overseeing the filming of the giant assemblage on both 35 mm and video, the Madras-based
magazine wrote that "it is expected that many of these scenes will be spliced in films scripted
by Mu Ka (informal of Muthuvel Karunanidhi) in the near future." See Janaki Venkataraman
and Ira Bhaskar, "The Show that Shook Madras," Aside 1-15 Oct. 1988: 19.

(24.) For hagiographies of MGR, see S. Jagathrakshakan, Dr. MGR: A Phenomenon (Madras:
Apollo Veliyeetagam, 1984); V. Kesavalu, ed., Impact: M.G.R. and Films (Madras: Movie
Appreciation Society, 1990); Attar Chand, M. G. Ramachandran: My Blood Brother (Delhi: Gian
Publishing House, 1988). For a somewhat more scholarly, though equally ideologically
committed, study of MGR's impact on Tamil Nadu politics, see R. Thandavan, All India Anna
Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (Madras: Tamil Nadu Academy of Political Science, 1987). For a
quite recent and scholarly study of the state's Dravidian politics, see G. Palanithurai and R.
Thandavan, Ethnic Movement in India: Theory and Practice (Delhi: Kanishka, 1993). For an
amusing novel loosely based on MGR, see I. Allan Sealy, Hero: A Fable (London: Secker and
Warburg, 1991).

(25.) DMK ad in the Weekly Mail 27 Feb. 1971, quoted in Ryerson 236.

(26.) C. R. W. David, Cinema as Medium of Communication in Tamilnadu (Madras: Christian

Literature Society, 1983). During his final administration, Karunanidhi's head of state security
(DGP)--arguably the most powerful man in the state after Karunanidhi himself--was a
Christian. Karunanidhi also sent one of his sons to Madras Christian College after being
barred from a Catholic school because of his name (see note 65). S. Swaminathan,
Karunanidhi: Man of Destiny (New Delhi: Affiliated East-West Press, 1974) 40, 78; Prakash M.
Swamy, "DMK in the Dock," India Today 31 Dec. 1991: 63-66.

(27.) Hardgrave and Neidhart 32; Barnouw and Krishnaswamy 180; Hardgrave 309.

(28.) For Karunanidhi's role in the DMK's 1967 electoral victory, see Ryerson 203-11.

(29.) Swaminathan 41, 45-47; New York Times 21 Mar. 1973, quoted in Ryerson 224.

(30.) K. Mohandas, MGR: The Man and the Myth (Bangalore: Panther Publishers, 1992) 6-7.
After Muthu's film career crashed on takeoff, he became involved in a number of highly
publicized scandals involving alcohol. When his father finally cut him off as a useless wastrel,
the DMK's opposition (Jayalalitha's AIADMK) attempted to create resentment against
Karunanidhi by advertising the fact that they had taken to supporting the financially
distressed Muthu with party funds. This probably backfired. See G. Nikam, "Jaya, the
Munificent," India Today 30 Apr. 1992: 62-63.

(31.) Stanley Wolpert, A New History of India (New York: Oxford UP, 1989) 402. After certain
changes in Delhi politics, the prosecution of Karunanidhi as a result of the Sarkaria
Commission findings was ultimately dropped. For more on the conditions surrounding Indira
Gandhi's dismissal of Karunanidhi's government, see Krishnabai Nimbkar, Trends in Tamilnad
Politics during the Emergency (Madurai: Koodal, 1977).

(32.) Swaminathan 22.

(33.) Swaminathan 22-24; Mohandas 62-63; Ryerson 154-55.

https://go.gale.com/ps/i.do?p=AONE&u=googlescholar&id=GALE|A90190298&v=2.1&it=r&sid=AONE&asid=2c23a6e9 37/43
11/3/22, 12:25 PM "We must make the government tremble": political filmmaking in the South Indian State of Tamil Nadu - Document - Gale Ac…

(34.) Prabhu Chawla, "The Bottle Bomb," India Today 31 Mar. 1989:110-14; "Sunken Spirits,"
India Today 31 May 1989: 91. Karunanidhi's first act upon taking office was to appoint as
excise commissioner the liquor scandal's

initial whistle blower, who had been fired by MGR six years earlier. Signing the new taxes into
law less than three weeks later, Karunanidhi announced with characteristic flourish that "we
have liquidated the liquor empire in the state within 20 days of coming to power.... What was
obviously bribe money will now be used to bridge the deficit in the state's finances."

Following her election, Jayalalitha immediately became enmeshed in the politics of alcohol.
After several wild policy shifts, the new chief minister attempted to shield herself from
criticism for making concessions to liquor interests by appearing in a film in which she played
a chief minister crusading for prohibition. Jayalalitha's film, Neenga Nalla Irukkanum (You
should live long), was a financial disaster. See "No, Chief Minister," India Today 31 Dec. 1992:
128.

(35.) Estimates of Tamil Nadu's Brahmin population go as high as 5.6 percent. Karunanidhi's
caste was the Melakarans, by tradition made up of temple dancers and music makers. While a
proud group, the state's more "advanced" castes would not have found them fit to eat with.
Ironically, the name "Karunanidhi," meaning "bountiful mercy," is Sanskrit. Many in the
Dravidian movement have Tamilized such names. See Ryerson 199.

(36.) Prabhu Chawla, "A Close Race," India Today 31 Jan. 1989: 27; Prabu Chawla and Amarnath
K. Menon, "Smashing Return," India Today 15 Feb. 1989: 26-27.

During the 1989 election, Jayalalitha sought to intertwine caste, politics, cinema, religion, and
her personal life together in interesting ways. Because the voting was to take place on the day
of the Thaipusam festival associated with Lord Muruga (aka Murugan/Murukan), she saw to it
that her 1966 movie Thani Piravi was rereleased beforehand. Film posters were plastered all
over Madras featuring not only Jayalalitha with former Chief Minister MGR in the role of
Muruga but the cock insignia associated with both Muruga and Jayalalitha's party. See Lalita
Dileep, "Invoking Legacies," India Today 15 Jan. 1989: 34.

Jayalalitha's decision to align herself with Muruga was ingenious not just because of the
deity's special prominence in South India but because it helped her bridge the contradiction of
being a Brahmin Dravidian. According to religion scholar Fred Clothey, the cult of Muruga's
"syncretic nature is such that Tamilians of varying perspectives can be comfortable in its
ranks. It is an eclecticism that makes the cultus a prism reflecting the cultural, historical, and
sociological facets that comprise Tamil Nadu."

On the one hand, because Muruga's regional exploits date back to pre-Sanskrit Tamil
literature to even the oldest known Tamil poetry, he has been embraced by antiBrahmin
Dravidian regionalists, who see his divinity as sacralizing the language and geography of Tamil
Nadu. On the other hand, Hinduism's general pliability has allowed the worship of the son of
Siva to become "an authentic expression of Hindu orthodoxy." Indeed, the Muruga cultus has
even adapted itself to Tamil Muslims, many of whom honor him under the name "Sekunder"
"So even though the cultus of Murukan finds itself in the middle of the Tamil-Sanskrit,
brahman-non-brahman disputes, there is a sense in which the cultus is truly democratic and
attractive to a significant cross section of Tamil life." See Fred W. Clothey, The Many Faces of
https://go.gale.com/ps/i.do?p=AONE&u=googlescholar&id=GALE|A90190298&v=2.1&it=r&sid=AONE&asid=2c23a6e9 38/43
11/3/22, 12:25 PM "We must make the government tremble": political filmmaking in the South Indian State of Tamil Nadu - Document - Gale Ac…

Murukan: The History and Meaning of a South Indian God (New York: Mouton, 1978) 1-4. For
more on Muruga's historical place in Tamil culture, see Kamil V. Zvellebil, Tamil Traditions on
Subahmanya-Murugan (Madras: Institute of Asian Studies, 1991).

(37.) The most important caste conflict during the 1989 election went conspicuously
unaddressed in Ithu Engal Neethi. The DMK was in the process of losing support from the
trading caste Vanniyars because the latter was resentful of the party's long-held policy of
reserving government jobs and university admissions for such backward castes as the 20
percent of the population that were the untouchable Harijans. As a somewhat higher caste,
Vanniyars wanted their own 20 percent reservations, and their leaders were freely calling for
violence against Harijans to achieve it. As it turned out, an inability to build an alliance with
Congress (I) caused Vanniyar leadership to call for a boycott of the election that probably
aided Karunanidhi. See Lalita Dileep, "Preparing for Polls," India Today 31 Dec. 1988: 60-62;
Guha Prasad, "Caste Rumbles," India Today 31 May 1989: 62. For a series of case studies in the
intersection of caste, class, and politics in rural Tamil Nadu across the four decades of the
DMK's existence, see Kathleen Gough, Rural Change in Southeast India 1950s to 1980s (Delhi:
Oxford UP, 1989). For other discussions of caste and class politics and the DMK, see Francine
R. Frankel, "Middle Classes and Castes in India's Politics: Prospects for Political
Accommodation," India's Democracy: An Analysis of Changing State-Society Relations, ed. Atul
Kohli (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1988) 243-49; D. A. Washbrook, "Caste, Class and Dominance in
Modern Tamil Nadu: Non-Brahmanism, Dravidianism and Tamil Nationalism," Dominance and
State Power in Modern India, Decline of a Social Order, Vol. 1, ed. Francine R. Frankel and M. S.
A. Rao (Delhi: Oxford UP, 1989) 204-64; Atul Kohli, Democracy and Discontent: India's Growing
Crisis of Governability (New York: Cambridge UP, 19901 154-83; Steve Barnett, "Identity Choice
and Caste Ideology in Contemporary South India," The New Wind: Changing Identities in South
Asia, ed. Kenneth David (The Hague: Mouton, 1977) 393-414.

(38.) Ithu Engal Neethi's concern with providing the blind with adequate medical attention
represents an additional intersection with Karunanidhi's biography. Shortly after leading the
agitation at Kallakkudi station, Karunanidhi was involved in an automobile accident that
forced him to spend six months at the Government Eye Hospital in Egmore undergoing
extensive surgery. Indeed, because of inadequate facilities in India, he was ultimately sent to
the United States for treatment. Upon his release, he was advised to wear the dark glasses
which quickly became associated with him as a trademark. MGR liked the image the glasses
created and he quickly took to wearing a pair himself.

If the story of Karunanidhi's eye problems was well known in Tamil Nadu, it was less so farther
north. Post-election commentators repeatedly claimed that Rajiv Gandhi's biggest single faux
pas of the campaign came when he charged that the DMK leader wore sunglasses everywhere
"because he was incapable of looking anyone in the eye." Even Karunanidhi's most fearsome
opponents quickly came to his defense, attacking the prime minister's attempt at wit as below
the belt even for Tamil politics. See Janaki Venkataraman, "The Making of a Leader," Aside 1-15
Feb. 1989: 20-22; "Election Eve Oddities," Aside 1-15 Feb. 1989: 36.

(39.) Philip G. Altbach, "Politics and the University: Rethinking Higher Education in India,"
Change July-August 1987: 56-59.

https://go.gale.com/ps/i.do?p=AONE&u=googlescholar&id=GALE|A90190298&v=2.1&it=r&sid=AONE&asid=2c23a6e9 39/43
11/3/22, 12:25 PM "We must make the government tremble": political filmmaking in the South Indian State of Tamil Nadu - Document - Gale Ac…

(40.) S. H. Venkatramani, "Grounds of Dispute: Land Laws Are Twisted for a Liquor Baron's
Trust," India Today 15 Aug. 1988: 62-64; M. Prakash, "Shifting the Spotlight," India Today 30
Sept. 1992: 30. After her election in June 1991, Jayalalitha returned the medical college to
Udayar, prompting Karunanidhi to charge her with taking Rs 40 crore in exchange for the gift.

(41.) Tamil roots in Ceylon are at least as ancient as the eleventh-century Chola dynasty, with
the last influx spurred under British colonization of the island and the development of tea,
coffee, and rubber plantations. The notion of a "Tamil Eelam" covering the Tamil-speaking
parts of the island in the north and east dates to independence movements in the twenties.
For historical background on Sri Lankan Tamils, the Eelam separatist movement, the latter's
relationship to Dravidian Nationalism, and the Indian government's response to the crisis, see
A. Jeyaratnam Wilson, The Break-Up of Sri Lanka: The Sinahalese-Tamil Conflict (Honolulu: U of
Hawaii P, 1988); Jonathan Spencer, ed., Sri Lanka: History and the Roots of Conflict (New York:
Routledge, 1990); Satchi Ponnambalam, Sri Lanka: National Conflict and the Tamil Liberation
Struggle (London: Zed Books, 1983); S. Piyasena and R. Y. Sendheera, India `We Tamils' and Sri
Lanka (Delhi: Sri Satguru, 1987); Depinder Singh, The IPKF in Sri Lanka (Delhi: Trishul
Publications, 1988); Bhabani Sen Gupta, Rajiv Gandhi: A Political Study (Delhi: Konark, 1989); S.
D. Muni, The Pangs of Proximity: India and Sri Lanka's Ethnic Conflict (London: Sage, 1993).

(42.) Tamil Eelam factionalism was in large part a function of factionalism within Tamil Nadu
Dravidianism. Because MGR made his government's support of LTTE conditional on the Tigers
having nothing to do with the DMK, Karunanidhi was forced to back the rival TELO.

(43.) Mohandas feels that Delhi was in competition for access to Trincomalee with the United
States, which was in the process of quietly allying itself with Sri Lanka. India's warm relations
with Moscow put a cold war spin on the whole Sri Lankan conflict. See Mohandas 77-81.

(44.) Anita Pratap, "Political Acrobatics," India Today 15 June 1988: 56-57.

(45.) Pratap 56-57; Prabhu Chawla and S. H. Venkatramani, "A Sticky Stalemate," India Today
15 Sept. 1988: 116-19; Dilip Bobb, "On the Brink," India Today 15 Nov. 1988: 40-44.

(46.) "Targeting the LTTE," Aside 1-15 Sept. 1988: 10.

(47.) Prabhu Chawla, "Smashing Return," India Today 15 Feb. 1989: 30.

(48.) Mohandas 27, 49.

(49.) Anirudhya Mitra, "The Inside Story," India Today 15 July 1991: 22-29; Anirudhya Mitra,
"The Web Widens," India Today 31 Aug. 1991: 30-34; Anirudhya Mitra, "Conspiracy Surfaces,"
India Today 15 Dec. 1991: 57-60; Prakash M. Swamy, "DMK in the Dock," India Today 31 Dec.
1991: 63-66; Prakash M. Swamy, "Damning Diary," India Today 29 Feb. 1992: 157; Anirudhya
Mitra, "Back in Business," India Today 15 Apr. 1992: 45-46; Anirudhya Mitra and Prakash M.
Swamy, "Damning Disclosures," India Today 31 May 1992: 59-60. In the context of the
intersection between fiction and reality, it should be noted that even a "respected" publication
like India Today seized on rumors that Dhanu had been raped by IPKF forces to give her
zealotry an explanation that conformed to popular modes of melodrama.

(50.) Since coming to power, Jayalalitha has proven to be an intensely autocratic and vindictive
ruler. Recent polls show her approval level dwindling to scandalously low numbers, as
https://go.gale.com/ps/i.do?p=AONE&u=googlescholar&id=GALE|A90190298&v=2.1&it=r&sid=AONE&asid=2c23a6e9 40/43
11/3/22, 12:25 PM "We must make the government tremble": political filmmaking in the South Indian State of Tamil Nadu - Document - Gale Ac…

Karunanidhi's have steadily risen. An April 1993 India Today--Marg poll indicated that in a
rematch, the DMK would take 149 seats of the House to AIADMK's 34. Karunanidhi's approval
rating was placed at an "amazing" 60 percent, dwarfing Jayalalitha's "sorry" 21 percent. In
Indian politics, however, such fortunes are always subject to sudden shifts.

(51.) Lalita Dileep, "Political Video Wars," India Today 31 Jan. 1989: 28-29; Lalita Dileep, "`We
will protect Tamil identity,'" India Today 15 Jan. 1989: 35; Amarnath K. Menon, "Colliding Head-
on," India Today 31 Jan. 1989: 26-27. For more on the use of media in recent Indian electoral
politics, see Lloyd I. Rudolph, "The Media and Cultural Politics," in Harold Gould and Sumit
Ganguly, eds., India Votes: Alliance Politics and Minority Governments in the Ninth and Tenth
General Elections (Boulder: Westview Press, 1993) 159-79. According to Rudolph, the 1989
Tamil Nadu state assembly elections "inaugurated the video cassette era" for the rest of India.

(52.) "Swept away by the DMK Wave," India Today 15 Feb. 1989: 30; "Eye Catchers," India Today
15 Mar. 1989: 180; Abraham Eraly, "Winners and Losers," Aside 1-15 Feb. 1989: 11.

(53.) For biographies and studies of N. T. Rao, see S. Venkat Narayan, NTR: A Biography (New
Delhi: Vikas, 1983); C. Narasimha Rao, NTR: Politico-Psycho Analysis; S. Venkat Narayan, "The
Phenomenon called NTR: Actor-turned-Politician," Seventy Years of Indian Cinema: 1913-1983,
ed. T. M. Ramachandran (Bombay: Cinema India-International, 1985) 203-14; Joseph W. Elder
and Peter L. Schmitthenner, "Film Fantasy and Populist Politics in South India: N. T. Rama Rao
and the Telugu Desam Party," Studies of South India: An Anthology of Recent Research and
Scholarship, ed. Robert E. Frykenberg and Pauline Kolenda (Madras: New Era, 1985) 373-87. In
Kerla, the state directly west of Tamil Nadu, Prem Nazir also tried to move from cinema into
politics. Beloved as he was, the late Malayalam star of some 720 films failed to duplicate
MGR's and NTR's success. See Lalita Dileep, "A Sad End," India Today 15 Feb. 1989: 66.

(54.) Arun Katiyar, "Sunil Dutt: An Emotional Man of the People," India Today 15 Feb. 1993: 82-
83; Alok Tiwari, "Star Duel," India Today 15 Nov. 1991: 33.

(55.) Das Gupta's central concern has long been in the "quality" side of international
filmmaking, going back to 1947 and his participation in the formation of the Calcutta Film
Society with Satyajit Ray. A self-described polemicist for the likes of Ray and the Indian "New
Cinema" movement, he has until just recently been interested in the Indian masala film only
as a whipping boy. Moreover, what marginal exposure to such titles he has does not seem to
include more than a handful from South India.

In his first book on Indian popular cinema (published in 1991), he draws on selected
secondary sources (principally Bennett, Sivathamby, and Hardgrave's "Celluloid God" article)
to expand out the Hoberman piece. While a distinct improvement over the earlier article in at
least giving some cultural and political background on the Dravidian movement and its use of
film as an instrument of propaganda, Das Gupta is only more emphatic in holding to his
earlier argument. For what it's worth, India Today's review of the book felt that in "slumming,"
Das Gupta had "overreached" himself. These two pieces are, as far as I can tell, the extent of
what he has published on the subject of South Indian films, politics, economics, or culture. See
Chidananda Das Gupta and J. Hoberman, "Pols of India," Film Comment June 1987: 20-24;
Chidananda Das Gupta, "The Painted Face of Politics: The Actor-Politicians of South India," in
Wimal Dissanayake, ed., Cinema and Cultural Identity: Reflections on Films from Japan, India.
and China (Lanham, Md.: UP of America, 1988) 127-47; Chidananda Das Gupta, "The Painted
https://go.gale.com/ps/i.do?p=AONE&u=googlescholar&id=GALE|A90190298&v=2.1&it=r&sid=AONE&asid=2c23a6e9 41/43
11/3/22, 12:25 PM "We must make the government tremble": political filmmaking in the South Indian State of Tamil Nadu - Document - Gale Ac…

Face of Politics," The Painted Face: Studies in India's Popular Cinema (New Delhi: Roli, 1991)
199-247; Chidananda Das Gupta, Talking about Films (New Delhi: Orient Longman, 1981);
Madhu Jain, "Split Screen: Poor Study on Popular Cinema," India Today 15 Mar. 1992: 180. For
more on Tamil politics and its relationship to film, see Duncan B. Forrester, "Factions and
Filmstars: Tamil Nadu Politics since 1971," Asian Survey 16 (1976): 283-96.

(56.) Though MGR ultimately tried to prevent his followers from tattooing his image on
themselves, Jayalalitha revived the practice after taking office. Indeed, many men and women,
including ministers in her cabinet, raced to perform the act, in the poorest instances lining up
in front of street artists armed with only a single needle. All of this went on as tattooing was
being outlawed in other parts of India as an anti-AIDS measure. When pressed to renounce
the practice, Jayalalitha insisted that "I cannot ban this now as all those who have already
tattooed their arms will feel offended." See G. Nikam, "Grovel, Grovel: Sycophancy Scales New
Heights in TN," India Today 31 Mar. 1992: 23; Prajash M. Swamy and Girish Nikam, "The
Rampaging Empress," India Today 31 May 1992: 47; "Interview of the Fortnight: `The Congress
(I)'s attitude towards me is condescending,'" India Today 15 Dec. 1992: 72-74.

(57.) Chand 212.

(58.) M. Karunanidhi, "Dust Bin," "Flame" and Other Stories (Madras: Rising Sun, 1970) 9-13;
Swaminathan 77.

(59.) The Cinematograph Act of 1952 (as amended 1981), reprinted in Vasudev and Lenglet
332-43. An occasional member of the advisory panels assembled to judge Tamil films for the
Central Board confessed to me that in their opinion, panel members were matched to films
according to their sensitivities. In other words, if a morally stringent ruling was desired one
panel would be constituted, while if politics were to be scrutinized another group of people
would be called upon. This person's assessment was "it's all politics." For an insider's account
of Indian film censorship, see Kobita Sarkar, You Can't Please Everyone! (Bombay: IBH
Publishing, 1982).

(60.) "Politicians and Films," Aside 1-15 Nov. 1988: 49.

(61.) "Rare Agreement," India Today 30 Apr. 1989: 83. Governor P. C. Alexander waited until
Karunanidhi's election to send the bill back to the Assembly for reconsideration, where it was
promptly withdrawn.

(62.) "Grapevine," Aside 1-15 Nov. 1988: 36.

(63.) Ira Bhaskar, "Star Blitz!" Aside 1-15 June 1988: 1625.

(64.) P. Ramamurti, The Freedom Struggle and the Dravidian Movement (Delhi: Orient
Longman, 1987).

(65.) M. S. S. Pandian, The Image Trap: M. G. Ramachandran in Film and Politics (Newbury
Park: Sage, 1992). For Pandian's analysis of Tamil Nadu's current chief minister, see M. S. S.
Pandian and Geetha V., "Jayalalitha: `Sworn Heir,'" Economic and Political Weekly 18 Mar.
1989: 551. For a similarly critical analysis of the MGR phenomenon and its impact on Tamil
politics, see Darshan Sing Maini, "The Death of a Celluloid God," Indian Express 13 Jan. 1988:
6.
https://go.gale.com/ps/i.do?p=AONE&u=googlescholar&id=GALE|A90190298&v=2.1&it=r&sid=AONE&asid=2c23a6e9 42/43
11/3/22, 12:25 PM "We must make the government tremble": political filmmaking in the South Indian State of Tamil Nadu - Document - Gale Ac…

Das Gupta, rightly disturbed by Tamil Nadu's extremely poor civil liberties record, also uses
words like "dictatorship" and makes analogies to Hitler (Das Gupta 216-17). The fact that the
English language biweekly Aside finally concluded that the Tamil people had done the right
thing in voting for the DMK in 1989 did not prevent their reviewer from being aghast at Ithu
Engal Neethi, which he called nothing less than "a dangerous film." See C. S. G. Prasad,
"Fascism of the Mind," Aside 16-30 Nov. 1988: 43.

One measurement of where Karunanidhi "is coming from" on the political spectrum is
suggested by the fact that he named one of his sons "Stalin." M. K. Stalin has for some time
been head of the DMK's youth wing, and Karunanidhi has been extremely heavy-handed in his
attempts to position the young man as his successor in the party. A recent picture of Stalin
published in India Today shows him posing at his desk in front of a small shrine of photos that
prominently includes Lenin--the Soviet revolutionary leader, not some other son of
Karunanidhi. See Lalita Dileep, "Heir Apparent," India Today 15 Jan. 1989: 36; M. Prakash,
"Dodgy Elections," India Today 30 June 1992: 27.

(66.) As one commentator put it, "Mahatma Gandhi notwithstanding, the world, and India, will
never be non-violent." Tarun J. Tejpal, "The Highs of Violence," India Today 15 Nov. 1991: 169.

At least two essential studies on Indian film and politics have been published since this essay
was originally submitted for publication. See Sara Dickey, Cinema and the Urban Poor in South
India (New York: Cambridge UP, 1993) and Sumita S. Chakravarty, National Identity in Indian
Popular Cinema 1947-1987 (Austin: U of Texas P, 1993).

Pratt, David B.

Copyright: COPYRIGHT 1994 University of Texas at Austin (University of Texas Press)

http://www.utexas.edu/utpress/journals/jvlt.html
Source Citation (MLA 9th Edition)
Pratt, David B. "'We must make the government tremble': political filmmaking in the South
Indian State of Tamil Nadu." Velvet Light Trap, fall 1994, pp. 10+. Gale Academic OneFile,
link.gale.com/apps/doc/A90190298/AONE?u=googlescholar&sid=bookmark-
AONE&xid=99d36f2f. Accessed 3 Nov. 2022.

Gale Document Number: GALE|A90190298

https://go.gale.com/ps/i.do?p=AONE&u=googlescholar&id=GALE|A90190298&v=2.1&it=r&sid=AONE&asid=2c23a6e9 43/43