Peering through the Stage: Tamil Nāṭakam, Cinema, and the Politics of Discernment in South India, 1891-1975

Abstract

This dissertation focuses on a distinction that emerges prominently in twentieth century discourses about south Indian Tamil nāṭakam (drama) and cinema, namely, that between “the masses,” who consume media in a seemingly unskeptical, unthinking way, and a smaller, elite minority, who are conceptualized as watching drama and cinema with more discernment, maintaining a critical distance between themselves and the objects of their gaze. This dissertation asks, when it comes to Tamil nāṭakam and cinema, what does it mean to be discerning, and who gets to decide? How do diverse groups of people come to be categorized as members of either the unthinking masses, or the discerning elite? The following chapters analyze discourses produced by different groups of urban elite writers and leaders, ranging from those published in drama journals in the first decades of the twentieth century, to those appearing in film magazines during the 1950s-1970s. In writing these Tamil and English discourses, caste-elites with significant degrees of social and political capital positioned the Tamil stage and cinema as an object of critique, underlining what was for them, these medias' distasteful excesses and opacities. These writers oriented themselves towards the stage and screen primarily through what I have called four modes of peering, or modes of attending to/looking closely at nāṭakam and cinema: the scrutiny that accompanied efforts to “reform” the Tamil stage and Tamil cinema from “degradation” and its excessive (chapters 2 and 3); the sharp-mindedness that was won through a commitment to Dravidian Self-Respect and Rationality (chapter 4); the surveillance that followed “questionable” figures in these industries, namely the “deceitful” devadāsi (hereditary female performer) and the actress (chapter 5); and finally, the “objective” gaze directed by magazine editors towards the labor of actors, in their attempts to elucidate what went on behind the “illusions” of cinema (chapter 6). Each of these modes of peering, or looking closely at drama and cinema, generated their own dichotomies: the money-hungry professional company actor versus the materially-disinterested amateur sabha actor, the musical mythological versus the dialogue-driven social drama, ātal pātal (purportedly meaningless “dancing-singing”) versus rational, Dravidian karuttu, or ideology, the deceitful devadāsi/actress versus the morally-grounded observer, and finally, the obsessed, impulsive fan versus the objective film magazine editor. In constructing these dichotomies, the urban elite of Madras generated what I have called claims of discernment: they positioned themselves as attending to nāṭakam and cinema from a more elevated, or more intellectually robust standpoint than their predecessors/their less fortunate peers, and they insisted, further, that they were attending to nāṭakam and cinema not for one’s own sake, but for the sake of the larger collective. These claims of discernment, produced consistently by different groups over the course of a century, when linked with claims of intelligence and public service, helped to cement distinctions between the unseeing/unthinking “masses” and the critical, discerning elite – distinctions which continue to hover over contemporary scholarship as well. In the twentieth century, these claims were integral to the strategies that the urban elite used to bolster their own social capital and their political legitimacy to lead a seemingly more gullible public, all in an era that saw the coalescing of reform efforts directed at hereditary performance communities and indigenous performance traditions, the rise of mass democratic politics, as well as the dominance of Dravidian electoral power in south India.