Out of curiosity, and because I know little about Tamil cinema, I went to the master mind of knowledge, Google, and did a simple search for Tamil cinema. In the blink of an eye, I was provided 476,000 hits. After a little surfing I could see that Tamil cinema was as popular as Periananygam, Jesudoss says it is in this lead article for COMMUNICATION RESEARCH TRENDS. One of the reasons that the editors were attracted by the submission was that for most of us outside of India, Indian film is from the Mumbai production center and is called Bollywood. As the author of “Tamil Cinema” points out, Mumbai is but one of five major production centers in India with three in Southern India, known jointly as kollywood. But we in the United States have probably not heard of these films, even though they represent a major factor in national film making and a vibrant and increasingly lucrative center of Indian film making. There are several things about the article that are surprising besides the name Kollywood. One is Jesudoss’s assertion: “While yesterday’s discussion of film often centered on Hollywood and Europe, today the largest producer of film is India, and the fastest growing cinematic audience is Asian and South Asian”.
This assertion fits with the perception that Asia is increasingly acknowledged as the region of eminence for this century, even as Europe was in the 19th and the Western hemisphere was in the 20th. Furthermore, it highlights that not only will India be among the economic and technology leaders in this century, but also that India will be a creative leader in the visual arts.
Moreover, there is a distinction between Hollywood and Bollywood and Kollywood that needs additional attention. India, unlike the USA, has multiple centers of production just as its languages and cultures still maintain their identities in India instead of being amalgamated into a singular overarching popular culture as appears in the Los Angeles-dominated film industry of the United States. Even with production taking place outside of Hollywood, the dominance of Hollywood still remains, a force throughout the U.S. film and television industry.
The other surprise in the article is the author’s assertion that television is still subordinate to film in its popularity with audiences, despite the fact that the Tamil Nadu government gave a color television set to all poor people in the state. Film, he reminds us, has a solid place in the lives and hospitality of the people of south India. Jesudoss also points out that all the major political parties (many more than the two the United States is used to) own their own TV stations and use them to great effect. Adding to the importance of film in everyday life, the author also states that all the last five governors of the state have emerged from the film industry. That makes California’s Ronald Reagan and Arnold Schwarzenegger more exceptions than norms in the United States by comparison.
A final note of why this story of a little known film industry might be of importance to others around the world is the author’s argument about the cultural influence that film has wielded in South India: Cinema technology has brought a revolution in creating different cultural forms: mass culture, public culture, popular culture, cinema culture, star culture, etc., which are different from crowd culture. What was considered high culture, great culture, classic culture, elite culture, official culture, traditional culture, and Brahmin culture. Rediscovered and reconstructed the identity and cultural value in popular culture in a positively. Film’s role in Tamil Nadu’s cultural mix provides an important look at how different regions create popular cultural forms. The export of these forms, as has begun to the Tamil expatriate community, will also export the cultural form.
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