Watching from an Arm’s Length: The Foreign Hand in Tamil Cinema Preeti Mudliar Xerox Research Centre, India
[email protected] Joyojeet Pal School of Information, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor
[email protected] Abstract Scholarly work on Tamil cinema has traditionally focused on the construction of Tamil authenticity. Much of this work portrays the foreignness of the other Indian — particularly the North Indian — but little work exists on the construction of the non-Indian space or person. We argue that quite often films emphasize Tamil authenticity by constructing an othering-type discourse of foreign spaces and their inhabitants, including the Tamil Diaspora. Through an analysis of 90 films and five in-depth interviews, we demonstrate that Tamil film presents an opportunity to understand how an important regional center of Indian cinema both represents the foreign and constructs the Indian Diaspora and its spaces, while differing from the more globally known Hindi-language productions of Bollywood. Keywords: Tamil cinema, Foreign, Other, Diaspora, Bollywood, Indian cinema, Films Watching from an Arm’s Length: The Foreign Hand in Tamil Cinema Hindi films saw a flood of cinematic articulations on the figure of the migrant, the returning migrant, and on foreign geographies post-liberalization in 1991. These economic reforms coincided with the growth of a wealthy western Diaspora, which found its way to the Hindi cinema screen and in turn helped create a niche market, particularly in North America and the UK. With the imagery of upper-class Indians in exotic foreign locations, this phenomenon was an important thematic turn for Hindi cinema.