Tamil Cinema: The Cultural Politics of India's other Film Industry

Previously, the academic study of Indian cinema has focused primarily on Bollywood, despite the fact that the Tamil film industry, based in southern India, has overtaken Bollywood in terms of annual output. This book critically examines the cultural and cinematic representations in Tamil cinema. The chapters outline the cinema's history and distinctive characteristics, and proceed to consider a number of important themes such as gender and the portrayal of women, religion, class, sexuality, cinematic genre and the politics of identity. Throughout, the book manages to link the analysis to wider social, political and cultural phenomena in Tamil and Indian society. As interest in Indian cinema grows across the globe, Tamil Cinema is an exciting contribution to an under-studied field, facilitating a fresh consideration of the existing body of scholarship on Indian cinema.

Selvaraj Velayutham works in the Department of Sociology at Macquarie University, Sydney, Australia