by N. MANOHAR REDDY
S V Srinivas, Politics as Performance: A Social History of the Telugu Cinema. New Delhi: Permanent Black, 2013, 431 pages.
A new book on Telugu film shows that the cultural industry was tied up with caste and regional politics.
To the grossly underexplored field of Telugu cinema, S V Srinivas’ Politics as Performance: A Social History of the Telugu Cinema is a significant contribution. As one of the first works on the topic it is likely to gain historical value and become a reference book. Andhra Pradesh, too, is under-studied within the social sciences and humanities in India. The Telugu film industry is the second largest in India, but there had previously been no full-length books written in English on Telugu cinema, except for one on Telugu film star Chiranjeevi (popularly known as Megastar) by the same author, Srinivas. But under-representation aside, scholarly work on Telugu cinema at this time is important: Indian cinema is usually reduced to Bollywood, and South Indian cinema to Tamil cinema.
Politics as Performance is not written in the style of a specialist ‘film history’, which falls within the ‘film studies’ genre in a narrow, conventional sense. Employing an interdisciplinary approach, it studies film culture not in isolation but in the intersection of history, economy and politics. It provides a detailed account of Telugu cinema and argues that this cultural industry is directly implicated in the emergence of a new idiom of politics. By specifically focusing on the career of one of the most charismatic stars of Telugu cinema, N T Rama Rao (NTR), who became, in 1983, the first non-Congress Chief Minister of one of the largest Indian states, Andhra Pradesh, Srinivas tries to demonstrate that cinema is crucial to understanding politics in India, particularly the south. In doing so, the author also claims an autonomous role for cinema in constituting modern identities rather than simply reflecting the existing ones.
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With the formation of Andhra Pradesh in 1956 and Telangana (the Telugu-speaking region of the erstwhile Hyderabad state under Nizam’s rule) becoming a part of it, both economic and cultural/aesthetic integration (read Teluguness) were made possible, and the state began to play a major role in determining what it meant for films to be Telugu. As a result, Srinivas argues that the place of film production (meaning the geography of the new state) displaced cinema’s Teluguness from its aesthetic domain. In other words, once Telugu cinema managed to reach out to all Telugu people, it was no longer anxious about being Telugu. As Telangana opened up as a new market, Telugu cinema now addressed Telugus as a single unified community, even claiming to speak for the Telugu nation, although Srinivas believes that this was only an “unintended consequence.” It was during this period (from the 1950s to ‘80s) that NTR emerged as a star and finally decided to enter politics, using his populist films, which cast him as the representative of the masses, to his advantage.
Srinivas is largely unconvinced by the existing explanations of how NTR attained his phenomenal political success. By defeating the Congress party headed by Indira Gandhi in 1983, NTR became the first non-Congress Chief Minister of Andhra Pradesh. This happened just one year after he had formed the Telugu Desam Party (TDP). However, unlike the Tamil film star M G Ramachandran (MGR), who had had a long innings in politics before he finally became the Chief Minister, NTR had no prior association with politics or any political party. Analysts have variously attributed NTR’s political success to the divine roles he had played in Telugu mythological films, his cashing-in on the Telugu nationalist sentiment, his promise of populist welfare schemes such as subsidised rice for the poor, and the decline of Congress. All of these factors Srinivas finds unsatisfactory. He argues that although NTR had claimed to represent the Telugu nation, he had nothing to do with the Telugu cause. Even in the early days after the formation of Andhra Pradesh, NTR preferred to stay in Madras and was reluctant to relocate to Hyderabad. Even more, NTR had gained notoriety for playing sexually-charged numbers with heroines and cabaret dancers, and yet he succeeded in claiming that he was the true representative of Teluguness. How did that happen? One of Srinivas’ aims in this book is to find a more convincing answer to this question than those previously put forward.
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