Tamil Film Culture and Political Attitudes: Descriptive and Causal Analysis

• In Event: Tropes and Tools of Telling Tales About Political Movement(s)

Abstract

K. Kamaraj, a politician in the Indian National Congress (INC) and former Chief Minister of the Indian state of Tamil Nadu once famously commented, ‘‘How can there be government by actors?’’ Not long after, in 1969, his party was defeated by the Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (DMK), making way for a Chief Minister who was also a film screenwriter. This set into motion the long relationship between film and politics in Tamil Nadu. Thereafter, various Tamil actors turned to politics with two actor-politicians collectively holding nine terms as Chief Minister and others becoming successful as opposition leaders and members of parliament.

Political messages in Tamil films serve two purposes: bolstering the popularity of aspiring actor-politicians and convincing the population of a specific Dravidian ideology. For actors who become politicians, film and non-news media function as heuristic devices for voters to discern their ideological and political positions. Beyond pure personalist politics, Tamil films have often served to popularize the basic tenets of Dravidian ideology, anti-elitism, anti-Brahminism, economic redistribution, and regional nationalism. Theoretically, we argue for an approach to studying this phenomenon that treats film's messages and the culture of film fandom as meaningful for conveying and changing political ideas. Thus, we argue that this nexus is based not only on actor-politicians' personal popularity but also on their corresponding ideological image, which is most commonly constructed through their films.

By using mixed methods, this project aims to understand whether and to what extent film itself and film culture causally affect ordinary people’s political beliefs. First, through an online survey experiment, we isolate the impact of star power and name recognition versus ideological messaging in film on viewers’ political attitudes. Second, we descriptively demonstrate the correlation between the political candidacy of film personalities and electoral turnout. Third, through interviews and observation in a Tamil actor-politician fan club, we analyze the underpinnings of the political salience of popular film.

Authors

• Daniel Raoul Hirschel-Burns, Yale University

• Deepika Padmanabhan, Yale University