== DMK Film ==

Unique and extraordinarily influential type of
propaganda cinema pioneered in Tamil Nadu
by the Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (DMK).
Histories of the DMK trace the party’s ancestry
to 19th C. reform literature in the erstwhile
Madras Presidency, where writers like
Subramanya Bharati (1882-1921; sometimes
considered the greatest modern Tamil poet)
extended their reformist politics to advocate a
specifically Tamil nationalism. After the
establishment of the Justice Party aka the South
Indian Liberation Federation (Est: 1917), this
nationalism retained a strongly anti-Aryan
thrust in its claim to represent the indigenous
cultures of South India, attempting e.g. to
rewrite Indian history to trace the Tamil
influence back to the Indus Valley civilisation.
The Justice Party had a strategic alliance with
the pro-imperialist landed élite but also
advocated bourgeois-democratic reformism
opposing e.g. caste oppression. 

The party
broadened its base in Kerala and Andhra
Pradesh, esp. when contesting the provincial
elections after the Montagu-Chelmsford
reforms (1919) on an anti-Brahmin platform.
The Party was transformed in the post-WW2
era by one of the most influential politicians in
20th C. Tamil Nadu, Periyar E.V. Ramaswamy
Naicker (1879-1973), a former Congress Party
member who founded the Self-Respect
Movement (1926), a social action group aimed
at eradicating Untouchability and caste and
advocating an atheist politics. According to
Charles Ryerson, at that time the movement
deployed five principles: no God, no religion,
no Gandhi, no Congress and no Brahmins. In
1944, Periyar transformed the Justice Party into
the separatist Dravidar Kazhagam (DK) and
later called for India’s first Independence Day
in 1947 to be declared a day of mourning, since
his demand for an independent Dravida Nadu
or Tamil state remained unrealised. In 1949, his
chief disciple, the playwright and scenarist
[[C.N. Annadurai]] broke away to found the
DMK. The DMK was elected to the TN state
assembly in 1967, mainly on an anti-Hindi
platform, repeating their victory in 1971
through a conditional alliance with Indira
Gandhi’s Congress. The DMK split once again
when its most famous member, film star [[MGR]],
was expelled for indiscipline and launched the
Anna-DMK (ADMK) in 1972, which later
became the All-India Anna Dravida Munnetra
Kazhagam (AIADMK), winning power along
with the Congress in 1977 and making MGR the
Chief Minister. The DMK under [[Karunanidhi]]returned to power in 1988 after MGR died, but
was dismissed by the Congress (I)-backed
minority government in 1990 and then
decimated in the 1991 elections following Rajiv
Gandhi’s assassination which brought into
power MGR’s former heroine [[Jayalalitha]] as
the new AIADMK leader and Chief Minister.The
DMK Film genre is the most spectacular of the
party’s propaganda fronts and helped make
five film personalities Chief Ministers
(Annadurai, Karunanidhi, MGR, his wife and
former star V.N. Janaki, and Jayalalitha)since 1967. Annadurai launched the genre adapting
his own play [[Velaikkari]] to the screen,
followed by his script for [[Nallathambi]] (both
1949). The films, esp. Nallathambi, were major
hits and spawned many more as the party
decided to use film as its main propaganda
medium with writers like A.V.P. Asaithambi
(dialogue for [[T.R. Sundaram]]’s Sarvadhikari,
1951), A.K. Velan and the DMK poet
[[Kannadasan]] who also produced the
propaganda hit [[Sivagangai Seemai]] (1959).
Karunanidhi scripted [[Manthiri Kumari]]
(1950) as MGR’s first folk legend for directly
political purposes. He also wrote and
contributed lyrics for the most famous DMK
film, [[Parasakthi]] (1952), [[Sivaji Ganesan]]’s
début. A string of hits followed, often starring
MGR or Ganesan: [[Marmayogi]] and
Sarvadhikari (both 1951), [[Sorgavasal]] (1954),
and the MGR-directed [[Nadodi Mannan]]
(1958). Annadurai had codified an elaborately
plotted and highly charged melodramatic idiom
promoting an iconoclastic ‘rationalism’ and an
anti-Brahmin, Tamil-nationalist ideology. The
films incorporated numerous references to
Party symbols and colours, anagrams of Party
leaders’ names and characters reciting whole
passages from Annadurai’s speeches (cf.
[[Pandharibai]] in Parasakthi). These devices are
part of a very rhetorical visual and literary style
as the hero, usually in the courtroom at the end
of the film, presents his (and his Party’s) case in
a speech that could last up to 30’. The success
of the DMK Film idiom has been linked (see
Bhaskaran and Sivathamby) to the fact that the
cinema was an important social equaliser in
Tamil Nadu, where the other performing arts
traditions were rigidly demarcated along class/
caste lines. The old Congress Party’s attempt
(e.g. by C. Rajagopalachari) to continue that
élitism in the cinema allowed its DMK
opponents to present cinema as a people’s art.

Numerous studies have been devoted to the
DMK Film: K. Sivathamby’s The Tamil Film as
a Medium of Political Communication (1981);
Robert Hardgrave’s When Stars Displace the
Gods: The Folk Culture of Cinema in Tamil
Nadu (1975); Hardgrave and Anthony
Neidhart, Film and Political Consciousness in
Tamil Nadu (1975); S. Theodore Baskaran’s
The Message Bearers (1981) which deals with
the pre-DMK history of political film; Ka.
Thirunavukkarasu’s Dravidar Iyakkamum
Thiraipada Ulagamum (1990); M.S.S. Pandian’s
The Image Trap: M.G. Ramachandran in Film
and Politics (1992). For histories of the DMK
Party and Tamil politics, see Margaret Ross-
Barnett’s The Politics of Cultural Nationalism
in South India (1976) and Charles Ryerson’s
Regionalism and Religion: The Tamil
Renaissance and Popular Hinduism (1988).

[[Studio]]