Cinema as politics, politics as cinema

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.

With its readable prose and simple style, the book differs from the existing books on Indian cinema which tend to be infused with heavy doses of film theory. That does not mean it has no theoretical grounding. The author’s theorisation is supported by many very significant details – largely sourced from unconventional and unexplored materials, such as film posters, film song books, ‘yellow’ journals – combined with empirical details, analyses of filmic texts, and so on. Thanks to the Bangalore-based MaNaSu Foundation, which has been digitising Telugu books, journals, and newspapers, Srinivas was able to include 209 images in his 431 page book. These make Politics as Performanceeasily comprehensible and enjoyable even to people who have no formal training in understanding cinema, and Srinivas has missed no opportunity in providing his reader with some of the most unusual and least-known facts: for instance, Kankara Chandraiah, the dalit entrepreneur from Telangana who went on to own eight cinema halls in Hyderabad, began his career as a ‘gravel breaker’.

The “peasant industry”
The book covers a long and crucial period of Telugu cinema history, almost half a century, from the 1930s to 1980s. There are several interrelated reasons that make this period important. In post-Independence India, particularly in the south, a certain kind of elite rose to power. K Balagopal, Marxist scholar and human rights activist, has called this elite the “provincial propertied class” which, according to him, had strong links to agriculture and constituted a major proportion of India’s exploiting classes. Balagopal argued that this class was the “enemy of the masses.” Srinivas traces the emergence of this class to the 1930s and redefines their origins as “non-brahmin, non-vaishya and non-zamindar” (more specifically the Reddy and Kamma castes).

In the past three decades or so, scholars in India have increasingly become aware of caste as a crucial category in the analysis of life-worlds, and the credit for this largely goes to vibrant Ambedkarite Dalit movements. Reflecting such awareness, Srinivas has made a conscious effort to bring in the caste dimension in his analysis of Telugu cinema. The second factor that makes the 1930s-80s an important time is that from the 1930s, Telugu films underwent a substantial increase in viewership. And thirdly, the NTR period witnessed a particular idiom of mass politics, which Srinivas calls “performative politics”. The author identifies the culmination of such a politics in 1983, with NTR becoming Chief Minister.

Srinivas traces the growth of NTR and also, to some extent, Akkineni Nageswara Rao (ANR), who hail from the coastal Andhra region of Andhra Pradesh, and belong to one of the dominant peasant castes, Kamma. Their growth as stars and entrepreneurs at the same time is read by the author as “symptomatic of the domination of the industry by the new elite.” A substantial section of the book focuses on what the author calls “the peasant industry”. However, the ‘peasant’ here is not to be confused with the Marxian peasant, or the figure of the subaltern rebel. ‘Peasant’ is used to indicate the fact that the major investors in the Telugu film industry had roots in agriculture, whether they were small or medium landowners, or wealthy landlords. The argument is not that these peasant-caste entrepreneurs constituted the essence of the industry, but that they managed to keep the industry and its economy under their control. This new elite (starting from the two pioneers of early Telugu cinema, Gudavalli Ramabrahmam and B N Reddi, who rose to prominence during the pre-Independence period, and their contemporary L V Prasad, to the later key players from the 1950s to ‘80s, such as B Nagi Reddy, Chakrapani, D Ramanaidu and so on) invested their agricultural surpluses in the film industry. Their investments were combined with incentives such as loans and subsidies offered by the state after the formation of Andhra Pradesh. Besides producers and directors, all major stars belonged to the agrarian castes and rose from modest status to positions of enormous wealth and prestige.

By the 1950s, this elite successfully managed to take control of the industry by replacing Madras Presidency zamindars belonging to the Kamma, Reddy, Kapu, Velama and Raju castes, who in the 1930s and 1940s had established studios and other cinema production infrastructure in the province’s capital, Madras. While the zamindars made an important contribution to the film industry as moneylenders and financiers, they also blocked the generation of surpluses in the regions under their control by collecting huge taxes from farmers. However, the domination of the industry by the zamindars ended with the passing of the Abolition of Estates Act in 1948, paving the way for new entrants in the film industry, especially the “capitalist-farmers” from the Andhra region, who accumulated surpluses as a result of the post-Independence economic boom. Srinivas shows th

at investments in cinema soon made their way from village and agriculture to the small town and to the Madras studios.

While the first few chapters of the book map such larger socio-economic realities of this culture industry and its association with politics, the later

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Credit: Imprints on Indian Film Screen