Can Humiliation be an Aesthetic Experience? Anti-caste History and Tamil Cinema

Abstract

The history of (popular) cinema, and the emblematic studies on it, have revolved around the ideas and theories of “image-movement” and “spectatorial gaze.” These ideas stood in to explain questions and critique answers about industry, technology, state, representation, and social relations, and thus importantly, it reflected on “time” as embodied in cinematic experience. Indian cinema and, particularly, Tamil cinema too have been studied through such political and poetic frames. This paper foregrounds the question of history – and thus the cinematic narration of “time” itself – for the formation of Tamil Cinema’s engagement with culture and caste. The paper wishes to foreground and reflect on the Dalit “moment” of entry, by studying Pa. Ranjith’s radical movement towards the reconstruction of “the marginal and the minor” – i.e., the excluded of cinematic representation–as popular presence.