Tamil Nadu’s technicolour politics

A new entrant to American High School, Madurai, the bastion of Tamil culture in the early 1950s, I was not prepared for the passionate outpouring of filmi dialogue of my classmates, most of whom were extremely poor. They quoted alluring, alliterative dialogues from the film Velaikari: “Sattam oru iruttarai, aathil vakeelin vadham oru vilaku. Aanal adhu ezhaikku ettada vilakku” (Law is a dark room where the lawyer’s argument is a lamp. But it is not accessible to the poor). My classmates had seen the film more than once and when not quoting lines from it, were busy writing its reviews and reading them out to others (more...)