Brown Faces Go White: Essays on Popular Culture of Tamil Nadu in Bloomington, MN

Even though films in India occupy a special place evoking scholarly attention, their place in Tamil society is unique and has been fairly documented. The main purpose of this book is to analyse and understand the shift that is perceptible in the way personhood in Tamil films has been conceptualised. This book thus tries to account for the dramatic movement away from the way the concept of person was shown in Tamil films till recently to a surprisingly new way of deploying the concept of person as observable in the new spate of Tamil movies that have come out during the last decade of the 20th Century. While the old concept of person as seen through Tamil films, strictly adhered to the idioms and codes generated by Dravidian movement, the post 1990s Tamil Film heroes, break and violates these idioms and codes, and unveil a completely new person, whose significance, especially in the context of socio-economic-political changes of the globalisation phase, is the focus of this book.