The general outrage around Chennai Express seems to revolve around the fact that a Hindi film has reduced a Tamilian to this crude stereotype. I am not defending this. All I’m asking – rather, wondering out loud – is whether Tamil cinema is so blameless. (I take the example of Tamil cinema because I am familiar with it, but I suspect what I say is true of other regional cinemas as well.) For the longest time in Tamil films, Malayali women wandered around in tightfitting blouses and mundus. Any North Indian was a seth, a Shylock — and he’d speak a strange, fractured patois. But forget the depiction of these outsiders and look at Tamilians — say, Tam-Brahms — and the exaggeration is no less. Not every Iyer woman is trussed up in a nine-yard sari, and neither is she always a Carnatic music expert. Why, then, haven’t we seen many protests against these stereotypes in Tamil cinema? Probably not many from outside Tamil Nadu watch Tamil films, and we probably sigh at the inaccuracies but don’t do much else because we are making fun of ourselves. This explains the success of the Suryan FM show “Kittu Mama Susie Mami,” which saddles a stereotyped Tam-Brahm with a stereotyped Anglo-Indian spouse. No one’s offended. It’s just a joke. But when an outsider, especially from North India, makes fun of us, we erupt in rage. “How dare you?” we seethe. “What makes you so superior?” - Baradwaj Rangan
Posted on: Mon, 24 Jun 2013 13:31:52 +0000
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