Melodrama and

Negotiation of Morality

• The Premise: “the moral universe is grossly

violated and the disorder apparently
irresolvable”
• Defining and celebrating the modern Indian
identity
• “Making films for the Indian audience”
• The mother or the mother figure / the
Western other
Material/Spiritual
Dichotomy (Home and
the World)
“Europeans failed to colonize
the inner”

The threats of westernization

of women

Reformists were mocked in

the parody literature
Virtue of
modesty
• Material/spiritual as
seen as primary aspects
of European/India
• “In Arya system, the wife
is a goddess. In the
European system, she is
a partner and
companion.”
‘The Resolution’:
The New Woman
• “The content of the resolution
was neither predetermined nor
unchanging, but its form had to
be consistent with the system of
dichotomies that shaped and
contained the nationalist
project”.
• Different from ‘common woman’
and ‘westernized woman’.
• Women’s education: focus on
vernacular, not English,
education for cultural
refinement
 Archetypes, Iconographies and Mode of
Address in the Melodramatic Imagination
• Purity of the kinship bonds
• The knowledge and the appearance
• Villain figuration as social types
• The association of visual space (bright lights,
lurid color and overtly erotic spectacle)
• Two levels of conflicts
• The iconography of film and popular culture
• Negotiation of modernity through the battle of
good of evil
Conflicts and Closure in a
Melodrama
• Family as the microcosm of the society
• Mother figure as the centre of virtue,
crisis of the absent father
• Son as the new patriarch in a transformed
family at the conclusion
• Question of genre: A fluid system of
signs, modes of address and social
positions. Post-independence social
blurred the binary of films for middle
class and films for working class.
 Nation, Modernity and Couple Space
Nation building as a modernizing
enterprise (Vasudevan, 2005)
Feudal family romance carrying the
burden of pre-capitalist social and
economic organizations in tropes like
late arrival of police or ban on kissing
(Prasad, 2008)
Love and romance as Hindi cinema’s
fantasy of the modern in the 1950s
(Wani, 2022)
Special Marriage Act in 1954
Imagining a
Sovereign
Dravidanadu
in Post-
independence
Tamil Film
Melodrama
Anti- Congressism
Anti- Brahminism
North Indian/ Hindi
Hegemony
Tamil Nationalism
 Film Melodrama in Social and Cine-politics
• Shift from mythological: “Dravidian ideology and Tamil nationalism
demanded a genre that would not exclusively privilege Hindu philosophy,
religion and theism” (Pillai 2015)
• Importance of Social: based not on historical/mythological tales, but on life as
it is lived at the present time (Vasudevan 2000)
• Reference of moral world and archetype from Tamil cultural milieu (Kannagi
from Silapathikaram)
• In the late 1940s the critique against colonial rule of British transformed into
an attack on Congress government
• Cinema as a medium of Political Communication : the imagination of
Dravidanadu, ‘irrational religiosity’ indicative of contemporary politics, the
politics of othering, social justice.
Parasakthi (1952) and
Idea of a DMK Film
• Evoked instant opposition (from Congress
supporters and upper caste press) followed by
signature campaign
• Letters written to officials
• “Communist propaganda film ridiculing Hindu
religion”. “It will make people atheist”. “It will
create a revolution… In each frame of the film,
dialogues attacking the government, the gods
and Brahmins.”
• Anxiety over portrayal of self-respect marriage
and non-traditional women
Melodrama and Public Sphere
• Film text and cinema hall both provided spaces for
citizens to discuss the affairs of the day independent
from official state.
• Cinema developed political functions
• Melodrama and Social Justice