Article: The Tamil Language as More Central than Even the Gods. The Movie THIRUVILAYADAL (IN 1965) Is an Outlier as a Devotional Film
Abstract
The narrow genre of devotional films in India follows a regular template – a combination of theophanic interventions, bhakti (devotional) worship and didactic narratives. THIRUVILAYADAL (THE DIVINE PLAY, Akkamappettai Paramasivan Nagarajan, IN 1965), a film in Tamil (a language spoken across South and East Asia by a large diaspora), was long considered a devotional movie that celebrated the God Shiva. However, a close analysis shows that the movie subverts the darshan concept (viewing) in a Hindu devotional film. Though it may appear to be a film about Puranic (mythic) Hindu gods, the subtle subtext reduces heavenly entities to supplicatory positions in relation to a cornerstone of identity in the post-independence Dravidianist Tamil State – Tamil language. This understanding of THIRUVILAYADAL is all the more relevant in light of the increasing rigidity of Hindu religious beliefs in contemporary India.
Preferred Citation
BibTex
Gopalkrishnan, Sreeram; Sreeram, Lekshmi: The Tamil Language as More Central than Even the Gods. The Movie THIRUVILAYADAL (IN 1965) Is an Outlier as a Devotional Film. In: Journal for Religion, Film and Media, Jg. 9 (2023), Nr. 2, S. 127-142. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.25969/mediarep/20127.
@ARTICLE{Gopalkrishnan2023,
author = {Gopalkrishnan, Sreeram and Sreeram, Lekshmi},
title = {The Tamil Language as More Central than Even the Gods. The Movie THIRUVILAYADAL (IN 1965) Is an Outlier as a Devotional Film},
year = 2023,
doi = "\url{http://dx.doi.org/10.25969/mediarep/20127}",
volume = 9,
address = {Marburg},
journal = {Journal for Religion, Film and Media},
number = 2,
pages = {127--142},
}
author = {Gopalkrishnan, Sreeram and Sreeram, Lekshmi},
title = {The Tamil Language as More Central than Even the Gods. The Movie THIRUVILAYADAL (IN 1965) Is an Outlier as a Devotional Film},
year = 2023,
doi = "\url{http://dx.doi.org/10.25969/mediarep/20127}",
volume = 9,
address = {Marburg},
journal = {Journal for Religion, Film and Media},
number = 2,
pages = {127--142},
}
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