Gopalkrishnan, SreeramSreeram, Lekshmi2023-11-202023-11-202023https://www.jrfm.eu/index.php/ojs_jrfm/article/view/358/316https://mediarep.org/handle/doc/21350The 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.engCreative Commons Attribution Non Commercial Share Alike 4.0 GenericTamilLanguageGodsMovieOutlierDevotionalFilm70010.25364/05.9:2023.2.710.25969/mediarep/20127THIRUVILAYADAL2617-3697