Abstract
The aim of this paper is to explore how ethnic and linguistic identities intersect with national identity in Indian cinema through a ‘diasporic’ reading of the film Nala Damayanti (2003) produced by Kamal Hassan. Tamil cinema or ‘Kollywood’ may share common genre conventions with Bollywood (duration, stylized exaggerations of speech and plot, song and dance sequences). However, unlike Bollywood, which is most often neither ethnicized nor geographically situated, Tamil cinema first promotes Tamil pride (feminized in Tamil culture as Tamil Tazhi, guardian deity of Tamil culture) before national chauvinism. Through a reading of the Tamil screen comedy, Nala Damayanti , this paper will explore how Indianness is produced within the cultural constraints of Tamil cinema. To this end, the paper will first examine two issues, (a) existing paradigms of Tamil identity in India and overseas; and (b) caste and comedy conventions in Tamil cinema, before investigating how Tamilness, Indianness and South Asianness intersect around the politics of culinary culture in Tamil screen comedy.
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