Professional Documents
Culture Documents
nationalist party, a powerful opposition was brewing in Tamil Nadu. Many South
Indians, especially Tamils, saw Congress’ claim to power as the advancement of a North
Indian Brahminic campaign to exercise political, social, and economic control over the
united under a Sanskritized Hindu spirituality and Hindi language. An outgrowth of the
articulate an autonomous racial and political identity for non-Brahmin South Indians,
offering a vociferous critique of the Congress party, and its bourgeoisie vision of the
Indian nation.
The advent of Tamil regionalism and the establishment of the Dravidian Progress
the relationship between Tamil folk cultural productions and South Indian identity
politics. Prior to the mid-20th century, Tamil folk forms, especially folk musics were
excluded from elitist representations of national and regional identity, both of which were
heavily invested in the creation of “classical” music canons, suitable for urban middle-
class audiences. By the mid-20th century however, largely because of the DMK’s
government.
The DMK’s political and social agenda sought to forge a new subaltern non-
Brahmin public, composed not of lawyers, academics, bureaucrats, and land-owners, but
of farmers, market-sellers, construction workers, and washer-men. Towards this end the
was in this context that the tropes of “folk” or nattupura makkal, and village gramiya
found articulation in various forms of South Indian public discourse, including political
Film was a critical medium through which Dravidians were able to advocate their
social reformist ideas and spread their populist message. By the mid-twentieth century
actors and screenplay writers. It was under their patronage and artistic direction that the
As “village sequences” were introduced into Tamil cinema with greater frequency,
film directors were faced with the task of putting these scenes to music. Before the 1950s
the “village” had rarely been portrayed sonically in Tamil film. Without a dominant
filmic idiom of “folk music” to draw from, the Dravidian film industry constructed its
own, repackaging and retooling indigenous folk music practices into a single
commodified entertainment form; one that reflected the ideologies and agendas of the
DMK. In their attempts to depict the village on screen, Dravidian film directors favored
particular sounds and musical conventions over others, contributing to the musical
stereotyping of the folk or what Mark Slobin would call their musical leveling. Musical
leveling refers to the process by which complex musical cultures are reduced to basic
patterns and structures that reflect engrained supercultural assumptions and imaginations.
drivers,” “snake charmer’s tunes,” and “silent Dalit drums”- in several DMK propaganda
films released between 1950 and 1970, I hope to offer a critical reading of the sonic
devices that came to dominate the cinematic representation of the Tamil village and its
folk inhabitants.
Bullock cart songs are one of the most common type of folk song to be heard in
early DMK cinema. Films like Veerapaandiya Kattabomman, Nadodi Mannan, and Baga
Pirivinai depict hero and heroine singing while traveling by bullock cart through the
countryside. These songs parody a genre of folk song in Tamil called maddu vandi
temmāngu or bullock cart songs. Though the verse structure and melodic contour of
these film songs fit the temmāngu song form, the instrumental accompaniment, up-beat
tempos, and singing female passengers have little to do with the musical life of bullock
cart drivers. Play example Traditionally, maddu vandi temmangu songs speak of distant
loved ones and sexual yearning, and are sung unaccompanied, by male drivers during
long and solitary overnight journeys. Not especially concerned with capturing an
ethnographically sensitive representation of this genre of folk song in their scores, music
directors reinvented the bullock cart song as an “assumed vernacular music passed off as
the genuine item. Using stereotyped folk rhythms, romanticized lyrics, and unidiomatic
instruments, they orchestrated a folk music for their audience that was imaginary, yet had
verisimilitude.
Investing every film with at least one folk song and dance sequence, in which an
entire village springs to life musically, was a convention established in the early
propaganda films of the DMK. All the films surveyed for this paper include a scene of
this type. Though there are slight variations from film to film, scenes depicting “the
village” are often represented acoustically through stock musical phrases, instruments,
timbres, and rhythms. While heroes, heroines, and other individuated characters in these
films are joined to a variety of musical expressions including karnatak, folk, devotional,
disco, jazz, flamenco, western classical, and Middle Eastern sounds, “the folk” are
usually limited to a select few. Common musical clichés that signal “folk” include the
from Dalit and nadodi communities, and have a long history in Tamil Nadu. However, in
Kattabomman, Tirudathe and Nam Naadu, these tunes, divorced from their traditional
context, become nonspecific musical markers of the “folk.” The mahudi is a short double
reed instrument with a sharp and shrill tone color, closely approximating the North Indian
shennai and the Egyptian mizmār. Tamil music directors, well acquainted with
Hollywood film score idioms, may have chosen mahudi melodies not only for their local
and recognizable sound but also for their ability to evoke the exotic Orient. Reinforcing
this association, MGR in Tirudathe wears a fez, while singing a folk song accompanied
by this instrument. The sound of the mahudi, though distinctively indigenous, was used
by music directors as a general index of the village. In early Tamil film scores, it became
a sonic metonym for “the folk,” erasing a multitude of vernacular musical identities.
While the mahudi served as stock melodic accompaniment for folk songs in films,
the parai frame drum provides a similar function in the domain of rhythm. The parai,
also called the tappu, is the traditional instrument of Paraiyar and Chakiliyar Dalit
festivals and religious celebrations, Dalits for the last several centuries have provided
inauspicious religious services for higher castes, most notably drumming at funerals.
Because of its close association with death, both the drum and its players have often been
Symbolic of the oppression and exploitation of the lower castes, the parai’s
introduction to Tamil film was ideologically motivated. In tune with the Dravidian
movement’s staunch anti-caste politics, music and film directors overlooked the drum’s
village life and the value of Dalit culture. Interestingly however, Dravidian propaganda
films were more concerned with representing the parai visually than aurally. In many
popular Tamil films produced after 1950, the figure of the parai abounds in village song
and dance sequences, often combined unconventionally with other percussion and
melodic instruments.1 In many cases these drums function as decorative props; dancers
spin them around, balance them on their heads, and use them to create complicated
choreographic designs. Within all this activity, however, the distinctive rhythms and
powerful percussive timbre of the parai are often missing and in its place is often be
heard the sounds of less stigmatized instruments such as the dolak, mrdangam, and tavil.
The rhythms or beats (ādis) of the parai, like those of many folk drumming
traditions in Tamil Nadu, are semiotically connected to individual rituals, rites, and
dances (Wolf 2000:14). Tamil Nadu’s folk musics make use of hundreds of ādis, each
with its own particular meaning and significance. Nonetheless, in early films this
incredible diversity and complexity of rhythm was essentially reduced to two ostinati and
their related variations. The first of these two has a compound-duple feel, with a strong
polyrhythmic texture.
R1 x - x x - x| x - x x - x
o o o o
V1 x - x x - x| x - x x - x
o x o o x o
V2 x x x x x x| x x x x x x
o o o o
R2 x - - - x - - - |x - - - x - - -
o o o oo o o o oo
V1 x - - - x - - - |x - - - x - - -
o o oo o o o oo
V2 x - x - x - x - |x - x - x - x -
o x oo o x oo
These two rhythms became the most prominent iconic markers of the filmi folk song
more than any other musical element. In simplifying parai drumming to two easily
identifiable rhythmic tags, music directors evaded the difficulties of having to negotiate a
The folk songs of early Tamil cinema are formulaic and predictable not only in
sound but also in lyrical content. Musical numbers that depict dancing and singing
villagers are often accompanied by lyrics that praise peace, hard work, harmony, and
togetherness. The song “Summa Irunda” from Madurai Veeran commends the daily
labor of the common farmer as equal in value to the government jobs and occupations of
the educated elite. The song’s chorus, “So long as we work hard we will all live together
happily,” glorifies the toil and difficulty of rural agricultural life. Similarly,
Kannadasan’s lyrics for Therodum, a hit song from the film Baga Pirivanai are as
follows:
The lyrics of folk songs in Dravidian films romanticized the village using tropes of group
solidarity and homogeneity and metaphors that stress the inseparable connection between
folk-life and nature. By assigning the village a unified voice and speaking on its behalf,
film lyricists and songwriters undermined the power of folk song as a medium for
narratives, and articulate personal desire (Appavoo 1986, Sherinian 1998, Deces 2005).
2
Translation done with the help of B. Balasubrahmaiyan
For the most part, Folk music heard in the pre-Ilaiyaraja films of the 1950s and
1960s is clichéd and lacks cultural specificity. Only a single scene in one of the films I
surveyed features folk music that sounds ethnographically accurate. Since this is a highly
unusual event, I’d like to examine the scene and the music in some detail.
The scene (Tenali Raman, 1956) begins with a panoramic shot of a nighttime
village festival. A group of villagers stands outdoors in front of a large statue of the
goddess amman. Dancing before them is a man (sāmi) wearing an elaborate headdress;
likely possessed by the spirit of the goddess. Shown providing the musical
accompaniment for the ritual is a group of pambai drummers and kombu (water buffalo
horn) players. As the ritual comes to a climax, the head pujari or temple priest shouts
out, “Bring the sacrifice!” Just before the priest raises his knife to cut goat’s throat, the
hero of the film (played by Sivaji Ganesan) interrupts the sacrifice, snatching the animal
away. He chastises the priest and villagers for offering the life of an innocent victim and
The music that suffuses this scene sounds like pambai drumming and kombu
playing, the same instruments featured on screen though not precisely synchronized with
the musicians’ movements. The combination of these particular instruments could very
well provide musical accompaniment for a goddess kodai vizha (offering festival) of this
kind. Why in Tenali Raman is vernacular sounding folk music used to accompany this
ritual? The folk in this village are certainly not portrayed as model representatives of
peace and social harmony. Sivaji, then the cinematic voice of the DMK, in fact criticizes
these villagers and their practice of animal sacrifice as “crule” and “backwards.” This
place is the antithesis of the idyllic Dravidian village; the people do not dance together,
nor do they sing romanticized songs in a folksy style. Carefully chosen, the music
symbolizing this dystopia is the unmediated and prosaic folk music of everyday village
life.
Although “Folk music” in Tamil Nadu was hardly uniform either in sound or
meaning, regional variation, diversity, and caste inequality were overlooked in Dravidain
films in favor of stereotypes that advocated unity and homogeneity. Rather than
classes and castes, “folk” became a category, within which all non-Brahmin musics were
purify the Tamil language of substandard colloquial speech, composed of regional, caste
based and other wise marked dialects, Dravidain propaganda films attempted to create a
sanitized, proper and refined folk music, devoid of vernacular markers of difference and
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