Tamil Cinema is “one of India’s largest, most prolific and increasingly significant cinemas” (Velayutham 2008, pp.1-2). Madurai genre in Tamil films is popularly known as 3M films (Murder, Mayhem and Madurai) (Damodaran Gorringe 2017, p.9). Subramaniyapuram (Sasikumar, 2008) is a Madurai film that attained cult status in both the Indian states of Tamil Nadu and Kerala since its release in 2008. A collection of essays on Subramaniyapuram edited by anthropologist Anand Pandian was published in 2013, a rare honour to be bestowed on a Tamil film in recent times. Significantly, the film’s problematic gender narrative—especially the entangled relation between the romantic plot and the masculine “plots”—is not the central subject of exploration of any of the essays in this edited collection, nor has it been discussed in depth in any critical discourse on the film so far. In this article, using Laura Mulvey’s theoretical lens as a point of departure, I argue that the female identity is crucial to the narrative functioning of the various plots of Subramaniyapuram. The film’s ultimate narrative desires, I illustrate, are in affirmation of masculine supremacy, hegemonic masculinity, and the women as femme fatales.

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In this article, through a spatial reading of Roberts’ Scenes and Characteristics I illustrate how the stringent regulations of the East Indian Company disempowering the Eurasians are manifested through the spatial strictures, and how notions of cultural purity and hierarchy are realized through the politics of space in colonial India. Spatial concepts of lived space, third space, and hybridity— drawn from the theories of Homi Bhabha, Edward Soja and Henry Lefebvre—are useful in mapping the spatial politics in nineteenth-century India, especially in relation to the Government-house in Calcutta, the seat of the highest authority in colonial India, and the marginalized orphanages/schools run by the East India Company primarily for the benefit of Eurasian children. Discrimination through spatially segregation was practiced by the British East India Company in order to preserve the racial purity of the European upper class at the helm of the Indian colony. My paper illustrates how the fortunes of the male and female “half-castes” of empire were variously charted, and how spatial homogeneity was subverted through the subtext of marital relations. The “third space” that some of the fortunately-marked interracial men and women occupy constantly pulled at the seams of apparently inviolable concepts of homogeneity and purity to expose and challenge the cultural dominion of the British Empire.

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