Region/Regional Cinema

Abstract

Region' and its avatars including 'regional cinema' assume an overlap between language, culture and territory, linked to the mid-twentieth century emergence of languagebased administrative units in India. In the field of cultural practice, including cinema, language forms the basis of thinking the 'region', following from the organisation of print publics in the subcontinent.In the Indian context, 'regional cinema' is used as a marker of difference from Hindi cinema; the plural, 'regional cinemas' indicate diversity of national cinema. In the tradition of 'national' cinemas, 'regional' cinemas denote non-Hindi language cinemas, following models of nation formation, with language as the marker of difference. The difference is that the languages that constitute the regional exist in a hierarchical relationship with Hindi and English, disallowing its claim to nationhood in fullness. The aspiration for complete nationhood on the foundation of language has been a point of contention, most visibly in the case of Tamil Nadu. In contrast, as a term of analysis, it doesn't yield sufficient results owing to its conceptual opacity. Firstly, it points to the continuing tensions in imagining a national cinema in India; secondly, it throws into relief the shaky foundations of and the fault lines ingrained in regional formations.In the early decades of industrial consolidation of cinema till the late 1940s, the linguistic and cultural specificity of industries were not of grave concern (Hughes, 2010a; Radhakrishnan, 2015). 'Regional cinema', as a way of indicating a linguistic tapestry of practice within the Indian nation, came to be used with the restructuring of the film industries in accordance with the administrative reorganisation of states, but this took time. The consolidation of these new geographies of cinema was initiated in the late 1960s and early 1970s when capital flows centred on colonial presidency cities were re-channelised to urban centres of the post-independence linguistic regions. The significance of the relationship between princely states and cinematic cultures in this history has been less attended to (Krishna, 2019; Menon, 2009). The unexamined and seamless incorporation of industrial histories of princely states into that of the linguistic state papers over contested terrains of region formation and consequent reorganisation of the cinematic imaginary, and further its relationship with the 'nation'.Madras was the production centre for films not only in Tamil, Telugu, Kannada and Malayalam but also in Sinhala and Hindi. Hyderabad became the industrial BioScope 12(1-2) [162][163][164][165] 2021