Before concluding, let me make a brief speculative detour about the term seemai. I take the lead from the illuminating discussion of Tamil spatial terms of semantic drift like Ur and Nadu by Valentine Daniel (Daniel 1987). The lexicon gives it a range of meanings: boundary, limit, country, territory, province, district, Western country especially England and an impertinent person. While seemai as a prefix is added to several things imported or foreign or exotic,9 in the language used in Tamil cinema, it appears that
seemai as a suffix is added only to the towns and areas in southern Tamil Nadu like Sivaganga. As for directions, both east and south have taken the suffix seemai but north and west do not appear to have taken the suffix in Tamil cinema. ‘‘Kizhakku Seemai’’ and ‘‘Therkathi Seemai’’ have been used but not ‘‘Merku Seemai’’ or ‘‘Vadakkathi Seemai.’’ I would like to suggest that such semantic boundaries of usage are determined by the enunciatory
location for a language at a given point in history. The current usage of seemai to mean foreign lands, prefix to things foreign or exotic and suffix to south, south-east and southern geographical entities is probably the result of certain exteriorization and exoticization of the south in the language used in cinema which has Chennai as its enunciatory location.
What has concerned me in this paper is that, while Tamil cinema has largely argued in favor of the rural, agrarian and pre-modern values and lifestyles, even while accepting love-marriages across social segmentations and propagating humanist egalitarian ideals, the present dichotomy between modern, civic Chennai and the backward, less civic south can be used for setting up urban, middle/upper class, consumerist life as normative.10While
it is necessary to seriously engage with the real problems of the south, it is also necessary to be wary of self-legitimizing discourses and narratives of modernity which offer modern political rationality and ‘‘progress’’ of capi- talist modernity as the only alternatives to savagery and caste bigotry in an unsurprising continuation of European enlightenment discourses.
Notes
1 It is a time honoured tradition to release a bunch of films on three special festive
occasions in Tamil Nadu: Pongal, usually celebrated on January 14th, Tamil
New Year’s day on April 14th and Deepavali which is celebrated some time between October 15 and November 15.
2 The south of Tamil Nadu is now understood to be constituted by eight revenue districts: Madurai, Theni, Virudhunagar, Ramanathapuram, Tuticorin (Thoo thukudi), Tirunelveli and Kanyakumari.
3 Katta Panchayathu is where locally powerful men resolve conflicts and adjudicate disputes enforcing their diktat through recourse to violence.
4 Known as Mangal Sutra in north India; sacred thread, a thin rope or metal chain, in which certain symbolic objects hang, made of gold when it can be afforded, tied around the neck of the bride by the groom and is to be worn by the woman all through her life as long as the husband lives. Even though the place of thali aka mangalyam in the histories of Tamil cultures is a matter of debate and speculation, its presence in Tamil cinema and its narrative sig nificance has been huge and ubiquitous.
5 Ian Hacking’s intervention from philosophy of science also deals with the wide spread use of the ‘social construction’ argument in the social sciences. When we say something is constructed we are not saying that the thing is ‘false’. We are only bringing the process of its coming into being as an entity for consideration. 6 Kabadi is played by two teams of 12 players each on a 12.50 metre by 10 metre
rectangular court in which a player, while holding his breath, dashes into the opponent team’s area, touches some player(s) and/or wrestles out to come back home safely without releasing his breath and thereby scores point for his team. Kabadi can be debatably described as a subaltern sport in Tamil Nadu.
7 Kannagi, a key character from the ancient Tamil epic Silapathigaram, set in a period two millenniums ago, lived in the Chola capital Kaveripoompattinam. Her husband was wrongly given a death penalty by the Pandian King when the former came to Madurai. Kannagi, a chaste woman, burns the city in her wrath. The purpose of the subtitle in the film is ambivalent: it seems to say that Madurai is still not disinfected of injustice. However, the hero’s name is Maduravel
called in short Madurey. The villain also wants to burn the city since then he too would be remembered like Kannagi
8 I gratefully acknowledge a project carried out by M. S. S. Pandian and A. Sri vatsan for information on this point.
9 I thank Prof. Tho. Paramasivam, Manonmaniyam Sundaranar University, for adding to my understanding of the term as referring to things considered exotic. 10 What I suggest is that the dichotomy of Chennai vs. the south initiates a radi
cally different coding of nativity and modernity than what constitutes a depar ture for Sundar Kali (2000) in the making of neo nativity films.
References
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