Shero worship: Female stardom in Tamil cinema

ABSTRACT

Post-millennial Tamil cinema has seen a marked increase in casting women as protagonists or in pivotal roles. In a historically patriarchal industry that rests on an almost sycophantic male star system, this proliferation of women characters has proven significant in expanding the possibilities of female stardom. In turn, the potential of women stars and women’s narratives participates in and showcases the broader globalising impulses of Tamil cinema in the twenty-first century. This paper focusses on two actors – Jyothika and Nayanthara – who have been instrumental in bringing to the fore a new figure in Tamil cinema, i.e. the ‘lady (super)star’. This paper theorises their rise to stardom as a set of complex negotiations between their personal and professional lives while navigating and resetting the boundaries of the ‘good Tamil woman’.

KEYWORDS:

• Tamil cinema
• stardom
• gender
• Shero
• Nayanthara
• Jyothika

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. See the discussion of Aval Appadithaan in Pillai 83.

2. If Tamil cinema has been branded an ethno-centric industry, it is because of the sense of local and regional that has been imbued into the male mass hero (Dickey; Prasad; Pandian; Nakassis; (Doing Style)), who is then understood to represent Tamil culture as a whole. Female performers historically tended to move between industries and were thus never considered placeholders for an overall local culture.

3. See Chinnaiah for a similar discussion on the implications of real world politics on reel representations of women on screen.

4. I take this term from popular accounts of these stars in newspapers and other journalistic writing from Tamil Nadu.

5. As; Dean and Nakassis argue, ‘the masala superstar hero has lost his power to inspire identification’ (92). The more popular and established actors, whose quasi-political fan clubs are more visible, have been gradually disappearing with the actors that have come to be popular after 2005 or so. Instead, there has been a ‘shift in the conceptualisation of narrative tropes in Tamil cinema’ (Kailasam 28): films are no longer constructed around a star’s cult personality, but lie more in genres of the neo-noir gangster film, black comedy and self-reflexive spoofs, and women-centric films that move away from an incorruptible celluloid masculinity and towards multiple, morally shaky gender representations.

6. She has alternated between various spellings including most recently, Jothika. For the sake of consistency, I have used the English spelling of her name as per Wikipedia at the time of writing.

7. In June R (Varmha) and Mozhi (Mohan).

8. The song was written by Vivek, composed by Vishal Chandrashekar, and sung by Sinduri Vishal and Brindha Sivakumar.

9. The lyrics go ‘Irukku sillatta pillatta/Naan silent-ah nazhuvatta/Dagulu lady star vellatta.’

10. While biriyani traditionally signals non-/anti-Brahminism in popular culture, in recent times, biriyani has taken on anti-national connotations, when, in the face of the ban on sale of beef by Narendra Modi’s government, many places in South India threw beef and biriyani festivals.

11. This is an occurrence that is then used as an extratextual reference in later films. For instance, when pulled in for a special performance in the title song of Vijay’s Sivakasi (Perarasu), what would have otherwise positioned her as an item number gets upended by her declaration, ‘superstar-u jodi thaan kooda aadu da’ (I was the superstar’s pair; come dance with me).

12. A rowdy archetype in Tamil culture incorporates qualities of a gang leader or mob boss, and is associated with violent dominion over a specific area.

13. Nayanthara was viewed as a Malayalee Christian with a publicly unorthodox love life, and Jyothika was perceived as a North Indian Muslim.

14. See Anandhi for further exposition on the feminist questions during the Dravidian movement.

15. Mahanti and Nadigai Thilagam are the honorifics given to Savitri in the Telugu and Tamil film industries respectively. The movie was named Mahanati/The Great Actress in Telugu and Nadigai Thilagam/ The Pride of Actresses in Tamil.

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Amrutha Kunapulli

Amrutha Kunapulli is a Visiting Assistant Professor of Cinema Studies at Colby College. She obtained her PhD from the Department of English at Michigan State University. Her current project, Worlding Tamil Cinema, studies contemporary Tamil cinema within the framework of world cinema, and its recent attempts at global circulation and visibility, in conversation with parallel movements in cinemas of Africa, East and West Asia, and Latin America. She also works in digital media, postcolonial literature, and popular culture.