Intimate Visualities and the Politics of Fandom in India 9789048536269

Citation preview

Intimate Visualities and the Politics of Fandom in India

Asian Visual Cultures This series focuses on visual cultures that are produced, distributed and consumed in Asia and by Asian communities worldwide. Visual cultures have been implicated in creative policies of the state and in global cultural networks (such as the art world, film festivals and the Internet), particularly since the emergence of digital technologies. Asia is home to some of the major film, television and video industries in the world, while Asian contemporary artists are selling their works for record prices at the international art markets. Visual communication and innovation is also thriving in transnational networks and communities at the grass-roots level. Asian Visual Cultures seeks to explore how the texts and contexts of Asian visual cultures shape, express and negotiate new forms of creativity, subjectivity and cultural politics. It specifically aims to probe into the political, commercial and digital contexts in which visual cultures emerge and circulate, and to trace the potential of these cultures for political or social critique. It welcomes scholarly monographs and edited volumes in English by both established and early-career researchers. Series Editors Jeroen de Kloet, University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands Edwin Jurriëns, The University of Melbourne, Australia Editorial Board Gaik Cheng Khoo, University of Nottingham, United Kingdom Helen Hok-Sze Leung, Simon Fraser University, Canada Larissa Hjorth, RMIT University, Melbourne, Australia Amanda Rath, Goethe University, Frankfurt, Germany Anthony Fung, Chinese University of Hong Kong Lotte Hoek, Edinburgh University, United Kingdom Yoshitaka Mori, Tokyo National University of Fine Arts and Music, Japan

Intimate Visualities and the Politics of Fandom in India

Roos Gerritsen

Amsterdam University Press

Cover illustration: Rajinikanth and Ranjit, Puducherry; date unknown Source: Ranjit’s family collection Cover design: Coördesign, Leiden Lay-out: Crius Group, Hulshout isbn 978 94 6298 523 0 e-isbn 978 90 4853 626 9 (pdf) doi 10.5117/9789462985230 nur 740 © Roos Gerritsen / Amsterdam University Press B.V., Amsterdam 2019 All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this book may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise) without the written permission of both the copyright owner and the author of the book. Every effort has been made to obtain permission to use all copyrighted illustrations reproduced in this book. Nonetheless, whosoever believes to have rights to this material is advised to contact the publisher.

In memory of my father



Table of Contents

Acknowledgements

13

Notes on language and figures

17

Introduction Fans – cinema – politics: a concise history Everyday politics Cinematic audiences in South India Affective images: Intimate publics and public intimacy Spectacular icons, public spaces, visual strategies This book

19

25 34 38 40 46 48

1 Keeping in control

55

The figure of the fan in the tamil film industry

Tamil film fan clubs The figure of the fan How it all started Film-watching The (too) active audience Vigilantes and keeping in control 2 Intimacy on display

Film stars, images, and everyday life

The household and intimacy Tactical images, proximate celebrities Family images, family lives Residues of encounters Mimesis and its limits 3 Vexed veneration: the politics of fandom Shaping the figure of the fan Making visible: Altruism and politicking Praise Gendered fandom Style and the power of fan collectivity Vexed veneration: The politics of Rajinikanth From fan club to party politics and back again: Vijayakanth The (im)possibility and (un)desirability of politicking

59 62 66 72 78 80 85 88 94 96 102 111 115 118 123 127 130 139 143 149 151

4 Public intimacies and collective imaginaries Cinematic geographies The downfall of painted images The painted image Materiality and affect The limits of star imagery Visual presencing

161 164 166 172 179 184

5 Chennai beautiful

189

Shifting urban landscapes and the politics of spectacle

Aspirations for the future, nostalgia for the past Reflecting the essence of Tamil culture? Shifting publics The unruly potential of images Conclusion Epilogue The cinema Loss Fan mimicry New media, new politics?

157

193 197 208 213 222 225

228 232 234 238

References

241

Index

253

List of figures Figure 1 Figure 2 Figure 3



Wall painting displaying MGR (left) and Jayalalitha (middle and right) commissioned by AIADMK party members Shankar’s shop Rajini Shankar’s collection; Puducherry 1987 Selvam’s wall, showing a commemorative poster for Rajinikanth’s 60th birthday, a film poster for Kusalan, a calendar, and a framed photo of Selvam’s deceased mother; Puducherry 2010 Selvam holding his photo album. In the background, several of his Rajinikanth posters and the Neyam

30 67

4 Public intimacies and collective imaginaries Cinematic geographies The downfall of painted images The painted image Materiality and affect The limits of star imagery Visual presencing

161 164 166 172 179 184

5 Chennai beautiful

189

Shifting urban landscapes and the politics of spectacle

Aspirations for the future, nostalgia for the past Reflecting the essence of Tamil culture? Shifting publics The unruly potential of images Conclusion Epilogue The cinema Loss Fan mimicry New media, new politics?

157

193 197 208 213 222 225

228 232 234 238

References

241

Index

253

List of figures Figure 1 Figure 2 Figure 3



Wall painting displaying MGR (left) and Jayalalitha (middle and right) commissioned by AIADMK party members Shankar’s shop Rajini Shankar’s collection; Puducherry 1987 Selvam’s wall, showing a commemorative poster for Rajinikanth’s 60th birthday, a film poster for Kusalan, a calendar, and a framed photo of Selvam’s deceased mother; Puducherry 2010 Selvam holding his photo album. In the background, several of his Rajinikanth posters and the Neyam

30 67

Figure 4 Figure 5 Figure 6 Figure 7 Figure 8 Figure 9

Figure 10 Figure 11 Figure 12 Figure 13 Figure 14

music channel – run by Rajinikanth fans – playing on TV; Puducherry 2007 Napoleon Raja (left) posing for his sister’s wedding in white clothes and a Rajinikanth pose; Puducherry Saktivel and Nalini’s wedding invitation; Moratandi 1995 Collection of Saktivel and Nalini Cover of a wedding photo album with the bride and groom in the middle and the film star Kamal Hassan on the left, talking into a microphone; Puducherry, 2002 Photo studio Devi Rajinikanth and Selvam, Puducherry Date and photographer unknown (Selvam’s personal collection) Rajinikanth and Ranjit, Puducherry, date unknown Ranjit’s family collection Image constructed from the photo of a meeting with the former AIRFC leader Sathyanarayanan with Ibrahim, Saktivel, and Murugan. Rajinikanth appears on the leftand right-hand side. The six men at the bottom of the image are other fan club members; Vannur, date unknown Saktivel’s personal collection Framed photos in Ibrahim’s office; Villupuram 2008 Constructed image of Rajinikanth and Sundar in photo album; Cuddalore, date unknown Sundar’s collection Rajinikanth and Annamalai, and Annamalai and Rajinikanth; Puducherry, date unknown Annamalai’s personal collection Banner made by fans for the coming-of-age ceremony; Puducherry 2008 Men arranging the packages with bread, fruit, and a Rajinikanth image in buckets. They make sure the images of Rajinikanth are visible; Puducherry 2007 Borrowed buckets and gurneys from the hospital to carry the packages for distribution; Puducherry 2007 The men around a hospital bed in the female emergency ward of the government hospital; Puducherry 2007 The press taking pictures of the men distributing their packages in the emergency ward; Puducherry 2007

86 98 99 101 105 105

107 108 109 111 116 125

Figure 15 Local women and children waiting at the place where Selvan Nathan’s fan club will distribute their social welfare items; Puducherry 2007 A photo opportunity when interim committee leader Jothi Kumar (in the orange dhoti) and the local MLA (to the right of Jothi Kumar) hand over saris to women; Puducherry 2007 Poster made by children in the fan club style hanging near the spot where the event was due to take place; 126 Puducherry 2007 Figure 16 Part of the mural that banner artist Ranjit and his friend Selvam made for the film Sivaji: The Boss; 158 Puducherry 2008 Figure 17 Kumar and apprentices and helpers working on a painting in front of his house-cum-studio; Puducherry, 160 date unknown Figure 18 Garlanded fan club metal board on Rajinikanth’s 163 birthday; Puducherry 2002 Figure 19 Cutout commissioned by fans on the release of the Rajinikanth movie Maaveeran (Rajasekar 1986) at the 167 Anandha Cinema; Puducherry 1986 Collection N. Kumar, Puducherry, photographer unknown Figure 20 Rajinikanth birthday banner by a fan club on Koot 173 Road, a main district junction in Villupuram, 2002 Collection Saktivel Figure 21 Wedding invitation displaying Rajinikanth and fan 209 club members Collection of designer and studio owner Yuvaraaj; Puducherry 2006 Figure 22a A banner for an ear-piercing ceremony. It depicts DMK connections. In the top right corner, we see Karunanidhi, below his son Stalin, and three local DMK leaders; Gingee 2008 180 Figure 22b The right-hand banner shows the same family but now with Rajinikanth (left), district fan club leader Ibrahim (top right), the parents (below), and their children; Gingee 2008 180 Figure 23 Beautification mural made by artist J.P. Krishna depicting two foreign tourists looking at the Mamallapuram heritage site; Chennai 2010 198

Photograph by McKay Savage Figure 24 Beautification mural made by artist J.P. Krishna depicting a musician; Chennai 2009 Photograph by McKay Savage Figure 25 Artist uses a copied page of the famous Amar Chitra Katha comics as a model to paint the story of Kannagi; Chennai 2010 Figure 26 Beautification mural made by artist J.P. Krishna depicting a rural scene of the harvesting and transplanting of rice, along with an Ayyanar shrine; Chennai 2009 Photograph by McKay Savage Figure 27 Mural of golf players that has been incorporated into the series of beautification paintings made by the artist J.P. Krishna. According to the Corporation officials this mural should not have been included as it does not represent Tamil culture; Chennai 2009 Photograph by McKay Savage Figure 28 Beautification mural of a doctor looking at an X-ray. This mural is on the compound wall in front of the government hospital on Poonamallee High Road; Chennai 2010 Figure 29 Beautification mural depicting an ayurvedic healing scene; Chennai 2010 Figure 30 Vendor in front of a painted scene depicting a market; Chennai 2011

199

200 203

206

207 208 209

Acknowledgements When I returned to Puducherry in March 2018 for a short visit, I immediately wanted to visit Thengai (coconut) Selvam. Selvam was an important figure during my research. He was a very devoted fan of Rajinikanth and at the same time not someone who would (or could) put himself forward in the view of other fans. He always enjoyed talking about the images he had collected and displayed at home and in his area when my research assistant Gandhirajan and I came to visit him. When I got to know him, his mother had recently passed away and Selvam was still an unmarried man. Later he married, and when I returned to present him with a copy of my dissertation, he had two small children who upon seeing the book with images of Rajinikanth immediately started playing with the pages. This to the joy of Selvam who saw another sign of his children becoming true Rajini fans. So when I returned in 2018, I wanted to see how Selvam was doing. Moreover, I was curious about Selvam’s take on the recent events in Tamil Nadu: both Rajinikanth – the background protagonist of this book – and his counterpart Kamalahaasan recently announced their entry into politics. As Selvam never believed that it would be fitting for Rajinikanth to engage in a political career, let alone in the politicking of his fellow fans, I wanted to know the state of affairs for Selvam and his fan-club activities. I rented a bike on a late evening in March to head for Selvam’s neighbourhood, expecting him to be home after a day’s work in the city selling coconuts. Selvam was always around; if not around his home, I knew where I could find him selling coconuts. But when looking for the right lane in the warren of streets where his house was based, and while asking around for his whereabouts, a passer-by told us that Selvam was no more. He had died three years earlier by falling out of a coconut tree. While writing this word of thanks, Selvam was the first of the people that I had got to know in Puducherry for my research that I thought of, someone who would have liked to have seen this book. But time and a fatal accident made this impossible. Where a certain period of fandom and generational change are central to this book, sometimes explicitly and very often implicitly, Selvam’s death made me even more aware of how our interests, pastimes, obsessions, and even lives are subject to the forces of time. Many things have changed throughout my research and afterwards: fan subjectivities, Tamil politics, and image technologies, to name but a few. But also my own life has transformed during these years, as I moved on from being a Master’s student, conceiving this project, a PhD student working on it, to a lecturer juggling academic life and a family. Several

14 

Intimate Visualities and the Politics of Fandom in India

years have passed from that first moment of an idea and now, finally, this book is seeing the light. In the course of this project I encountered numerous persons who contributed to it in one way or another, more than I can mention, remember, or even realize. I am much indebted to the many fan club members who have opened their lives to me, kindly inviting me into their homes and to all kinds of occasions, and patiently answering my numerous questions. Their names would be too many to mention here, but I want to thank a few of them explicitly as they have engaged in my project in very specific ways: Balradj, Ibrahim, Jothi Kumar, Kannayram, Napoleon Raja, Raja, Rajini Shankar, Ramesh, Ravichandran, Sasi Kumar, Saktivel, Selvaraj, Taragai Raja, Thengai Selvam, and Tamizh Vaanan. The banner artists and studio designers Kumar, Muthu, Raja, Yuveraaj, and the family of the late Ranjit were extremely kind and helpful. They have shared their stories with me, but also their collections of images. I am grateful for their wonderful insights into the world of banner art and the changes that they as artists were going through. I want to extend my gratitude to Chaku and Vinoth for their dedication as research assistants. I owe much to Gandhirajan in particular, who worked as a research assistant during a few of my stays in Tamil Nadu. His contribution to this project cannot be described in words. His passion for Tamil Nadu, his knowledge of its arts, and his enthusiasm in exploring fan culture and street art together with me definitely have defined the contours of my project and the knowledge of and insights into arts that he shared with me. I am grateful to Meera for helping me with the transcription and translation of recorded interviews. My friends Bharath, Elka, Gandhirajan, Gita, Hari Priya, Kavi and Kathir, Maheswari, Peer & Shuba, Pragathi & Raja, Prince, Rajesh, my landlords the Choudrys, and numerous others transformed Chennai and Puducherry into hospitable places to live in but also places to return to, discussing anthropology, cinema, politics, or just the endless daily matters, whether over lovely dinners or long afternoon chats over milky tea or coffee. A special thanks goes to Maheswari and Satheesh. I cherish the warmth and generosity, the welcoming home, the delicious dinners, as well as the vibrant rooftop parties on consecutive New Year’s eves. I have seen their two lovely daughters Nandhini and Malini grow from teenagers into married women. I do not know how to express my gratitude to my PhD supervisor Patsy Spyer. The positive way in which she commented on my work and encouraged it have always been a great motivator to me. In addition, I will never forget the workshops and scholars she introduced me to, turning academic life into a fantastic experience of which I still reap the benefits. A number of

Acknowledgements

15

scholars, too many to mention, have contributed to the content of this manuscript as I presented chapters and papers on different occasions. I owe much to the transvisuality group which was organized by the Cluster of Excellence in Heidelberg. The inspiring discussions in Istanbul, Delhi, and Heidelberg, and the platform they offered me for presenting my work, traced their way into the manuscript as it is now in more than one way. The group has not only provided me this engaging platform, it has also been a good place for ‘companionable moments’, to paraphrase Ken George (keynote summer school seeing matters Heidelberg, 30 July 2012). Within the environment of this group and various other academic encounters I want to thank the following persons in particular for commenting on my work: Bart Barendregt, Christiane Brosius, Wendelmoet Hamelink, Stephen Inglis, Rivke Jaffe, Sabine Luning, Partha Mitter, Britta Ohm, Maarten Onneweer, Martijn Oosterbaan, Chris Pinney, Peter Pels, Katrien Pype, Sumathi Ramaswamy, Annemarie Samuels, Kavita Singh, S.V. Srinivas, A. Srivathsan, the late Mary Steedly, A.R. Venkatachalapathy, Paola Zamperini and Dorien Zandbergen. Moreover, I am much indebted to Kajri Jain, Steve Hughes, Pieter ter Keurs, Erik de Maaker, and Nira Wickramasinghe for a careful reading and their critical questions for the dissertation that became this book. Some of their questions and comments have contributed greatly to a renewed critical thinking about the topic. Working on the book manuscript, while being hospitalized and hoping that our son would not be born too early – which he was – was the beginning also of a struggle with sleep, time, and writers block. It is also in the light of these perpetual sometimes difficult moments of writing that the two reviewers of this book, Lotte Hoek and Constantine V. Nakassis, have done an amazing job in sharpening the arguments, contesting its contradictions, straightening chapters, and what’s more. I don’t know how to express my gratitude to their attentiveness. Naturally all flaws and shortcomings are entirely my own. I want to thank my colleagues and cohort in Leiden, Antwerp, and Amsterdam: Andrea Cerda, Christoph Rippe, Erik de Maaker, Griet Steel, Joan van Wijk, José van Santen, Kadhija Kadrouch-Outmany, Lea Zuyderhoudt, Lotte Pelckmans, Manja Bomhoff, Marloes van den Akker, Martijn de Rooij, Metje Postma, Nina OsterHaus, Ratna Saptari, Tamsyn Adams, and Zane Kripe for our intellectual and not-so-intellectual moments in Leiden, Hawaii, New Orleans, Luberon, and various other places around the world. My time in Heidelberg, where this manuscript has been reshaped from a dissertation, wouldn’t have been so pleasant without the discussions, dinners, drinks, and long conversations with Thomas Hatry, Sandra Mueller, Catherine Scheer, Evelyn Wladarsh, Sina Emde, Lukas Ley, Cathrine Bublatzky, Laila

16 

Intimate Visualities and the Politics of Fandom in India

Abu-el-Rub, Christiane Brosius, Patrick Froelicher, Richard Fox, Lukasz Siegwald, Nila Jeep, Toni Constanze, Moritz Engel, Christian Schirmer, and Isabelle Kronauer. A special thanks goes to Christian Schirmer, who kindly shared his access to literature at a crucial moment of writing the last words. Many thanks to Katherine Ulrich, who did a magnificent job in editing this manuscript. Being an expert on Tamil Nadu herself, she not only corrected my typos and grammatical language flaws but also came with fresh, insightful comments and questions that improved the content in many ways. Saskia Gieling at AUP has been very helpful in making this manuscript into a professional book. And I owe gratitude to Michiel Baas who actually connected me to AUP after an unkind experience elsewhere, which delayed this project in many ways. The Leiden University Fund and Catherina van Tussenbroek fund have generously supported the project financially for my extensive fieldwork periods. My mother and father have taught me to be curious and have shared their own passion for literature, music, and the eccentricities of life. My father was an original thinker and I am not sure if I can ever reach that creativity but I know that he would be full of pride seeing the completion of this work. It is to his memory that I dedicate this book. My mother Janneke has seen all the phases of this work while travelling the world in a different way. Moving continuously in-between homes and when occasionally not moving, we were regularly too engrossed in our work. It must have been annoying at times. My mother has always read my publications with great curiosity and posed many questions and comments. These have been invaluable. Fortunately, some family and friends managed to visit us in India. These visits were rewarding as I was able to share my enthusiasm for a place that has become home, to show in reality what has been occupying my mind for so many years now. Others have joined us in our various writing abodes, taking a few days or weeks to jointly write dissertations, papers, or just to de-stress and savour life in the Provence. These visits in the Luberon, its long evening dinners, and extensive walks made writing a dissertation and later a book something to savour and possibly something I could see myself doing again. Our children Amon and Kirin have brought me the joy of seeing the world differently and in the meantime have become continual visitors of Tamil Nadu. And Karl, thank you for being there with me, in spirit but also in sharing a passion for India. You can’t imagine how much your original take on subjects and your interest in my work has formed this book. I know it is wishful thinking, but I truly hope that the rollercoaster life of academia can give me and everyone around me not only more beautiful encounters and inspiration but also instants of slowing down.



Notes on language and figures

To keep this book readable for a broader public I have only used Tamil words where I think they are important to convey their meaning. There exists a major difference between literary (or written) Tamil and spoken Tamil. Also, in spoken Tamil and its transliteration into Roman script, people spell words in a variety of ways. For example, two films that I write about regularly can be spelled Shivaji or Sivaji, Endhiran or Enthiran. A name like Satheesh can also be spelled Sathish. The name of the film star Kamal Hassan can also be written Kamal Haasan, Kamalahasan, or Kamalhassan. Also, in newspapers, billboards and the like, whenever Roman script is used, the spelling can vary. The use of English also changes the ways in which words are spelled in Tamil. Hotels,1 canteens and street vendors that sell the staple food of Tamil Nadu, a selection of different dishes served with rice (saappaadu in Tamil) announce that lunch can be eaten with a signboard saying ‘meals ready’ written phonetically in Tamil script as மீல்ஸ் ரெடி (transliterated back literally as ‘mīls reṭi’). Because this research is about the vernacular, about the everyday, I prefer to stay as close to the everyday experience as possible, even though it is translated. For that reason, whenever I use Tamil words, I have not used one official orthographic way of writing them but have instead used a spelling that comes as close as possible to how the people with whom I worked would have used or encountered them, while also making it readable for a non-Tamil audience. The conversations I had with most of my interlocutors were in Tamil; the quotations given in the pages that follow are thus my translations and those of my research assistant. The photographs have all been taken by the author unless stated otherwise. Wherever possible I have asked permission to publish photos that depict people. I have archived the work of several banner artists in Puducherry by photographing their archival albums. When I use photos from these collections, I indicate the artists’ names as the original source. Their work is published with their permission.

1

Hotel is a common word for a restaurant in Tamil Nadu.

Introduction The things that need saying step out of people, just as people step out of houses and begin to walk the street. Messages find walls, images their imprints, bodies leave traces. People and pictures, objects and subjects, machines and meanings, wires, cables, codes, secrets and the things that need saying out loud crowd the streets, become the streets, and move, overwriting old inscriptions, turning in on themselves, making labyrinths and freeways, making connections, conversations and concentrations out of electricity. Raqs Media Collective 2002, 93

Images come and go. They do not just float without direction; there is a logic and resonance in how they move (Larkin 2008). In the words of Raqs Media Collective, images crowd the streets and become the streets. The cityscapes in Tamil Nadu and Puducherry2 are no different in that respect. Banners, posters, murals, cutouts, and other signboards of diverse styles and formats constellate in its public spaces. In cityscapes such as these, buildings blend in with the billboards in-between. Typically, signboards present a plethora of stimuli displaying the most diverse range of products. Huge billboards may advertise jewellery, saris, underwear, mobile networks, new urban development plots, or the latest film releases. Shopfronts carry all sorts of ads on their shutters. Walls of buildings become vast displays of cement brands, underwear, and all sorts of commercial paraphernalia. Unless clearly 2 As I will explain further below, my research was conducted in both Tamil Nadu and Union Territory of Puducherry. Before independence in 1947 the region belonged to the Madras Presidency, covering most of South India. The Madras Presidency transformed into the Madras Province after independence in 1947 and became the Madras State in 1950. In 1969, the states were divided according to linguistic lines and Tamil Nadu was formed as separate state. Pondicherry was part of French colonial India. It comprised Chandernagor, Mahé, Yanam, Karaikal, and Masulipatam. From 1954, the French territories were transferred to the Indian republic and a decade later these territories become union territories within India, which means that the administration and governance falls directly under the federal state. Being enclosed by Tamil Nadu, Pondicherry also has Tamil as its main language. While the political parties in power differ from those in Tamil Nadu, there are many overlaps in how parties work, and how the electorate is approached. Also fan clubs were not structured differently within the Union territory. Therefore, for the sake of convenience, I will refer to Tamil Nadu as a region which includes Puducherry instead of always indicating the two formally separate states. The Union Territory of Pondicherry officially changed its name to Puducherry in 2006. Most people, however, still call it Pondicherry or Pondy.

20 

Intimate Visualities and the Politics of Fandom in India

marked otherwise with the typical ‘stick no bill’ sign, building façades and walls are sure to be painted or pasted with something. Whenever possible, their walls double as commercial advertisements that bear little or no relation to the shops they shelter. Villages in Tamil Nadu are thus sometimes almost literally overshadowed by advertisements. Political imagery is even more pervasive, covering buildings and compound walls in political party symbols and images of their leaders. Cutouts, in their turn, used to tower over cityscapes, displaying larger-than-life images of Tamil Nadu’s main political leaders and film stars. Film stars like these present yet another of the city’s visual tropes: their faces adorn film posters and billboards but also appear on signboards belonging to photo studios, tailors, or barbers who use them to attract customers. As I navigated the towns and streets of Tamil Nadu, this whole visual landscape would become part of my everyday experience. I would have stopped noticing it at a certain point, I believe, if it hadn’t been such a transient presence as well. Everything in this landscape could look unexpectedly different each time I returned, as if some of its characteristic forms and media had changed, disappearing from sight and trading places on the visual horizon with new ones that were now raising their heads. When I first arrived in Chennai for an earlier research project in 2002, I experienced an initial disappointment. Sitting in the back of the (then still) inevitable Ambassador car taking me to my hotel in the centre of Chennai, I craned my neck, hoping to finally see the city’s legendary cutouts, these huge figures of politicians, popular actors, and cine-politicians which I had heard so much about. The South Indian state of Tamil Nadu and its capital Chennai were legendary for their larger-than-life displays of political and cinematic heroes that materialized the entanglement of politics and cinema in public spaces. But on my way to the hotel and during the next few days while travelling around the city, I could not spot a single one of these structures. Only at cinemas did I manage to locate much smaller versions of the painted cutouts and banners publicizing the most recent film releases. My disappointment almost prevented me from noticing what was now becoming increasingly dominant in the city: vinyl billboards populating walls, junctions, streets, cinemas and the like made for birthdays or religious events, or by fan clubs and political supporters. Even though the spectacular, enormous painted image had diminished in presence, vinyl billboards had replaced it and thereby changed the public realm considerably: not only in outlook but also in the ubiquity of their usage. This portrayal of the visual is not merely a way of describing this cityscape at a certain point, but rather is a statement about visuality in Tamil Nadu in which many phenomena

Introduc tion

21

overlap: film stardom, fan subjectivities, politics, and image practices. The intricate ways in which these intersections come to the fore form the topic of this book. Film fan clubs actively contribute to the ubiquitous visual culture of Tamil Nadu’s cities and towns. For film releases and their stars’ birthdays they display billboards, posters, and murals in public spaces. These images portray a selective range of local Tamil stars and contain visual signs that give away the presence of their respective fan clubs. The signs and images that emanate from these fan clubs leave behind an ubiquitous trail of imagery that, despite being rather ephemeral, has a continuous, familiar face and hence one that can have a strong evocative effect (Holland 2004, 2). It is this ephemeral, yet consistent and resonant trail of images marked out by fan clubs that I seek to analyse in this book, in particular the traces left by Tamil film actor par excellence Rajinikanth. This book is an ethnographic account of the circulation of Rajinikanth in everyday life worlds as well as of the street-level appropriation of this iconic figure into networks of patronage, veneration, and social mobility via billboards, murals, and posters. I focus on the question of how these practices traverse everyday lives, as well as public spaces and public spheres. How do fans relate to their star in daily practices and what do those relations tell us about the broader social phenomena of film audiences and film-going in the context of Tamil film? What do the widely used images tell us about their producers and their social worlds? Images articulate the desires, ambitions, political projects, and agency of their users. They are part of the everyday practices and experiences of their producers and consumers. At the same time images trigger and represent feelings of collectivity and resistance beyond the images themselves. In articulating collectivity and opposition they become central to how individuals and collectivities imagine and recognize themselves (Strassler 2010, 3). In other words, images are not simply reflections of social life; they are actively making it (Pinney 2004; Rajagopal 2001; Ramaswamy 2003; Spyer 2008a; Williams 1974). The central argument is that the modes of visual proximity that fans aspire to and cultivate, engender advantages of different sorts. It is first of all personally rewarding as well as potentially socially efficacious. The different chapters open up different modes of allowing yourself to be visually proximate to significant others, some appropriate and some inappropriate. The appropriateness of various activities and visual display is not related to the image itself per se but to the social position of those who put it on display. Relating the familial and public display of images attends to what cinephilia is and does. Fandom on display indicates the double sense of

22 

Intimate Visualities and the Politics of Fandom in India

display. The first sense of display involves the publicness of fandom, its need to show its presence to make it meaningful. Being the fan of a star can be a personal feeling, but it needs collectivity to be recognized and cultivated. And second, it refers to the practices of display that come along with fan practices. Such an understanding shifts away from relating fandom exclusively to the cinema and this focus on everyday images practices, enables us to include the embodied, sensuous, visual, and spatial practices related to film, celebrity, and political and fan activity. The study of cinephilia, especially in India, has been dominated by a film studies paradigm (Dyer 2004; R. Vasudevan 2003; Rajadhyaksha 2009; Nandy 1998). In the last few years there has been a considerable shift in the field of South Asian film studies. Several works have taken the social lives of films from their inception to their screening as subject of investigation, bringing new insights into the ways in which people engage with film in various ways. A few recent works stand out and seem to indicate a new direction in thinking about film in South Asia, from the creative process of bringing film into being to its ‘afterlife’ and the process of watching and appropriation (A. Pandian 2015; Hoek 2013; L. Srinivas 2016; Ganti 2012). The remarkable South Indian histories of a politics of adulation and blurring of the on/offscreen images of Tamil film star-politicians have received abundant attention, often also from a historical, film, or cultural studies perspective. I will describe this literature in more detail below. I will also nuance the claim that fan subjectivities and producers of the public media produce the personality politics of Tamil Nadu (Dickey 1993b; Jacob 2009). While the basic premise of Dickey’s and Jacob’s arguments has been confirmed by my research, my exploration of image practices and everyday lives of fans themselves show an ambiguity towards their star, politicking practices and themselves as fans that urges us to understand how these fields blur, disconnect, or cannot be considered altogether. What do fans make of their star, not simply through film, but through the various media that they engage with? Even though the figure of the fan is not neglected in film studies, the focus there remains predominantly focused on fans as exceptions, as fanatics. In this book, I explore the image practices of fans themselves and attempt to show the importance of producing modes of visual proximity in engaging with a star, other fans, and local political networks. What insights do such image practices offer us about cinephilia in Tamil Nadu, India, and perhaps more generally? What do the intimate practices tell us about the ways in which images mediate and cultivate relations with far-away others? I make two arguments. The first relates to the nature of everyday affects and intimacy and their expression through the image cultures that fans

Introduc tion

23

engage in. While this book is framed around fan clubs, it does not seek to offer an ethnographic account of fan clubs in South India. To paraphrase Geertz (1973), I did not study fan clubs, I studied in fan clubs. The focus on image practices of fans brings the topic of this book to be about the ways in which visual technologies have been deployed at the level of grassroots or vernacular politics. The longstanding connections between the film industry and political parties in Tamil Nadu have put fan clubs in a particular position within this relationship, and several works have dealt with the entanglement of politics and film. Some of these works take the perspective of the blurring of the cinematic format, political aesthetics, popular culture, and the charisma of its actor and its hero role to attract a specific audience (Sivathamby 1981; Hardgrave 1973; M.S.S. Pandian 1992; Jacob 2009); others approach the topic from the perspective and agency of fans (Dickey 1993b; Rogers 2009, 2011). These works are particularly important efforts in understanding and analysing the specific history of politics, charisma, and cinema in Tamil Nadu. But while of immense value, these works fail to elucidate what it actually means to be a fan. How can one explain the ambiguity of fandom that becomes apparent in appraising fan image practices time and again? How can one understand fandom without necessarily looking at the political influence of their stars? I suggest that investigating the image practices and fan subjectivities that are not explicitly related to electoral politics help us understand fandom as everyday practice at a specific moment in Tamil Nadu. I argue that the banners and posters fans produce actively shape the social worlds of fan clubs and individual fans, as do the more intimate commonplace images fans keep and exhibit in the everyday space of their homes. With their ‘fandom on display’ fans pursue aspirations of ‘presence’ and power that go beyond the affection for celebrities and the fan clubs’ cinematic roots. As I will show, while fandom may start for the love of an actor, fan club membership moves to include other regimes of affect and political subjectivities. The second argument relates to the publicness of images and the mediation of public spaces of the city in which everyday affects as well as negotiations and imaginations of patronage and mobility appear and disappear, are made visible and invisible, conflict or concur. Images in their ability move – in the double sense of the word following Steedly and Spyer (2013) – are formed by being in motion, moving ‘in and out of people’s everyday lives and frames of value’ (K. Jain 2007). These frames of value do not merely change; they also diverge in their potentialities in various places and times and across individuals and publics. The billboards fans made did not last very long; they were modified from being hand-painted

24 

Intimate Visualities and the Politics of Fandom in India

to being digitally designed, and colours and design changed to hold the attention of its possible onlookers. In addition, a counter politics of the image in state-level political squabbling caused selective bans on public images, and fights over images and discussions over their effects dispersed in public spheres. Particularly new imaginations embedded in a ‘world-class aesthetic’ have become exceedingly visible in the built environment and public spaces of India (Ghertner 2015; Searle 2016; see also Brosius 2010). Whereas Tamil Nadu politics has for a long time crystallized political loyalty and leader veneration in visual display, the same parties seemed to distance themselves from the image of populist personality politics and instead focus on a rising middle-class and world-class Chennai. The ways in which this political visual play in Tamil Nadu materialized in public spaces tells us something about the after-effects, ephemerality, and heterogeneity of images and the ways they are tied up in social practices, public discussions, and larger sociopolitical constellations and histories (see also Strassler 2010). I argue that public spaces have become one of the stages on which political subjectivities, affective regimes, and moralities are being played out. However, instead of considering these as concurring, or one pushing out the other, I propose that we should think in terms of layered articulations that produce a varied array of visual strategies. In addition, there is a range of permissibility for them. They are (un)wanted and (im)possible at different locations. The connecting thread throughout the book is images that circulate and resonate in everyday spaces of the household and the more public spaces of the cinema and street and a shift in visual technologies and ideologies – from painted cutout culture to digitally designed vinyl billboards to competing city government rhetoric and laws promoting a world-class cityscape – as infrastructure to the construction of affective modes of engagement with public figures. It teases out the articulations of the ways in which stars and intimacy with these stars can bring present and future benefits. By looking at the ways in which images are personalized and become part of the interpersonal linkages of family and face-to-face communities, this book provides an instance of how spectacle mediates social mobility via access to the public sphere, and of how images play a part in mundane, familial settings. It is through these images practices that come and go, are expected, desired and dismissed, that we can try to understand the ways in which images produce feelings of pleasure and dismissal, of (a lack of) recognition, agency, and power. Images are the tangible form of an intangible connection between fan and star. The latter are presenced through the former’s images, individualized and therefore owned. The star is also presenced in the fan’s

Introduc tion

25

images as an embodied being. Yet stars are not merely personas to be adored and adulated; neither are they mere bodies for other aspirations. This book examines not merely a specific moment in time but also changes in time. By looking at the image practices and ideologies we can try to understand how the politics of spectacle for which Tamil Nadu is so infamous, is a rather multifaceted phenomenon that while specific for each generation and star, can help us understand how an image is built, possessed, and dismissed.

Fans – cinema – politics: a concise history Dear friends, I have officially joined the list of those who have become infected with a virus which affects the senses and spreads to everybody around. The virus has been identified as a seasonal one, that which comes into existence every time that a f ilm of a certain actor called ‘SUPERSTAR RAJINI’ releases all over the world. The virus induces restlessness, anxiety, sleeplessness, feverish excitement, strange sensations and a nonstop recitation of two words – ‘Rajini’ and ‘Shivaji’. The virus is called ‘SHIVAJI’ VIRUS. – Kaza Raja

This message was posted by Kaza Raja on the Yahoo Group RajinifansDiscussions (at Rajinifans.com) a few weeks before the long awaited release of Sivaji: The Boss (Shankar 2007). Kaza Raja uses the metaphor of a virus, ‘the causative agent of an infectious disease’3 to indicate the anxiety experienced by him and others in the run-up to the release of the latest film starring his film hero Rajinikanth. But there is more to it than that. The virus is highly contagious and, as Kaza Raja put it, creates all kinds of sensorial effects. His metaphor of the virus suggests on the one hand a personal and physical experience and on the other it plays up the causative infectiousness of the film release: you cannot help but get infected by it; it spreads in many ways and is thus collectively experienced by a larger group. The proclaimed ‘superstar’ of Kollywood, 4 Rajinikanth (1950, born Sivaji Rao Gaekwad in Karnataka) is a phenomenon loved by many. His real-life and 3 Virus (2009). In Merriam-Webster Online Dictionary. Retrieved 29 April 2009, from www. merriam-webster.com/dictionary/virus. 4 Kollywood is named after the neighbourhood Kodambakkam where most film studios are situated. It has more than 80 million potential viewers in India and abroad and an annual film production similar to that of Bollywood.

26 

Intimate Visualities and the Politics of Fandom in India

film character and his distinctive mannerisms are part of his attraction and, together with his film releases, the topic of much conversation throughout the state. He is popular among all strata of society, men and women, young and old, and his films are watched time after time on television and in the cinema. Rajini, or talaivar (leader), as he is predominantly called, started acting in the 1970s. His popularity rose to a new level in the 1990s, from which point he became ‘a “mass hero”, a term used in south India for an actor who is a “hero” to the “masses”, and whose “mass” – or power, charisma, and popularity – has a gravitational pull on all those caught in his orbit, be they fans or filmmakers, voters or governments’ (Nakassis 2017b; see also M.S.S. Pandian 1992; S.V. Srinivas 2009; Prasad 2014). Fan clubs of film stars (rasigar manram) are widespread throughout Tamil Nadu; their number often runs into the tens of thousands dedicated to one actor alone. Their members consist mostly of men, and they are devoted to male stars, local and Tamil actors, in whose names they organize certain events. Fans go and watch their heroes’ films together in local cinemas; they celebrate the stars’ birthdays and share the latest news they have picked up about their star. These are leisure activities, but fan club members themselves emphasize their philanthropic outlook by their involvement in social work. In the name of their heroes they donate blood or distribute schoolbooks, saris, and food, especially on the occasion of their star’s birthday or on other important occasions. Moreover, once fan club members are a bit older, they become active in local political and patronage networks. In several instances, actors have started their own political parties: when they entered electoral politics, their fan clubs transformed into party cadres. Fan clubs are predominantly all-men environments, but throughout Tamil Nadu several female fan clubs do exist. In Chapter 3, I will describe a female fan club for Rajinikanth to say a bit more on how such a female space fits into what fan clubs ‘do’. Fan clubs are organized per neighbourhood and village or town, depending on the local activity of the fans and of how many fan clubs exist. Another dividing factor is location and caste and class (see also S.V. Srinivas 2009). Members were mostly from lower socioeconomic classes, employed as auto rickshaw drivers, bicycle and motorbike mechanics, and lower-grade clerks in government offices; or they run a shop of their own, a tea stall or a small business, and some young men are lower middle-class college students (Dickey 1993a; Jeffrey 2010; Rogers 2009; S.V. Srinivas 2009). Especially in villages I have observed a division of fans in caste-specific fan clubs that are also spatially distinguished: a fan club within the village, made up of the non-Dalits who live within village boundaries, coexists with a separate fan club of Dalits, commonly segregated at the outskirts of villages. Even

Introduc tion

27

though most fans said that everyone could become a member, in reality, the spatio-social hierarchies and divisions defined the membership of a specific fan club (see also S.V. Srinivas 2009). All major male Tamil film heroes have their own fan clubs. The number of fan clubs devoted to actors corresponds directly to their popularity. The older, established Tamil film stars have a relatively stable base of fan clubs, whereas younger actors depend on their films’ success as well as on their fan clubs’ activities. There are hardly any fan clubs dedicated to actresses, although there are a few exceptions. The first, which is not really a fan club, is the temple built for actress Kushboo by her fans in the southern city of Trichy. The temple was later demolished by protesters who objected to Kushboo’s controversial remarks on premarital sex.5 In addition, in 2006, a fan club was founded in the name of Tamil actress Trisha. The fan club, consisting of male members, primarily conducted social work in Trisha’s name. But besides these instances the number of fan clubs for and activities organized in the name of actresses remains limited. The number of fan clubs for Tamil male actors is high, although exact figures are difficult to verify. Rajinikanth, for example, put a limit on the number of fan club registrations,6 restricting the number of fan clubs to about 20,000, with an average of ten to thirty members per club. However, this did not hold his fans back from starting new, unregistered, clubs. When these clubs are considered as well, the number of his fan clubs probably doubles. Some fans7 estimated the number of official Rajinikanth fan clubs to be around 70,000. Vijayakanth, another contemporary film star who started a political party in 2005, had a fan base of an estimated 30,000 to 40,000 fan clubs (Swaminathan 2004, 13). Younger actors such as Vijay, Ajith, and Surya also had a considerable number of fan clubs dedicated to them. For Surya it is said that there were 25,000 registered clubs in Tamil Nadu and several thousand more if we include Kerala, Mumbai, and some other cities.8 These numbers are not reliable, though, as fans tended to quote higher numbers and official fan club documents relating to the main organization were not accessible to me at the time. Fan clubs are not unique to Tamil Nadu, but they do not exist all over India, and especially not in the form and numbers in which they can be 5 Kushboo advocated the right of women to have premarital sex. This caused a controversy in Tamil Nadu and political groups have accused her of going against Tamil culture. 6 Local fan clubs ask for official permission to start a fan club at their local head fan club which sends the registration to All-India Rajinikanth Manram in Chennai. Below I refer further to the registration in more detail. 7 When speaking about fans, I am referring to fans who are members of a fan club. 8 Stated by the leader of the Surya fan club, Madhavan. Chennai, 10 December 2009.

28 

Intimate Visualities and the Politics of Fandom in India

found there. In Tamil Nadu they stem from a rather specific history in which film and politics have become mutually reinforcing. Since the end of the 1960s, the state has been ruled by Chief Ministers who started their careers in the film industry. The first major film star to become Chief Minister, M.G. Ramachandran, commonly known as MGR, was also the first film star with active fan clubs that supported him, both in his capacity as a film star and as that of a politician. From MGR’s era onwards, fan clubs have become a permanent presence with their own aspirations in terms of film-watching as well as politics. The history of Tamil cinema and the links with electoral politics have been described at length by other scholars, so let me only try to pinpoint the most important aspects that help us understand the era of Rajinikanth fans who are the subject of this book. Chennai is the centre of the Tamil film industry.9 Together with the other South Indian film industries of Karnataka and Andhra Pradesh, the Tamil film industry is known for its close connections between film and politics. Particularly Tamil Nadu has a long history of film stars entering electoral politics and politicians using film. Madhava Prasad has coined the term ‘cine-politics’ to recognize such celebrity figures who pull their screen image to electoral politics (Prasad 1999; 2014). Chennai, formerly Madras, is one of the three centres, together with Mumbai and Kolkata, where cinema arrived and settled in colonial India in the late 1890s.10 In the early days of film screening in colonial Madras, silent f ilms were not restricted by linguistic or social identif ication or stratification and hence brought several language groups to the cinema: Rather than as a medium of some already existing linguistic group, the silent cinema innovated its own language of address. Compared to other cultural forms of music, literature, drama, the emerging public institution of the cinema in South India worked to allow castes, classes and communities as well as women, children and families to participate and mix in new public ways within a new kind of social space. (Hughes 2006, 34; see also Sivathamby 1981)

9 Baskaran 1996; Dickey 1993a; Forrester 1976; Hardgrave 1973; Hughes 1996; 2000; Irshick 1969; M.S.S. Pandian 1992; A. Pandian 2015; Sivathamby 1981; Velayutham 2008; for more in-depth accounts of Tamil cinema. 10 Chennai’s former name is Madras; Mumbai’s former name is Bombay, and Kolkata’s is Calcutta.

Introduc tion

29

The f irst screenings were primarily dramas and serials from overseas, starring film actors such as Eddie Polo and Elmo Lincoln who were extremely popular at the time (Baskaran 1996; Hughes 2006). These stars had a huge fan following in South India (Hughes 2006) and were the first to have fan clubs devoted to them.11 These fan clubs, however, were completely different in structure, activity, and class formation to what they would later become. Resistance in India against the colonial regime heralded what appears to be the first link between film and politics. As with theatre productions, films were used to criticize colonial rule and refer to India’s independence (Bhatia 2004). Theatre performances in the Tamil-speaking parts of South India were already articulating social reform and conveying political messages. As many theatre actors shifted to the film industry, they implemented their political and social commitment there as well. With a growing desire for independence in India, theatre as well as film was used to convey criticism of colonial rule. From the f irst Dravidian movement and party, the DK (Dravida Kazhagam or Dravidian Party), led by E.V. Ramaswamy (1879-1973), popularly known as Periyar (meaning great one or great leader in Tamil), that was opposing Brahmin and North Indian hegemony in South India (Bate 2009; Hardgrave 1964; Irshick 1969; M.S.S. Pandian 2007; Price 1996; Ramaswamy 1997; Subramanian 1999), a group of members split and founded the DMK (Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam, Dravidian Progress Party). Scriptwriters, directors, f ilm stars and others involved in the cinema industry were drawn to the DMK. As a result, the party attracted massive crowds with its pervasive use of cinema’s heroic images and film stars. Many DMK members came from the f ield of theatre, including its f irst leader, C.N. Annadurai. Annadurai, a dramatist, writer, director, and producer, was a charismatic rhetorician (Hardgrave 1964, 401; Widlund 1993, 9) who, in combination with the mobilization of f ilm stars to attend party rallies, attracted thousands of people and resulted in a growing electorate (Dickey 1993b, 343; Hardgrave 1964, 400-401). The public was drawn to party rallies by the new popular f ilm stars such as MGR, K.R. Ramaswamy, Sivaji Ganesan, and S.S. Rajendran, whose fame spread with the extension of cinema to rural areas through electrif ication (Sivathamby 1981). Film actors for their part were drawn towards the DMK because of its position in the f ilm industry as owners of film companies (Widlund 1993, 11) and its generous awards and grants to encourage the cinema industry in the state (Jacob 1997, 152). For artists, 11 Personal conversation with Theodore Baskaran, 23 May 2008.

30 

Intimate Visualities and the Politics of Fandom in India

Figure 1 Wall painting displaying MGR (left) and Jayalalitha (middle and right) commissioned by AIADMK party members

being linked with the DMK was founded on a desire to become famous (Hardgrave 1964, 401) and by the fact that the DMK sponsored cultural events on political subjects (Widlund 2000, 65). The DMK for their part used the artists to attract the public to their party rallies and as such to enlarge their voting base. Film from this period until the 1970s addressed moral imperatives with social realist themes, such as caste discrimination, the struggles of the poor, and family relations (Velayutham 2008, 4). The emphasis on social reform in the 1950s and 1960s was increasingly explicitly related to party propaganda for the DMK. The close involvement of film stars and directors in politics heralded decades in which films were used for political (particularly DMK) publicity. Films of all genres, from mythological and social to melodrama, were infused with political imagery and rhetoric relating to the political subjects the party was interested in at the time (Thoraval 2000). Annadurai’s portrait, the DMK symbol of the rising sun, the party colours red and black and dialogues and songs referring to the party were inserted into films (Widlund 1993, 11). In addition, the party’s publicity material started to be modelled on the visual vocabulary of film publicity by using similar pictorial conventions. In this shared visual language of film and politics banner artists used similar colours for political as well as cinematic cutouts, murals, and banners (see Figure 1). In 1972, MGR, a

Introduc tion

31

rising film star who was previously a member of the DMK, founded his own party, the AIADMK (All India Anna Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam or All India Anna Dravidian Progressive Party). When still in the DMK, the first fan clubs in his name were formed in 1953 (Hardgrave in S.V. Srinivas 2009, 8). His popularity as a film star made his party win elections and after he passed away, Jayalalitha, a film actress and co-star of MGR, took over the party leadership.12 Jayalalitha was the leader of the AIADMK until she passed away in 2016. The public culture that developed in Tamil Nadu out of this close relationship between film and politics prefigured the fan club imagery that is the subject of this book. This period of cine-politics has attracted a great number of academic accounts explaining the format of films, their tropes and narratives as a foundation of political action in South India (Forrester 1976; Hardgrave 1964; M.S.S. Pandian 1992; Sivathamby 1981; Prasad 1999, 2014; Baskaran 1996; Rajanayagam 2015; Pongiyannan 2015) and in adjacent South Indian states (S.V. Srinivas 2009; Prasad 2014). Instead of looking at film text and star charisma influencing spectators, Sara Dickey has presented how the institutional structure of MGR fan clubs was a base for political action while she also emphasized the agency (and its limits) of fans in the adulation of film star MGR (Dickey 1993b). She argued that fan clubs and particularly their local leaders employ their membership to attain political power motivated by fans’ own background, coming from the urban poor (Dickey 1993b; see also Rogers 2009). For Prasad, who coined the term ‘cine-politics’, f ilms did not only propagate star charisma and political representation, they actually created a specific kind of bottom-up political engagement: ‘a virtual political community is forged between a star and his fan following, and […] this community operates independently of, and need not necessarily culminate in, party politics’ (Prasad 2014, 7). For Prasad, this cine-politics refers to the total phenomenon, also before entry into formal electoral politics ‘but is crucially centered on the political dimension that is already present before that shift’ (ibid., 11). Moreover, he sees cine-politics not as a solution or expansion of democratic ideals but as a symptom of a political order’s subjective disorder (ibid., 185). Prasad has argued that the explanations usually given for the enmeshing of film and politics can be roughly divided into two approaches: one explaining the phenomena in terms of cultural and religious factors and the other in 12 This is a very short summary of how the party was led, taken over, and the many disputes that took place. However, these issues have been discussed elsewhere (Baskaran 2008; Sivathamby 1981; Widlund 2000).

32 

Intimate Visualities and the Politics of Fandom in India

terms of cinema as a tool of political communication. He criticizes such approaches for studying cinema and parliamentary politics as distinct fields, each with their own logic and rules, that are then brought together in explanations of the phenomenon, rather than examining the way in which ‘cine-politics’ operates as a unique system on its own (Prasad 2014, 12). This tendency we can also notice in accounts beyond South India. Boorstin (Boorstin 1992) refers to ‘pseudo-events’ or ‘pseudo-politicians’ to describe the media spectacle, which has become more important or attractive than the socio-political world itself. With a Baudrillardian feeling of loss of reality and replacement by spectacle, Boorstin and a number of scholars that followed him consider celebrity as separate from political culture and often as something with a lamentable effect on it. As, for example, in the case of film star-turned-politicians Arnold Schwarzenegger or Ronald Reagan, scholars and public intellectuals commonly speak of their move into politics as if they would interrupt the rationality of political practice or undermine democracy. They criticize the entry of celebrities into politics on a number of grounds: they claim (1) that celebrities interrupt the rationality of politics; (2) that they undermine democracy; and (3) that their political careers depend on the deliberate construction of an image – in other words, they are running on personality and not policy. The most germane argument for the purpose of this book is the charge that celebrities turn otherwise-rational politics into a spectacle: they mobilize voters on the basis of a carefully constructed image rather than a rational set of policies (Kellner 2003; Messner 2007; Thimsen 2010; McKernan 2011). The ways in which spectacle is inherent to political practice and the ways in which ‘the public’ lives such images is usually not considered. Another problem is that seeing cinema as a tool of political communication is not incorrect per se; people indeed create an image of a star-politician in various ways – through media, tea-shop talk (Cody 2011) and the various other ways people relate to a party and its leader (through caste, family conventions, etc.). Rather, it fails to move away from a type of textual or image analysis, suggesting a unilinear relation between what is seen on screen and what is believed to be the true person seen on that screen. But to understand the complex reality of film-going, of fandom, of politicking in the name of a star, we need to consider the messiness and fragmentedness as well as the time in which such presentations take place. The political dominance in film stories disappeared as, in the 1970s and 1980s, a new generation of film stars, with Rajinikanth and Kamal Hassan as the most popular actors, came to the fore. The films that came into vogue in this period can be described as melodramatic stories with a strong social

Introduc tion

33

component. The films are often set in rural environments and venerate the innocent, honest, rural populace, and also repeatedly glorify the Tamil language, people, and culture (Velayutham 2008).13 The film’s hero usually fights injustice imposed by an evil person towards the honest but helpless people. A love interest between the hero and heroine runs through the story, their romance being expressed in songs (see e.g. Dwyer 2004; Gopalan 1997; Taylor 2003). From the 1990s onwards, nativity became an important leading focus in films. Nativity is a term used by the industry to indicate a film’s attention to everyday habits, customs, and spaces (A. Pandian 2017, 12). Moreover, more and more films fall into the category of what can be called blockbusters and have focused increasingly on urban environments and middle-class audiences. I will discuss this shift more elaborately in relation to fans in the epilogue. Films may be less explicitly political; politics have not disappeared from the film industry. First and foremost, Jayalalitha has been the face of the AIADMK party from 1987 until she passed away in 2016, and Karunanidhi has been the DMK’s leader from 1996 until he passed away in 2018. Both were already active in politics years before they became party leaders, indicating the continuing cine-political connections. The main political parties in Tamil Nadu still have links to the movie or media industry and it is alleged that many politicians launder money through film productions. Most films are produced with money supplied by the DMK, and several political parties own television channels and newspapers. Almost the entire film industry, from film production, distribution, and screening to the sale of rights is dominated by a few production houses owned by relatives of Karunanidhi, the late leader of the DMK party. The smaller film production companies have complained in recent years about not being able to enter the market because of a lack of funds for production and lack of places to screen films, among other things. While MGR, Jayalalitha, and Karunanidhi have been the only actors who served as chief ministers, other film stars were or are politically active. MGR was a chief minister for seventeen consecutive years (1970-1987), and Jayalalitha held the position five times, between 1990 and 2016. Several film stars affiliated themselves to political parties and some film stars started their own party. When they were young, they were usually not connected to any party but once they got older and more established in the film industry, fan clubs and political parties start to push them towards a 13 See Ramaswamy for an account of the Tamil language as it is the embodiment of the essence of Tamil culture (Ramaswamy 1997).

34 

Intimate Visualities and the Politics of Fandom in India

political affiliation. Film star Vijayakanth started the DMDK in 2005. Just as with MGR, his fan clubs changed into party cadres. In Chapter 3, however, I will show how fans and their clubs have not played an important role in his party and have been very disappointed with the failure of their own political careers. In 2007, film star Sarath Kumar started the AISMK 14 after serving in the DMK and AIADMK respectively. And then we have Rajinikanth, the talaivar or leader as people and specifically his fans called him, the popular star of whom many hoped that he would start his own party. But, despite waiting since 1996, when Rajinikanth supported the DMK and TMC (Tamil Maanila Congress)15 alliance for the assembly elections in Tamil Nadu and everyone expected him to become active in electoral politics, and up to when I was doing my research between 2006 and 2011, his announcement didn’t come. He made just enough remarks or statements of support to parties during elections for fans to continue to believe that one day he would enter politics. And then, finally he did announce his entry in electoral politics in 2017 and pronounced that he would contest in the Tamil Nadu Legislative Assembly elections in 2021. Throughout my research, however, there was no sign of this announcement and therefore I will address this recent change in the epilogue.

Everyday politics I have described the initial period of Tamil film, film stars, and their involvement with politics at length because this period in the development of the film industry and the formation of fan clubs cannot be seen separately from political projects at the time. My aim in providing this history was to show how these practices prefigure the first two decades of the 2000s, in which Rajinikanth fans, the fans at the centre of this book, engaged with their star and with politics. It raises questions about what kind of communities fan clubs give rise to which also routinely involve them in politicking. Moreover, it questions the understanding of politics and cinema as distinct fields in the first place. Can we talk about politics as becoming part of cinema or as the cinema as becoming part of politics, or do we need to abandon those categories altogether? Should we rather consider the practices around film – from watching, talking, dreaming, creating visual materials, or politicking, 14 Akila India Samatuva Makkal Katchi or All India Equality People’s Party. 15 The election symbol of the TMC was a bicycle and on their posters, they used an image from the film Annamalai where Rajinikanth rides a bicycle.

Introduc tion

35

connecting to local politicians, producing a big man status as part of the same subjectivities? While this study has been influenced by nuanced accounts of the ways in which the cinematic field and political regimes blend together, I would take a step back and ask how we could understand the ways in which the political is always part of fan subjectivities, yet, not in an explicitly (electoral) political sense. Several scholars have pointed out how in the Indian context (and I would add this goes beyond India) the distinction between state and citizens is problematic (Chatterjee 2004; Berenschot 2010; Gupta 2012). The state is not only fragmented (T.B. Hansen 2005), but local politicians and mediators control everyday operations of bureaucracy (Berenschot 2010; Fuller et al. 2001, 22). In a similar vein I would argue that the difference between the political field and cinema is problematic. In both, the practices that we would consider to be part of these fields show overlaps, are fragmented, and various mediators cannot be put into straightforward categories as being related to exclusively the ‘political’ or the ‘cinema’. Therefore, setting aside the electoral politics that film stars get involved in, the various fringes of the messier daily everyday politicking by fan clubs shows how such divisions are problematic. Whereas fans do wish for an entry into electoral politics, and we therefore need to consider this as a separate field, the everyday practices by fans, as I will show throughout this book, show how such categories are much more distorted. Why would fans desire or support political practices through a film star and his fan clubs? Are these specific to fan clubs or to stardom or do they relate to other kinds of politicking as well? Rajinikanth was not active in electoral politics at the time even though he did participate in it in a particular way. He has supported political parties at certain times or actively denounced parties at other times. Politicking by fans is not necessarily related to electoral politics, even though it is certainly part of it. One of the initial steps that we must take to understand the intricacies of fan club practices is to unravel the relationship between fan and star and the everyday politicking that these relationships engender. I follow Srinivas in his emphasis on seeing the fan not as a product of everything else (caste, religion, political movement, gender, and economic class) except the cinema (S.V. Srinivas 2009). I also subscribe to Prasad’s emphasis on the pre-electoral political moment and the politicking as symptoms of a political system’s disarray (Prasad 2014). Where Srinivas shows how the cinema’s materiality is crucial to understand fandom, and Prasad considers the democratic, political disorder, I suggest that we must see fans in a specific time-space relation that makes fandom not merely about cinema, not merely about politics, but rather a generational movement of how fans relate to their stars. We need to look at the everyday

36 

Intimate Visualities and the Politics of Fandom in India

politicking practices to understand how this might also give us another nonlinear story of the cine-political phenomenon in Tamil Nadu. I use the term politicking specifically to indicate the various practices, interaction, and regimes of value that fan activity brings with it. I use the state as a frame of understanding that is the mid-level political unit between local government and national government, in this case the state of Tamil Nadu. For the purposes of this book I see politics or politicking not to be merely about state-level political parties and elections, but as much about everyday activities and subjectivities relating people, state, institutions, and spaces, and producing power and networks.16 They are about the social activities that are seen as political in some sense. Spencer has argued that to understand political practices it does not help to only see political acts as instrumental political action, rather we need to look at the unpredictability of where they are performed (Spencer 1997). Everyday politics has been the subject of several works on South Asia (T.B. Hansen 2005; Gupta 2012; Chatterjee 2004; Jeffrey 2010; Fuller and Bénéï 2001). They are part of the ‘vernacular’ structures of power (Kaviraj 1988) in which ordinary people mediate their access to state resources. Everyday politics may be related to larger networks of political parties and state institutions, but it is also about other kinds of mobilization, small talk, family events, and other less apparent sides of political practice. I would like to turn to Craig Jeffrey’s work on uneducated young men and the politics of waiting (Jeffrey 2010) to understand how everyday politicking practices articulate a certain agency in these men’s lives. Jeffrey describes the ways in which the everyday politics that young men are involved in can be seen in a Bourdieuian sense of capital and habitus. He draws specifically on the idea of the ‘f ields’ of social competition and the game that has stakes. Another important point he takes from Bourdieu is time and the ways in which subordinate classes ‘lack assets that confer advantage in everyday struggles and the spatio-temporal acuity that comes with routine success’ (Jeffrey 2010, 20). While seeing the usefulness of Bourdieu, Jeffrey also sees the limits in understanding the everyday politics that young men are involved in as class is not so rigidly and uncreatively formed. His ethnography shows how young, educated, middle-class men engage in various kinds of micro-tactics of everyday politics that are not necessarily bound to class and to the state. Seeing the ways in which class identities can be perpetuated, undermined, or removed from class interests, is also 16 The effect that national-level politics has on the politicking activities are beyond the scope of this book and are therefore not mentioned here.

Introduc tion

37

relevant for this study, as it shows how everyday political activities do not necessarily have to be successful in a clear-cut way, as offering mobility, visibility, or other kinds of social advantage. To the contrary, it is often not clear-cut at all. While politicking is impeded by class and caste boundaries – as lower-class/caste men have lower ranks within the fan club and less chance to gain recognition throughout the fan club – the ways in which smaller interventions, feelings of respect, and moments of belonging do happen, show that politicking is more than the class/caste boundaries suggest. It also calls our attention to the micro-tactics of everyday life and social mobilization. Besides the ways in which everyday politicking practices are cultivated though micro-tactics, the question remains as to what role a film star plays in this. If we go back to Spencer, we find he suggests that MGR inhabited the space between the fantasy of cinema and the fantasies of the political arena. He brings forth ‘a kind of politics in which the force of the idea of “representation” has connected it to other areas of popular culture, other kinds of representation – movies and their heroes and villains’ (Spencer 1997, 12). Film stars in Tamil Nadu have used their cinematic image for their political careers and fans have followed them, as Dickey has described for fans of MGR (Dickey 1993b). Yet, as we will see, Rajinikanth fans have expected such an electoral political move from their star but in vain, making some of them unsatisfied. Before I continue, a word of caution is needed about the specificity and generality of the argument put forward here. This ethnography is about fan club members of the film star Rajinikanth in a specific era of the Tamil film industry and political regime. The ways in which his fans related to him, presenced him, praised him, and rejected him is not necessarily generalizable for all Tamil film fan clubs. However, it does say something about the ways in which politicking and devotion are characterized in Tamil Nadu. I show in this book that fan club membership moves with age and status from cinematic pleasures to politicking practices while constantly balancing excess and moderation. I observed various forms of politicking, which were conceived as such within certain limits. By making visible the fan subjectivities expressed in practices that were enacted through the fan club, I hope to show that politicking is not merely an instrumental social mobilizing act but a way in which fan club members find meaning in different activities, including those linked to democratic politics, the state, and everyday mobilization, but also to the sensuous intensities of delight, wonder, and presence (see also A. Pandian 2017). Being a fan, in other words, is not always explainable in terms of rationality and pragmatism; rather,

38 

Intimate Visualities and the Politics of Fandom in India

it contains a level of attraction and engagement that is about desire and attraction and the sensation of cinema.

Cinematic audiences in South India Fandom and cinema cannot be explained out of pragmatism and political ambitions as I argued in the previous section. The aim of this book is not to analyse films or the life histories of film stars to understand the ways in which fans relate to cinema and its stars. Obviously, films and life histories matter to fans. I also do not aim to argue that fan clubs are all about politicking and that cinema has nothing to do with fandom. To the contrary, I will show how connecting to a star, cinema, and the fan club is a generational process that builds up with age and socioeconomic background. This helps us explore the different affectivities that fans build up. How do fans differ from the audience at large? And what can we understand from meaning-making of cinema in Tamil Nadu in general that helps us situate fan clubs? In media or film studies audience perception is very often still represented as an abstraction of thought, feeling, and seeing, coming together with assumptions on how a film text and its meanings make audiences have a given experience (L. Srinivas 2016; Dickey 1993a; Mulvey 1989; Ang 1991). Moreover, pleasure and entertainment are often ignored, with seeing popular media, following the Frankfurt School, being regarded as deception of the masses, as engagement with the political and ideological. But as several authors have pointed out, film-going is also about mere pleasure (L. Srinivas 2016; Dickey 1993a; Dyer 2002). In other words, ‘the audience’ is a problematic term if we want to understand the various engagements individual and collectivities have with the cinema. Throughout this book I will use the term audience occasionally, using it mostly in relation to how people speak of film-goers and the ‘masses’ as abstractions of those watching films. Moreover, since fan club membership is about more than film-watching alone, many other terms such as ‘film-goers’ are equally problematic, as they do not necessarily include the extended public that can for example be found at first-day film releases. One of the first, groundbreaking works that dealt with the place film had in the lives of the urban poor is Sara Dickey’s Cinema and the Urban Poor in South India (Dickey 1993a). This work was not only unique at the time in relation to Indian cinema but generally one of the first studies considering meaning-making by filmmakers, film viewers, and fan clubs. Situated in Madurai, she shows how films matter for those who take popular

Introduc tion

39

film seriously. Cinema is connected, Dickey argues, ‘to some of the most poignant concerns of viewers’ lives and, far from being divorced from those lives, influences everyday conduct’ (1993a, 5). The significance of cinema lies ‘in an escape constituted through utopian fantasy, the pleasure of that escape derives from its roots in real-life social and psychological stresses and from the soothing of those stresses through melodramatic crisis resolution’ (Dickey 1993a, 175). Lakshmi Srinivas in her recent work on film-going in Bangalore has attended to the social practices, experiences, and aesthetics of film-going in relation to urban geography and by considering the heterogeneity of audiences in the cinema. Srinivas uses the notion of the ‘active audience’ to describe improvised, spontaneous, and performative experience in contrast to the silent absorption of films (L. Srinivas 2016, 3). What is relevant in her work is her attention to this mundane reality of cinema: how social relations, individual preferences, spatial embeddedness, and trivia such as buying tickets, make up the film-going experience. This attention to the mundane, to improvisation and fragmentedness is important if we want to understand ‘audience’ engagement with films. Film-goers are not necessarily always interested in a film as an entirety, and the pleasure of watching already starts before actually watching the film. Media already pay attention to films and songs, and short trailers are released in advance and fans organize their activities around the first days of the film. The collectivity created around such media and practices of this experience is therefore as important as watching the film itself. The agency and activity by film-goers that is acknowledged in such an approach removes us from seeing cinema as something that is only watched and taken in, as something that is merely the effect of something else. This becomes even more obvious if we return to the ways in which cinema and politics have intersected. It has not only been a top-down political entanglement, from film stars to fans who take over their stars’ political articulations. Rather, what I will show here is how fandom is expected to be political at a certain point. The Tamil f ilm industry in the 1990s and 2000s has been fashioned around star celebrity, where personages such as Rajinikanth were built up. By maximizing screen exposure, and presenting a star as Rajinikanth as a powerful personality, the mass hero is reinforced on screen (Nakassis 2017b, 2009). Fans have mostly confirmed the leadership figure of male film stars but also rejected or resisted changes in their star’s image (see also Prasad 2014; S.V. Srinivas 2016). The screen appearance of Rajinikanth is not only his screen image but is reinforced by his off-screen image. There exists an ontological identity between screen image and its object: ‘Every

40 

Intimate Visualities and the Politics of Fandom in India

avatar-character “played” by Rajinikanth is Rajinikanth, performatively presenced in the moment of the image’s apperception’ (Nakassis 2017b, 291). Nakassis has emphasized the intertextuality of Rajini’s performative and indexical acts, producing a metapragmatics of presence which endorses his cine-political potential (Nakassis 2017b, 209). Richard Dyer, in his study on Hollywood stars, argues that a star’s image consists of the complex and contradicting interplay of his or her ‘image’ made up of screen roles and image of the real person (Dyer 2004, 7). Time is a relevant factor here: a star’s image is not static, since different elements of a star’s image predominate in different images and in different periods (Dyer 2004). Likewise, a star’s image is a constant mediation of the natural person – like us – and the larger-than-life screen image. It is the amalgamation of the real and the reel, of a dream world that appeals because it relates to concerns and issues of ordinary life that makes cinema and their stars attractive (Dickey 1993a; A. Pandian 2008, 2017). This is a different kind of merging of images than has been suggested for the blurring of onscreen messages of stars to their off-screen political promises in Tamil cine-politics. The blurring of images is not a consequential taking over of messages of films but rather of an active presencing of film stars. Fans engage with images outside of the movie screen and therefore construct such screen and real images. Crucial here is to acknowledge the complexity and contradictions characteristic of images of stars. Presencing of a star and the creation of his image goes beyond rational, pragmatic explanations of why fans feel attracted, what attracts, and how such feelings and ideas can also fade away. Following Richard Dyer and Anand Pandian, we should not forget that fandom and the fan-star relation gain their force and intensity from the way these are experienced, ‘the sensory textures of this experience, and the circumstances of their crafting’ (A. Pandian 2017, xxi; Dyer 2004). This experience cannot always be explained in words. One way in which I believe we come a bit closer to this experience is through a focus on images. It brings to light how fans negotiate and experience the practical as well as the wondrous stuff of fandom. Images are part of this wonder.

Affective images: Intimate publics and public intimacy Images of film stars circulate widely. By images, I mean the actual, physical image as well as a mental construction. In this book I oscillate between these two meanings, which sometimes blur. The physical image can prompt mental images and vice versa. However, for the most part, this book is about

Introduc tion

41

the physical, material objects. Their lifespan exceeds their initial cinematic publicity purpose, triggering new meanings and responses that are channelled through the adulation of a star and visualized by an array of images (Dwyer and Patel 2002; Mazumdar 2007b, 92). Film posters are exhibited in houses and shops, vinyl banners are reused as covers for trucks, houses, or canopies. A repeatedly appearing story in Tamil Nadu, for example, suggests that slumlords in the city of Coimbatore used to pull down billboards of MGR and let them to women in slums to sleep on overnight.17 Fan clubs, for their part, reuse commercial images of their star for the murals, posters, and billboards they make for fan events or images they keep as keepsakes at home. Photos of the star and of fan events appear in family albums, and brothers fight over images at home. The circulation of Rajinikanth’s image beyond the screen has been crucial in building up his star persona.18 As Kaza Raja posted his message about the circulation of Rajinikanth fever, the film Sivaji: The Boss was being announced, speculated upon, and discussed in various magazines and newspapers; the songs had been released some weeks in advance, posters announcing the movie were displayed everywhere, and fans had started to collect and use images of Rajinikanth to prepare their own imagery that would be part of their film celebrations and their own life-cycle celebrations. These different interacting media genres create and reinforce modes of seeing and more general sensorial engagements with a film that has not yet been released. In this inter-ocular field ‘meanings, scripts and symbols transfer from one site to another’ (Appadurai and Breckenridge 1992, 41). The images as made, collected, and displayed by fan club members interconnect in meaning, aesthetics, spaces of display, and the politicking they enact with other imagery in Tamil Nadu. The aim of this book however is not to analyze the images as aesthetic objects, or to restrict their meaning to what they depict. Moreover, the sensory experiences of fandom I just described alert us to thinking about the image as more than just an image. What images are or do is not clear, as Mitchell has noted: The simplest way to put this is to say that, in what is often characterized as an age of “spectacle” (Guy Debord), “surveillance” (Foucault), and all-pervasive image-making, we still do not know exactly what pictures are, what their relation to language is, how they operate on observers

17 This story was also covered in the magazine India Today (Vāsanti 2006, 78). 18 See also Rosie Thomas’s work on fanzines in which she demonstrates how gossip in fanzines constructs an actress’s star persona (Thomas 1989).

42 

Intimate Visualities and the Politics of Fandom in India

and on the world, how their history is to be understood, and what is to be done with or about them. (W.J.T. Mitchell 2007, 13)

What makes images so difficult to theorize is their irreducibility to a visuality mediated exclusively by language (K. Jain 2007, 28; see also Pinney 2006). Images are more than can be said about them. Nevertheless, we can attempt to grasp the image as representation and material object by looking at its biography and movement, its enframement, technologies, affect, and uptake (Spyer and Steedly 2013). Images, in other words, are not merely what is represented by them but also the material object itself. They are worked with, touched, looked at, installed, removed, demolished, or reused. Images are material presences and their meanings are produced by and in their production, consumption, material form, or various ideological, political, and cultural positions and conditions (Edwards 2012; Poole 1997, 7-8; Spyer and Steedly 2013). The biography of things, as Igor Kopytoff has argued, makes us aware of the social contexts in which images appear and reappear and shows the move meaning or use of representation and object (Kopytoff 1988). But not only do objects move as individual things, their common form can also change in mode of production, general outlook, or media in which they are ‘screened’. These technologies and media also shape images, produce meaning and the practices in which they appear (Edwards 2012). Technologies contour their capacities: they evoke and limit their possibilities just as the circuits in which they move (Spyer and Steedly 2013, 8). Images, Kajri Jain has argued, are bodies that move: they move from sites of production to those of circulation and use; they move across the states of commodity, gift, icon, ornament, waste; they move in and out of people’s everyday lives and frames of value. In doing so they also move people in and out of their everyday lives, in and out of “history”; they act on bodies and create relationships between bodies. (K. Jain 2007, 218-219).

Jain’s work acknowledges the different frameworks in which we can try to understand what images do and are, by looking at their mobility. Or as Spyer and Steedly have argued: images move and move us, that is, they are in motion and they affect us (Spyer and Steedly 2013). Where, when, in which constellations, through which forms and technologies they take shape tells us something about them. Images need a frame, not merely a physical frame for representation but also a setting in which to represent, which all attempt to focus attention and response of the viewer (Davis

Introduc tion

43

1997, 9). While images are intended to be looked at, they are also ignored, intended for a specif ic public, willingly or unwillingly including some and excluding others. The aesthetic outlook, its location and repetition of something familiar contributes to who feels addressed by these images (Warner 2002). Recognizing the material presence of images and the desires set in them necessarily also attends us to the affective relations with images that goes beyond the visual (see Pinney 2004; K. Jain 2007; Meyer 2011). Seeing does not only include the visual but also attends to the affective, sensorial forms mediated through the image. Images kindle, produce, and convey desires, ambitions and imaginations through sensory experiences and engagements. Looking not only includes the visual but various sensorial forms mediated through and because of the image. ‘All media are mixed media’ W.J.T. Mitchell suggested, ‘[t]hat is, the very notion of a medium and of mediation already entails some mixture of sensory, perceptual and semiotic elements’ (2005a, 260). One of the questions that this work brings forward is how such affective relations are constructed between fan and star. How are images infused with the presence of a star and how do images mediate or contain such presence? The many nuanced questions raised by studies of images and media in the West are multiplied in the context of India with its own distinctive history of images and their interpretation. Hindu devotees consider physical objects that represent deities to come to be infused with the presence, life, or power of those deities (Davis 1997, 6). Visuality in India has commonly been discussed in relation to this tactile mode of visuality in Hindu religious practice called darshan. Diana Eck’s influential work on darshan notes that the term can be translated as seeing and being seen by the divine and implies a direct, corporeal, reciprocal, and affective understanding of seeing (Eck 1981; Babb 1981). The reciprocal gaze and active, repetitive veneration create a relationship or bond of intimacy between image (as material presence and what is depicted) and beholder (Appadurai and Breckenridge 1992, 46-50; Meyer 2011). Even though darshan is primarily a Hindu religious concept, it is used for a wider practice of viewing in India as well. Images of gods, gurus, deceased family members, politicians, or film stars can be imbued with extraordinary power, and exchanging gazes with them empowers the viewer as well (Babb 1981; Pinney 2001; Ramaswamy 1998; K. Jain 2007; Taylor 2003; Ramaswamy 2010). In these images, the eyes

44 

Intimate Visualities and the Politics of Fandom in India

of those portrayed often look directly at the viewer, thereby exchanging gazes with him or her.19 While darshan’s contribution to everyday visuality is recognized and emphasized by many scholars of South Asian visual culture, Rachel Dwyer argues that the ways in which darshan can help us actually understand visual practices and visuality in a South Asian context still lack in-depth analysis (2006, 284). Investigating other forms of religious and non-religious practices in different contexts or regions shows us that labelling a highly complicated embodied corporeal practice as darshan leaves little scope for, and can even impede, in-depth analysis. Sophie Hawkins, in an attempt to rethink darshan, argues that ‘[r]ather than understanding darshan to be an end in itself […] it becomes merely one aspect in a repertoire of devotional aspirations that seek union with God’ (Hawkins 1999, 150). Moreover, the mutual gaze of viewer and viewed is not unique to South Asia or to a Hindu religious way of seeing but rather identifies a widespread way of seeing (Benjamin 1969; W.J.T. Mitchell 2005b; Morgan 2005; Pinney 2006; Taylor 2003). Vision is polyscopic and the act of seeing is real beyond darshan as it also includes the inauspicious evil eye, drishti (Taylor 2003; Dean 2013). In other words, we should be careful with defining the inter-ocular visuality and the gaze as deriving merely from a Hindu religious background. It raises the question whether a tactile mode of visuality is fundamentally religious or if the religious and the cinematic share a similar semiotic ideology and phenomenology (Nakassis 2017a, 3 footnote 17). Not all vision is darshanic even if it is transactional, so how do we come to terms with this tactile, religious mode of visuality? A territorial or culturalist understanding or conceptualization of visuality suggests that historical transformation is subordinate to suprahistorical forces such as Hinduism (Bhatti and Pinney 2011, 231). Shaila Bhatti and Christopher Pinney have critically questioned this supposed regionality of visuality and, following Latour, asked what a ‘networked’ anthropological analysis of Indian modes of visuality might look like. They argued for a historicized account and a ‘networked’ approach that would attempt to understand current changing idioms ‘through which questions of visuality make themselves apparent within India’ (Bhatti and Pinney 2011, 231-232). Such an approach is useful as it does not do away 19 Preminda Jacob cites the example of AIADMK leader Jayalalitha who gave regular darshan appearances on the balcony of her home in Chennai (Jacob 2009). At regular intervals she appeared on her balcony just to look at people and let people look at her. These appearances, and the way they were announced with a signboard indicating the hours, are similar to the temples where the appearances of deities are scheduled as well.

Introduc tion

45

phenomenologically with darshanic modes of visuality and the effects of seeing and being seen but attempts to also consider other ways in which current transformations take place. A similar critique accounts for devotion and how to understand the enthusiasm and energies fans put into their star. A common understanding of popular devotion is through the notion of bhakti. Bhakti is a form of devotion directly attending to the deity, unmediated by a Brahmin priest. This denotes that deities can also be worshipped at home and in other locations, mediated among others through popular prints, the so-called calendar or bazaar art (K. Jain 2007; Pinney 2004; Uberoi 1990). We can apply such a notion to the ways fans invest in their star, but need to be careful not to fall into the trap of seeing fan devotion as essentially originating in Indian tradition and civilization while ignoring other sources that explain fan practices (Prasad 2014, 172). Again, as Madhava Prasad argues, the question here would be whether fans merely ‘borrow’ religious devotional practices when they worship their star in similar ways or if their star worship is an independent site of enthusiasm which derives elements from other sources. Therefore, even though the religious analogy (in the form of darshan and/or bhakti) is useful to take account of, fan practices cannot be seen as simply a secularized form of religious worship. Therefore, instead of framing such encounters between fan and star in religious terms, I find Pinney’s concept of corpothetics, that is, an embodied and corporeal aesthetics, instead of ‘disinterested’ representation, helpful as including wider embodied engagements with images is much more useful (2004, 8). Pinney introduces the concept of corpothetics in order to deal with the embodied, active ways in which images are appropriated in India. He contrasts a Kantian tradition of aesthetics, which separates the image from the beholder and implies a disinterested evaluation of images, with corpothetics, which ‘entails a desire to fuse image and beholder, and an evaluation of efficacy […] as the central criterion of value’ (ibid., 194). This helps us understand the sense of touch that occurs between fans and stars not merely as sites of devotion or worship but as intimate, tactical encounters, mediated through imagery that fans collect, display, change, create, and relate to. The corpothetics mediated through and present in images contains desires and ambitions that partly craft the experience of fandom. This is, I will show, to some extent about seeking proximity to the star, but is also about staging oneself as a fan. Images become central in the ways in which fandom is articulated as they are produced, used, discussed, and remembered. Images like these do not stand on their own but are embedded in their

46 

Intimate Visualities and the Politics of Fandom in India

social surroundings and act as mediators to access something else, such as establishing personalities or bringing close an absent star (Latour 2002). Birgit Meyer, in discussing religious pictures, has argued that pictures do not have intrinsic power or agency but mediate the imagination and shape belief in particular ways (2011). They are indispensable – as stand-ins for the absent body – to articulate and materialize the religious imagination and its mental images (Meyer 2011, 1037; see also Morgan 1998). In a similar vein, I would suggest that the images put up by fans, by standing in for the absent, shape the cinematic and political imagination and the ways in which fandom is enacted and lived. Therefore, the corpothetic sense of engagement with a film star or his image, is not merely an act of devotion but shapes fan communities and subjectivities. It gives material and imaginary form to fandom. Images in that sense are the symbolic and spatial tropes of fandom and indicate their shifting temporalities and subjectivities. While fandom often starts with cinematic pleasure, it often shifts to politicking networks in later stages of fan careers. Publicly exhibited imagery mediates these imaginaries and ambitions. Therefore, while I agree with Meyer that images mediate the imagination, I would see signs and cutouts as active agents that work and do something for their audiences (Gell 1998). Karen Stern, who follows Gell’s argument on the agency of art objects, writes on graffiti, and understands it as a type of action and not only a product of action (Stern 2018, 22-23). In this way, graffiti, or Rajinikanth cutouts for that matter, function as social agents that endure as lasting and powerful substitutes for the activities and agencies of their original creators (Stern 2018, 23). Image producers and users respond to each other, cluster together, take over each other’s style (within and beyond fan imagery, as also for example temple images have taken over the vibrant colours of film), or ask others to respond. In this way, the social life of the images goes beyond the cutout of Rajini as an active agent.

Spectacular icons, public spaces, visual strategies Urban spaces are mediated environments (Hirschkind 2006; Larkin 2008; Spitulnik 1993; Sundaram 2009). Images, sounds, and cinemas form the everyday experiences of cities. The visible and material urban reality also informs an invisible space of imaginations, anxieties, and aspirations (see also de Boeck and Plissart 2004). Images need their surroundings to be seen, and people must see them for the images to be effective. The ‘onlookers’ can be a specific audience that excludes other potential viewers (Spyer

Introduc tion

47

and Steedly 2013). Images, in that sense, are part of the communities of fans in which they perform and produce the imagined community of fans and star. Tamil Nadu’s spectacular display of cinematic and political images is a site of symbolic and territorial claiming of space. Although the close relationship between cinema and politics in Tamil Nadu has received widespread consideration in terms of the transmission of screen image or public personality to politics, the way in which these relationships have been portrayed in images other than on screen has received surprisingly little attention. One exception is the work of Preminda Jacob, who in her book Celluloid Deities argues that the forms of popular art such as films and banners portray the personal lives and public roles of (cine)-politicians as identical (2009). In other words, the screen image of a hero fighting injustice blurs with his public life as a politician. This in turn convinces audiences of the sincerity of the person and as such augments his or her celebrity status. Although Jacob’s work identifies the ways in which cinema and politics merge in images outside the realm of the screen, it does so from the point of view of a political party that is deliberately trying to convey an image of its leaders. Jacob concentrates primarily on the ways in which personality images blur through the exhibition of cutouts and banners by focusing on some of the leading artists of Chennai’s banner industry. She describes in detail how these companies work and how screen and political images fuse. Within this context of ubiquitous display, I am interested in the many less well-known artists that do work for local party members and fans alike and how they construct images that may be a fusion of cinema and politics but may also be something else, not necessarily related to this obvious entanglement (Gerritsen 2013). Both fans and political party workers commission banner artists. The ways in which they publicize their hero’s image and show their loyalty suggest a much more complicated process in which public personae are produced. Moreover, fans collect images; they display them at home in enlarged and enframed form, paste them on their motorbike, put them in their pocket; or, for special fan events, produce posters and banners which they display in public spaces. Fans are active agents in the construction of meaning for these images: they do not merely consume them but produce them. I am therefore not merely interested in their consumption, but also in their production process. The local scale of the production raises the question of how we situate these images vis-à-vis the alleged grand narratives of personality production of film stars and politicians. The investment put in images and the corpothetics at play show that such images are more than a confirmation of the blurring of cinematic and political subjectivities. The images made by fans are as much about

48 

Intimate Visualities and the Politics of Fandom in India

star devotion and constructing and emphasizing a star’s fame as they are about exposing fan club activity and individual fans. Not only does their content convey these different desires, the act of collecting, disseminating, and exhibiting articulates their efficacy and the affective relationships that they establish. It shows how personal fame is being built up in and through images and how a fan-star relationship is cultivated. The spectacular quality of the images of film stars, but also of political figures in Tamil Nadu’s urban landscapes brings together the imaginaries of communities, politics, and counter-politics. In the last Chapter, I show other forms of uptake and parallel strategies of using urban walls that can tell us something about the symbolical assertion of images and imaginaries. The city government of Chennai has initiated the removal of political and cinematic posters from public walls on some of the major thoroughfares through the city. Educational and ‘traditional’ images suddenly ornamented walls and the government openly criticized the distraction and de-aesthetization of the city by political imagery. This shift, I argue, fits in a larger discourse in post-liberal India that witnessed several cities aspiring world-class stature, cleaning up strategic parts of the city, enriching it with symbolic markers of world class (Beelen, Gerritsen, and Srivathsan 2010). At the same time, it is a continuation, yet in a different form, of a political competition of the dominant political parties in Tamil Nadu. The images intended to fashion new political and governmental legitimacy to Chennai’s rising middle class. They became part of the city as arena for consolidating power and identities (Kusno 2010, 82), adding to the visual strategies that public spaces comprise. I understand public imagery in this sense as part of these arenas where power, aspirations, and desires are played out. Its uptake traverses the publics they are intended for. Occasionally they replace each other but mostly they are different visual strategies competing on Tamil Nadu’s walls. And what’s more, the lives of the billboards, murals, and posters are of an ephemeral quality, at least in the public display they are intended for. Yet they compose the city spaces that they are exhibited in. In this way, the permissibility of the images depends on the places where and times at which they are displayed. They exhibit claims to space and the city that attend to different audiences. Their size and quantity make them, to paraphrase Raqs Media Collective, become the spaces they inhabit. They appear but also fade, disappear, and reappear in altered forms, for new publics or as distinct strategies.

Introduc tion

49

This book Images were not only the subject of my research in conversations; they also led me to the people I encountered and got to know well over the last few years. The research was conducted from 2006 to 2011, with three sixmonth research periods and a few short trips. I used participant observation (about which I have more to say below), media elicitation, and countless of interviews with fan club members, their families, banner artists, cinema owners, politicians, and so forth. The fieldwork has been mostly done in Puducherry and Chennai. As often in anthropology, coincidence, lucky moments, and missed chances were part and parcel of my work. While doing an intensive Tamil-language course in Puducherry, I was introduced to fan club members who informed me about the turbulent times the fan clubs were going through in town. I saw this moment of conflict (which I will spell out in detail in the chapters below) as a unique chance to see what was considered normal and what not, how the fan club should look like and how not. Therefore, instead of moving further after my language course, I decided to stay. Puducherry is a town 150 km south of Tamil Nadu’s capital Chennai. Its centre is a gridded town flocked with on the one hand well-kept colourful colonial buildings, and on the other hand many structures painted grey, marking them as being owned by the Sri Aurobindo Ashram. As a former French colony, it still houses French research institutions, a Lycée Français, a French consulate, and various other visual, linguistic, and social links that disclose the town’s colonial history. This so-called white town is remarkably quiet in comparison to average Indian towns, mostly filled with the foreign inhabitants and tourists that move around on mopeds and bicycles. This is enhanced by the nearby presence of Auroville, an experimental commune founded by Mira Alfassa (known by her followers as the Mother), the collaborator of Sri Aurobindo, who founded the ashram in Puducherry. The universal town, as Auroville is also called, houses people from all over the world – from Bengal to Italy – and attracts numerous visitors who stay there temporarily. Throughout the years that I have spent there, the city boomed as a tourist location, not only for foreign tourists but mostly for Indian tourists, often coming from Bengaluru, as it makes a good weekend trip to charming Puducherry and spiritual Auroville. But as soon as you divert from the road from Auroville to Puducherry or move outside of the core centre of the town you encounter a different Puducherry. For the people that I worked with Puducherry was another town, far away from the tourist bubble of the centre, far away from the Ashram. None of the fan club members that I have worked with came to

50 

Intimate Visualities and the Politics of Fandom in India

the white town, except for an exceptional evening walk on the beach or for selling their wares on the streets. Several fans worked and lived in an area just bordering Auroville, but for them it was an inaccessible world, they explained. I also encountered yet another Puducherry. Travelling by motorbike, bicycle, or on foot in Puducherry, Villupuram district, and Tamil Nadu’s capital Chennai with my camera always at hand, I took countless pictures of the myriad banners, posters, and other images that I came across. It was as if I got to know the lives of particular people in Puducherry through images; knowing their faces, political colours, deaths in the family, birthdays, and the like gave me a first glimpse into people’s histories. Fans’ banners, murals, and posters led me to their fan clubs; they allowed me to recognize relationships between fans and they steered me towards the producers of their images. I photographed murals and cutouts created by artists that I tried to search for later using their name and phone number, which they added as their signature on every mural and banner. I got to know the most popular banner artists by seeing their work exhibited throughout the city. In this way images became my signposts, leading me to being introduced in Puducherry. They were a topic of research, as I could talk about them, track them, and get to know fans before I even met them. These images made the urban areas of Puducherry and Chennai spaces in which I got to know its residents through their images. From that point onwards, my network of fans soon expanded to other fans, not only in Puducherry but also in Tamil Nadu at large. Chennai, the fourth largest city of India, was the second location where I spent large amounts of time. The capital of Tamil Nadu, of the film industry and of the main cutout artists, for me the city offered another view on what I experienced in a smaller scale in Puducherry. Here I could trace the All-India Rajinikanth Fan Club and fan clubs of other stars, and I spoke to various cutout artists and to cinema managers. But something else happened that turned out to be crucial for the development of my argument. In Chennai, the city’s walls on main locations got repainted with cultural scenery from the state. Instead of politicians and film stars, cutout artists were painting murals ranging from famous temples to nature scenes. This change allowed me not only to speak with my respondents about the affectivity of public imagery, it also allowed me to see a shift in an era and its related cinematic regimes, publics and modes of political mobilization. Throughout my research it started to become increasingly clear that images were crucial in how fans practised fandom. Images were discussed, looked at, displayed in the everyday spaces of the home, in a person’s wallet,

Introduc tion

51

or exhibited in public spaces. Images provided an opportunity for gossip, criticism, or uttering and gaining respect. Despite the omnipresence of images, my fieldwork and the subject of my research was dominated by the absence of Rajinikanth. Despite this absence he was the focal point of the fan club, but it was the distance to him that made him the subject of hours of conversations: he was the reason I met people and entered their lives. Through these encounters Rajinikanth entered my life as well: talking about him, thinking about him and writing about him every day until the last letter of this book had been written. Talking about images was also a way to overcome the gap between my interlocutors – mostly men from eighteen to forty years old – and myself, a young, foreign woman. Being a female researcher had certain difficulties for ‘deep hanging out’ (Geertz 1998) with a group of men, yet, the idea that someone from outside of India came all the way to Tamil Nadu to study Rajinikanth was what made many fan club members want to spend time with me. Like the images that served as evidence of fandom, the presence of a young foreigner attested to the fans’ dedication to Rajinikanth – I had chosen to study them, and not other (inferior) fans. Moreover, my presence, as a foreigner, was significant in that it signalled that their relationship towards Rajinikanth was of international significance. Everyone hoped that I could convey the details of their fandom and their fervour for Rajinikanth. This obviously affected what people told me about their activities. One way to overcome the gender divide was working with a male research assistant. I have worked mostly with Gandhirajan, a friend, researcher, traveller, and connoisseur of Tamil art, who was also highly interested in the affects produced by the visual aspects of fandom. Besides helping me to overcome my language flaws, he was considered a trustworthy broker between the men I worked with and myself. With him at my side, people could invite me to places and events that were otherwise inappropriate to invite me to. But certainly, my gender also excluded me from some domains that would otherwise have been more accessible. But such in- and exclusions are present in research at large and the phenomenon itself, fandom, in a way is all about presenting an image of oneself as a dedicated fan to others, whether or not those others are actually present (as fellow audience members in a cinema) or only imagined (as passers-by viewing a cutout). Hence, I do realize that the ways fans showed their dedication is partly the result of my own presence. At the same time, I was also a safe outsider to whom some fans and politicians told or showed things that would otherwise not have been made explicit. With this in mind, one must read the account presented here. I have decided not to anonymize my interlocutors. The

52 

Intimate Visualities and the Politics of Fandom in India

decision to keep the real names goes together with the photographs that are displayed. Just as the fans’ own fandom was on display and they sought ways to archive their fan commitment, they often considered me as a way to prove their fandom to a larger audience. They eagerly wanted to share their images and see their work published. Likewise, the dissemination of their names was not seen as problematic. While I am aware that people cannot always oversee the consequences of such public presentation of ethnographic work, I believe the public visibility of being present in this book does not harm my interlocutors. Moreover, the public images reveal the names of fans with their photo, and the names of the artists, often also with their phone number as advertisements for their work. Anonymizing these images would not only conceal most of the relevancy of the images; it would also only be partly effective. Whereas the first four chapters are mainly about fan clubs, images, and the production of public imagery, the last chapter brings fandom into a larger debate about the processes, politics, and effects of image production. To disentangle the different stages of fandom mentioned above, Chapter 1 to 4 are structured around these stages, following fans from film-watching and political networking to the anti-climax of non-politics. The erasure of fandom by citywide beautification schemes brings this book to a close as I examine the nexus of spectacle and city, and the ways in which urban spaces serve as canvases for various shifting sociopolitical projects is the topic of Chapter 5. I consider images as the leitmotiv in these various articulations of fandom. I have separated two kinds of image practices: the everyday mundane images that fans collect personally and display personally and the collective banners and posters made in the name of the fan club. Separating these two spheres of consumption, however, is somewhat artificial since it appears to assume a natural distinction between ‘private’ and ‘public’. As we will see later, the images displayed in the public realm are on the one hand public statements in that they are on display for everyone passing by; on the other hand, they are as much about a personal, intimate relationship with the star. Personal collections of star imagery on the other hand are mostly collected from publicly available commercial magazines, newspapers, or as rings or gadgets given away free with other consumer goods and thereafter used in everyday spaces of the home or to decorate the body. Even though displayed in the privacy of the home, they do attend to community constraints. The distinction I make here is not to understand these publicly and privately displayed images as separate categories played out in different spaces; rather,

Introduc tion

53

I attempt to map out the different ways in which fans engage with images and constitute spheres of intimacy and publicity by producing these images. The book opens with a description of the personal affection for and relationship with a star. I show how fans become fans, along with their expectations and desires related to film and film stars. Films and circulating images and narratives play an important role in the construction of affection towards a star. In Chapter 1, I provide an ethnography of the figure of the fan and the relationships and intimacies that fans establish with their star. I situate these ethnographic details in theories on fandom in India and beyond and argue that we cannot single out one ‘reason’ why fans become a member of a fan club or why they feel themselves the fan of a star. I deliberately use the terms figure and ethnography in what seems to be a paradox, a nuanced account of a figure that assumes the generic. But I use the idea of the figure, following Barker and Lindquist, as an individual who is a creatively constituted subject position that can tell us something about a particular historical moment (2009, 37). In this way the chapter focuses not on what the figure of the fan is but rather on how it is perceived in scholarly accounts and in the realm of public opinion. I move from these accounts to the personal life stories of fans and the cinematic engagements in which fans relate to their star and construct a network of fans. Chapter 2 focuses on the role of images in the everyday life of fans in the construction of desires and imaginations. Fans collect and display all kinds of images of their star in the everyday spaces of their home. These generic images, often obtained from commercial magazines and the like, articulate personal engagements with the star. I will show various ways in which fans personalize images and as such engender intimacy between them and their hero. This chapter demonstrates how fandom is inflected in familial relationships as well as being informed by them. Moreover, it shows how personalized images of film stars in everyday settings instil a relation with the star. Chapters 3 and 4, move on to fan clubs’ public activities and political networking. Fans organize social welfare events on special occasions in the name of their star. Chapter 3 explores these activities and shows how these social welfare activities and the hierarchical relationships within fan clubs generate a political style mediating praise, respect, and prestige. This chapter also demonstrates how once fans are older, they expect the fan club to be a network in which politicking becomes an essential part. The chapter situates fan politics within a broader perspective of honour, prestige, and respect as an essential part of political culture in South India. However, the chapter also shows how, despite the obvious patronage relationships

54 

Intimate Visualities and the Politics of Fandom in India

that establish themselves through fan practices and the political work fans become involved in, politicking also reveals a fine balance between being active in political networks and using the fan club for one’s own gain. Chapter 4 pushes this tension further as I discuss how banners, posters, and murals are an essential part of the events that fan clubs organize. By highlighting the production of imagery for fan events, I also represent the artists who make these images and consequently evoke themes of efficacy, intimacy, and the effect of the painted image. From narratives on the artists and effective images I go on to describe a technological change that has taken place in Tamil Nadu in the last few years. Fans have started to use digitally designed vinyl banners instead of painted ones. I will show how the advent of vinyl has resulted in reflections on the efficacy of painted and digital images as well as an enhanced visibility for fans. This visibility via images has shown itself to be crucial in the political networking activities of fans: it has enhanced their prestige and their access to sociopolitical networks. Whereas the first chapters of this book revolve around fan clubs and visuality, in the last chapter I move to the counter-politics of the image. Chapter 5, which deals with a beautif ication initiative in Chennai in which public culture, as displayed by fans and political supporters alike, is abandoned and replaced by new imagery, one that substitutes images promoting the glory of Tamil history, culture, and land and the Hindu religion for images of individual film star-politicians. I argue that these images articulate a shift from a particular political practice in Tamil Nadu towards neoliberal imaginings of a ‘shining India’ that seem to indicate competing visual strategies of politics and politicking that is prevalent in Tamil Nadu. Banners are increasingly restricted and in Chennai neoliberal ideologies have been illustrated in a set of murals of a recent ‘beautification’ initiative. Public walls are now beautified by means of images showing a neo-classicist, touristic version of cultural heritage and nature scenes in the local government’s attempt at a ‘world-class’ makeover of Chennai. Taken as a whole, I move from the figure of the fan via everyday image production and consumption, the display of images in public spaces and conflicts over image media and placement to a counter-politics of new, neoliberal imaginaries and the ideology of promoting a world-class city and Tamil culture. I end this book with a short epilogue in which I prefigure certain changes that may make fan clubs lose ground in the cinematic and political realms in which they circulate.

1

Keeping in control The figure of the fan in the tamil film industry Flip that ciggie: Late nights with the Rajini army Enthiran. Day one. Late night show. An impossible-to-attain ticket procured after hopping through a warren of dens. Fan clubs have bulk-blocked cinemas for almost the next two weeks. Inside the packed auditorium full of die-hard fans in auto-erotic animation, Rajni signals his arrival through digital fracture. Ra-ja-ni. His name punches the screen alphabet by alphabet. Phatakphatak-phatak. The alphabets form digitally in the morphology of monolithic architecture. Then the full name repeats in a final smashing crescendo. The acolytes are on their feet, arms extended towards the Holy Name. A collective baying engulfs the hall, drowning the high-decibel ambitions of the Dolby system. By now, the Rajni raanuvam (army) is jumping in the aisles in the most vivid display of premature ejaculation ever in public. The sighting of the messiah is imminent, and the flock is in a state of self-hypnotised hysteria. Rajni reigns. However, the audience reaction at the beginning and the end of this Rajinikanth blockbuster is a study in contrast. The audience enters the hall on the crest of a hype that has been sustained over months. At last, on this auspicious Friday, the serious Rajni fan has been active since 3 am, decorating the entrances to cinemas with flags, festoons and cut-outs, performing honey and milk abhishekams [ritual baths] on their idol and dancing in the streets. So, when the fans eventually enter the hall on high adrenalin, it makes no difference to them what the film is. Their ecstasy derives from the fact that the deity who was remote and distant in his garbha griha [inner sanctum] is now manifest as an utsav murti [festival image], come out in their midst in a new avatar. It’s celebration time. (Menon 2010, 18)

On 1 October 2010, the film Enthiran (Shankar 2010), featuring the film star Rajinikanth, was released in more than 2000 cinemas around the world, more than 500 of which were in Tamil Nadu alone (Ravikumar 2010). As with every film release involving a popular Tamil film hero and particularly ones featuring Rajinikanth, the aural and visual presence of the audience in and around cinemas was noteworthy. But when commentators such as Menon describe the craze during a film release of a Rajinikanth film, they are not

56 

Intimate Visualities and the Politics of Fandom in India

generally referring to this wide-ranging audience but rather to the ‘fanatic’ behaviour of a particular type of audience – that is, young men, many of whom are members of a fan club. Just as Menon is doing in his piece, many journalists write about these festive moments celebrated by fans in terms of amazement, bewilderment, and mockery. Fans are described as rowdies and devotees or, at the very least, as somewhat fanatical and noisy figures worshipping every move their hero makes. With every release, journalists make much of the ‘behaviour’ of fans at the cinema: anointing the superstar’s larger-than-life billboards with milk or beer, dancing, whistling in the cinema hall, and, if really excited, damaging the cinema if the manager does not want to replay a song that they want to hear once more. Besides being part of myriad news items, the stories told here are also symptomatic of almost any account of fan clubs in Tamil Nadu. Throughout my research, almost every person whom I told about the topic of fan clubs readily recounted these same stereotypical narratives of excessive fan behaviour. These narratives were mostly derisive in nature, pointing to the lower-classness of fans. This image of fan behaviour results in Tamil film fans being commonly seen as the central figures of film-watching. Yet, fan club members recognize themselves or other fan club members in these narratives as well, sometimes expressing this in terms of embarrassment and sometimes with pride or pleasure. Fandom, I suggest, forms a continuous negotiation of intense affinity, affection, and excess versus justification, control, and denunciation. This chapter interrogates the binary of the figure as image and the figure as subject position. Taking a cue from Barker and Lindquist (2009), I want to take up the notion of the figure of the fan to help us situate a distinct period in Tamil Nadu’s cinematic history and place the lived practices of fans herein. Barker and Lindquist describe figures as ‘creatively constituted subject positions that embody, manifest, and, to some degree, comment upon a particular historical moment in the complex articulation of largescale processes that are not always easy to grasp in concrete terms’ (Barker and Lindquist 2009, 37). A figure, they argue, can ‘evoke both underlying historical processes and the ‘structures of feeling’ of a particular time and place’ (ibid.). In other words, a ‘figure’ is an individual who is situated in a particular historical moment, whose actions and emotions are the result of a particular set of social, cultural, political, and historical processes. And the fan in turn is part of and has an effect on those circumstances. In this way, the fan is more than a sui generis individual; a fan is the result of a particular set of historical, psychological, social, political, etc., circumstances and transformations. This suggests that figures are individuals as well

Keeping in control

57

as indicative of a larger societal articulation. Seeing the fan as a figure, I therefore suggest that he represents a specific instantiation of a historical moment in Tamil film and political history. At the same time, I show that the discursive categories of ‘cinema’, ‘audience’, ‘fan’, and ‘cine-politics’ need to be refined to better account for the ambiguous, sometimes contradictory lived experience of fandom.20 Fan clubs represent a relatively small and select group within the broader ‘category’ of audiences, but how should we understand their connection? Does an understanding of fan clubs as audiences help us understand the broader social phenomena of film audiences and film-going? Is the difference between fan club and audience and between the members of those groups a difference of kind, degree, or quality? I argue that even though the subject positions of fans do not always differ from the subject position of other kinds of audience members, there is at least one key difference. Fan club members navigate between affection and excess; non-fan club members regard such affection and excess as something to be justified, controlled, and/or denounced. This discloses a different quality of fandom and relationship with the star. Moreover, I argue that the figure of the fan, by its delineation as audience par excellence, reinforces and enshrines its opposite: the deemed proper, cultured audience, not in terms of class distinctions per se but in terms of behavioural rules in relation to cinema. My aim in this chapter is twofold. First, I take up the figure of the fan as it has come to feature in collective imaginations, which is stigmatized by detractors of fandom as hero worship – a prototype that is variously extolled or disparaged, depending on the social position or political leanings of the commentator. I started this introduction with the release of Enthiran and what media coverage about fan and audience reactions to that release evoke, in terms of discourses and stereotypes of the figure of the fan. To clarify, I do not aim to scrutinize stereotypes about the figure of the fan, let alone to prove them right or wrong, but rather to point out the phenomenon of fandom in recent decades in Tamil Nadu for which the state has become widely known and which has come to figure as a trope in many journalistic, scholarly, and public accounts on the conjunction of cinema and politics in the state. The prototypical figure of the fan comes to the surface time and again, partly negatively, partly as fascination and recently also positively, as cinema-going is re-enacted by middle-class film-goers via the release of 20 In the epilogue I will also describe how the figure of the fan becomes a trope to imitate by others, again suggesting a new lived experience of the figure of the fan.

58 

Intimate Visualities and the Politics of Fandom in India

all-in packages (see epilogue). By identifying the fan as a figure, I want to go beyond these essentializations and instead show how fan activity relates to the pleasure of film-watching in Tamil Nadu and how keeping in control (both physical and emotional) reflects the figure of the fan, the subject and object of praise and blame. These various experiences or affects of being a fan identify my second aim, which is to introduce enactment and performance, or the lived experience, of fandom and to illuminate the various ways in which fans build up relationships with their star. These relationships are only partly conveyed through the fan club. Fandom and membership of a fan club are not one and the same thing, but they do come together in several ways in the life trajectories of fans I describe here. Following Williams (1974), I see these structures of feeling as particular for fans yet extending through larger parts of cinematic audiences. Raymond Williams used the term ‘structures of feeling’ to indicate the lived experience, that what is not caught in fixed time, the differences or the categories of a time in history. It helps to see the in-between, the lived experience and change that is characteristic for a certain period. Structures of feeling consist of affects that are ‘those forces beneath, alongside, or generally other than conscious knowing, vital forces insisting beyond emotion’ (Gregg and Seigworth 2010, original emphasis; see also Massumi 1995; Stewart 2007; Mazzarella 2009). Affects can be given different content by different users, serve as essential amplifiers of other drives, and create possibilities for thoughts and feelings (Stewart 2007, 3). In this chapter I am looking at various ways or styles in which fandom is expressed in the context of film releases and affection towards the star. In this way I want to take Barker and Lindquist’s notion of the figure a step further by not merely considering the figure as arising within a social field but also by exploring what it means to be a figure of a fan. Fandom is a reality for a fan; it is something that can be experienced, as well as being considered by scholars, journalists, and people-on-the-street characteristic of an era in Tamil Nadu. At the same time, this experience of fandom is also frowned upon, looked at in disdain by non-fan club members. What I argue in this chapter is that the figure of the fan that navigates devotion and control is not the opposite of another, more cultured audience, of other kinds of film-watching in Tamil Nadu. This figure is not merely the discursive figure of the ‘pissing man’ that Mazzarella has described as the image of the uncultured excitable viewer that the censor imagines (2013, 104); the ‘pissing man’s’ prototype is the fan. In this chapter I aim to show how the ‘pissing man’ is grounded and performed in the social imagination and in this way indicate the potential of film-watching in general. Again, I do not

Keeping in control

59

aim to define fans as the uncultured viewer, but to show how the constant negotiation of fan performance and evaluations of such performances by fans and others index the potential of film intelligibility and meaningfulness of all film-watching in South India.

Tamil film fan clubs Tamil Nadu’s film industry, ‘Kollywood’, is one of the largest film industries in India, producing between 100 and 300 films in Tamil per year, around the same number as Hindi films, mostly produced in Bollywood.21 But the popularity and global circulation of Bollywood films have made the Mumbai film industry the focus of attention, in- and outside academia, and in- and outside India. Bollywood has left India’s other film industries in its wake, ‘provincializing’ them, as they are often dismissed as regional cinema (see also Velayutham 2008). The frustration felt in Tamil Nadu regarding this status of regionality is offset by the occasional moment of joy. So it is with great pride that Rajinikanth fans continually mentioned that their actor is the second highest-paid in Asia: and he does not follow his much-celebrated contemporary in Hindi cinema, Amitabh Bachchan, but Jackie Chan, the world-famous actor from Hong Kong. In addition, fans recounted with pleasure that Enthiran (Shankar 2010), featuring Rajinikanth, was the most expensive film ever made in India and the biggest release of an Indian film around the world. My mentioning these details is not a counter-attempt to provincialize Bollywood but rather to put the Tamil film industry beyond its regional classification. The 68-year-old Rajinikanth is probably still the most famous and popular film star of the Tamil film industry and certainly the one with the biggest fan following in terms of organized fan clubs. Rajinikanth’s star persona is the result of his being continually typecast in certain roles and styles, even if this is also not specific to Rajinikanth but part of the conventional career path of successful actors. He was supposed to become that star through the specific roles he played and through a negotiation of his on-screen and offscreen image (Nakassis 2016). The superstar image that has been cultivated by and for Rajinikanth expresses itself, as for him and for other stars, in stylish larger-than-life types. On-screen images of mass heroes need time and several performances to build up and deploy auto-citation of the hero’s 21 Estimate based on Central Board of Film Certification annual report of 2011 (Central Board of Film Certification 2011).

60 

Intimate Visualities and the Politics of Fandom in India

own films and mannerisms of style (Nakassis 2016). Rajinikanth started acting in 1975 and reached his superstar status in the 1990s. This was also the first moment that Rajinikanth was named by fans, journalists, politicians, and cinema pundits as a potential political candidate, something that did not happen until almost twenty years later. I will describe this connection to politics in Chapter 3 and 4 and the Epilogue. From the moment of his superstar celebrity status, his films began to contain various references to himself as a superstar (such as the introduction of the word Superstar on the screen), his first spectacular appearance on screen, and his mannerisms and expressions developed an after-life by circulating widely in daily life of fans and others (Nakassis 2016; S.V. Srinivas 2005). Rajinikanth comes from an underprivileged background: his supposedly modest lifestyle is a point of familiarity and connection for audiences. This off-screen status is entangled with the stylish and hip on-screen performance, ‘even while such on-screen performances are being read against the actors’ off-screen status’ (Nakassis 2016, 199; S.V. Srinivas 2009). In the next chapters, I describe how the off-screen status of Rajinikanth is important in asserting the time and efforts spent on the fan club. Rajinikanth in this way is as much a star following the path of, what the film industry calls, a mass hero in the Tamil film industry, as a public persona who has been actively shaped and moulded through fan pressure persuading him to take on the same type of role time after time (Prasad 2014). Almost all the feature movies in which Rajinikanth tried to move away from his conventional role proved unsuccessful. Yet, this is not only the result of fan expectations but also from changing audience demographics and expectations as well as the budding presence of television series and entertainment among others.22 Nevertheless, Rajinikanth remains a veteran mass hero who is appreciated on-screen and off-screen. Just as Rajinikanth, several other actors of various generations make up the Tamil movie industry and its acting scene. Yet the generation of film stars, led by the actors Rajinikanth and Kamal Hassan in particular, that came to the fore in the 1970s, still appeals to new generations of fans, even though they are now joined by a younger generation of actors such as Vijay, Ajith, Simbu, and Danush. Stars are appreciated at different levels, as people see the oldest generation of stars as the fathers of Tamil cinema, and the young Tamil actors as budding, building up their star charisma and style. Mass heroes are predominantly men: actresses may be renowned as well, but their male counterparts remain the major heroes in films. 22 Constantine Nakassis gives an insightful outline of the gradual demise of popularity of the mass hero (2016, 221-223 see also; Nakassis and Dean 2007; S.V. Srinivas 2009).

Keeping in control

61

Films are watched passionately in Tamil Nadu.23 Although families visit cinemas less frequently than they used to – particularly nowadays with the widespread coverage of television networks, satellite channels, DVDs, and VCDs – young men continue to spend time at cinemas watching films. Most of them have one star that they really like, one star that they are dedicated to as a fan. Many young men in Tamil Nadu are therefore also often a member of a fan club (rasigar manram). Most accounts on fan activity in Tamil Nadu are written against the backdrop of the political careers of film stars or the attraction of the star as coming from a similar background as fans themselves. They can be situated between two opposing ideas of fandom in this regard. On the one hand fandom has been understood as a product of the film industry and the political system – that is, fan activity as the agent of film stars’ political practices, where they are put into play for the political gain of the cine-political elite (M.S.S. Pandian 1992). On the other hand, fandom has been understood as the countercultural activity of fans as members of a subaltern class, using their fan club membership in order to join the political sphere (Dickey 1993b; Rogers 2009). These accounts tend to overlook or at least underestimate the cinematic pleasures and the highly ambiguous bonds that fandom forges between fans, between fans and their star, and the relations that fans create in opposition to non-fans. An exception is S.V. Srinivas, who argues against the work on fan activity in South India that explains it merely as a product of something else: socioeconomic background, subalternity, politics, religion, etc. (2009). He brings in the notion of cinephilia and argues that what distinguishes organized fans in South India from other organized fandoms is their tendency to make public their cinephilia, to display it, and indeed house it in the public domain (S.V. Srinivas 2009, 30). I would add to this argument that fans are fans of cinema and of film-watching and not fans of something else. Therefore, we need to take into account what is particular about cinema, about stars, and about the fandom that is created around it. If we understand fan clubs merely as organizations that provide political mobilizations for stars and fans, this enthusiasm would otherwise remain unexplained, and other personal desires would be disregarded. Grassroots politics, however, does become important in later stages of many Rajinikanth fans’ lives. Here I want to explicitly focus on the initial cinematic desires of fandom. This also brings 23 (See Derne and Jadwin 2000; Dickey 1995; Mankekar 2002 for ethnographic accounts of film-watching in India). (See Derné 2000; Dickey 1995; Mankekar 2002 for ethnographic accounts of film-watching in India).

62 

Intimate Visualities and the Politics of Fandom in India

Srinivas’ argument further by not merely acknowledging the publicness of fandom but also the individually experienced ways in which fans relate to their star. I seek to elucidate this experience by focusing on the ambiguity of film-watching as articulated by outsiders and fans alike. Following Ferguson (1999), instead of turning one’s back to ‘myths’ of fandom, I consider the figure of a fan as a productive entry point to explore the various ‘styles’ that fan club members adopt in their life trajectories as fans. Ferguson intimates that style is performative and acquired over time. Style is a navigational capacity in which, through collective practices, fans can individually move in certain directions. Ferguson’s argument is also essential in acknowledging that fan activity, though it shows signs of commonality in performance, does not result in a shared ‘total way of life’ or in authentic or inauthentic expressions of fan identities (Hills 2002). The personal experiences of fandom and film-watching go beyond being merely a fan and therefore can tell us something about the ways in which people feel attached to certain actors, their films, and the experience of film-watching.

The figure of the fan The essentializing image of fans as fanatics, often represented in journalistic accounts, is not something specific to descriptions of Tamil film fans – indeed, the English word ‘fan’ has its origin as a shortened form of the word ‘fanatic’. Several authors have pointed to the typecasting of various fans in Anglo-American contexts as an undifferentiated and easily manipulated mass put forward by the media, ‘non-fans’, and early communication scholarship (Gray, Sandvoss, and Harrington 2007; Jenkins 1992; Jenson 1992; Fiske 1992). These accounts frequently suggest a certain deviance or excess in the behaviour of fans. At the same time, the distinction between who is called a fan, on the one hand, and who is a collector, an aficionado, or art lover, on the other, indicates a Bourdieuian distinction in class and taste regarding what is seen as cultured behaviour and what not (see Doss 1999; Jenson 1992). Fans have regularly been analysed as a response to the culture industry or as a result of celebrity. Horkheimer and Adorno, for example, criticized mass culture or the culture industry for producing celebrities and for making audiences believe in the false promises of a capitalist culture industry (Horkheimer and Adorno in Marshall 2001, 9). This system created a mass society in which people were easily deceived and manipulated by these images of false promises, they argued. Moreover, theories on the crowd by among others Le Bon, Tare, and Sighele often had a criminologist perspective

Keeping in control

63

and have influenced the understanding of mass society and its irrationality and, related to this, popular culture and celebrity (Marshall 2001, 36). While the overlap between fan and fanatic is easy and obvious for English speakers, this is not the case in Tamil. While Tamil has a word for fanatic (veriyar), this is not the word that members of Tamil fan clubs use to refer to themselves. Instead, they deploy a Sanskrit-derived term whose history and use for the most part avoids the pejorative sense of fanaticism. In Tamil, the word for fan, rasikan (the feminine form is rasikai), is derived from the Sanskrit work rasika, itself a derivative of rasa (taste, flavour, aesthetic mood). Rasika means ‘man of taste, one who is able to appreciate excellence or beauty in anything’ (Madras University Tamil Lexicon 1924, s.v. rasikar). 24 Rasa and rasikar have a long history of being used for the performing arts, literary theory, and philosophical speculation on aesthetics. In modern Tamil, it means ‘an admirer, a connoisseur’ and in the film context ‘a fan’. The term rasikan is used in all kinds of contexts and is not restricted to f ilm fans alone. The honorif ic singular form rasigar, together with the Tamil word for association, manram, produces the term for fan club, rasigar manram. Interestingly, although for f ilm fans in particular the rasigar manram does have connotations of fanaticism, just as in English, the Sanskrit word rasika as used in the context of Carnatic music25 has no connotation of fanaticism whatsoever. However, non-fans do use the term veriyar to describe fans in common parlance. The word would never be used in official discourse, for example in writing, but in conversations the fan is described as veriyar. So where fans deploy a Sanskrit-derived term whose history and use for the most part avoids the pejorative sense of fanaticism, in more popular discourse the word for fanatic is used for describing fans. In other words, the semantic history and range of the Tamil terms for fan and fan clubs is distinctive. Punathambekar argues that the f igure of the fan as characterized in India needs to be taken away from the dichotomy of fan-as-rowdy versus fan-as-rasika 26 and instead should 24 In literary (formal, written) Tamil, as in the Lexicon, this word is spelled rasikar. In spoken Tamil (or, the Tamil spoken by most of my interlocutors), it is pronounced as rasihar; Tamil speakers writing in English tend to favour the spelling rasigar (if they don’t simply use the English ‘fan’). Tamil orthography does not have separate characters for k and g; the letter that usually appears as k when Tamil script is put into the Roman alphabet is, when spoken, pronounced in a variety of ways (usually k, g, or h). 25 Carnatic music is a classical music tradition from southern India. 26 In this context, Punathambekar uses the example of a rasika as someone who has knowledge of and likes Carnatic music.

64 

Intimate Visualities and the Politics of Fandom in India

be located ‘along a more expansive continuum of participatory culture’ (Punathambekar 2007, 199). The rowdy in India has been an evocative f igure of inappropriateness in middle-class imaginations and has come to be particularly evoked in relation to cinema, but it is also a focus of anxiety about what they see as the criminalization of politics (Dhareshwar and Srivatsan 2010). Also, here it suggests a Bourdieuian hierarchy, and a difference between taste and normal behaviour (Bourdieu 1984). Not only fans but also cinema in India is framed within an elitist discourse of ‘the pissing man’ who is all too prone to mimicking antisocial behaviour from cinema screens, a discourse that criticizes cinema-going as an activity for the uneducated (Mazzarella 2013; Nakassis 2016). This can be heard in derisive journalistic ref lections on fan behaviour, in political critical discourse on both f ilm and fans, but also in everyday talk about film and film audiences by people who watch films themselves (Thomas 1985; Dickey 1993b; S.V. Srinivas 1999; Derne and Jadwin 2000; Prasad 2014; Nakassis 2016). In these accounts, the behaviour at the cinema, the damage to cinemas, the danger and waste of milk and beer abhishekams, and the enormous amounts of money and time spent on f ilm screenings are discussed. Films are not only seen as dangerous because they give opportunity to copy unsolicited behaviour such as the love stories that people often describe as being an example for youngsters to follow; they also lead viewers to confuse the distinction between real and reel and encourage them to subsume their own personal moral and emotional development by ‘fostering a vicarious fantasy of transcending the mundanities of everyday life through identif ication with him’ (Nakassis 2016, 169; see also M.S.S. Pandian 1992; Hardgrave 1973; Osella and Osella 2004; S.V. Srinivas 2009). Fans present themselves within the limits of fandom and in an almost Foucauldian sense self-regulate their behaviour with the idea of what others think about such behaviour. Fans also move between ambiguous feelings, alternating between dedication to film-viewing and their hero-star and distantiation from film-viewing and fandom as bad habits. The dedication to a star or fan club by fans is played down when interacting with non-fans or those who have left fan clubs, and is described as something mostly kids and men belonging to lower classes do (Dickey 1993b; Nakassis 2016). If fan club membership and devotion towards stars and film is seen as a bad habit, as lower class, this substantiates how such discourse manifests itself ‘on the ground’ (see also Nakassis 2016, 178). Where others outside of the fan club mockingly and ironically look down upon fanatical behaviour of fans, fans use the same irony to look at their own behaviour or comment

Keeping in control

65

on other fans’ behaviour that is dedicated and enthusiastic. Tamizhvanan, a Rajinikanth fan club member from Puducherry, described the following: In Tamil Nadu we are fond of cinema culture, but this is not a good thing. This interest is not a good interest. Now we are sitting here to talk about Rajinikanth and do some work for Rajinikanth. That is bad in itself. But even in Japan you have lots of Rajinikanth fans. The Japanese are smart people and even they like Rajinikanth. In a way it makes us proud, but cinema culture is not a good thing.

Tamizhvanan points to this double feeling towards film, as on the one hand Rajinikanth’s widespread circulation makes him feel proud and at the same time he sees films (and therefore his own fandom) as something that is a bad habit. Just as with Tamizhvanan, this ambiguity came to the fore regularly as fans spoke to me about their own or others’ fan activities, parents about their children, or outsiders about fans. Films in general were often criticized by parents by pointing to the dangers of influence, the habits that came along with watching film heroes on-screen, and yet at the same time the same critics had their own film heroes, watched films regularly on television, and occasionally visited cinemas. Parents and wives criticized their son’s or husband’s fan club activities and at the same time supported them by giving them money or paraphernalia for these activities. Nakassis’s insightful portrayals and analysis of the citational practices of college youth in relation to hero-stars in Tamil Nadu gives a cue on how the ambivalence of embracing and disavowing works. Nakassis describes the balancing act of citation and style (weaving film dialogue into everyday speech or copying the mannerisms, dress, hairstyle, vices of hero-stars) that at times crosses the line into mimesis and overdoing it (2016). Film stars, he shows, can be only partially cited and reanimated because complete citation would bring the risk of being perceived as local or low-class, of being a fan. So here the figure of the fan is not merely a disdained discursive figure but referring to this figure in fact produces the larger experience of film, for fans and others alike. By referring to the figure, by keeping in mind how the fan behaves, looks like, or acts, and by partially re-enacting this figure, borrowing from it and rejecting it, it shows how film should or should not, could or could not be experienced. Following Goffman and Agha, the forms of behaviour of the figure of the fan have become socially recognized or enregistered as indexical for that figure (Agha 2005; Goffman 1981). Persons change their role and stance about that role according to the social context in which they are performing,

66 

Intimate Visualities and the Politics of Fandom in India

which Goffman called ‘footing’ (Goffman 1981). For fans, footing is the specific language (in its broadest sense) or stance towards the figure of the fan and its performance. Registers are not fixed entities but are social formations ‘susceptible to society-internal variation and change through the activities of persons attuned to alignments with figures performed in use’ (Agha 2005, 40). In other words, as Goffman argued, role alignment is not merely an individual interaction between speaker and listener, but relates and also includes metacommentaries and stereotypes associated with the repertoire (Goffman 1981; Agha 2005). The metacommentaries on the discursive figure of the fan can only exist while they are framing a larger discourse in which this figure is performed and evaluated by fans and ‘non-fans’ alike. The enregistered figure is embraced at one moment but may also be placed at a distance and disavowed at other moments. The detachment has been called ‘role distance’ by Goffman (1978), and explained in part as a defensive measure, one that helps to avoid the negative reflection cast on that person, in this case of the stereotypical figure of the fan. The concept of role distance acknowledges the fluidity in embracing certain roles and that the role is not just playing the individual (i.e. the discursive figure of the fan being taken over by the fan) but the individual is playing with the role – that is, the fan playfully cites or disavows the discursive figure of the fan. Distancing themselves from their role as fan gives them a means to playfully engage with the performance of being a fan. At the same time, the metacommentaries on the discursive figure – embracing it or rejecting it – say something not necessarily about the fan as a figure but rather about all film-watching in South India, whether one is a fan or not.

How it all started In 1976, Shankar had not yet seen Moondru Mudichu (Balachander 1976), Rajinikanth’s third film, but he already felt deeply attracted to the upcoming actor. Fifteen years old at the time, Shankar had a small corner store and tea stall where he heard customers telling stories about Rajinikanth. These stories were replicated in the film magazines he sold in his shop. This made Shankar admire the actor more and more. After the release of Moondru Mudichu, Bommai, a film magazine, showed a picture of Rajinikanth on its cover. Shankar hadn’t seen the movie but kept one copy of the magazine for himself and owing to his customer’s enthusiasm and the film magazine he created a 6-foot by 6-foot signboard that he put in front of his shop, just like the one on Figure 2. Shankar’s interest in Rajinikanth continued to grow. In

Keeping in control

67

Figure 2 Shankar’s shop; Puducherry 1987

Rajini Shankar’s collection The photo was taken in 1987, just after MGR died. After his death, Shankar redecorated his shop by displaying images of Rajinikanth and MGR to commemorate the latter. From this period onwards, Shankar called himself Rajini Shankar, just as many other fans put the word Rajini in front of their name.

1977, the popular daily Tamil newspaper Dina Thanthi published an article on the Agila India Rajinikanth Rasigar Manram (All India Rajinikanth Fan Club or AIRFC).27 This was the first time Shankar had heard of the fan club’s existence, and he instantly decided to start one himself in his hometown of Puducherry. He decided to go to Chennai and ask the fan club secretary, Pukkadai Nataraja, how to register a fan club. As Shankar was still young and slightly built, he thought they would never allow him to start a fan club on his own, so he took along some of 27 The official name of the club is the Agila India Rajinikanth Manram. Fans, non-fans, and journalists using an English-language equivalent translated this variously as the ‘All India Rajinikanth Fans Club’, ‘Rajinikanth Fan Association’, and ‘All India Rajinikanth Fan Club (AIRFC)’. When my informant or a published source used a specific English name, I retained that name; otherwise, I refer to the organization as AIRFC.

68 

Intimate Visualities and the Politics of Fandom in India

his burlier looking, moustachioed friends who made up for his own lack of physical stature. He paid his friends’ expenses, which included the bus fare from Puducherry to Chennai, 75 paisa (three-quarters of a rupee), a huge amount for him at the time. Once in Chennai, the secretary Nataraja told him: ‘Go back to Pondicherry, gather members and make it strong. Carry out activities on behalf of Rajinikanth, be active’. And that is what Shankar did. The fan club in Puducherry has grown from that moment in 1977 to an organization of around 650 fan clubs.28 The Rajinikanth fan clubs are organized in a tree-like structure according to Tamil Nadu’s and Puducherry’s division into districts, taluks or constituencies and blocks or wards.29 Puducherry is administratively not part of Tamil Nadu but for fan clubs it was treated as one of its districts. All local fan clubs were united in the AIRFC in Chennai. Every district had an umbrella organization, named a talaimai manram (leader association, or head fan club), consisting of established fans who had started out as members of a local club before assuming a role in the district-level organization. The talaimai manram of each district was responsible for the organization of all local fan clubs in neighbourhoods, streets, or areas. In Chennai, due to the size of the city, the organization was divided into four areas, each with their own talaimai manram under which the local manrams fall. These local manrams also consisted of an executive committee, often the men that started the club, and ordinary members. However, it turned out that it was generally the executive committee members who were most active in the club; the others were non-existent or not very active. This became clear during my initial search for fan clubs when I started this research. I could hardly find a fan who was ‘just’ a member without any official position within his own fan club. This had partly to do with the network I was circulating in, but it also revealed the lack of active non-officer members of local fan clubs active. It already gives a clue about the reasons for which people get involved in a fan club. I have more to say about this below. All fan clubs had names; usually these were the name of a film that came out around the time the fan club was set up (for example Shankar’s Moondru Mudichi), a reference to a phrase or notion related to welfare (e.g. Rajinikanth Narpani Manram), or included specific Tamil one-liners that Rajinikanth used in his movies (e.g. Idhu eppidi irikku or ‘how is it’). 28 Puducherry has a population of 946,600 according to the 2011 census (Registrar General & Census Commissioner 2011). 29 Although I am describing the structure of the Rajinikanth fan club here, clubs for other actors are organized along similar lines.

Keeping in control

69

Srinivas has shown how in Andhra Pradesh most fan clubs call themselves Town/City/State/Nationwide organizations despite the fact that they are highly localized (2009). The same naming practice accounts for Tamil Nadu where the AIRFC suggest an Indian-wide network whereas in reality the majority of fan clubs are located in Tamil Nadu. For local fan clubs at the neighbourhood or village level, I found less of such India-wide names than described by Srinivas. However, mentioning the pride taken in the fact that Rajini is popular in Japan (and through my interest in this topic, also in Europe as fans observed) provided a proof that the fan club is national and even worldwide after all. Within all levels of the organization, the fan clubs had an executive board consisting of at least seven members, for instance the general secretary, vice-general secretary, secretary, vice-secretary, treasurer, vice-treasurer, and public relations officer. The tree-like structure of the fan clubs resembled political party structures with a main office in Chennai, district heads, and local area fan clubs.30 The structure is such that local branches asked approval from and report to the district branch they belonged to about their activities and expenses. In turn, the district branches reported their activities and administration to the head branch, the All India Rajinikanth Fan Club (AIRFC) in Chennai. For fans, this reporting and archiving of their activities was an important way of proving their genuine fan club membership and fandom. When district leaders had to be selected, the AIRFC based its decision regarding new committee members on their commitment to the local fan club. And as we will see later, one’s position within the fan club structure (from local neighbourhood level to talaimai manram of the city or area) defined the quantity and layout of the images. Here are some other stories about club members: Tharagai Raja, who like Shankar became a serious fan as a teenager, was attracted by the images of Shankar’s shop as a young boy. After school, he and his friends walked to Rajini Shankar’s shop and ate something while listening to the stories of Rajinikanth and the fan club told by Rajini Shankar and the customers of his shop. Shankar had changed his name to Rajini Shankar in the meantime, a change that confirmed his link with and dedication to the star.31 For these young men, the attraction for Rajinikanth slowly grew, not by seeing his films but by seeing his images and hearing stories. As Tharagai Raja describes it: 30 The political party-like structure comes from the times of MGR, who had the first fan clubs dedicated to him. Since then, this structure is common. 31 In Tamil, people are often named in relation to their profession or the location where they live. For example, later we will encounter the late Thengai (coconut) Selvam, whose profession was selling coconuts.

70 

Intimate Visualities and the Politics of Fandom in India

When Rajini’s film was released fans placed a lot of banners in front of the cinemas. So, we went to the cinemas and counted the number of banners. Then we went to another cinema. If it was screening a Kamal Hassan film, we counted the banners there as well. We compared the number of banners and if there were fewer banners for Rajinikanth we bought some greeting cards and collected a Shiva image or something. We walked all the way to a Xerox shop, which were not as widespread as they are now, and copied the images. In this way we increased the number of images displayed. After doing this we went to the cinema where they screened Kamal Hassan and we told someone: hey, go and see: they have many banners for Rajinikanth’s film!

Tharagai Raja, at this young age, was present at many fan club events even though he could not see the film in the cinema yet. He was still too young to be able to get tickets since he did not have his own money and his parents did not allow him to go to the cinema. As soon as he was old enough to buy his own tickets, he did, and when he was allowed to open a fan club, he started one immediately. When I got to know him, Tharagai Raja was the public relations officer of the Rajinikanth talaimai manram/‘executive’ committee in Puducherry. He was always busy, trying to keep the relationships with newspapers, other fan clubs, and politicians running smoothly. He dealt with communication and, in order to prevent irregularities, racked his brain with every film release over arranging which local fan club got tickets for which cinema and the day of the so-called ‘fan show’, the first show in which fan clubs were able to buy tickets to distribute among their members. Sridhar was the president of the student’s block of the [Puducherry] fan club. He recounted his attraction to Rajinikanth as follows: It started when I was five years old. I am 31 now. When I saw the film Murattu Kaalai (S.P. Muthumaran, 1980) I was attracted to him and I started liking him. When I passed by a cinema at the time, I noticed the overwhelming response from the audience; they let off firecrackers, I saw the cutouts and the banners. It was impressive, awe-inspiring. Their excitement and activity were huge, they expressed their love in a very grand manner. I was five years old and I was studying first standard. I can still remember everything that happened that day. I was amused when I saw all those things and I started to like Rajini. I didn’t have the opportunity to know MGR, but I had the opportunity to see Rajini. I wanted to get to know Rajini, but since I was so young, I didn’t know

Keeping in control

71

anything about Rajini. So, I tried to find out more about him. At the time we did not have any media like nowadays, so I used to talk with my friends, and I sang his songs. Gradually I came to know that Rajini is a good man.

I have recounted these narratives by Shankar, Tharagai Raja, and Sridhar to show how the attraction these men felt towards Rajinikanth in the beginning was not initially related to seeing his films. In all three cases – and these cases are by no means unusual among fan club members – their interest first was sparked by other fans as well as the displays put on by those fans. Watching Rajinikanth on the screen came later. Film-watching, recollecting film scenes, re-enacting dialogues, and collecting and displaying stills from specific films all play a significant role in the lives of fans – but they do so as part of a larger imaginary fuelled by other fans and forming within a wider context of social relations. The illustrations given here emphasize how fans and fan banners came first in sparking an interest in actors, film, and fan clubs. It suggests that the power and influence of such displays and of fan collectivities are more important than Rajini himself. Of course, nowadays, with almost every home having a television of its own, and other media being more widely available, children are exposed much more to various segments of film. Yet initial encounters with a film star still go via various means outside the register of film-watching itself. Children take over their father’s favourite star, stories and images circulate, and neighbourhood friends may decide collectively to set up a fan club for divergent reasons. Fandom, these stories show, is intertextual as fans appropriate not merely cultural texts itself – which Henry Jenkins following de Certeau calls ‘textual poaching’ – but refer to and borrow from different texts at different times (Jenkins 1992). I would add that the category of borrowing needs to be broadened too to take account of the citational practices that may derive from film but circulate widely in other social settings (Nakassis 2016). The personal stories of becoming a fan interact with their inclusion on friend, neighbour, and household domains; the settings for these stories are not the inside of a cinema, where an individual stares at a screen, but on the streets, in tea stalls and corner stores, or in homes, where children and youths gather with friends and family. Fandom is a personal experience but is much affected by its social context. These are stories of enjoyment, of affective investments, and of pragmatism, to name just a few reasons how fans self-explain their attraction towards their star and later their fan club membership. The enjoyments of fans in relation to mass-heroes are usually explained away by theoretical accounts: ‘as escapism, as identification, as resistance to dominant ideology’ (Harrington and Bielby in Hills 2002, 74,

72 

Intimate Visualities and the Politics of Fandom in India

emphasis mine). Instead of rationalizing this enjoyment, however, we should try to understand it on its own terms (Harrington and Bielby 2010, 131). Fans have regularly been described in terms of consumer culture and resistance (Hills 2002; Jenkins 1992; Fiske 1992; Hall 1973; Adorno and Horkheimer 2007) or as displaying deficient behaviour that is analyzed psychoanalytically. Also these kinds of readings miss out on the emotional involvement and investment by fans that are not merely contained by society but also create new ways of involvement (Ang 1991; Harrington and Bielby 2010; Hills 2002). The ways in which a mass hero is merged into personal lives and households (see also Chapter 2) leads us to ask how we could get beyond the theorization of the fan acting or reacting to a cultural text and instead see the affective playfulness of fandom (Hills 2002, 80) in which celebrities and others become part of the investments and relationalities of everyday life. In this way, the ‘text’ as the other that is responded to is replaced by the ways in which fans perform fandom within the relationships of the fan club, between peers, or between household members.

Film-watching The apogee of watching Rajinikanth’s reel image lies in films. The day before the release of the movie, Sivaji – The Boss (Shankar 2007), at around 6.30 pm, a van carried banners and cutouts to the cinema where the film would be released the next morning. A big crowd, accompanied by percussion (thappu and thalam), dancing fans, and loud firecrackers followed the van. When the van arrived at Raman Cinema, the fans unloaded the banners from the van and started to fix them in their allotted space. Soon the entire cinema was decorated with banners, both inside and out. The first show started at 7.30 am. Three hours earlier, the cinemas were already full of activity. Fans shouted and railed at the cinema personnel as they demanded the gates be opened. ‘Open the gates! Look how long we’ve been waiting! Open the counter! SIVAJI, we are waiting to see you!’ some shouted. The police were on the alert with their lathies (wooden sticks used by police officers) at hand. Another crowd of passers-by was watching the scene curiously. Most of the tickets were given out in advance to the fan clubs, and only a few were sold at the cinema itself. Fans still tried to get tickets by any means, running from one counter to the other and calling friends in the hope of obtaining a ticket. A few lucky men were able to buy a ticket. After all the tickets had been issued, the cinema finally opened the doors to the hall. The film could begin.

Keeping in control

73

The interior of the cinema was full of police to control the crowds. Some of the men rushed to sit in front of the screen, but they were sent back to their seats by the police. When the film started and Rajini’s head (but not his face) appeared on-screen there was not a sound to be heard. Only when his face was seen and Rajinikanth nodded his head in his particular way did the audience start to clap. The police were trying to keep control over the audience. But slowly the restraint that was felt in the beginning disappeared completely after seeing more of Rajinikanth’s typical mannerisms. Everyone clapped and cheered. The dialogues were almost inaudible because of the noise the audience produced. Three friends commented to each other (in Tamil): Person 1: The songs aren’t great, are they? Person 2: No, mapila,32 but they’ll become popular over time. When we heard the Chandramuki songs for the first time, they were not at all good. Slowly they became very nice to hear. Our thalaivar’s [leader, name for Rajinikanth] songs are always like that. Person 1: Anyway, it does not look like Baadsha (Krishna 1995) or Annamalai (Suresh Krishna 1992), you know. Person 2: No, no, don’t say that, we are in the middle of the film. Let the movie finish. Then you say what you think, okay? Person 3: This guy is always like that. Let us see the whole movie and then we will talk about it.

I used this description of the release of the movie Sivaji – The Boss and the fragment of a conversation overheard in the cinema hall to indicate the celebratory atmosphere and expectation of seeing Rajinikanth on-screen. Once in a fan club, young fans (in the teenage years and early twenties) in particular do expect to see the movie of their star on the f irst day. The Sivaji release I have described is by no means atypical. The very first screening of a Tamil film featuring a hero-star is usually accompanied by film-club-organized special rallies. Cinemas are decorated with banners and cutouts; crowds gather, and fan club members engage in ritualized behaviour utilizing the physical gestures of Hindu ritual (if not always the physical substances, as the substitution of beer for milk shows).33 At the same Sivaji release, fans also distributed sweets, called prasad in 32 Term to indicate a maternal uncle’s son, a paternal aunt’s son, or a younger sister’s husband. 33 Prasad in the form of beer is not merely a deviation from the common ritual offering for deities. There are also such offerings in temples: a temple in Gujarat offers pizza and ice cream,

74 

Intimate Visualities and the Politics of Fandom in India

religious worship as offering to the gods after which worshippers consume the food. Films are often watched in groups, as a group of friends or as a family, but men also go to the cinema alone (S.V. Srinivas 2005). The release of a film is a highly embodied, celebratory, and collective event. College-goers and other younger fans cut classes or escape from their hostel to watch a f ilm (Nakassis 2016, 161), while days are taken off by those who work. Fan clubs celebrate the event by decorating the cinema with large billboards dedicated to the release. On the day of the release, the images will be garlanded, and fans perform special pujas by burning camphor and waving lights in front of images of Rajinikanth and by doing milk and sometimes beer abhishekams (pouring liquids, usually milk, over a statue of a deity) on billboards. This treatment of images, using the ritual gestures familiar from Hindu worship ceremonies, suggests parallels between the experience of a film release and that of a religious festival (see also L. Srinivas 2016). The play with liquids (beer instead of milk) shows that even though one can pinpoint a religious interaction with a star and his images, at the same time it shows the playfulness of using ritualistic behaviour in a public venue. It creates a provoking effect situated in this ambivalence of fandom: ‘You see, we are these ardent fans!’ Once more, the figure of the fan is playfully enacted in ways that allow the performer to take a stance toward fandom. The behaviour of the Rajini fans at a film release is comparable to what Walter Armbrust has described in the context of Egyptian cinema, where the cinema district takes on a carnivalesque nature as a liminoid territory where social norms are more relaxed and where people engage in experimental behaviour (Armbrust in L. Srinivas 2016, 190). The film, as the overheard conversation indicates, is about repetitive viewing. Fans often visited the cinema several times on the first few days, first celebrating the film, and then slowly starting to appreciate all its different aspects: fighting scenes, songs, acting style, story, and speech. Therefore, in contrast to what Menon suggests in the account that I reproduced at the outset of this chapter, the film does matter to fans. The celebrations heighten the importance of the film, but the ways in which the film is experienced does not fit into the structured viewing of a film as text as it is regularly identified by film critics like Menon and film studies scholars. The enthusiasm around a film release is what has been described as the audience in action (S.V. Srinivas 2003) or the active audience (L. Srinivas some others in Varanasi beer, and at a temple in Tamil Nadu the god smokes cigars (Ulrich, n.d., 32-33).

Keeping in control

75

2016). S.V. Srinivas suggests that while viewing the star is central, the experience of seeing a film is not an individual experience but a collective one; the fans form part of an audience. In addition to the collective experience, I would add that individual desires and expectations are also part of film-watching. Most fans prefer to see the film on the first day and at the first show, the so-called FDFS (first day, first show), which is often screened around six o’clock in the morning. People talk, laugh, shout, give advice to the f ilm characters, or, in other words, respond to what happens on-screen and in the cinema. Lakshmi Srinivas speaks of the active audience in relation to the participatory aesthetic of improvisation, spontaneity, and performance that shapes the experience of film-watching in cinema halls (L. Srinivas 2016, 2-3). Srinivas thus refers to film-watching not specif ically in relation to fans, but to f ilm audiences (comprising fans and non-fans) in general. Her account on participatory perception is useful as it shows how the nature of film-watching combines interactive viewing, selective viewing, and repeated viewing, which together show the evidence of social relations in making the film experience meaningful (L. Srinivas 2016). Let me quote some more fans and their way of articulating what the first show means to them. Saktivel, branch leader of his fan club and local Panchayat president, reports, From the date of the puja34 for the film we keep updating the news about the film, we are very curious to know what his character will be like, what his message is and what the story of the f ilm is. So, we cannot resist our curiosity to see the film on the day of its release. Once, in my brother’s house they had an ear-piercing ceremony for his son.35 As he is my nephew, I had to attend the function and do some ritual. I said sorry for not attending the function but I had to see the film Chandramuki (P. Vasu 2005) first day first show.

Baba Ganapathi, a fan club member in Saktivel’s block, compares the first sight of Rajinikanth in the cinema to a prayer in the temple: 34 A puja is a Hindu act of offering, mostly performed for Hindu deities but also for distinguished persons or guests. In addition, pujas are often performed for new things: in this case on the first day of the shooting of a film a puja is done for the film’s success, as are the pujas when a new car or bike is bought. 35 Kaadhu kutthal, a rite of passage ceremony for young children in which the child’s uncle plays a crucial ritual role. For Saktivel to skip this is perhaps comparable to someone skipping their godchild’s baptism.

76 

Intimate Visualities and the Politics of Fandom in India

It is interesting to see the idol in the temple, which is decorated with flowers and other things at the time of aarathi [prayer]. After two days the flowers lose their freshness. Like that it is interesting to see Rajini’s film at the first show. Otherwise it will not be effective. We’ll try to get tickets in all possible ways. Through the fan club or otherwise we’ll take leave from our jobs for three days to enquire about black-market tickets.

Packaraj, a fan club member in his twenties in Puducherry describes his need to see Rajinkanth: For the film Chandramuki we worked three days and the whole night at the cinema to do the decoration. The first show began at 11 am so around 11 am we returned to the Raman Cinema. We had a ticket for the film but due to the large crowd or a mistake on the ticket, they had screened the movie at 10:30 am. So, the policeman did not allow me to go inside. I tried to go inside but four policemen beat me up badly. But I did not move away from the cinema. Along with me there were forty other fans also waiting outside. Then I cried in front of Rajini’s banner: ‘Oh leader, I could not see you, what is this?’ Then a higher-ranking police officer came, and I told him that the police sent me out even though I had a ticket. I told him that I wanted to go and see his face, and that if I could not see it, I would commit suicide here by burning myself. Then the police officer looked at my ticket and sent me inside along with the other 40 fans.

Packaraj, Baba Ganapathi, and Saktivel refer to the need to see Rajinikanth at the first show. Indeed, being present for the first show is said to be more important than family celebrations or even one’s own life. Rajinikanth is present in such moments, a physical co-presence and an affective intimacy cultivated by fans (Nakassis 2017b). The emphasis on vision illuminates the ritualized way of seeing and being seen by an icon as expressed in these quotes. The billboards as decoration of this celebratory moment are also included actively as fans perform ritualized puja activities for the images, such as breaking coconuts, pouring milk or beer (abhishekams), lighting lamps, and garlanding. Just as viewing the film and seeing Rajinikanth is meaningful and effective according to these fans, their images and their properties contribute to their efficacy as well. However, as I pointed out in the introduction, instead of seeing this as a straightforward replication or continuation of a religious notion of darshan, I understand such practices as borrowing ritualistic practices and language that enhance the idea of presence, that is, the corpothetics of the image through rituals that are borrowed

Keeping in control

77

from religious and political regimes of meaning-making but also borrow from the practices around cinema itself. Beer abhishekams and pujas are supposed to be present as they are part of the celebrative moment of a release. The first glimpse of Rajinikanth on the screen is usually a celebratory moment in a film cinema, the first time when the audience cheers. In films featuring Rajini since the 1992 film Annamalai (Suresh Krishna 1992), the title-credit sequence introduces him in animated letters with his nickname Superstar followed by Rajinikanth. This moment is celebrated with cheers and whistles, which recur at the first moment he appears on screen (see also Nakassis 2017a). It is not so much the opening scene of the film that is celebrated by fans, but his physical appearance on the screen ‘in an overblown display of machismo and cool – in another word, of his style’ (Nakassis 2016, 163). For the film Sivaji the Boss, the film opens, after the appearance of SUPERSTAR, with a huge crowd gathered at a jail. The police are trying to control the crowd while the blindfolded Sivaji, played by Rajini, arrives by car. The moment he gets out of the car, the camera zooms in on his legs stepping out of the car, accompanied by dramatic music. This is the first moment of cheers of the arrival of the actor. Still we haven’t seen Rajni’s face. The scene continues with Sivaji’s entry at the jail, news reports, and the angry crowds outside throwing eggs at the police. When Sivaji is finally in his prison cell, we see his back, but the moment he turns around in slight slow motion is the first moment we can actually see his face. This is the real moment of celebration: Rajini has arrived. Packaraj needed to see his face, he explained, after building up the desire to see him during the long-term preparations of the fan club. Baba Ganapathi used the metaphor of the freshness of flowers at the moment of praying to indicate the freshness of seeing Rajinikanth on the first day. And Saktivel also mentioned the ways in which desire is constructed throughout the trajectory of the production of the film. The importance of seeing Rajinikanth is such that he can miss out on important ritualized family events such as kaadhu kutthal, the ear-piercing ceremony of a young child at which the uncle of the child plays an important role. Satish, another fan, explains his desire for Rajinikanth as follows: Whenever people went to meet him, they would fall at his feet. Rajini used to scold them, saying that we are all humans. He is simple. Whenever we watch his films we cry out of ecstasy. We don’t know why. Such is his attractiveness. Even now on seeing some of his photos I cry with joy. Roos: Why do you love him so much? Sathish: Don’t know. Whenever we see his introductory scene we cry. All his songs and scenes are written based on his fans. In the film Sivaji

78 

Intimate Visualities and the Politics of Fandom in India

there is an introductory song. In that he tells his fans to love the Tamil language. In Baadsha he insisted on loving and taking care of aged parents. In Arunachalam he thanks his fans for supporting him. Roos: Why do you want to see the first show? Sathish: We are hard-core fans of him and it won’t be meaningful [if we don’t see it].

Being a fan, Sathish seems to suggest, is not meaningful if you cannot perform as a fan. Therefore, it is essential to be part of the first-day show. From the sociability of the screening, the urge to see his face, the media attention generated to the comparison with the newness of a freshly decorated deity; all indicate a certain affect. This affect is built up throughout a period of waiting and receiving news about the film throughout its production. For fans the songs and the information they have collected about the production of the film through conversations, magazines, text messages, or television creates an image of what the remaining parts of the film will look like.

The (too) active audience The elaborate celebrations during film releases have regularly caused damage to cinemas. Occasionally, during fan shows cinema interiors have been demolished when managers did not agree to screen a song another time as fans demanded; fires broke out when pujas were performed in front of the screen; or fights broke out between fans of different actors or of different communities sitting in the same space. These accidents now generally belong in the past as the shows are much more regulated by holding fan clubs responsible for keeping the crowd under control, in cooperation with the cinema management and police. The audience has to comply with various conditions laid down by the cinema owners: do not stand and dance on the chairs; do not kiss the screen because that can cause damage; do not sprinkle flowers and paper cuts; do not light camphor in front of the screen; do not scream and ask for ‘once more’; do not perform abhishekam over cutouts using milk or beer.36 36 The negative connotations with milk and beer abhishekams is a story in itself. Film stars regularly ask their fans not to perform milk abhishekams, mentioning how it wastes milk. Recently, several newspapers covered stories of milk being stolen for the many abhishekams that were performed on cutouts and banners for Rajinikanth’s new film 2.0 (Shankar 2019). Another story mentioned the collapse of a billboard while a few men were performing an abhishekam.

Keeping in control

79

The prohibitions, while based on actual incidents at cinemas, convey and reinforce the trope and figure of the fan that fans as well as others propagate. Nowadays, only fan clubs of certain younger actors are deemed by other fan clubs, cinema owners, and others to behave excessively and violently. Older fans accuse younger fans or fans of younger actors of excessive, aggressive behaviour. A lack of education is also deemed to be a reason for behaving this excessively during a release. In every generation of film stars it is said there are two types of actors: one is the educated actor playing various kinds of roles and the other one is popular with the masses because the characters he plays correspond to the social class of his audience. The fans are also often divided along similar lines. For current fan clubs, people also make the distinction between the lower classes who like Rajinikanth and what some fans called ‘decent families’ who prefer Rajinikanth’s counterpart, Kamal Hassan. Every generation has its own fan figures: those of the lower classes, deemed aggressive and ardent and who contrast with the supposedly educated, serious fans falling for an actor who appears in serious films. As well as the figure of the fan being typecast as a young man from a lower socioeconomic background, the cinema itself has been seen as a place of decay, in terms of both the moral degeneration of audience members and the physical deterioration of the cinema (M.B. Hansen 1999; S.V. Srinivas 2005, 2007; R. Vasudevan 2003, 2004). Stephen Hughes (2000) has shown how, in the colonial period in India, censorship not only dealt with film censorship but also with the venues of exhibition through issues of fire hazards, physical safety, geographical location, gathering of film crowds, immorality, and ideological effects. After independence, this fear of more elite audiences for crowds and their audience behaviour persisted (S.V. Srinivas 2007). Although the cinema was still considered a place of family leisure, the 1970s and 1980s initiated a period in which the composition of the audience changed. The cinema became a space for young unmarried men (Derne and Jadwin 2000) and consequently lost its social legitimacy. This change was caused by the new cinematic theme of the poor, angry young man – characterized by film stars such as Amitabh Bachchan and Rajinikanth – who attracted a particular male public (Mazumdar 2007a) and by state regulations lowering ticket prices in order to please a large section of society, which was perceived as important in economic life and Again, the abhishekams are not only impairing the cinema premises, they are also part of the excessive behaviour that can lead to damage in all kinds of ways.

80 

Intimate Visualities and the Politics of Fandom in India

electoral gain (Athique 2011). These low ticket prices provided access to the cinema for the poor but at the same time also reduced the cinema’s revenue, so that the owners cut back on cleaning, repairs, and replacing shabby interiors, which in turn made cinema visits less appealing to elites. Moreover, cinemas are suffering from a decreasing number of visitors generally, which is caused by the availability of cable television, DVDs, and VCDs. However, this does not mean that families do not watch f ilms in cinemas anymore. Despite the negativity surrounding cinema spaces, film-watching in the cinema is still popular in India, and visitor numbers are still high (S.V. Srinivas 2005). More well-off audiences have shifted towards the semi-public, comfortable spaces of the multiplexes in which audience behaviour is much more restricted. In contrast, most film releases were taking place in the single-screen cinemas that I described above. I will address the tension between the single-screen cinema and the multiplex in the Epilogue in more detail. To summarize, the cinemas that I am referring to here and where fans celebrate a release is an ambiguous space, just as fans hold an ambiguous position in relation to the cinema. On the one hand they can celebrate excessively in the cinema; on the other hand, restrictions try to control them as excessive crowds. Although excess is considered proof of fandom, fans and others also believe that it must be controlled.

Vigilantes and keeping in control Fans feel connected to their star by the responsibility they feel in defending and protecting him. They defend him when family members or friends mock them by joking about their hero; they defend their star when public figures comment on him; and they also act as vigilantes towards other fans when they do not act according to the implicit and more explicit cinema rules governing fan behaviour. Fan club members have defended Rajinikanth when he was criticized by politicians or in conflicts he had with politicians. There have been serious conflicts between Rajinikanth fans and supporters of the PMK (Paattali Makkal Katchi) political party and its leader S. Ramadoss. Rajinikanth has regularly been attacked by Ramadoss for his behaviour in films. According to Ramadoss, Rajinikanth’s smoking and drinking habits displayed in films negatively influence Tamil youth. This came to a climax with the release of the movie Baba (Krishna 2002) in which Rajinikanth played a drinking and smoking saint. PMK cadres went on a rampage, damaging cinemas, film reels, and posters, and they physically and verbally

Keeping in control

81

attacked Rajinikanth fans. Several Rajinikanth fan club members sought police protection afterwards, which they received for some time during and after the hostilities. Ramadoss’s appeal to Rajinikanth was effective; since then, Rajinikanth has replaced his cigarette with chewing gum, using the same gimmick of tossing a cigarette into his mouth but now having the cigarette replaced with gum. On grassroots levels fans continued to compete with the PMK and defended Rajinikanth univocally, not merely in defending him as a film star but also, for example, in competing with them politically in the area where Ramadoss lives in the Villupuram district, and visually by placing (and destroying) billboards. A fan club member told me that he once noticed his neighbours watching an illegal copy of the Rajinikanth movie Baba, which had just been released. He explained how he caught his neighbour and handed him in to the police. When I asked him for more details about the pirated copies of Rajinikanth films and how fans deal with these, he explained that these copies usually do not circulate because ‘they’ as fans do not allow this. In contrast to what this man explained, pirated copies do circulate abundantly in Tamil Nadu, but this strong statement highlights the urge fans feel to protect their star and notions on what is right and wrong, what is deemed as excessive and what as fandom. The online community of the rajinifans.com website provided a platform on which to circulate articles or information about new film productions and releases, or to post personal messages about Rajinikanth. Fans sent messages asking Rajinikanth to meet them or they just expressed how much of a fan they were. In addition, in some of these posts, fans criticized articles, magazines or newspapers, and specific journalists for not being positive or for being negative about Rajinikanth. They took the matter into their own hands by writing emails with combined forces until the content was changed by the magazine or newspaper. This happened, for example, with an article on news portal Sify.com, which reported about Rajinikanth in a manner that fans considered too critical. Members of the rajinifans.com forum encouraged all members to write messages to Sify to change the content of the article. After some time, they got a reply from Sify:37 Dear Phil, Thank you for your note. We have removed the sentence which you found offensive. Sify.com strives to bring the best in entertainment and other 37 Email on Rajinifansdiscussion Yahoo Group, 12 July 2007.

82 

Intimate Visualities and the Politics of Fandom in India

news to our readers. We are totally objective in our reporting and have no issues whatsoever with any producer, actor or entity involved with the industry. Thank you once again With best wishes Sify Newsdesk

Rajinifans.com also reported about illegal activities such as watching scenes of a yet-to-be-released film online, listening to songs that had not officially been released yet, or downloading songs instead of buying the official CD. They tried to keep their fellow fans under control by reprimanding a person if that person behaved badly. If someone on the forum mentioned that he had downloaded songs before the songs had been officially released, other fans immediately responded that the moderator should remove this person from the site. After someone published unofficial photos of the film-shooting of Enthiran, another member posted the following comment on the forum: ‘Please dont put any unofficial potos of Enthiran… !!! thats not good. if we want Enthiran to be success then we must [not] do it. soo please dont publish. we love that pics but we must be in control’ (SL BOY 2009).38 ‘We love that pics but must be in control’ articulates the eagerness of seeing Rajinikanth and at the same time the difficulty of suppressing these same desires. The clear request and difficulty of control has come to the fore in several ways: fans who hand over their neighbours to the police, a website that is reprimanded, and fans who sense their own double position in being in control in the cinema while at the same time celebrating their star. It is only a fine line between behaving as a real fan and ‘keeping in control’. By acting as vigilantes, fans show authority in what they expect from others – not only from other fans but also from a wider audience. This brings us back to the notion of the figure as typecast and the figure as performed. Keeping in control does not only refer to the vigilante who feels the desire to defend their star but also to the inclination to justify excessive fan behaviour. The figure of the fan has been a recurrent image in popular and academic accounts, illuminating a specific cultural production of cinema and politics in Tamil Nadu. The figure of the fan has become central in these understandings of the popular, vulgar, and excessive workings of cinema audiences, but also of politics, where fans have been understood as voting banks and 38 SL BOY 2009. Due to the many spelling mistakes I haven’t used [sic] for wrongly spelled words.

Keeping in control

83

grassroots supporters or opponents of political parties. In this way, the fan has come to be synonymous for the audience as category related to mass film-watching. While the image of the f igure has become predominant in thinking about the dedication of fans, it also becomes an embodied experience of fandom itself. Fans experience their star and film-watching in their own ways in which excess is part of the joy of fandom. I have shown how fans were initially attracted by images of and stories about the star before they even had seen his films and how later they developed a desire to see his film on the first possible instant. The cinema is a key space for fans’ lived experience of excess and control, though by no means the only space in which these oscillations are performed. Even though out of control behaviour confirms and articulates fandom, such behaviour is not always deemed appropriate. Fans with whom I worked commented on other fans who become violent during film releases, and regularly expressed nostalgically how they wished to still be young and unmarried, so they could still perform as fans in excessive ways. Now, they had to keep up their status as husband, father, or respected person, but when they were young, they could behave as real fans, they suggested. It demonstrates once more that excess or abundance shows fandom: it proves it, and yet it needs to be controlled. The narratives of the excessive and the vulgar embody a narrative of distinction and seem to indicate a ‘split public’, referring to a social division mediated by a split media (Rajagopal 2001). Whereas the public may be split in terms of notions of social division, the narratives that they mediate are analogous and interacting with each other. These narratives invoke Mazzarella’s ‘pissing man’ (2013); though deriving from an elitist discourse, they are embodied by the figure himself. Fans are well aware of the negative stereotypes that people have about the figure of the fan, and indeed utilize such ideas and language when assessing their own fan practices and even more, when discussing the behaviours of other fans. Fans perform a certain role distance that is partly playful and partly serious, specifically in relation to other fans. In this way, the practices of fandom in accounts and in lived experience create as well as blur the typical notion of the lower-class, rowdy fan. Fans self-regulate their image to prove fandom as well as to distance themselves from the same behaviour. I see another similarity with Mazzarella’s ethnography on the censor: these concrete enactments and the metacommentaries around them show a larger discourse of the affective potential of film and of star-heroes. The fantasy of the pissing man or at this time the figure of the lower-class fan as susceptible to film

84 

Intimate Visualities and the Politics of Fandom in India

images and hero worship is also a response to what ‘non-fans’ ‘cannot readily acknowledge in themselves’ (Mazzarella 2013, 168). Fan practices therefore not only articulate and constitute fandom in Tamil Nadu but also reveal experiences and ambiguities that conjoin the manifold denotations of the figure of the fan. In a similar fashion, the discussion on the figure of the fan shows how the figure is not something that needs to be contained or expressed but is a constant reference to the affective potential of film and stars for all film audiences.

2

Intimacy on display Film stars, images, and everyday life

Selvam rushes in when he sees that Gandhirajan, my research assistant, and I have come to his house. ‘Please come in,’ he says, pleasantly surprised, and he rushes out again with the same speed. We settle on the floor of Selvam’s living room, looking around for the changes in decoration since the last time we were here. The room is sparsely furnished with a plastic chair and a cupboard holding a television set. The walls on the contrary are elaborately decorated with posters and framed pictures. These walls immediately reveal that Selvam is a fan of Rajinikanth. Each time I visit Selvam, his walls are embellished with novel images of the star. After a few minutes Selvam arrives again, as usual with two fresh coconuts. ‘Here, please drink this.’ While drinking our coconut, we exchange queries about each other’s well-being. Selvam finally asks the question which is always gripping him: ‘Have you met him?’ His voice has a curious tone when he asks me whether I have met Rajinikanth. ‘No, I haven’t,’ I reply, and Selvam, slightly disappointed but wasting no words on the lack of news, continues to look through his cupboard to pull out images of Rajinikanth that he has collected or made in the last days or months. When I got to know Selvam, he was a coconut seller in his thirties living in a modest house in Thengai Thope, one of the coconut plantations on the outskirts of Puducherry. Selvam was living alone; his parents were not alive anymore, and he was not married yet. Selvam has been a fan of Rajinikanth since his early childhood. Each time I visited Selvam, the images he has collected and displayed on his walls served as leading thread to recount his stories about Rajinikanth, the images themselves, the fan club in Puducherry, and his own everyday life (Figure 3). Every image came with a story, such as the death of his mother, his marriage, and later the birth of his children and their birthdays. This chapter is about these images. I make two interrelated arguments. My first argument relates to the way fandom is inflected in familial relationships as well as being informed by them. The ways in which the film star Rajinikanth emerges in domestic, everyday settings, provides a new take on how cinematic elements incite and inflect veneration, affect, pleasure, and family life. In Chapter 1, I showed how becoming a fan is ingrained

86 

Intimate Visualities and the Politics of Fandom in India

Figure 3 Selvam’s wall, showing a commemorative poster for Rajinikanth’s 60th birthday, a film poster for Kusalan, a calendar, and a framed photo of Selvam’s deceased mother; Puducherry 2010 Selvam holding his photo album. In the background, several of his Rajinikanth posters and the Neyam music channel – run by Rajinikanth fans – playing on TV; Puducherry

Intimac y on displ ay

87

in family life: sons take over their father’s favourite star, after which they develop their own preferences for stars of their own generation, and film stars are incorporated in households through film-watching, conversations, or other citational practices (Nakassis 2016). In this chapter, I trace the images that inflect such familial or household insertions of mass heroes. My second argument relates to the personalized images of film stars in everyday settings. These images engender a relation with the star. In everyday spaces of the home, images were an important mode through which fans related to their star and made this relationship particularly personal and affective. They were personalized, not merely through interacting with them (speaking to and of them, garlanding them, dusting them, gazing upon them) but by actively retouching, reworking, and familiarizing themselves with them, so that star images end up in familial albums, narratives, and memories. However, image practices, while producing personal connections with a star, do so through the mediating frame of the fan club. What I argue here is not just that images of film stars enter the private lives of Indian citizens; this assertion has been made already (Thomas 1995; Dwyer 2000; Blamey and D’Souza 2005). Most fans will never get to meet the star, yet through images he endures and resonates in people’s minds, to paraphrase Guha-Thakurta, ‘as a body of readily available, reproducible imagery’ (2003, 110). This intimates the extra-filmic circulation of stars via memories, stories, rumours, and images (Thomas 1995; Dwyer 2000; Dickey 2005). I also do not aim to prioritize still images above other ways of engaging with film stars. It is not just images that produce fandom, even though it plays a significant part in a larger imaginary fuelled by familiarity with films and film culture and the wider context of social relations. Naturally, images go hand in hand with other ways of engagement – watching and talking about films, fan club activity, memories of performance, and repeating scenes and songs to name a few (A. Pandian 2008; Dickey 2005). The social act of watching films, recollecting film scenes, and re-enacting dialogues play a vital role in experiencing fandom and in performing everyday life. What was striking throughout my research, however, was that many fans I have worked with became fans only by seeing images and hearing stories of a star. Several fans explained that when they were still too young to join a fan club or go to the cinema (and had no access to television yet) they actually became a fan of an actor not because of the films they had seen but because of the images exhibited at cinemas, and the stories and images that circulated in magazines, at tea stalls, or in friends’ talk. Fandom therefore is not merely a product of spectatorship: it precedes it here.

88 

Intimate Visualities and the Politics of Fandom in India

Taken together, in this chapter I will explore the multiple ways of how images in fans’ lives bring about forms of spectatorship and fandom that create affective relationships with public figures as well as permeate family lives. To specify, the images that I discuss here are not just ‘entering’ private lives, but also flesh out these lives, organize the star-fan relations as well as familial relations, memories, and affects. In what follows I explore the multiple ways in which celebrities enter everyday lives; how they become part of households, narratives, and relations via images that fans collect, produce, and amend. Through sometimes playful, sometimes paradoxical, sometimes ambiguous, sometimes secret ways to make a star tactical, I will show how images can cultivate the presence of a star.

The household and intimacy Celebrities, as we will see, are merged in familial settings of the household and hierarchical relations through deference and their inclusion in rites of passage such as marriages, births, birthdays, and deaths in several ways. Siblings and spouses share or change allegiances, stars are included into kinship terminology and talked about with family members, fathers see Rajinikanth as the patriarch to solve their children’s issues, and stars gets inserted into family imagery as they get inserted into family albums, wedding photos, or framed photos. People incorporated Rajinikanth in familial relations by referring to him as a relative, as someone close (see also Nakassis 2017b, 218; Dickey 1993b, 356). The household is not a f ixed entity, and it has gone through various recurrent developments (Uberoi 2006). Families grow and shrink as people move in and out; people die; children get born; women move into their husband’s home, etc. Households also relate to neighbours, community, and friends or the peer group of fans. In other words, the concept of household is flexible as it can change in time and across space. What I am interested in here is how distant figures, who are normally not related by kinship, become part of social relations. Making distant figures part of the conviviality of the household has among others its roots in consanguineal kinship terminology and practices of devotion. The naming of well-known f igures in familial terms is commonplace in India where in the Tamil language strangers can be called by consanguineal kinship terms such as tambi (younger brother), annaa (older brother), or akkaa (older sister). Also, acquaintances of families are commonly not (only) called by their names but by such kinship terms. At the same time, public figures very

Intimac y on displ ay

89

often have special nicknames such as ammaa (mother) and thalaivar (leader), which construct a sense of attachment. In addition, kinship models also make intelligible other kinship behaviours. Asif Agha calls these possibilities tropes that are made intelligible by the kinship model and normalize as alternative patterns of relationship within society (Agha 2007:341). Kinship relations therefore should be focused not on biological (genealogical) linkages but on the activities through which they are performed and construed. An illustrative example of such a tropic study of fictive uses of kinship terms is the work by Nakassis on college-going youth in Tamil Nadu (Nakassis 2014). He shows how through suspensions of cross-cousin kinship terms youth identity and sociality is performed as their tropic use detaches these youth from the hierarchies of respectability and propriety commonly instilled in them.39 Tamil kinship terminology is often implicitly hierarchical. For example older vs. younger brother entails expectations about service and obedience from the younger toward the older, which is also the case with sisters, between parents and children, in-laws, etc. The kinship relations come with a set of rules and obligations which are hierarchical. The tropic and fictive uses of kinship terms show how kinship terminology is used in a wider context than simply relating to the family, and includes friends, strangers, and public figures. 40 It can remove hierarchies, but also create new ones. Therefore, if someone refers to Rajini as annaa, it creates a specific relation between fan and star that is hierarchical but also detaches the typical fan-star hierarchy and creates an intimate bond between them. Generally, households in South Asia are patrilocal, that is women come to live with their husbands after marriage and the eldest son remains to live with his parents in the same household. Even though this is the general custom, especially in the urban environments I have been doing my research in, this was very often not the case. Women came to live with their husbands, but a lot of the fans I have worked with lived in a nuclear household; that is with wife and possibly children. Moving out of one’s home and into a new household, as women do after marriage, often not only means engendering sentiments of anxiety before marriage about their new role in a new setting, it also means getting a new position, 39 Cross kin is important in South Indian Dravidian kinship because it is the basis for potential marriage partners (Rivers 1968; Trawick 1990; Nakassis 2014). Nakassis argues that the shifting use of such terms as well as the changing conceptions of marriage and marriageability has also caused a tendency to avoid using the terms within the kin group. 40 See Ramaswamy (1998) specifically on language devotion and how metaphors of motherhood in Tamil Nadu came to dominate representations of language.

90 

Intimate Visualities and the Politics of Fandom in India

personality, status, and responsibilities and requires exhibiting deference to the husband and senior kin (Uberoi 2006; Gerritsen 2006; D.P. Mines and Lamb 2010). Loyalties are directed towards the new family members and new household. Authority within the family in patrilineal kinship systems lies with senior males and the eldest, the patriarch, acts on behalf of the family (Uberoi 2006). Love is not commonly articulated within the family. Spouses especially are not supposed to show love for each other, and also mothers usually do not express their love towards their children so as to not to attract the evil eye (Trawick 1990). It is not the scope of this chapter to elaborate on notions of love within the family, but I mention this here because fans do openly express their love or affect for their star, also within the household. Loyalties towards the family are often downplayed as fans give preference to spending time and money on their star, the fan clubs, and imagery made in a star’s name. So where on the one hand celebrities become inserted into domestic spaces, they do have a separated status, which I would explain with the concept of ‘hierarchical intimacy’ (Babb 1986) that informs deference and praise as performed for deities, politicians, film stars, and the like (Chapter 3 and 4). In several households that I was acquainted with during my research, Rajinikanth was expressed as a way of seeking common ground for the newlywed couple. This was also the case for Selvam, a Rajinikanth fan whom I introduced at the start of this chapter. Selvam married around two years after first I met him. He stressed that he was not planning to change anything about his activities regarding Rajinikanth. He emphasized that he was planning to keep on spending money on imagery and other activities related to the fan club and would not change the decoration of his house regardless of what his future wife would say. His biggest wish was a wedding under the auspices of Rajinikanth. He tried to invite him by sending his wedding invitation and later the invitation to the birthday celebration of his son to Rajinikanth. He sincerely hoped that the star would take up this invitation. Selvam hoped that I had better connections and asked me to send the invitations, with no effect: Rajini did not show up for his marriage. He never heard back from Rajinikanth. When I visited Selvam two and a half years later, he was married and had a son of more than one year old. His wife explained, when Selvam was out cutting coconuts, how she shifted her preference for an actor from Vijay to Rajinikanth. Even though she secretly still liked Vijay’s films more, in their household she stated that she now was a Rajinikanth fan. Rajinikanth’s films and the circulating knowledge about him gave them common ground. The way in which Selvam’s wife

Intimac y on displ ay

91

was relating to the commonly attributed characteristics of Rajinikanth was highly standardized but did trickle into their familial life. They watched the same films, talked about their mutual favourite star, and used his images for their invitations. Rajinikanth’s real and reel character was an example of good behaviour and for solving problems in their own lives (A. Pandian 2008; Osella and Osella 2004; Nakassis 2016). Below, I will say more about the fan club as a gendered space and the presence of female fan clubs. For now, let me just observe that fan clubs are gendered spaces and that women’s relationship towards film stars is different. This is not to say that they feel less attracted towards stars but that the public expression of fandom as performed through the fan club or first-day film screenings is more problematic for women (Nakassis 2016; L. Srinivas 2010). The women that I have worked with usually talk fondly about heroes and heroines, collected images, or tried to follow news, but they couldn’t perform the same acts that fan clubs are engaged in or the style that Constantine Nakassis describes for college youth (Nakassis 2016). I have met several women who changed allegiance to their husbands’ favourite f ilm stars. This signposts how personal affection can inform fandom but also how it is exchangeable and based on other selection criteria than merely personal attraction and affection for a f ilm star. Also, fan club members sometimes changed from one fan club to one for another actor, if they were not satisf ied with what they got out of their fan club membership. It is not the scope of this chapter to go into the details of this shift in fan activity, but it does parallel the ways in which women changed allegiance, even though the intricacies might be different. Fan shifts relate to the ways in which women, when moving into the household of their husband, must take up a new identity and role. ‘I like what my husband likes’ was an often-heard comment, yet I also witnessed women sometimes quietly pursuing their own preference for an actor. Usually, where their husbands were active beyond mere appreciation of films – in fan club activity – women were commonly not able to partake in such activities. Nalini, whose wedding invitation I will describe below, complained with each release of a Rajinikanth f ilm that she wanted to see the film on the first day in the cinema. But Saktivel, Nalini’s husband, kept turning her request down: ‘the cinema is not a place for women to be on the f irst day, it is full of men, and the f ilm cannot even be seen!’ At home, though, they did watch films together and Saktivel often buys VCDs to watch at home. But the investment in Rajinikanth was also the subject of complaints. Complaints by family members were usually about time and money. Some

92 

Intimate Visualities and the Politics of Fandom in India

of the wives or parents of fan club members I spoke to complained about the money their husbands or children spent on the fan club. Tamizhvanan’s wife: He [Tamizhvanan] spends a lot of money. He doesn’t do anything for the children and he does not want to purchase any gold ornaments for them. But he always spends money on Rajinikanth. I asked for a cupboard to keep our clothes in but he will not spend money on that. I asked for a dining table, but he won’t spend money on it. But if someone calls and says, ‘we’re going to Chennai to meet Rajinikanth,’ he immediately takes money and goes.

Such comments were not mere complaints, but also emphasize how important a role Rajinikanth played in their lives. He was there, influencing their lives in various ways. Fans and their families often laughed with guilt over behaviour that they said they could not help. Just as families have a deity they worship, several families that I knew had a ‘family star’ that was the favourite of the entire family. Nalini and Saktivel were such a family for instance. They took pride in their son for being keen on Rajinikanth, imitating his dances, buying his images, and imitating his father’s fan club activities by, for example, distributing sweets at school to celebrate a new film release. Nalini explained to me how her son had his own favourite star, Vijay. But despite this f irst choice he was also fond of Rajinikanth. Saktivel, Nalini told me, tried to favour Rajinikanth by putting up his images everywhere in the house, like on the fridge and walls and by mainly watching his films. ‘It worked,’ Nalini declared. Children regularly take over their father’s favourite actor, and then later or simultaneously have their own favourite, one who is concurrent to their generation. This is also exemplif ied by the names given to stars. Selvam told me proudly that his son reacts on hearing or seeing Rajinikanth on television, calling him taataa, grandfather. While scanning through a recent photo album of Selvam, their son indeed reacted instantly on seeing Rajinikanth’s image. Selvam’s father was no longer among the living, but Selvam and his family did have an elderly person in their household that they could give their respect to or intimately address with kinship names. Within familial relations Rajinikanth is ascribed an important role as patriarch of the family, not only in kinship terminology but also in the ways in which he is embedded in familial context. Let me illustrate this by the story of Balradj and his son. Balradj, a man in his forties, worked as a lawyer and was a fan club member high up in the hierarchy in Puducherry, told me

Intimac y on displ ay

93

how he detected problems with his son who got, as he described it, infected by Rajinikanth through his own active role in the fan club. He noticed that as a father he was not in control of his son anymore and he needed the help of Rajinikanth to get his son back on the right track. When you go and meet a religious person, you have some sort of chemistry in your entire body. That is with all big personalities, but it is only with this person when I met him, that I felt some sort of vibration. My son also had some sort of attraction to him. Because of my active involvement in the manram [fan club], this boy was only thinking about Rajini. When he was sleeping, always Rajini Rajini Rajini. The money I spent on my son’s health was exorbitant. I took him to all the best doctors, but they said: fix an appointment with Rajinikanth and take him to him. Only then, this boy will come to normalcy. Only he can solve it. After Rajinikanth came to know this, he said that he wanted to meet my son immediately. He just asked ‘what is the story? What problem is the boy facing?’ I answered ‘This boy only wants to be with you! Not even with me! He is my son, but he wants only you, he wants to be with you! He wants to spend time with you.’ Rajini sir said to my son ‘study hard afterwards, don’t worry, we’ll put you through, you can come and meet me at any time. All we want you to do is to study well.’ While he had his hands around my son and was talking, my son had been staring at him. He was dumbfounded! Perplexed on seeing him. This advice had that much of effect! Now, my son is going for his exams in Bcom. The boy is OK now.

A few themes come together here, which I would like to point to. First, Rajinikanth is seen as the patriarch who is listened to with respect by Balradj’ son, bypassing his actual father. Rajinikanth has taken over the family patriarch position. Second, this brings us to deference and veneration of family patriarchs and especially the gaze. Balradj noted the importance of seeing and being seen, or the power of the gaze. The story parallels several other narratives of fans or their children that I heard, that relate to the religious similarity that images of Rajinikanth seem to have. Several fans or parents of fans that I met recalled how they were always distracted in school thinking about Rajinikanth and his films, drawing his image in their notebooks. Parents complained that their children were spending so much time on their actor, losing their heads in the fantastic world of cinema and wasting money on fan activity. Different kinds of traces (tactical, indexical) of the star worked to ‘heal’ them, like Balradj’s son. This is also exemplified by a youthful memory of Saktivel, who has been a fan of

94 

Intimate Visualities and the Politics of Fandom in India

Rajinikanth since childhood. I can imagine Saktivel, at the age of thirteen, eagerly wanting to see a newly released Rajinikanth movie. He received money from his parents for his cinema ticket but instead of spending it on a ticket, he bought sweets to distribute at the cinema, as is commonly done by fan clubs. Afterwards, he had no money left for the actual ticket and in the meantime, his parents were out so he could not ask them for more money. He decided to earn some money by collecting and selling firewood. He climbed a tree, fell out, and was severely injured. Even though he could not walk properly, Saktivel was determined to see the film. With a broken leg he stumbled to the cinema and saw the film, after which he was hospitalized for months. His mother, Saktivel recounted, knew that nothing would please him more than an image of Rajinikanth, so she went to Chennai and tried to meet Rajinikanth to collect a photo of him, but in vain. Instead, she met Rajinikanth’s All-India Fan Club president, Sathyanarayanan. Sathyanarayanan agreed to give her his autograph. This autograph pleased Saktivel almost as much as a photo of Rajinikanth would have done. Even when Saktivel tells me the story, he enjoys recalling it and keeps emphasizing how happy he was with this autograph, keeping it under his pillow. He did not need anything else. The autograph here seems to work as an index: Sathyanarayanan’s autograph became a physical token of Rajinikanth’s proximity. Here it is Rajinikanth who is mediated to his fan in the shape of someone close to him, someone high up in the fan club ranks. This indexical connection is almost tactical: it works as medicine or a magical cure. The format of the signature – not a direct signature from Rajinikanth, not his image, and not the film performance that Saktivel wanted to see – distributes Rajinikanth’s proximity through the institutional organization of fan hierarchy.

Tactical images, proximate celebrities Fans build up a relationship with their star through the stories they collect and the desire they nurse to know about and engage in his personal life as well as his cinematic avatars. They are attracted to the on- and off-screen life of a star, which they trace, pursue, and follow through magazines, television, and circulating stories (Marshall 2002, 234-235; see also Doss 1999). Rojek considers the production of celebrity as an individual or collective abstract desire (2001, 186-187). For Rojek, this abstract desire is rooted in capitalism, where consumers develop a desire for commodities based on media representations. Marshall argues that the audience builds a relationship

Intimac y on displ ay

95

with a celebrity through a tension between the possibility and impossibility of knowing the authentic individual: The various mediated constructions of the film celebrity ensure that whatever intimacy is permitted between the audience and the star is purely at the discursive level. Desire and pleasure are derived from this clear separation of the material reality of the star as living being from the fragments of identity that are manifested in films, interviews, magazines, pinup posters, autographs and so on. (Marshall 2002, 234-235)

Both Rojek and Marshall point to the celebrity as a commodity or image that is consumed due to desire, but how this desire materializes and is experienced in personal lives is not explicated. In her study on erotic desire Purnima Mankekar observes a relation between erotic desire and a desire to consume (2004). She defines the desire to consume as ‘commodity affect’ which ‘ranges from the desire to consume a particular object, to the desire to acquire it, to the desire to display it. More importantly, desire in commodity affect pertains not just to the pleasure of acquiring a commodity but also to the pleasures of gazing upon it’ (2004, 408). This brings in the role of consumption and media that allow us to display, to gaze, and hence to familiarize ourselves with the commodity in everyday settings. While audiences, and fans in particular, consume the spectacle of celebrity on screen or in other media, fans themselves are part of this spectacle – and thus make it real – by producing stories, fantasies, images, and as such, the star himself. Besides magazines, other media, visual and aural, moving and still, are responsible for the construction of familiarity and affect as well (Mazumdar 2007b, 97). The role of images, I argue, becomes crucial in how fans articulate and mediate the presence of and desire for their star within the household. In almost all Tamil households, walls are populated by calendars depicting most often deities (the calendar images are later repurposed for worshipping practices) along with retouched and framed photos of deceased family members (Figure 3). Family pictures are objects of remembrance, of memory, and provide possibilities to project and explore identities and ideals (Poole 1997). Images that we could call family pictures or pictures that depict ‘the family’, Marianne Hirsch has argued, support the ‘familial gaze’ – ‘the conventions and ideologies of family through which they see themselves’ and which shape memories, narratives, and experiences (Hirsch 1999, xi). Hirsch intimates that the inclusion of extra-familiar subjects demonstrates pictures’ power to support and enforce these

96 

Intimate Visualities and the Politics of Fandom in India

dominant ideologies. What happens, therefore, if we include images of f ilm stars in family pictures and bring them within the realm of the familial gaze? In her book Refracted Visions Karen Strassler describes a novel in which the Indonesian protagonist imagines himself as peer and lover of the Dutch queen Wilhelmina via a circulating mass-produced photo of her in the former Dutch colony (2010). Instead of the intended effect of political allegiance, Strassler argues that ‘photographic images operate in different registers, circulating in the public sphere as political symbols while also mediating an intimate realm of personal affiliations, memories, and sentiments’ (2010, xiv). The images which are displayed in everyday settings of the home engender a feeling of familiarity and personal space as they are connected to the people living there (Morgan 1998, 57). They are part of the everyday practices and experiences of their producers and consumers who incorporate them into everyday practices. Presencing is an act that goes beyond mere representation as displaying your star indicates his presence as if in a sense he is there (Morgan 1998). The incorporation of images in everyday life engenders a relation between beholder and the picture that goes beyond ‘a simple person-picture dualism’ (Meyer 2011, 1046). What transpires here is a confluence of practices that call to our attention the affects, veneration, and respect related to familial relations, but which also goes beyond that. The position of fan club members in a family can on the one hand be appreciated, but also mocked and criticized. On the other hand fans define themselves as fans by their excessive behaviour that goes beyond the usual relations of respect and veneration. Therefore, the images that I discuss here are tactical: they invoke presence and they must be strategically used to navigate the balance between private household and the gaze of the fan club.

Family images, family lives Fan club members of Rajinikanth collect and portray all kinds of images in their homes: posters, photo albums, as well as personalized, framed photos (Figure 2 and 3). Such images were commonly placed in living rooms, workplaces, and bedrooms, but could also be found in such diverse locations as on motorbikes, fridges, and even bodies, as images holding indexical or iconical signs of the star were carried close to the body, in a person’s pocket or wallet, as rings or a necklace. Fans often kept special albums in which they collected images related to and of their star and

Intimac y on displ ay

97

the fan club of which they were member. These were partly snapshots of events that they organized for their fan club events, retouched photos putting together fan and star, combined with paper cuttings of magazines and newspapers tucked away on a shelf or in a cabinet. I have come across the use of star imagery for weddings, birthdays, ear piercings, and coming-of-age ceremonies as well as death notices of fans or their family members. Figure 4 shows a photo from a family album of fan club member Napoleon Raja. For the occasion of his sister’s wedding one finds him pictured as a young boy wearing a white outfit and posing with his hands in his pockets, mimicking with his clothes and posture a pose from one of Rajinikanth’s films at the time. By doing this he deviates from the emblematic formal postures that one can find in wedding photography and interweaves his fondness for Rajinikanth in his family life through photography. He looked back nostalgically, when he showed me the picture, seeing himself as a young boy, still being able to mimic his star in his own way. Now, as a young, working man, he needs to be more respectable. Even though he spends time on the fan club, his image as fan is shaped and mediated through the fan club activities. Outside the realm of photographic moments fans mimic haircuts, sartorial codes, and postures to look like their star. Or friends and brothers use gimmicks from Rajinikanth’s films as mutual language between them. These kinds of images, besides appearing in wedding albums, also end up in photo albums that contain both personal family photos and collected commodity pictures of the star. Figure 5 depicts the wedding invitation of fan club leader Saktivel and his wife Nalini, whom I introduced above. Saktivel was an active fan club member and acted as the local Panchayat president, while Nalini was mostly running the household.41 Each time I visited Saktivel and Nalini, Saktivel was usually out to solve an issue in the neighbourhood that he was responsible for. His fan club members assisted him and always accompanied him to where he went. When Saktivel was at home, Nalini usually stayed in the background, listening to the stories and preparing tea or coffee. But when Saktivel was away, Nalini enjoyed talking about her life, her and Saktivel’s fandom for Rajinikanth, and how their son integrated Tamil stars in his life. Nalini already was a fan of Rajinikanth before her marriage, as was her entire family. She recounted how, before her wedding, she secretly hoped that her future husband would be a Rajinikanth fan. Nalini’s youth friends, 41 I will have more to say about the position of Panchayat president in Chapter 3. It is actually Nalini who is the Panchayat president but her husband Saktivel is executing her position.

98 

Intimate Visualities and the Politics of Fandom in India

Figure 4 Napoleon Raja (left) posing for his sister’s wedding in white clothes and a Rajinikanth pose; Puducherry

Intimac y on displ ay

Figure 5 Saktivel and Nalini’s wedding invitation; Moratandi 1995

Collection of Saktivel and Nalini

99

100 

Intimate Visualities and the Politics of Fandom in India

she told me, were jealous that she was able to marry a husband who liked the same actor. I asked her when she found out about it: I didn’t know about it [when the marriage arrangements were made]. One day he came to my home to discuss the design of the [wedding] invitation. He asked permission to put Rajini’s photo on it. It was only then that we found out that he was a Rajini fan. In my home we all are Rajini fans, including my father, so we agreed that he could put Rajini’s photo on the invitation. Now I am happy that my long-time dream has been fulfilled!

The wedding was in 1995, before today’s multicolour, offset design and printing possibilities were available. The prints were mostly two-colour invitations with minimal designs, in comparison to the recent invitations that contain several special effects regarding the use of colours and multiple ways in which to include the star. The spatial organization of the invitation, together with the photos and text, exhibits a poetics of high and low and of multiple mediating frameworks addressing the spectator. The invitation shows two formal photos of Nalini and Saktivel, similar to identity photos. The image of Rajinikanth shows the star looking upward with folded hands, indicating the best wishes he gives to the bride and groom and their invitees for the wedding. Rajinikanth is placed above the married couple, indicating his status ‘above’ them, and with his upward gaze he is giving respect to God, as well as to the couple and to his audience. The gaze of the couple is directly towards the spectator, who is thus also figured as ‘below’ Rajinikanth and ‘below’ God. This order of high and low indicating status hierarchies is replicated in the ordering of the names in the text of the invitation. 42 First it begins with Superstar, Rajinikanth’s reel name followed by Thiru, a honorific prefix for men pointing to the genre of wedding invitations that often include respected guests. Rajinikanth’s name is followed by his wife Latha, also with the female form of the honorific prefix Thirumathi. In the text, just as with the pose by Rajini, the couple is blessed by Rajinikanth and Latha Rajinikanth. Crucially, before the wedding couple’s names are displayed below, another name appears on the invitation, that of the All-India Fan Club leader Sathyanarayanan. Just as the signature by fan club leader Sathyanarayanan mediated the affective attachment from Saktivel to Rajinikanth, here he commensurates stardom and kinship relations. 42 See also Chapter 4 in which I describe the text on billboards and the hierarchies produced on them.

Intimac y on displ ay

101

Figure 6 Cover of a wedding photo album with the bride and groom in the middle and the film star Kamal Hassan on the left, talking into a microphone; Puducherry, 2002

Photo studio Devi

Besides the still images used for invitations and later on wedding albums, weddings are habitually also registered on video (Gerritsen 2006; Abraham 2010). These videos are made by photo studios and are not a linear registration of the event but a filmic production that is edited and to which extra-filmic imagery is added. The couple is then situated within imaginary landscapes, clearly referring to a style also seen in romantic scenes of film songs. Couples, and sometimes the photo studio, select songs in which their favourite star has a similar experience as they are going through at that moment, relating their lives to their star. Moreover, I have come across various photo albums of family events in which a film star was included as if he were present. Figure 6 shows such a possibility of inserting a film star for a wedding album made by photo studio Devi. The cover of the wedding album shows a portrait of the bride and groom in the middle and on the lower left corner a photo of film actor Kamal Hassan, as if he is addressing the bridal couple for their marriage. Here the spatial organization of the album is somewhat

102 

Intimate Visualities and the Politics of Fandom in India

different than the invitation for Saktivel and Nalini’s wedding. The couple is framed above Kamal Hassan. The couple looks straight at the spectator, yet Kamal Hassan’s gaze is upward, looking at the couple. These examples bring forward a way of including a film star in familial photography. The use of images of the star is not a prerequisite, and family members of fan club members do not always approve of it. Saktivel came to Nalini’s house to ask her family’s permission to use Rajinikanth’s image. As the members of Nalini’s family were also Rajinikanth fans, they did not oppose it. But this is not always the case, and using the image of a film star is not always considered appropriate for momentous events such as weddings, as notions about fandom are woven into discourses on class distinctions and useless activities. Nalini’s words already show how the image is not merely a way of connecting to a star but also how this fandom sparks ties between husband and wife. This connection goes beyond the images as a star is also present in daily parlance and allegiances that husband and wife, but also brothers or sisters, have with their favourite star.

Residues of encounters For Selvam and his brother images played an important role in being a fan from early childhood. After father and mother, he [Rajini] is my breath. I have liked him a lot since I was a child. Even then, we painted on small cloth banners and celebrated [film releases] at the cinema in a grand manner with firecrackers. Also, for his birthday we celebrated and distributed milk and chocolate to children. My mother scolded me sometimes, but I didn’t pay attention to her. I was a fan of Rajini and my elder brother was a Kamal [Hassan] fan, so we held competitions to collect their images. At the time, when we were going to school, our parents gave us some pocket money. I purchased Rajini photos, but my brother found them, and he spoiled the images. So, we often fought with each other. And when I was in school, I was always thinking about Rajini and his films.

Selvam’s childhood memories resonate in many other childhood stories I heard from fans.43 Brothers and sisters fight over images or fight over which 43 This story reminds me of a scene in the movie Slumdog Millionaire (Boyle and Tandan 2008) in which the protagonist, when he is still a young boy living in a Mumbai slum, is in raptures

Intimac y on displ ay

103

film to see on television. When I met Selvam, he actively collected and displayed images. He spent a considerable amount of his modest earnings on collecting and producing images in the form of posters, wall paintings, and large billboards for display outside his home. He also produced elaborate invitations that contain Rajinikanth’s image for family events. If he could not afford it himself, he borrowed money from friends to cover the costs. With slight embarrassment but primarily pride Selvam admitted that he gives preference to his star over his family: How many fans have you met? Did you ever see such a collection? You cannot find one! I have collected even the smallest piece of paper with his image. […]Did you ever see such a variety of photos of Rajini? See, I have pasted them all over my house, even on the TV and everywhere else. I have only one photo of my mother, the rest are all of Rajini.

Selvam’s mother died a couple of months before I first met him. He felt guilty since he had been spending large amounts of money on the fan club and his collection of Rajinikanth images, but he had not devoted as much attention to his mother’s death yet. He urgently needed to frame a picture of her and display it in his home, but had yet to do so. In the meantime, he had displayed new images of Rajinikanth. Only months after this confession did he manage to put up his mother’s image. The best-preserved and most-displayed images are the ones recounting fans’ meetings with the star. These photos show fans and star looking at the camera and thus the viewer can also be part of the moment of greeting the star where they look at each other. They are often enlarged and framed and figure proudly in homes or offices or are stored away in pockets or wallets. It is a fan’s ultimate dream to meet Rajinikanth at least once in his lifetime, even though most will never achieve this. Also recall the story of how I was expected to bring a photo camera when I was invited to meet Rajinikanth. After our conversation, I was immediately asked to pose for the photo, something I had already forgotten about due to the special character of the meeting. Selvam was extremely keen on meeting Rajinikanth: ‘All I want is to see him. We must bring some fans to him, take a picture with him, and that is enough. That is what we are working for.’ because of the autograph he received from the celebrated film star Amitabh Bachchan. In the next scene, to his sorrow and rage, his slightly older brother sells the signature, which leads to a fight between the two.

104 

Intimate Visualities and the Politics of Fandom in India

The importance Selvam puts on seeing Rajinikanth refers to the desire of proximity of a star. Images mediate this corpothetical viewing. In these images of the fan meeting the star, the eyes of those portrayed often look directly at the viewer, thereby exchanging gazes with him or her. In this way, seeing the star in real life is transferred to the image that serves as the mediator of exchange, also after the meeting has ended. In other words, it prolongs the gaze. Meeting the star is what all fan club members wish for, but this meeting is not complete without a photographic memento – preferably one that can be enlarged and framed. Selvam indicated this by stating: ‘We take a picture with him, and that is enough.’ Most fans I have worked with, when they talked about their meeting with Rajinikanth or when they expressed their hope to meet him, expressed this in the desire to take a photograph with Rajinikanth. Selvam did meet Rajinikanth but was frustrated that he did not have a photo of this meeting. He still hoped that he could meet him again, so he worked for it by showing his dedication to the fan club as a genuine fan. Taking a picture does not always happen for fans. Most fans have never met him personally and if they have, the photographs were not always fit for use. Several fans showed me photos of their meeting that were badly framed and out of focus due to the hectic moment and the fact that the photographer was as overwhelmed as the others were by seeing Rajinikanth and therefore just pressed the button without paying attention. Nevertheless, despite being blurred or badly framed, at least it was evidence and a keepsake of the event. Without a photo, the meeting did not really count, as shown by disappointed fans who did meet Rajinikanth but did not have a photo of the occasion. Since they could not show ‘evidence’ to their family, fellow fans, and others, they did not talk about their meeting in the same way as fans who did have such photos. So when Selvam told me that he did not have a picture of his meeting with Rajinikanth, I was surprised to find a framed photo of him and Rajinikanth on his television set (Figure 7). ‘How is that possible? Where does that picture come from?’ I asked. Selvam was first reluctant to reveal the story but explained that he asked a photo studio to retouch a photo of another fan who did meet Rajinikanth and replace that person’s face with his own. Selvam’s retouching of the photo demonstrates that images do not have to be indexical to be effective. While the photo is not indexical, it becomes indexical as it replaces the traces of the actual meeting he once had. Selvam’s wife didn’t know about the retouching of this photo, seeing it as proof of Selvam’s accomplishment of meeting Rajinikanth. Selvam

Intimac y on displ ay

105

Figure 7 Rajinikanth and Selvam; Puducherry

Date and photographer unknown. (Selvam’s personal collection)

left it that way, not wanting to admit the disappointment of not having the photographic evidence of his meeting. This was now the evidence. This would suggest that such a photo of a meeting of the star should be indexical and a reliable representation of what is photographed. The manipulated image is a construction of something that did take place but does not have an indexical trace, something which would be desirable to have. Going beyond the Peircean distinction of icons, symbols, and indexes, Barthes pointed out how the photograph is not a copy of reality but an emanation of a past reality: ‘the photograph possesses an evidential force, and that is that its testimony bears not on the object but on time’ (Barthes 1981, 88-89). We can think about the retouched photos as a way of creating what has been, not as a copy of reality but as a production of it. Where for Barthes reality arises from the photograph and the image is produced by it, the images here instead entail a relationality that has no antecedent indexicality of the photograph but are made to be so. The photograph, Selvam’s case shows, is supposed to be indexical, but this connection can be made substantial through the doctoring with images. At the same time, Selvam’s reluctance to admit the retouching to his wife shows that certain photographic practices are not accepted. The doctoring of the image is again mediated through the fan club. Selvam’s reluctance lies at another level, which points to the

106 

Intimate Visualities and the Politics of Fandom in India

fine balance between public and private selves, or genuine fandom and exceeding what fandom should be. It is the location of display, the everyday space of the home, and of who gets to the see the photos that brings about leeway in what is possible. Another instance of retouching to evoke contiguity can be seen in the next image. Figure 8 shows a meeting with the late Ranjit, who was a friend of Selvam and a Rajinikanth fan. He met Rajinikanth once, but not alone. Being a billboard painter Ranjit replaced the other person in the photo by Figure 8 Rajinikanth and Ranjit; Puducherry, date unknown

Ranjit’s family collection

Intimac y on displ ay

107

continuing the background, and he added Rajinikanth’s arm which was previously around the shoulders of the person he erased. He also repainted the wall in the back and added flowers in the doorway, probably to hide the objects and keeping your attention to what is important in the photo. So, where Selvam replaced someone else with his image, Ranjit erased someone to make the image entirely his own. In both instances, the contiguity made by amending the photo, through paint or cut-and-paste techniques, evokes an imaginary of the indexical, of an attempt to bring Rajinikanth close. Figure 9 displays a retouched photograph of actual and constructed meetings with the star, which figured in a personal album of Saktivel. In Figure 9 the fans, who haven’t met Rajinikanth on this occasion, have added Rajinikanth at either side. The tactical link lies in the fact that former All-India Rajinikanth Fan Club leader Sathyanarayanan is present next to three fan club members, namely Ibrahim, Saktivel, and Murugan. Those fan club members not present (and of lower rank in the fan club) have been added with passport size photos on the bottom of the image. Rajinikanth has been added with two ‘natural stills’. By using the term ‘natural stills’ fans Figure 9 Image constructed from the photo of a meeting with the former AIRFC leader Sathyanarayanan with Ibrahim, Saktivel, and Murugan. Rajinikanth appears on the left- and right-hand side. The six men at the bottom of the image are other fan club members; Vannur, date unknown

Saktivel’s personal collection

108 

Intimate Visualities and the Politics of Fandom in India

Figure 10 Framed photos in Ibrahim’s office; Villupuram 2008

were referring to photos of Rajinikanth that were not taken from movies but were of his off-screen life. A natural still would therefore give the photo a more ‘realistic’ look. As a result, ‘natural stills’ were mainly used for personal occasions such as wedding invitations, whereas ‘film stills’ were used for images produced at film releases and other fan club events. In this way, a film star is naturally included in the ‘familial gaze’, becoming part of the memories, narratives, and experiences of family life. Another way of centring the attention on the individual, personal meeting and which resembles Ranjit’s removal of a person is the blurring of other people in a photo. This is a digital retouching trick that equals Ranjit’s use of paint. District fan club leader Ibrahim runs an office and telephone booth at the main bus stand in Villupuram. The framed and enlarged photos in his off ice immediately show that Ibrahim has met Rajinikanth (and his wife Latha Rajinikanth) more than once (Figure 10). On the right, we see Ibrahim meeting Latha Rajinikanth and on the left, a portrait of Ibrahim and Rajinikanth. The photo in the middle was taken much earlier than the other photos in his office, as we can tell from the young appearance of both Rajinikanth and Ibrahim. The images of the first meeting with Rajinikanth and the one with Latha Rajinikanth depict other people as well. To push them into the background, these people have been blurred which brings the meeting into the foreground and makes it more personal as such. On Figure 11 we can see Sundar who walks with Rajinikanth towards the viewer. They hold hands and both smile. It is common for men in India to hold hands with friends while walking on the street. Similarly this constructed

Intimac y on displ ay

109

Figure 11 Constructed image of Rajinikanth and Sundar in photo album; Cuddalore, date unknown

Sundar’s collection

image with Rajinikanth shows a similar closeness, physically as well as in terms of friendship, of someone emotionally near to you. Retouching and collage techniques are commonly used for images in Tamil Nadu and India at large, for example in wedding albums or in studio portraits (Pinney 1997; Gerritsen 2006). From the beginning personal photographs in India have been more than indexical photographic documentation (Pinney 1997). In studio photography, which has become popular throughout the years, photo settings and poses are staged and manipulated to signify possible states of being that ‘leave substantive traces of what otherwise would be mere dreams’ (Pinney 1997, 91). People pose in front of backdrops of all kinds of imaginary scenes. What makes the liberal use of paint unproblematic, Pinney suggests, is the lack of desire in India

110 

Intimate Visualities and the Politics of Fandom in India

to capture someone within a temporal and spatial framework. Moreover, photography does not capture the ‘inner’ character made visible by its physiognomic traces but is a creation of worlds (instead of a duplication). In this way, creating a romantic wedding narrative or positioning yourself next to Rajinikanth in a manipulated image is not problematic but a creation, as in this case a photo is not just an indexical trace of the ‘real’. What we see is merely the person’s physiognomy in a constructed dream world. The efficacy of the image, however, is more than that. Proximity by physically putting objects together, as Pinney has also shown in his work, imbues the image with power (ibid). I have argued elsewhere that in wedding videos and photographs in Tamil Nadu the bringing together of the bride and groom in imaginary landscapes through tropes of romance in visuals and sound, and which connect to popular film in Tamil Nadu, connects the bride and groom to each other amid ‘future memories’ (Gerritsen 2006). Where the couple does not know each other yet in the way in which they are presented in the wedding souvenirs, the images cultivate memories of the wedding and the moment when the couple was still innocent and a desire for such tropes to turn out to be part of their future lives. The use of photos of Rajinikanth works in similar ways. It creates traces of the star where they would otherwise be mere dreams, and it creates memories. For fans, the power of these kinds of images lies, first and foremost, in the pleasure of seeing yourself with your star. But embedding the star in the familial surrounding of familial images naturalizes his presence. Yet, keeping these images in the confines of the household also makes them less prone to be viewed by other eyes. I show in this chapter, but also in Chapter 1, how images and ways of connecting to the star are mediated through the fan club. Images at home are also considered through this mediation, but since they are at home, they can be enacted in a playful manner. The corpothetics at play here is cultivated through an indexicality that is not made through photography but made by doctoring photographs. It creates a residue of an encounter, an encounter that existed without indexical traces (in the case of Selvam) or an encounter that is singularized as one’s own (in the case of Ranjit or Ibrahim). Images are tactical in a double sense: they mediate the relationship between fans and Rajinikanth and create a sense of contiguity, but this relationship is also strategic as it balances the complex relations of fans within a household, between couples (as for example Selvam never telling his wife that the image was not ‘real’) and between the individual fan and the fan club. The playfulness that these balancing, tactical practices reveal show how the act of presencing through photography is more than making present in an indexical sense.

Intimac y on displ ay

111

Figure 12 Rajinikanth and Annamalai, and Annamalai and Rajinikanth; Puducherry, date unknown

Annamalai’s personal collection

Mimesis and its limits Annamalai, who works as an auto-rickshaw driver, is proud to be the only person in Puducherry with a Rajinikanth flag fluttering on top of his vehicle. He tries to imitate Rajinikanth in every possible way, admiring him particularly in the highly successful movie Baadsha (Krishna 1995) in which the actor played a rickshaw driver. During a conversation with Annamalai in his rickshaw, he kept emphasizing that nothing is more important to him than waking up and seeing Rajinikanth’s image first. Rajinikanth is also the first on his mind when he wakes up. That, he says, is why there is such a huge poster of the actor above their bed. Indeed, in their small one-room home, this poster is visible from every corner of the room. In Tamil Nadu it is considered auspicious to see something pleasant in the morning, and the first person that you see in the morning affects your day. Therefore, seeing Rajinikanth first as Annamalai describes it, is a statement about the ability of Rajinikanth to effectuate the course of a day for a fan-spectator. Underneath the poster stands a huge television set with two framed images (Figure 12).

112 

Intimate Visualities and the Politics of Fandom in India

Annamalai, in order to emphasize that he imitates Rajinikanth in every possible way, combined his own photo with Rajinikanth’s in two picture frames. One of the frames shows an enlarged portrait of Rajinikanth, to which he added a passport-sized photo of himself in a similar pose. In the other frame, he enlarged himself instead and added the original passportsized photo of Rajinikanth. Just as other fans had their meeting with the star framed and displayed in their living rooms, Annamalai framed his attachment to Rajinikanth by mimicking him and in this way enhanced proximity, and hence intimacy, with Rajinikanth (Pinney 2001). Such photo practices create a narrative that is shared, not because Rajinikanth shares the narrative but because the image makes Rajinikanth come closer and be embedded in everyday memories. This is enforced by the play with the physical and imaginary size of Rajinikanth and Annamalai. Annamalai is playing with mimicry by copying Rajinikanth’s pose, but he is also mimicking Rajinikanth’s eminence by both enlarging and reducing his own image and that of Rajinikanth. But who mimics whom here? Can we speak of an original and a copy in this case? This reversal mimesis ‘becomes an enactment not merely of and [sic] original but by an “original”’ (Taussig 1993, 79 author’s own emphasis). Benjamin defined the mimetic faculty as the capacity to copy and to become the other (Buck-Morss 1989). Taussig, drawing on the work of Benjamin, has pointed to the sensuous connection between perceiver and perceived and mimesis as ‘the nature that culture uses to create second nature’ (Taussig 1993, xiii). He argues that mimesis not only copies the appearance of the ‘other’ but also appropriates its power. In this way, mimesis is not only a reproductive but rather a productive act; Annamalai does not become a copy of or similar to Rajinikanth, but accentuates his own identity by means of mimesis. But there are limits to the agency of mimesis due to fan community constraints. On the one hand Annamalai is actively mimicking Rajinikanth, and in this way confirms his genuine devotion to his hero; on the other hand, the way in which he does this – by comparing himself to Rajinikanth’s status as a star – is considered to be inappropriate. Copying the star’s posture, clothes, or hairstyle is accepted but fans consider it inappropriate if you depict yourself as being as large as or larger than the star. This would suggest, it is said, that you see yourself as being as significant as the star. It crosses the line ‘where the “as if” may be taken as an “is,” where the subject of style is seen as problematically assuming the status presupposed and figured by the stylish act, as the act’s origin and author and not its mere reanimator’ (Nakassis 2016, 175, original emphasis). The fact that Annamalai knows he is crossing the fine line between devotional intimacy and identification

Intimac y on displ ay

113

acknowledges the existence of the original; yet as it is an image, it works in both ways for Annamalai. But these limits to the creativity and mimesis of fans depend largely on the site of display. As we have already seen with Selvam’s doctored photo, the personal, domestic spaces and personal appropriations of a star allow more liberty for mimetic performance than public spaces do. Even though simulacra seem to go beyond their original, I argue that they are bound by social and spatial limitations that are not instilled by the ‘original’ but by those engaging with the images. These limits, and importantly the zone of flexibility and ambiguity in which they navigate, tell us as much about the production of images as the act of mimicking itself does. Again, it is the peer group, in this case the fan club, that mediates the idea of what this line can be. In this chapter I have narrated several instances of the affective ways in which images create a relationship between a fan and Rajinikanth. Wedding albums include Rajinikanth and are the first visual connection of a new married couple; deceased mothers are set aside to a second place of honour; and doctored photos bring Rajinikanth’s tactical residue closer. Images, I have argued, are quintessential in mediating desires and imaginations or the daily attachments with a star, particularly when those images are used within the more private space of the household. They facilitate these personal desires and memories. As material objects they become the trace of something that has been – ça a été in Barthes’ words – and become a residue of contiguity. Fans pursue proximity outside the realm of the photograph but often do not reach their desire. Photos then become a stand-in for this desire. They make Rajinikanth tactical and show how indexicality of photographs is less straightforward than the notion suggests. The retouching techniques of photos that get a place in households, on television sets, on walls, next to deceased family members, or in family albums compel us to rethink the family photo and its familial gaze (Hirsch 1999). Instead of the presencing of ‘lives halted at a set moment in their duration’ (Bazin and Gray 1960), they reveal the complex negotiations that constitute family pictures, going beyond who was present at the time the photo was taken. The presencing of film stars and the retouching of images cultivate a familial gaze that incorporates the star into that family. In addition, the fan club serves as extrafamilial mediator of this relationship through its ideologies of what is possible and what not in connecting to a star. The normally regimented photos in people’s homes that do not reveal disagreements and compromises within the family (Hirsch 1999), do reveal agency in how through the extrafamilial gaze in the privacy of the household one can play

114 

Intimate Visualities and the Politics of Fandom in India

with the regimes of value that instil the image. It’s the gaze of the fan club and that of Rajinikanth that imparts the photos in everyday homes. The limits of display refer once more to boundaries and its public and private expressions that fandom maintains. This ambiguous playfulness of what is possible and what not, becomes centripetal in the more public ways in which fandom unfolds. The next two chapters will deal with this public ambiguity.

3

Vexed veneration: the politics of fandom

For the coming-of-age ceremony for his daughter, Rajini Shankar, the Rajinikanth district fan club leader of Puducherry, organized a grand event that resembled more of a political spectacle than a family event. The family did not only invite relatives and friends, but Shankar also invited several fan club leaders and regionally well-known political personae such as the then Chief Minister N. Rangasamy, 44 the late political strategist M. Natarajan, 45 and several local MLAs (Members of the Legislative Assembly) whom Shankar knows well. The mandapam (reception hall) could be seen from afar as it had been transformed with impressive light decorations. Huge banners announced the event in front of the reception hall (Figure 13), an elephant greeted the guests at the entrance and the guests were served freshly made grape juice before entering the hall. The elaborate decorations, more than usual, already indicated that something special was going on here. Behind the mandapam, a group of around ten were preparing the typical celebrative Biryani meal in enormous cooking pots. The hall was divided in two, with stages on either side. On one side a large stage was set up for the fan club and political guests and on the other side, the religious ritual of Shankar’s daughter would take place. The guests’ chairs were facing each other so that the guests could watch both sides of the mandapam. Various cameramen covered the guests who waited patiently for Shankar’s family and the political guests to arrive, zooming in and out on the slightly bored faces. A screen broadcast images of the function live so that guests could watch themselves and the event they were participating in from a distance. Finally, after a long time of waiting, Shankar arrived with his wife and their dressed-up daughter. Just at this moment of excitement, coincidently, the honorary guest and politician M. Natarajan arrived as well. While 44 He was first a member of Congress but started the AINRC (All India N.R. Congress). The letters N.R. in the party’s abbreviation stand for Namathu Rajiyam (our kingdom), but they are also Rangasamy’s initials. 45 M. Natarajan was the husband of Sasikala, the woman who lived with AIADMK leader Jayalalitha. Both Natarajan and Jayalalitha have passed away in the meantime. All kinds of rumours abound about the alleged lesbian relationship between Jayalalitha and Sasikala. Natarajan was still married to Sasikala, but they lived apart. Natarajan was described as a political strategist and was a well-known public figure in Tamil Nadu politics.

116 

Intimate Visualities and the Politics of Fandom in India

Figure 13 Banner made by fans for the coming-of-age ceremony; Puducherry 2008

It displays filmi and natural images of Rajinikanth and the Chief Minister of Puducherry on the right side. Shankar is greeting them with flowers. The people at the bottom are Shankar (somewhat bigger than the rest) and other fan club members.

everyone was first trying to get a glimpse of the family, the eyes of the guests and the cameramen turned away from Shankar’s daughter and everyone stood up for Natarajan’s arrival. After Shankar had taken his daughter inside, the hall was split into two different spaces. On one side you could hear the speeches of politicians and fan club leaders from other districts. And on the other side of the large hall, the ritual ceremony for Shankar’s daughter took place. Shankar was predominantly attending the political side of the hall. After the religious ceremony was over and the photo session of the family with the guests started, Shankar moved to the other side of the hall. The coming-of-age ritual and guests’ congratulations were over relatively quickly but the political part of the event continued for a while. I overheard two women who were disappointed about the political character of the event; they expected a more filmi function, but now Shankar had gone political, they uttered. And these women were not alone in their assessment of their host. While most families used traditional decorations and hospitality conventions in major life-cycle celebrations, fan club members often use images of the star to decorate and announce the event. For a fan club leader like Rajini Shankar, the elaborate presence of visuals of Rajinikanth was common and even expected. Within fan club circles, even though Shankar’s political ambitions were clear for many, the event was seen as a personal statement of affiliation that went beyond ordinary fan club ‘politics’. Shankar started his fan club because he enjoyed Rajinikanth’s acting and his films (see Chapter 1). Once leader of the fan club in Puducherry, he gradually became part of political networks. Shankar had been able to employ the fan club environment to establish his political networks.

Vexed vener ation: the politics of fandom

117

He was connected to the AIADMK, 46 was active in canvassing for parties which Rajinikanth supported during the last few years, and he knew the chief minister (CM) of Puducherry well. The way in which he brought into play his daughter’s function to demonstrate his political power serves as a starting point in this chapter for showing the ways in which political practices became part of fan activity in various ways. In Chapter 1, I demonstrated how fans negotiated the fine line between excess and keeping in control in relation to cinema. In a similar vein, politicking became essential in a fan’s life, yet without crossing the line of self-promotion. Most fans, once they were older, expected to be active in political networks through their actor’s fame, the fan club network, and public visibility of club activities. For many fans with whom I worked, these connections seemed particularly important, with Rajinikanth being simply a common denominator for their network. At the same time, Rajinikanth had clearly expressed his own political preferences, which made his fans campaign actively for the party he supported during elections. Fans that did not want to join the political campaigning activities of the fan club were deemed to be disloyal by their fellow fans. However, political practice was not supposed to be part of fan activity, as fans were dissuaded by the head office and Rajinikanth himself from participating in party politics. Also fans themselves considered an obvious use of the fan network for political gain to be self-centred. In other words, this fine line between misuse and proper fan activity as seen by other fans suggests an obfuscated relationship between politics and fandom, one that will be explored in this chapter and the next. I explore the ways in which fans engaged in everyday politicking as mediation of desires and ambitions for presence and immediacy, and, on the other hand, for future gains. These desires and ambitions are mediated by a fan’s image and his images (for the latter, see particularly Chapter 4). Whereas the mediation through images is the topic of the next chapter, in this chapter I explore the ways in which politicking cultivates a fan’s image and how the display of fan activity is the materialization of relationships to influential others. The exhibition becomes a medium through which fame – as an effect of presence and futurity – circulates between fans and stars (Munn 1986). These relationships articulate another form of investment in a star and are situated and produce leverage within the everyday governing structures of urban South India and its class and caste hierarchies. The everyday politicking and modes of visibility were political responses to expectations beyond the cinema. 46 All India Annadurai Dravidar Munnetra Kazhagam, Annadurai Dravidian Progress Party.

118 

Intimate Visualities and the Politics of Fandom in India

Throughout this chapter I will explore the nature of these forms of mobilization and everyday politicking, modes of agency, hierarchy, and status that fans articulate through their public activities. These activities are not necessarily particular to fan clubs, but fans did see the fan club as their way to navigate the sociopolitical field. Fan activity, I argue, cultivates a form of fame in which their image-work of public generosity and visibility is needed to produce star and self. To understand how this works, I address the expectations fans have of their membership. These expectations were fulfilled in a practical way by getting access to networks and ideologically by obtaining power and prestige. A climax to these expectations, many fans felt, would be Rajinikanth’s entry into politics. Rajinikanth’s staying out of politics47 shows how everyday political and social networks were much more important for most fans than the state-level politics in which their star was or eventually would be involved in. 48 I end the chapter with a short detour to the failure of the Tamil actor Vijayakanth’s fans to establish themselves in his political party. The failure of Vijayakanth’s fans in electoral politics shows how, despite the aspirations of a political career, the economic and social situation of most fans holds them back from becoming actual political figures.

Shaping the figure of the fan Most Tamil film stars have an ambivalent relationship with their fans. Even though the presence of fans has proven useful for several actors, as in their political careers, most actors have tried to discourage fan clubs from starting in the first place or have emphasized the social role these fan clubs have to fulfil. This ambivalence can be seen in the addition of the word narpani (social service) to the name of fan clubs, to justify their existence. Most fan clubs are called fan welfare organizations. Rajinikanth regularly instructed his fans to give priority to their family, then to social service, and last of all to him. This is also what most fans considered an important reason for becoming a fan: their hero gives preference to charity and not to cinematic leisure activities. Here again fans and the way their actor approaches them suggest that the figure of the ardent film-loving fan is set aside in favour 47 Within the period of my research. 48 Also the failure of fans positioning themselves in the party that f ilm star Vijayakanth established shows that political careers for fan club members are less evident than suggested in most of the literature (Gerritsen 2013).

Vexed vener ation: the politics of fandom

119

of the seriousness and philanthropy of fandom. But this image is not easy to maintain. Sudhakar, the present All India Rajinikanth Fan Club leader, expressed it to me in the following terms: On the one hand you cannot blame fans or forbid them from doing what they do because they are fans after all. But on the other hand, fans do crazy things with milk, beer, and sweets [the ritual practices around billboards comparable to religious worship] or use politics for self-publicity, so you should bring them into line, reprimand them, but not throw them out of the fan club.

Sudhakar refers yet again to the image of the excessive fan and the use of politics for his own gain, but he also acknowledges him as a fan. Social work seemed to be a way of sending across a different message. By showing the good deeds of the fan club not only do actors justify the existence of fan clubs in their name, fans justify their devotion to fan clubs. But the image of the excessive fan often occurs in representations of fan clubs, as I have shown earlier, and in narratives by fans if others misuse the fan club environment for personal gain. Even though most fans joined a fan club because of access to tickets and a collective fan community when they were young, young fans nowadays are often tested on their seriousness and willingness to do social work. Older fans did not attend the f irst-day, f irst-show f ilms in the same way as younger fans did, if indeed they watched the first days at all. Film became of less importance, and older, more established fans disassociated themselves from the younger, ardent fans. Social service became a means to see whether younger fans are interested in more than f ilm tickets. Social welfare had become the most recurrent activity of fan club membership and included a wide range of activities. These included blood donation camps and the distribution of notebooks for children, dresses such as saris and dhotis, or food items such as rice or sweets at fan club events. The fan clubs carried out social work on special occasions, on Rajinikanth’s birthday, around f ilm releases, or when a new club was being founded. The way in which items were given away was similar to political events where often the same kind of social welfare was undertaken. For political as well as fan events, a stage is erected or there is a simple demarcation of the space for the event. The area is decorated with flags, posters, and banners, and often loudspeakers blast music from films. These meetings are further marked by speeches by fan club members and their special guests. These guests are the talaimai

120 

Intimate Visualities and the Politics of Fandom in India

manram 49 members and local leader f igures such as MLAs. After the speeches, the distribution of items begins. The people who are designated to receive something now come forward to be handed their items, an act recorded by photographers. Dickey argues that fan clubs identify with the poor with their aid to people from their own area and class (2001). At the same time, they distinguish themselves from this group as a whole through their social welfare activities, designating the recipients as ‘the poor’. In this way, Dickey argues, fans are the embodiment of their heroes’ ideals (2001, 237). Even though I agree with Dickey that certain fans do nurture a feeling of responsibility to help others, at the same time we should be careful in defining the wish to do social work as merely an impersonation of a star’s ideals. Fan club membership, as I showed in Chapter 1, is also about obtaining film tickets. And, as I demonstrate in this chapter and the next, social welfare activities are also a way of promoting a fan’s own image. Not everyone is keen on organizing activities, and if they do, it is also in large part a celebrative occasion for the neighbourhood. For the organizers their own visibility is crucial, even though this visibility is partly established through the attractiveness of Rajinikanth. I will return to this point below. Events take place in public spaces with visual and aural stimuli that make it hard to overlook the event. These meetings are further marked by speeches by fan club members and their special guests. In these speeches fan club members venerate their film hero and name local benefactors who support their activities. The welfare is conducted in the name of a hero and seems to come directly from the actor in person. At the same time, it is clear that the welfare is coming from the fans themselves. In this way, local fans establish social credit. It shows their fellow fans and others in their community that they are committed fans. The publicness and visibility of the event is therefore crucial. Photographers, sometimes hired from photo studios and sometimes invited from the local press, take photos of important people handing over items to the masses. The presence of local fan clubs and political leaders is necessary for the press to cover the activities and often an amount is paid to the reporters to ensure their presence. The recording of these events is an important way to prove fandom. Documentation in the form of photo albums, news clippings, and VCDs is kept at home and sent to the local talaimai manrams of the district and the head office in Chennai. Fans spent a considerable amount of money on the activities they were involved in. A widespread belief in Tamil Nadu suggested that the money 49 Leader association, or head fan club.

Vexed vener ation: the politics of fandom

121

for fan club activities came directly from the star. Fan clubs and the stars themselves strongly denied this and the fan club books that I have been able to look at in detail make no note at all of money that might come from the star. Rajinikanth fans claimed that only ‘little’ (chinna) actors give money to the fan clubs to attract members. According to fans, these actors were eager to start fan clubs because they understood the strength and political power of Rajinikanth’s fans, so they gave money to start fan clubs and, in this way, received support. While explaining this, Rajini fans always mentioned that all the members of ‘little’ actors were actually Rajinikanth fans who were not able to start a fan club in his name because of the registration restrictions that Rajinikanth implemented in the late 1990s. In their heart they were Rajinikanth fans, they claimed. This was also visible in their banners, they said, as they often used Rajinikanth’s name or picture. Again, it is not relevant if such stories contain truth or not: such beliefs and stories and the ways in which they are framed reveal what is seen as important and how the hierarchies and generations of fandom work. Fans can spend anything from tens to thousands of rupees on activities, depending on what they can afford and what their position is within the club. Even though less active fan clubs do not spend much, I was amazed by the sums some fans spend on activities and on the accompanying visuals, given their incomes. Thengai Selvam, for example, whose images we encountered in Chapter 2, would occasionally spend two or three times his monthly income on the images he made for Rajinikanth’s birthday. In addition to the other occasions on which he spent money (murals for a film release, posters and banners for birthdays of some friends or family members, volunteering for the organization of activities), a large amount of his income was spent on Rajinikanth. The amount a local fan club decides to give is subject to competition with other clubs. They notify the talaimai manram of what they will do in a particular year but the amounts they plan to give are set specifically to surpass the amounts given by other groups. Tharagai Raja: ‘If another club gives small notebooks, we give big notebooks and on top of that we give a variety of costly saris or dhotis.’ But competition and comparison also occur between the fan clubs of different actors. Remember the story of Tharagai Raja, who when he was young, made Xeroxed posters for Rajinikanth just to make the number of images for his release greater than that for Kamal Hassan. Tharagai Raja might be more competitive – or more articulate and aware of competition – than other fans, but he was by no means unique. Also in terms of social welfare, fans legitimize their fan club membership with the amount and grandness of social welfare in comparison with fan clubs for

122 

Intimate Visualities and the Politics of Fandom in India

other actors. Almost every fan club member I have spoken to claimed that the fan clubs for his actor were the most actively involved in social welfare activities, whereas fan clubs for other actors were not active at all. Similarly, Rajinikanth fans highlight that their star insisted that fans prioritize social welfare over cinematic enjoyment or promotion of Rajinikanth himself, while the fans likewise denigrated ‘little’ actors for wanting fan clubs not for the welfare of all but for self-promotion. Again, narratives of particularity and ‘specialness’ of an actor are conveyed in generic terms within the landscape of fan clubs that keep an eye on each other. Within the fan club environment, the amounts spent and the activities that are organized by fan clubs and individual fans are closely observed and discussed by other fans. The harder a fan works for the fan club and the more he spends, the more he is considered a real fan. In this way, a fan club promotes itself as a real fan club, but individual fans also promote themselves as genuine fans. Fans explain their involvement in social work as a way of helping people. They regularly accuse authorities or individual politicians of lining their own pockets and not working for the people. Through the fan community they have the power to do something, they feel. Another Rajini fan explained the following: If we are alone, we can’t do anything. If we are with twenty people as a fan club, we can do anna dhanam [donation of food] or help the poor. We can give help to the village if we are in a group. For that we need the fan club. If we go to an MLA or MP alone it does not work, as a group we get a benefit. So, we started an association.

This fan expresses how the formation of a group gives them the power to help others. But he also emphasizes how it helps them as fans. He suggests here something I have seen with many other fans as well, that MLAs and other politicians take you more seriously as a group. Moreover, many politicians know fans of Rajinikanth have been actively supporting their party or their political opponents. In other words, their size makes people take them seriously. In this way, a local political person such as an MLA will more easily dedicate himself as intermediary to a group of fans than to a mere individual.50 50 Obviously, political party members have more affiliations than merely to fan clubs. I am only emphasizing here the difference between a fan collective and an ordinary individual. While this distinction might the case, naturally, MLAs and other persons in such positions are involved in other kinds of network relationships for which they also attend events.

Vexed vener ation: the politics of fandom

123

Making visible: Altruism and politicking Social service is a must. Only then do you become familiar and famous. – Rajinikanth fan club member Rajini Shankar

It is Rajinikanth’s 57th birthday, 12 December 2007. Fan clubs all over Tamil Nadu and Puducherry have prepared themselves for the festive occasion in their neighbourhoods. I joined Rajini Shankar, whom I introduced earlier, his district team, and their supporters to celebrate the birthday. As they do every year, they started the day with a special puja. After the visit to the temple Rajini Shankar’s team headed to the government hospital where they were to distribute food packages on the female emergency ward.51 Before they could start their activities, they had to wait for a long time for the local MLA Jayapal, whom they had invited to the event, and for the press to arrive. In the meantime, the members of the committee arranged the packages that were to be distributed to the women in the emergency ward. The packages were assembled in large buckets lent by the hospitals and contained two bread slices, an orange, and an apple.52 Some of the packages had a colour image of Rajinikanth and Rajini Shankar in them. They made sure that these packages were on top of the others, with the image facing forward.53 Even when Jayapal was there, they couldn’t start the distribution immediately 51 Government hospitals in India are generally used by the poor. In hospitals they do not feed people, assuming that family members will bring meals. 52 Bread, apples, and oranges are not very common food items consumed in Tamil Nadu. Apples are often presented as a gift while visiting others, and bread is often consumed by children. In this case,fruit and bread are good items to distribute at a hospital as they remain relatively clean, are healthy, and are easy to pack by the fan club members themselves. 53 In chapter 4, I have more to say about the image politics practised by fans. Here I want to indicate an interesting contrast between such images in terms of how they are perceived. In this case, the image politics is not seen as problematic but rather as a tribute to the person who is the reason why the items are distributed. On the other hand, during the 2016 floods in Tamil Nadu, Jayalalitha was criticized by many for having her images put on relief packages that were actually paid for by NGOs and the central government, just as more and more people started to criticize the ever-present face of Jayalalitha on all kinds of commodities, from commercial (cheap) water bottles to welfare-scheme-related distributed mixers and fans. I have more to say about the political image in chapter 5. Here I already want to dichotomize the two practices and the ways in which people can take different attitudes towards such images. It seems that welfare in the name of an actor (or a politician for that matter) is not seen as problematic, but using your image as a politician on charitable distributions that you clearly do not own is condemned. Thanks to Katherine Ulrich for pointing out the parallel and distinctions in these two forms of welfare.

124 

Intimate Visualities and the Politics of Fandom in India

because the local press hadn’t arrived yet. Shankar, Jayapal, research assistant Gandhirajan, and I had a coffee in one of the spaces reserved for doctors to wait for the press. Once a group of around ten photographers had gathered, the fans, press, and the MLA Jayapal, a group of around twenty men in total, entered the female emergency ward. The ward was now completely packed with people. The women lying on their beds seemed to be taken by surprise by the number of people in the room. The MLA and Rajini Shankar started to hand out the packages with a Rajinikanth image and made sure that the image was visible for the photographs that the journalists took. After handing out a package to each of the women, the women were given extra packages to empty the buckets. Within a couple of minutes, the men left the ward again and the peace and quiet of the room was restored. Several buckets with packages were left over, though. Some fans suggested that they could distribute these later to other wards in the hospital. But the buzz of the moment was over, and the event ended quickly after that [Figure 14]. While Rajini Shankar’s group handed out packages in the hospital, local neighbourhood fan clubs conducted public events in their neighbourhoods as well, handing out items such as notebooks and rice to the poor and needy (Figure 15). Therefore, after our visit to the temple and hospital, Gandhirajan and I had to race to be in time for attending Selvan Nathan’s celebrations. Selvan Nathan, an auto-rickshaw driver and active fan club member in Puducherry had, along with his branch fan club in Nellithope, organized the distribution of saris and rice to deprived women, packages of biryani to the poor, and notebooks and pens to children. Also, here, most of the day passed with waiting, this time for the special guests to arrive. The day before the festivities Gandhirajan and I had met up with Selvan Nathan, and he had appeared tense and excited about the activities the next day. In order for the day to run smoothly, he tried to plan the event in the utmost detail, from the flags, music, and other decorations where the events were being held to the invitation of local big men who would attend the function. From early morning on Rajinikanth’s birthday loud music from Rajinikanth films blasted out of the loudspeakers that had been set up for the occasion. Selvan Nathan and his club exhibited a banner of about 6 m in width directly in front of the bus terminal on the main road. Its location and the music that could be heard on the main road gave the event maximum visibility and audibility. Children had made small posters from photocopied letter-size paper with cuttings of Rajinikanth’s images and texts written with pen mimicking their fathers’ fan club posters and banners. In the street where the event was about to take place Selvan Nathan’s fan club had set up a table and decorated the street.

Vexed vener ation: the politics of fandom

125

Figure 14 Men arranging the packages with bread, fruit, and a Rajinikanth image in buckets. They make sure the images of Rajinikanth are visible; Puducherry 2007 Borrowed buckets and gurneys from the hospital to carry the packages for distribution; Puducherry 2007 The men around a hospital bed in the female emergency ward of the government hospital; Puducherry 2007 The press taking pictures of the men distributing their packages in the emergency ward; Puducherry 2007

126 

Intimate Visualities and the Politics of Fandom in India

Figure 15 Local women and children waiting at the place where Selvan Nathan’s fan club will distribute their social welfare items; Puducherry 2007 Poster made by children in the fan club style hanging near the spot where the event was due to take place; Puducherry 2007 A photo opportunity when interim committee leader Jothi Kumar (in the orange dhoti) and the local MLA (to the right of Jothi Kumar) hand over saris to women; Puducherry 2007

Vexed vener ation: the politics of fandom

127

The fans and their small audience of children and several elderly women who were attracted by the filmi music and the items that were going to be distributed had to wait patiently for the big men to arrive. The event could only begin once interim committee-leader Jothi Kumar54 and the invited local MLA had arrived at the scene. As the two men had to visit many local fan club events, they were easily held up. At Selvan Nathan’s festivities they arrived hours later than planned. Once there, the distribution of items had no sooner started than it was over. With much effort the men tried to keep the eagerly waiting children and elderly women in line to distribute the items one by one in return for the token that they were to hand in. Only with a token can people collect what has been designated to them. Again, journalists were present to record the event, and the local fan club made sure that the new photographers took shots of the MLA, Jothi Kumar, and the journalists themselves distributing the items. When the MLA and Jothi Kumar had left again, within thirty minutes, the celebration was over. At many of the fan club events I attended the fan club members used quite some force to keep order during the distribution. They tried to keep the recipients in line with forceful words and gestures, and they sent away others who were not designated to receive distributed items. The officiousness and importance shown at the heightened moment of the actual celebration – with the use of tokens, the lines in which people have to stand to collect their items, the strictness with which those without a token are sent away, the presence of local big men and photographers – stand in stark contrast with the relaxed atmosphere after the event when the leaders and big men have gone or when the importance of the moment has passed. Remaining items were randomly distributed, and tokens were not necessary anymore to receive an item. The local group of fans that stayed behind now shared and enjoyed the leftovers and a moment of excitement with neighbours and friends.

Praise As the examples above suggest, fan clubs established patronage relationships by inviting ‘big men’, that is politicians or other eminent men, to their events. Fans considered the fan network as a means to access these big men and establish relationships with them. One of the most obvious ways to do this 54 At this time, for reasons I discuss later in the chapter, Jothi Kumar was off icially the Puducherry fan club’s president while Rajini Shankar continued to act as the de facto leader.

128 

Intimate Visualities and the Politics of Fandom in India

was through public events that show the generosity of the fan club as well as that of the big man. Fan clubs commonly tried to invite local politicians to preside over their functions. Often these leaders sponsored the event to a certain extent, paying for a part of the items that were to be given away as charity. The presence of local big men gave the event authority, attracted bigger crowds, and as a result (re)established relationships (M. Mines 1994). Brokerage relationships are not unique to fan clubs – it is part of the more common men-to-men relationships in Tamil Nadu and South Asia in general (see Chatterjee 2004; V.K. Chopra 1996; Fuller and Bénéï 2001; Kaviraj and Khilnani 2001; Kaviraj 2010; Kohli 1990; Price 1996; Subramanian 1999). What makes fan activity and particularly the close relationships fans establish with political parties noteworthy is the organized networking activities and the ambivalence towards political work that comes to the surface time and again. Most fans, once they are older, expect to be active in political networks and gain prestige through their actor’s fame, the fan club network, and public visibility. Social welfare activities were a way of promoting a fan’s own image as, following Appadurai, indirect flattery that is a mixture of adoration and expectation of reward (1990). The relationships were complementary as fans need influential people to be present to show their own position to the people who attend the events as well as provide certain benefits, such as publicity or various kinds of support. In return, the local big man widens his reach by being present and visible on such occasions, and he establishes his position and support in the community where he operates. Two parallel issues are at stake here: first, the access fans believed the fan club and its relation to influential persons and governing institutions provided; second, the production of value and fame, for both Rajinikanth and the self. Relating to the first, access to state institutions is not evenly distributed in India. People belonging to lower socioeconomic classes often need connections or have to resort to bribery to get access to state institutional processes (Appadurai 2001; Chatterjee 2004; Jeffrey 2010; Liang 2005). The importance of brokerage has been described repeatedly in scholarly work on Indian politics (Bailey 1963; Chatterjee 2004; Fernandes 2006; Fuller and Bénéï 2001; T.B. Hansen 2005; Harriss-White 2003; Jeffrey 2010). And also in Tamil Nadu, the ways in which people seek access to local politicians, schools, or schemes they are entitled to is determined by their connections to such persons or what Thomas Blom Hansen have called fixers (2005). Hansen describes how in West India people from the lower classes establish themselves as local ‘fixers’ who form relationships between the local communities and government officials. These men are

Vexed vener ation: the politics of fandom

129

often motivated by job insecurities and a feeling of having to compete with ‘outsiders’, a feeling exacerbated by the right-wing Hindu nationalist Shiv Sena party. The way in which these relationships are established parallel other forms of patronage and big-men relationships that underlie political life. In a similar fashion fan club members and officials are using the fan club as a way of positioning themselves as ‘big men’ or as a way of establishing relationships with ‘big men’. In India, individual brokers or fixers and connections to big men play a central role in giving people access to state institutions (see also Fuller and Bénéï 2001). Big men need to establish and maintain relationships with their community in return for support. In Tamil Nadu individual power plays an important role in the construction of an image of a leader figure. Generosity is an important individual attribute of political and other kinds of leaders. Mines uses the term big man (periyavar or periyar in Tamil) to indicate the pre-eminence of people within their community (1994). Big men need to establish their relationship with their supporters by showing generosity and trustworthiness publicly (M. Mines and Gourishankar 1990, 763). Leaders therefore need skill and charisma to have sufficient followers (M. Mines and Gourishankar 1990, 762). Skill and charisma depend on what a leader can do for a community, family, or person. A local intermediary of the government, in this case an MLA, must show his presence and willingness to help not merely his party members but everyone. Family events or other public events are important moments of image building. Political leaders use occasions such as temple festivals or family functions ‘to establish their instrumental role among their fellows and their individual reputations as patrons of the public’ (M. Mines and Gourishankar 1990, 773). This relates to the second issue I pointed out: the production of fame and value which is generated through public display and affects individual fans, the fan club, Rajinikanth, and political persons or parties. In return, having connections with such local influential people gives access to authorities and other domains that are otherwise difficult to access because of fans’ lower socioeconomic background. To have access to various institutions, permits, benefits, documents, and the like, one often needs to visit a local government official or political person who is in charge or who can mediate one’s needs. An MLA for people is most important for his constituency services (V.K. Chopra 1996) as he helps someone to get access to an entitled pension, helps people to participate in one of the available schemes in which they can get money, or secures money for roads, water, and other basic infrastructural amenities. MLAs function within an area or neighbourhood and should be approachable

130 

Intimate Visualities and the Politics of Fandom in India

for all kinds of issues that residents must deal with. As MLAs are always elected from a political party, their relationship with the people from an area is susceptible to selectivity. Being in the same political party or having some kind of patronage link therefore often benefits these relationships. Fans often belong to working-class or middle-class communities: they are employed as auto-rickshaw drivers, bicycle and motorbike mechanics, and lower-grade clerks in government offices; or they run a shop of their own, a tea stall or a small business; or some young male fans are lower middle-class college students (Dickey 1993b; Jeffrey 2010; Rogers 2009; S.V. Srinivas 2009; Nakassis 2016). This background makes it more difficult to access certain institutions, from schools to government structures, and therefore the fan club, they said, gave them a feeling of power. And in the patriarchal culture of Tamil Nadu, women from lower socioeconomic class backgrounds have even more limitations on their access to social power and prestige, and so female fan club members likewise comment on the benefits of membership.

Gendered fandom While male fan club members make social welfare activities central to their self-identity as fans and mere film-watching is denigrated, female fan club members seem to place equal weight on the possibilities of both film viewing and visibility. I met Saroja, a woman in her thirties, for the first time at her neighbour’s home. She was eager to tell me about her activities as a female fan. One of the first things she emphasized was that she saw all Rajinikanth’s films within a week of their release. Although seeing a film on the first day is not appropriate as a woman, at least she managed to see it within a week. Saroja: I had been thinking about starting a female fan club for a long time. I always cooked for Rajini’s birthday and provided meals to the fans and villagers. But no one gave me advice on how to start a fan club. Later I told my brother [Baba Ganapathi] about it. I told him that I wanted to become a member of the club. Baba Ganapathi replied that to start an association I should gather twenty women. Now women are still joining the club for Rajini. I can’t manage it!

Saroja does not see Rajini’s movies on the first day but she does see the film several days later and several times, usually together with her husband or

Vexed vener ation: the politics of fandom

131

other family members. The male-dominated space of the cinema on the first days, made that she and her co-fans would not even try to obtain tickets for the first-day show. For her, the fan club was not a means of getting tickets at all. For Saroja the acknowledgement as a fan was the most important thing. What I have attempted to describe up to now is how fandom ranges from cinematic devotion towards a film star to politicking in the name of that star and self. These activities and fan clubs in general were predominantly male environments. Nevertheless, I came across only a few fan clubs consisting of women, and there has been fan activity devoted to actresses such as Trisha and Kushboo as well. But even fan clubs for these actresses were mainly joined by men. It was less easy for women to join a fan club because of the activities the fan clubs are engaged in: excessive behaviour and public activities. It does not mean that women do not have their own ways of engaging with their star (see also Nakassis 2016). Women, and particularly young girls, also talk about their favourites and collect images at home. But to join a fan club is not considered normal for young women. Some female Rajinikanth fans I worked with were frustrated that they could not start their own fan club. For the most part they were married to a fan club member and participated actively in the events by preparing food for the occasion. But they did not participate in the same way, they felt, as they did not have a fan club structure and therefore did not operate fully independently as a fan club. They, with a few exceptions, did not join the first day release of a film. It was seen by both men and women as a male space that would be too aggressive for women. The women I worked with, including Nalini (described in the previous chapter), were frustrated about not being able to see the first-day first show but also about not being able to display themselves on banners and posters. A few days later I met Saroja again, now in the context of a group interview that she had organized with more than ten of her fellow female fans. The women were mainly older than typical male fans, the youngest being thirty years old and the eldest in her sixties. It was noticeable that, in contrast to their male counterparts, most members were already married and not adolescents anymore. As young girls or recently married women, it would not be appropriate to take part in the same kinds of activities as young masculine fans. Because all the negative stereotypes of the ‘figure of the fan’ were associated with young males, these older, established women escaped censure for being fans but, conversely, had to constantly assert their identity as fans. During the interview, the women emphasized several times how important it was for them to be present on the imagery that they displayed on the main road a kilometre away from their village. They

132 

Intimate Visualities and the Politics of Fandom in India

considered such banners to be proof of their independent existence as a fan club. The women felt proud that now they were visible to a wider group than merely in their own area in which they live their everyday lives. Saroja expressed it as follows For the opening ceremony of the fan club we put up a banner at Koot road. And from then onwards we have put up a banner for his birthday every year. When we started there were twenty fans, so twenty photos were displayed. Now I am known in ten to twenty areas, before I was only known in my street! Now everyone says that the chief of the female fans is coming. Now even gents respect me. So, I got all this because of Rajini!

This acknowledgement was emphasized repeatedly during the conversation and brought with it lots of laughter. Despite the laughter, Saroja and the others were serious about their feeling of making women more powerful. They gave ample examples of how their fan club membership had helped them to take their rights into their own hands. For example, an older woman present during the interview explained how her husband died some time ago. She was entitled to a widow’s pension. Even though the amount was small, for her it was a crucial amount to survive. She had all the documents she needed but even so, the local MLA kept sending her away with specious arguments. When Saroja and the others heard the story, they went along with the woman and told the MLA that they were all from the Rajinikanth fan club and he should do his job. And he did. The name of Rajinikanth and the power of fan clubs in the area convinced the man to give this woman what she was entitled to. The women had several other similar examples of how the fan club has given them status, how people, particularly men, now take them seriously. Again, it is not necessarily the fan club that made such access possible, but that fans emphasized that and exaggerated how club membership bolstered or brought them fame, status, and influence. As I argued in Chapter 1, derogatory opinions about fan behaviour in journalistic accounts or as commonly heard opinions are connected to the cinematic activities of fan clubs. Feelings of respectability and power by fans themselves, on the other hand, were related to active involvement in social welfare activities and affiliations to local politicians. Many fans felt that as a collectivity they were taken seriously and had access more easily through their contacts with local big men. Not everyone was keen on organizing activities, and if they were, it was also in large part a celebrative occasion for the neighbourhood. For the organizers, their own visibility was crucial, yet this visibility was predominantly established through the

Vexed vener ation: the politics of fandom

133

attractiveness of Rajinikanth. From the many conversations I had with fans throughout my research, it became clear that a large number felt that the fan club environment and particularly their connection to the star and powerful people provided them with respect. Before being part of the fan club and before involvement in politics, many fans suggested that they were not respected, even by their family members (see also Chapter 1). The fan club gave them respect and the power to access political figures in their neighbourhood. Tharagai Raja: If you need something from a politician, hospital, or doctor, an ordinary person will be rejected. If I belong to the Rajini manram, suddenly they give me what I need, anything. Because they don’t only see me but also the strength behind me. That strength will help the politicians in the elections. For that reason alone, they give help to us, they do not give any help to a single man. For example, I asked for a place in a school. My second son is going to join a Christian school. They did not give him a place. They only give places to the A category, which means high-class people only, not people like me in the middle classes. So, we wanted a recommendation. For that recommendation, I went to the Pondicherry Education Minister: ‘Sir, I would like a place for my son.’ There they asked: ‘What is your job?’ I replied: ‘I work in real estate, Sir.’ ‘And then what else?’ ‘Sir, I am from the Rajini manram, I am Rajini’s PRO [public relation officer].’ Then they simply gave me a letter which said: I know this man very well, could you please give him a place for his child. Just like that he recommended me and gave me his signature. I got the letter and took it to the head of the school, the principal. He said: ‘Oh, you have been to the Education Minister, okay, I agree to your request.’ If I hand in an application and try to pressure them, I get no response. But when I get a recommendation, they agree to my request. That is because of the Rajini manram. It helps us.

Tharagai Raja felt the strength of the manram helped him to be taken seriously by politicians and government officials. Tharagai Raja emphasized the mutual benefit of this relationship. They benefited from being respected and in a practical way by gaining access to domains that otherwise would remain inaccessible. At the same time, he explained how government officials gave their support as they understood the mutual benefit. The Puducherry Rajinikanth fan club had regularly supported local politicians or political parties during elections. Fan clubs could therefore be seen as platforms of

134 

Intimate Visualities and the Politics of Fandom in India

agency and participation in the political process (Rogers 2009). The kind of politicking at work here provided politicians with votes and support. At the same time, it gave fans a way of letting the system work to their advantage, especially for people who, due to class, caste, and political hierarchies, would not be able to access certain domains otherwise. Tharagai Raja’s words on the direct benefits of fan club membership might seem overstated. Yet, while they might not be of such an effective nature, the way in which he expressed this points to how fan activity cultivates a constant form of fame and value production that requires such an accumulation of star- and self-image (Munn 1986). I will come back to this point further below. Where connections with political persons helped fans to access institutions, institutions were also supported by the fan club. In Vannur, an area of Villupuram, Saktivel is the popular leader of the local fan club. We encountered Saktivel in earlier chapters while discussing his wedding invitation and the signature that helped him deal with his accident. In 2006, Saktivel was selected as Panchayat president with the help of the fan club. Before Saktivel became fan club president, the fan club was not very active. Fans complained that the former leader was not trying to unite fans. So, when the former, local, fan club president was expelled by the head office in Chennai, Saktivel was appointed and the fan club started to shine. Saktivel is known to be a sincere fan who spends his money on screening films and organizing events in the name of Rajinikanth. A friend of Saktivel described his popularity as follows: Saktivel used to distribute sweets to the entire village when a Rajinikanth film was released. He also regularly hired a TV and VCR, which were still very costly at the time, and played Rajinikanth and MGR movies for the entire village. He organized this whenever he had the money and sometimes, we pushed him to organize it. The TV was put up in the village somewhere and everybody gathered around. First, we used black-and-white TV and later colour; we used to fan the VCR to cool it down. This was in the early 1990s. The MGR films were screened mainly for elderly people. Later, the temple authorities bought a TV. The shows were screened on special occasions and sometimes even on ordinary days but mostly on Saturday nights as Sunday is a holiday for everyone. We enjoyed those moments. We admired and respected Saktivel a lot. We tried to follow his path. He spent his own money.

Generally, Saktivel was known for his commitment to social issues. In 2006, Saktivel decided not to join the PMK, which drew many members and

Vexed vener ation: the politics of fandom

135

voters from the Vanniyar community to which both its leader Ramadoss and Saktivel belong. Ramadoss lived a couple of kilometres farther north. Tensions between Rajini fans and Ramadoss supporters have been expressed in fights but also, as I will later show in Chapter 4, in the demolition of banners on the important Koot Road junction. Saktivel stood as a candidate for the local Panchayat elections and won with the help and support of the fan club. The Rajinikanth fans helped him canvass for the elections and helped in all other ways to accompany Saktivel in his activities. In fact, the Panchayat position was allotted to a woman, so officially his wife Nalini was registered for the position.55 But as often the case, Saktivel carried out the job. Nalini expressed that she did not want to stand for the elections as she was afraid of speaking in public. But Saktivel reassured her and promised that she would not have to do anything. Only for official events such as Independence Day did Nalini join Saktivel on a trip around the area to hoist the flags at schools. Saktivel was extremely busy with his job as local spokesperson for the area. He had a circle of friends who were also fan club members and who always supported him to help solve issues in the neighbourhood. The acquisition of land to give people ownership of the land they lived on; family feuds; and fights are some of the issues that Saktivel was involved in. He was always on the road. Almost every time we tried to meet, he was called away to solve an urgent matter, and his phone rang constantly. Despite his extremely busy life, Saktivel always tried to make time to talk about his passion, that is, Rajinikanth: ‘I would leave my family for Rajinikanth, if he starts a party, I would follow him immediately.’ A Panchayat president is not a political position per se but is nonetheless one with public visibility and power. So Saktivel could perform his role without clashing with the rules from Chennai that fan club members should not be actively involved in politics. The way he was elected was clearly with the help of the fan club, while his prestige and visibility were shaped by his work as a fan club leader. Fans see the social welfare activities of their fan club as a way to establish their own position in their neighbourhood, in politics, or in the fan club environment. On the one hand, fans need public visibility and relationships 55 The 73rd Amendment of the Constitution of India (1992) demands that one third of the seats for panchayat presidents must be reserved for women. However, activists have commented that women holding such posts were mere ‘rubber stamp’ functionaries who were denied authority (Sivarajah 2016). Moreover, the other comment is that party men have pushed their wives forward in order to gain control over the seats, something that was also clearly the case with Saktivel and Nalini.

136 

Intimate Visualities and the Politics of Fandom in India

with influential people through the fan club to gain access to institutions otherwise difficult to access, and on the other hand, fans also become local big men themselves through the fan club and their acts of generosity. However, a fine line separates ‘self-regard’ and outreach. Generosity suggests ‘seemingly selfless agency’ (M. Mines 1994, 65) in which people seem to act for others and not merely for themselves, as the social welfare of fan clubs suggests. However, generosity is an act of presence and futurity in which the transactions, as Munn have called them, are not directly closed (1986, 61). In other words, acts of generosity – say a donation of food to emergency ward patients – are favours granted with the implicit expectation of future returns in the form of votes, public shows of support, or respectful forms of address (mariyatai). Therefore, the image work at play here is building up and not giving mere direct present advantages but also expectations for the future. The fans I worked with constantly commented on other fans and how they were ‘good workers’ or calculating, self-centred individuals. The evaluation of other fans – when they are young through their bond with Rajinikanth in cinema and once older through the social welfare activities pursued within the fan club – say nothing about the degree of emotional investment in or bond to Rajinikanth. Fandom is not simply an emotional state; rather, it is expressed or even constructed via action. ‘Good workers’ are characterized for their involvement in social welfare activities done for the sake of Rajini. Simply indicating one’s affection for the star hero isn’t sufficient to make one a praiseworthy fan; you have to act out that love in specific, culturally defined ways. Margaret Trawick has described in her work Notes on Love in a Tamil Family how love (anpu) in Tamil Nadu is not shown openly but through actions (Trawick 1990). While I do not aim to analyse the notion of love in similar depth as Trawick did in terms of the family that she lived with, I do see relevance in pointing to the ways in which love manifests itself through other forms of action. The idea that love is not necessarily expressed intentionally as love in a culturally specific way, does not mean that other forms of action, such as performed by fans, are purely pragmatic. My argument here is not that fans, instead of being affectionate towards Rajinikanth, now use him, as it were, for pragmatic reasons. However, instead of framing fandom in terms of love, the practices that fans are involved in show how the affectionate relationships go beyond the star himself, framed in different ways, through acts of devotion that do openly show love – which in the familial circumstances described by Trawick would not be possible – or through action. And in this variety of possibilities I cannot designate one sincere and another insincere (Trawick 1990, 92), but all amount to certain ways in which fans perform fandom

Vexed vener ation: the politics of fandom

137

and show their sincerity as fans. Memory and documentation played an important role herein. Remembering, as Munn suggests, is an important dimension for transactions that do not involve immediate closure (Munn 1986, 61). The proof of a fan’s dedication or otherwise was found in the ways in which they worked hard (or not) to organize activities and how they presented themselves on images displayed at events (see Chapter 4). Even though fan club membership did help to gain access to certain resources and networks of power, at the same time belonging to a fan club was not enough in and of itself to cause a member to be always taken seriously, particularly given the negative stereotypes about fans. For this reason, even though it was not officially approved within the fan club network, many fans I knew, once they were older, got involved in political parties as well. Younger men, however, would immediately be perceived as self-centred for getting involved in politics, as it breaks the spatio-temporal framework of fame (Munn 1986). Dickey has suggested that it is inappropriate for young people or for someone with little social or financial capital to make claims to power, and therefore the fan club offers a place to seek this power (1993b). One needs an amount of self-respectability and social standing to be seen and recognized by others (Nakassis 2016; Dean 2013; Dickey 2013). Therefore, I would add that while indeed the fan club offers a space to seek power, at the same time it also articulates a fine line between what is allowed and what not, when and when not and by whom. So, cultivating an image of a serious fan goes through generations and spaces of performance as well. Where in Chapter 1, I showed how the figure of the fan was mostly the young film fan, once in his thirties, the figure is a working man who dedicates himself to the fan club for building up an image of star and self. Fandom is no longer expressed in terms of cinematic devotion and investment but in terms of prestige and politicking. This does not mean that his prestige and politicking do not include praise, to the contrary. The presence of big men and the veneration of the film star at events can be understood as a form of praise that brings visibility and acknowledgement for those praised and praising (M. Mines 1994). Bernard Bate argues that praise by subordinates is an ancient cultural logic in the production of power […] a logic by which the praiser participates in the greatness of the praised at the very moment of naming that greatness. […] [P]raise embodies power and one’s relationship to it: one praises one’s leader with the desire to participate in the world of that leader and to thereby generate greatness for oneself. (Bate 2009, 89)

138 

Intimate Visualities and the Politics of Fandom in India

He also suggests that praise ‘informs the discursive practices whereby one aestheticizes power as an intimate being, such as a family deity or mother, who will grant us the benefits of her presence and respond to our appeals’ (2009, 120). This relationship is intimate yet hierarchical (Babb 1983 quoted in Bate 2009, 120). While seeing the similarities, Bate is also careful not to presume an unmediated continuity from precolonial courtly practices to recent political patronage, as he correctly states for instance that the political patronage we observe now appears to be much more recent and the deification of political figures did not occur until the rise of the public figures MGR and Jayalalitha (Bate 2009, 145). Praise, in other words, is not mere adoration but a fusion of adulation and the prospect that the connection brings forth (Appadurai 1990). Appadurai singles out the indirect form of praise for those lacking direct contact with the superior. Praising the good deeds, capabilities, powers, and reputation of the superior sets the speaker him or herself in a privileged relationship with the superior. This form of indirect praise authorizes the power and status of the one who praises (M. Mines 1994, 11-12). And this interplay of hierarchy and intimacy, Bate suggests, forms the model of patronage and political power in Tamil Nadu. Similarly, the ways in which fans perform the aesthetics of praise and the politics of patronage, suggest a figuration of praise which contains a form of presencing: of Rajinikanth, his fan clubs, and individual fans. As such, the structure of fan clubs and political parties overlap in many ways. Its structure, use of imagery, and organization around a charismatic leader resembles political party organization and specifically the AIADMK party before the death of Jayalalitha in December 2016.56 The complex balance of present practices and future rewards shows how praise articulates the emotional relationships that fans build up with their star. Rajinikanth, other big men such as invited politicians, or local fan club leaders are hailed within this hierarchical intimacy. Nevertheless, the hierarchy that is suggested between praiser and praised comes with a less straightforward loyalty towards a film star. The relationships between fan and star have not only created a hierarchical intimacy with a star; they have created expectations and possibilities that go beyond what this star might represent. This hierarchical intimacy is not merely the result of the agency of the viewer in what he or she takes out of what is viewed, but also shapes the figure of the star, and it suggests a kind of reciprocity of future rewards. I will return to this point elaborately in the conclusion of this chapter. 56 See (Dickey 1993b; M.S.S. Pandian 1992; S.V. Srinivas 2009; Gerritsen 2013; Bate 2009). Specifically, Bate’s work on Tamil oratory is noteworthy here, as it provides an elaborate discussion on the aesthetics of political oratory.

Vexed vener ation: the politics of fandom

139

Style and the power of fan collectivity While political networks create a feeling of agency, hierarchies within the fan club are created and reinforced by means of the activities fans organize. Fans who already have the right social or economic capital can climb up the fan club hierarchy more easily and establish political networks. It is noteworthy that fan club leaders were often small businessmen who were more economically well off than others. They need money to be a leader as they are expected to attend the functions of people from the area and contribute f inancially, help people in emergencies, and celebrate their own functions in a grand manner. They also need a car, in case of fan club or other functions that they have organized or have been invited to. Indeed, several poorer fans and fans from rural areas said that the lack of resources would always mean a lack of power and mobility in political environments. So even though the fan club could be seen as a space for mobility, economic background does play a role in someone’s possibilities for climbing up the fan club ladder. Politicians as well as fan club leaders need economic capital to act as a leader, and these leaders also need a particular style, which in return requires money. They need to cultivate their public image to generate fame. The following description of a trip I made with the Rajinikanth fan club leader of Villupuram district, Ibrahim, shows how style becomes crucial in the production of importance of individual fans. In February 2008, my research assistant Gandhirajan and I received an invitation from Ibrahim to join him on a trip to Gudalur, a town situated almost 400 kilometres south of his home town of Villupuram. Ibrahim for his part received an invitation from Stalin,57 his fellow district fan club leader of Teni, to attend his son’s ear-piercing function. Gudalur is a small town in South Tamil Nadu on the border with Kerala, surrounded by a lush landscape of mountains, paddies, and rivers so Ibrahim saw this trip as a small vacation as well. He arranged lodging in Teni for the first night after which we headed on to Gudalur the next day to attend the function. Ibrahim’s car was packed with the seven travellers, our luggage, and a considerable amount of alcohol. We were with seven of us. Ibrahim and his nephew who drove the car were in front, Kannayram, Gandhirajan, and I on the middle passenger seats, and Kumar and Selvam, two lower-level fan club members, in the back of 57 Names like Stalin were popular in Southern India as they reference global figures rather than specific caste identities.

140 

Intimate Visualities and the Politics of Fandom in India

the car, sitting on top of our luggage. Ibrahim had what is called by many a ‘politician car’ – a white SUV. As many of the cars in the state carry the flag of the affiliated political party of the owner, the hood of Ibrahim’s car was decorated with a Rajinikanth flag. Throughout the journey Ibrahim and Kannayram, his right-hand man, talked primarily about fan club politics: who was doing what, meetings, and so on. Jokes were also made about the other fans in the car who were of lower rank within the fan club but also from a lower socioeconomic background. There were also jokes about the failure of actors Vijayakanth and Sarath Kumar in movies, which had led to them starting political parties instead. No one was really talking about Rajinikanth, let alone about his film. We often stopped during the journey to eat, get some snacks, or for the men to smoke and drink. Ibrahim explained that he smoked the same cigarettes as Rajinikanth: expensive imported Benson & Hedges cigarettes. Coincidentally, on the day we set off, an article had appeared in a popular daily about my research. As is common, highlights of the paper were published on cheap posters displayed around the vendor selling the paper. Even though we noticed the posters everywhere, we were not able to obtain a copy of the paper itself. Once we found it, it became the subject of much fun, by surprising people on the streets who were just reading the article with my presence in that small place deep down south in Tamil Nadu. When we approached Teni, local fan clubs were awaiting us. We stopped in several villages where fan clubs honoured Ibrahim and me by garlanding us. After a day-long journey we arrived in Teni, where one of the higherlevel fan club leaders was waiting for us in our lodge. After a conversation with the district leader, Ibrahim wanted me to have dinner, after which they accompanied me to my room, making sure I was settled and safe. The men, now ‘free’ of their responsibility for this foreign guest, did not eat because they planned a night of drinks – so-called hard drinks. When people, generally men, drink in Tamil Nadu it is common that they usually do not eat in advance but have snacks accompanying the drinks and eat later. The following morning the men were up early again, preparing themselves for the next part of the trip. We headed on to Gudalur, where the function was to be held. Before we left, however, Ibrahim wanted a photo of Rajinikanth in front of the windshield because the Rajinikanth flag, he thought, looked too much like a flag of the Dalit Panthers. Selvam immediately went to a local photo studio and returned a couple of minutes later with an A4-size photo of Rajinikanth. Ibrahim was not too happy with this photo because it was a ‘natural’ photo instead of a filmi one, but he placed it in front of the

Vexed vener ation: the politics of fandom

141

windshield anyway.58 Ibrahim’s shiny white car with tinted windows is not uncommon in Tamil Nadu but does attract attention in more remote areas. In addition, the flag and photo of Rajinikanth enhanced the importance of the car. People noticed it, they pointed at it, and small children waved at the car when we passed by. It’s imaginable that they thought they had just seen Rajinikanth passing by. Once we had arrived in Gudalur, we paid a short official visit to Stalin, the district leader. But then it was leisure time. All the men changed into comfortable lungis, short pants and towels. We went to see famous waterfalls in the area. Normally, visitors must pay a fee, but when the guard saw the Rajinikanth flag and photo, he let us pass. The waterfalls are a popular spot for people to bathe, and just a bit further downstream we settled with the food and drinks. The two lower-rank fans carried all the alcohol and food that had been made by a fan club member’s wife in Gudalur. After everyone had become sleepy from the alcohol, they dozed off, and Ibrahim and Kannayram got an oil massage from a lower-rank fan club member. When everyone had slept and had their lunch, we headed off to the waterfall. Part of the crowded passage to the waterfall was closed due to construction works. In their slightly drunken state all the men nevertheless took the closed off but easy steps. A commotion started, and a guard tried to prevent them from taking that route, but the men continued, stating that they were from the Rajinikanth fan club and therefore had a right to do this. And so it was; people let them take the stairs instead of the detour. The next morning Ibrahim said he wanted to wash the car and bathe somewhere. We drove for a few kilometres in the lush landscape of paddies in search of the place where the mother of the famous music composer Ilayaraja is buried. Once we arrived at the spot, an old watchman opened the gate of the property, and Ibrahim told him that we were sent by Ilayaraja. The confused watchman could not refuse us entry after this remark and thus allowed the car inside. The men started washing the car and themselves in the compound. Gandhirajan and I spent the time at the river, embarrassed about the misuse of power of which we were part. The ear-piercing function was our last activity of the day. At the event, the men took time to speak with fellow fan club leaders from other areas, and I was introduced to various local fans who wanted to speak to me. After lunch we were on the road to Villupuram again. At two in the morning we 58 In Chapter 4, I elaborate on the suitability and categorizations of different images made by fans of Rajinikanth.

142 

Intimate Visualities and the Politics of Fandom in India

arrived in Villupuram, and Kannayram then gave me a lift home on his motorbike, another forty kilometres away from Villupuram. The hierarchy among the various fan club members in our car and the ones we encountered during this trip was expressed by where they sat, who carried the bottles of alcohol, who washed the car, and by how different members addressed each other by their fan club position. Jokes were made about the lower-level fans, and Ibrahim was addressed by the others as thalaivar (leader) and sometimes as a future MLA. Rajinikanth, who brought these fans together, played a role in the background. During our journey to Teni, when Gandhirajan and I were waiting for the others who were having a quick drink on the road, Rafiq, Ibrahim’s nephew, put on the film Baadsha (1995) for us in the car. The film ran for two hours while we drove further south, although no one was really paying attention. Only Kannayram looked at the film occasionally. His eyes twinkled during specific fighting scenes or scenes in which Rajinikanth made bold statements. Besides that, Rajinikanth seemed to be merely touched upon as an object of status and power. It was through his style and performed cinematic connection, I would suggest, that Ibrahim was able to get access to the memorial place of Ilayaraja’s mother. It seemed almost a symbolic act to wash the car – it was not the place per se but the fact that he could enter that place through his generated fame that made it Ibrahim’s wish to wash his car there. And of course, it must have impressed the others who were present, reemphasizing Ibrahim’s status to his close followers. Images of Rajinikanth and the political style – the flag, the photo, the car and the performance – mediated Ibrahim’s image. I have described this trip at some length as it shows how, through the fan club, status is ascribed to local fan club leaders. Moreover, it shows the style of leadership that Ibrahim exercises and the style of obedience of the other fans towards him. This becomes clear for instance in dress, ways of speaking to each other and to outsiders, and in the behaviour of who carries what, who drinks what, and so on. Ibrahim was the district Rajinikanth fan club leader of Villupuram district. He was a businessman who had an office at the main bus stand in Villupuram. He had been the fan club leader of Villupuram district since the 1980s. He was said to be one of the longest-running leaders, liked by many because of his service to the fan club and for keeping fan activity and party politics separate. The emphasis on Ibrahim as one of the few fan club leaders who always clearly separated the fan club and party politics is noteworthy. Ibrahim was engaged in all kinds of political activity, but as he was not using the fan club explicitly for his politics, it was considered

Vexed vener ation: the politics of fandom

143

permissible. Through his long service to the fan club and his position as a moneylender he had a large patronage network of fans and others around him. The way in which he was addressed by his fellow fans, as a future MLA and as an important person who could avoid rules (exemplified in the situation of the waterfall drinking outing and the washing of the car), refers to a certain performance that brings him into the political domain. Ibrahim, on holiday and with his lower-level followers around him, clearly needed to perform in a certain way to prove his status. It would be completely different in the context of his meeting politicians with whom he worked. In that case he would be the person who is expected to behave humbly and to praise his superiors. Just as fans like Ibrahim created links to more important politicians, they also regularly supported local politicians or political parties during elections. Moreover, fans have employed the visibility and support of the fan club for their own political aspirations. For example, Saktivel, the Panchayat president, and his fan club members in the area served as henchmen before and after the election process. Whereas his status as fan club leader and the campaigning activities of the fan club played an important role in the elections and Saktivel’s visibility, also community vote banks were decisive in the result. In other words, it is hard to sustain that fan clubs carry sole responsibility for the failure or success of a party. However, what is important here is that political success is not necessarily the outcome of certain fan club activities, but that the fan club is an environment where political possibilities exist.

Vexed veneration: The politics of Rajinikanth Using the fan club for political ambitions is a delicate matter. On the one hand it is inherent to fandom as many fans join political parties as fans; on the other it can be evidence for selfish career ambitions. When I asked Thengai Selvam how that works, he replied: He [a fan] must work hard, he must face difficult things as well as good things within the fan club. Once Rajini supported the DMK and asked fans to support the party. That time many fans followed his words but some of them didn’t. So, we considered the person [that followed him] as a diehard fan as he worked hard for his fan club. He must be loyal to his leader and the fan club. According to their [a local fan club’s] activities we can identify how serious they are. Someone can contribute

144 

Intimate Visualities and the Politics of Fandom in India

Rs 1000, someone else can contribute Rs 5000, another person can contribute Rs 500; it varies from person to person according to his f inancial background. But how he involves himself is the deciding factor in seeing how serious he is. There are some fans who are very calculating; they are always keen to collect tickets from the fan club and wait to make a huge prof it [by reselling those tickets]. We notice them from the beginning, so we can say [who is a hard worker and who isn’t].

Throughout my fieldwork, fans constantly commented on other fans and what kind of fans they were: serious, calculating, spending nothing but wanting the prestige, spending a lot without looking for personal gain, connecting to political parties by using the fan club, or being decent in having two separate networks: the fan club and politics. These observations mainly focused on defining the line between selfishness and working for the fan club and Rajinikanth. If fans went too far in using the fan club for their own political ambitions, they were told by fan club leaders or the head fan club in Chennai to stop their activities. Sometimes they were (temporarily) expelled from the fan club. The ways in which other fans were assessed as genuine fans were on the basis of being a good worker or not. The affective presence of Rajini through his films, images, and stories as I have described in Chapter 1 and 2, seemed to have waned with the activities organized through the club and the rewards that these activities were expected to bestow on them. Being a member of a party is not problematic but being an active politician is. Different kinds of politicking are differently perceived. Practical benefits and prestige gained through the fan club are accepted, but using Rajinikanth’s image for a political career is not. Many fans, however, hoped that Rajinikanth would start his own party, not an uncommon move for film stars in Tamil politics. A Rajinikanth-founded political party would, many fans think, be more effective than even the most active fan club, not merely for their own benefit but for what a star such as Rajinikanth can do for society. It would resolve the contradiction of political practice in name of the star and the alleged selfish use of the fan club for a fan’s own political career. The problem for most fans however was that Rajinikanth had not started his party. Not at the time at least. For fans, aff iliation with a political party aff irmed their long-time activities in the name of their f ilm star. But fans wanted more. Rajinikanth fans had become restless with Rajinikanth’s reluctance to start his own party. Rajinikanth’s hints in films – such as ‘no one knows when

Vexed vener ation: the politics of fandom

145

and how I will come but I will be there at the right time’59 – kept his fans hoping that he would f inally take the big step, but so far nothing had happened. Why is the expectation of their star’s own political party so great if fans can already engage in politics in their own name? The level of prestige and recognition as a fan was limited. Even though they engaged in social welfare activities and established connections with local political big men, they were still to receive the benef its they would have as ‘proper’ politicians. Moreover, fans felt they had put a lot into their devotion to Rajinikanth and wanted something in return from him. Most fans I worked with, even those who were not really involved or seemed to be uninterested in politics and the subsequent brokerage relations became somewhat frustrated about the situation. For years, they said, they invested in the fan clubs, spent their own money on social welfare, and had not really received anything in return. Only fans higher up in the fan club really benefited from their position, many believed. Now it was time to get something in return. Otherwise it was useless to continue spending all that money on social work. This resulted in fans being less active in the fan club, knowing that they would not accomplish what they had slowly started to expect. Many felt that Rajinikanth had missed the right moment for his political entry. At the end of the 1990s, when he hinted about his possible entry into politics in a film, Rajinikanth was in his heyday. Most fans thought that if he had started his political party at that time, he would have won the elections. Now, even though they did not want to be unfaithful to their hero, they thought that his political heyday was over. As Rajinikanth was not showing any sign of what he would do in the future, fans were becoming restless and were starting to doubt their investment. Occasionally, a fan club somewhere in Tamil Nadu announced the party flag and as such a political party in the name of Rajinikanth or rallies were organized by local leaders to show their desires, after which this fan club or leader would be expelled from official fan club membership. Many fans expressed their disappointment with Rajinikanth as he kept them waiting and hoping but, in the meantime, did not take the step into politics. Other fans became less active and spent less money and time in the organization of events. Gnanavel, a member of the fan club and a member of the AIADMK party, expressed his frustration in the following way: 59 ‘Naan eppo varuven eppadi varuvennu yarukum theriyathu, aana varavendiya nerathile correctaa varuven’ from the film Muthu (K.S. Ravikumar 1995)

146 

Intimate Visualities and the Politics of Fandom in India

We are all ready to give our lives, but he doesn’t understand that yet. Even though he is acting like this we still love him. See, a political party gives power. That’s why we are asking him to start a political party. Last year I had a problem and my political party [AIADMK] helped me overcome it. Likewise, the fans who are struggling to get a better life will be helped if Rajini is a politician. He doesn’t see what his power is. Lakhs60 and lakhs of fans are behind him, but he never ever uses them. I think he is frightened of starting a party and managing it. Many film stars start a political party. Look at Vijayakanth, Sarathkumar, Karthik: they don’t have as much power as our Rajini, but they have started a political party. These actors give a voice to their fans, to the people who believe in him, but Rajini hasn’t done this. All his films after Mannan contain politics; they contain dialogue that refers to his entry into politics. It’s so irritating you know. We’ve lost hope, but we still love him. We don’t know why he speaks about politics but doesn’t do anything. He says that he loves Tamil Nadu and the Tamil people, but he doesn’t act as if he does. He has a mill in Karnataka where four thousand people work, he owns lorries and much more, but everything is in Karnataka. Then how can we believe that he loves Tamil Nadu? Many of the members of his fan clubs will quit if this continues. The day will come when there are no more fan clubs.

Gnanavel’s frustration articulates the ambiguity of praise for a star. Despite Rajinikanth’s behaviour, Gnanavel’s love for his hero was unconditional, and he continued to love him. But that was also why he was frustrated: he loved him, but the star did not do what is right. And here the unconditional love lands on shaky ground. Fans, Gnanavel mentions, wanted something in return for their efforts and dedication, and that is political power. Another matter that is worth alluding to is Gnanavel’s point about Rajinikanth’s loyalty to Tamil Nadu or Karnataka. Rajinikanth is sometimes criticized for his questionable loyalty to the state of Tamil Nadu. This feeling of belonging to a state should be contextualized within the linguistic political paradigm that has developed in Tamil Nadu. Notions of belonging are primarily attached to linguistic background. People in South India have long historical memories; it is not uncommon for people to identify as a ‘hometown’ (sonda ur) a village that their many-times-great-grandparents emigrated from. Likewise, even a descendant of a family of Telugu speakers that settled in the Tamil-speaking region more than three hundred years ago is far 60 A lakh is 100,000.

Vexed vener ation: the politics of fandom

147

more likely to identify as someone from Andhra Pradesh than as Tamil.61 Rajinikanth was born and raised in Karnataka, after which he settled in Tamil Nadu to study at the Madras Film Institute. His fans always defended him and often the metaphor of marriage was used: when a girl comes to live with her parents-in-law they include her in the family as their own daughter. Likewise, Rajinikanth has chosen Tamil Nadu and we as Tamils should treat him as family. It was therefore surprising for me to hear fans commenting on Rajinikanth’s origins in later years of my research. It seems as if, in difficult times, crucial issues of origin, loyalty, and the like were heightened and revealed. Two years later Gnanavel gave up the fan club and indeed left to be an active supporter and member of the AIADMK, the party (then) of the former actress Jayalalitha. For Rajini Shankar, who started as a dedicated fan of Rajinikanth and initiated the first fan club in Puducherry, Rajinikanth’s attitude towards politics and his own fans had been the limit. Shankar had become a dynamic businessman and active political supporter of the AIADMK over the years. But his fortune and prosperity within and through the fan club had changed as well. A few years ago, Shankar was dismissed from his post as Puducherrystate fan club leader. After a group of fans got the feeling that Rajini Shankar was making money by selling the first-day-first-show tickets at a higher price than necessary and that he was using the fan club purely for his own political career, they complained to the All-India Rajinikanth Fan Club leader Sathyanarayanan in Chennai. As a result, Rajini Shankar was dismissed from his post. Rajini Shankar, though, is a well-known man in Puducherry and had been the face of the Rajinikanth fan club for years. He continued acting as the fan club leader, as we could see in the coming-of-age ceremony for his daughter. But even though Shankar continued to act as a president, he also developed anger and frustration towards Rajinikanth. Rajini Shankar was frustrated about the investments he had made in the fan club in the name of Rajinikanth and for which he had received nothing in return. In 2007, he was angry with the head office in Chennai in particular, and so turned to the AIADMK, then led by Jayalalitha: I met her [Jayalalitha] because I was thinking of working for the political party. Since the headquarters of the Rajini fans association’s administration is not doing anything, I cannot stick with them forever. They never listened to my requests. We [Rajinikanth fan club members] cannot work 61 See also Lisa Mitchell’s work on attachments to Telugu as language, situated roughly in the twentieth century (L. Mitchell 2009).

148 

Intimate Visualities and the Politics of Fandom in India

for a political party, the president of the headquarters of the Rajini fans association does not allow us to get paid by a political party if we work for them. So how will we survive? I have been in the fan club for twenty-eight years, and I have worked hard for him. He is not doing anything for anyone, in the end where will I go for my survival? So, I thought of working with a political party directly. […] I met her [Jayalalitha] because I wanted to work with the party to increase my income. I thought of getting some post in a political party. For instance, if I were appointed president of the youth wing in the party, I would get paid for my work. Or for example, if I am in the party and somebody calls me to the police station to settle a problem, they will pay the police and they will pay me for acting as a middleman between that person and the police. That’s how I can earn money, whereas I don’t get any money for working in this fan club. When I joined the fan club, I was fifteen years old, today I am forty-three years old. How many years have I wasted without getting any recognition! If I had worked as government staff or if I had been with a political party I would have achieved more.

During this period, Rajini Shankar expressed his frustration towards the head office as he was expelled as president because of his political interests. But it was primarily because of his status as fan club leader that his active involvement in party politics made it problematic. As a lower-level fan is not so much in the limelight as higher-level members, their political activities were considered less problematic. Shankar was a known person in Puducherry and had well-known political contacts. His party support would be related too directly to the fan club, something that Rajinikanth would not appreciate. Shankar’s story reveals how he, from being one of the first fans in Puducherry, started to turn against Rajinikanth, still using his image and name in the events he organized but now far removed from the Rajinikanth he wanted to be close to initially. Shankar felt betrayed by Rajinikanth and therefore chose to become political instead of a fan. His move suggests that being a fan and the practices that a fan should perform, comes with the expectation of future reward in the political arena (see also Appadurai 1990; M. Mines and Gourishankar 1990). This anticipation of political reward was already there but now, as Rajinikanth’s fame did not give the expected reciprocal advantage, the political terms changed. If future remuneration through present devotion is not foreseen, then the structure of affect falls apart. Thus fan and fan club activities, perhaps especially when it comes to politicking and political expectations, take place within a temporal frame:

Vexed vener ation: the politics of fandom

149

fans engage in certain practices with the hope of future reward and the type and level of fan devotion shifts over time. This becomes utterly visible in the rise and fall of fan clubs of Vijayakanth, a contemporary of Rajinikanth, who started his own political party, the DMDK, in 2005. I will make a small detour here from my discussion of the temporality of fandom to consider the fiasco that resulted from the electoral political move of f ilm star Vijayakanth. This case shows that while fan club members might desire social, economic, or political rewards from being active in a club and might see the transformation of their star into a political leader as a way for those rewards to be generated, the fans’ socioeconomic status is all too often a stumbling block in the political process of party politics.

From fan club to party politics and back again: Vijayakanth On Deepavali, 21 October 2006, one of the most important festival days in India, the film Dharmapuri (Perarasu 2006) starring the actor and politician Vijayakanth was released. I was excited at attending a first-day show, an event that is a must for fans. Chakravarthy and I tried to obtain tickets somewhere. All the fans I knew told me it was a must: ‘All the fans shout and dance during the show, it is spectacular!’ everyone asserted. The first indication that the spectacle would be less electrifying than described was the timing of the film’s screening. In Puducherry, the film was not screened until late morning rather than usual early morning for the first-day first show. Outside the cinema a handful of banners made by Vijayakanth party members and fans were displayed in the cinema compound, wishing the actor well with his new film. The banners were in the party colours of the DMDK, Vijayakanth’s party, and did not suggest any connection to cinema or this specific film at all. To my surprise we were still able to buy tickets for the same day’s show, though for double the price. Before the film started, a crowd assembled at the cinema compound. I noticed how diverse it was contrasted with other first-day shows, which usually only attract men: young and old, men and women, and not the ‘ardent’ fans wearing Vijayakanth’s political party colours everyone had told me about. Throughout the film only a handful of young men on the first row danced during two songs and performed aarti (burning a light in front of an image) to bless Vijayakanth in his new film. One young man on the front row was completely immersed in the film: he waved his arms frantically as if trying to help Vijayakanth during his battle against the enemies.

150 

Intimate Visualities and the Politics of Fandom in India

The film made obvious references to Vijayakanth’s politics just as the banners outside did. Signs and symbols in the film, such as Vijayakanth’s ring, related to the DMDK’s party colours, and he was described as an honest superhero who knows how to rule. Just after the climax of the film, even before it ended, people began to leave the cinema hall.62 I was surprised about the relative tameness of the public in comparison with audiences at other actors’ film releases and the descriptions given by Vijayakanth’s fans who urged me to see the enthusiastic audiences. What was the reason for this? As I learned later, what was going on here was the decline in fan activity for Vijayakanth because of his political career. Fans who encouraged Vijayakanth to set up his party in the first place had gradually lost interest in the actor due to a lack of prospects for them in the party. Even though film-watching was still relevant, the enthusiasm that was supposed to be part of fandom was gone. Even the young fans who usually made their presence felt at the cinema had lost their enthusiasm. The rise and decline and new start of the Vijayakanth fan clubs and party cadres is worthwhile discussing as it tells us something about the trajectory of building up an image from the start. It shows how the political success of both film star and fan club cadres was not a spontaneous process. Fans began to see an image of a political leader before he was one. Vijayakanth started his party in 2005 after consulting his fans to see if they were willing to start a party. The intention to enter politics had been there for some time already, as Vijayakanth’s films contained political messages with him as the promising leader and images of a party flag. Vijayakanth’s fans and many others expected a lot from the party and even expected him to win elections easily despite the strong presence of the wide-reaching DMK and AIADMK parties. When he announced his party in 2005, his fan clubs were converted to party cadres in their respective areas. Vijayakanth’s DMDK party had not reached the heights to which some people expected it to rise but it was a small but notable player in Tamil Nadu politics. Due to health issues and his alcoholism, his popularity has decreased steadily over the past years. At a grassroots level, the party’s relative success played out unexpectedly for his fans. Many fans did not experience any improvement in their position and their status actually declined because fans were replaced by politicians from outside the fan club to lead the party in many areas. In Puducherry in particular, this was explained by the dominance of personality politics among local politicians and the large amount of election money that was 62 This is common with most film screenings, even for the first-day first show.

Vexed vener ation: the politics of fandom

151

distributed. Politicians needed to adopt a certain style to perform as a politician. They needed a white dhoti, followers, a car to travel around in, and money to give away when invited to family functions within a politician’s constituency. The failure of Vijayakanth fans to obtain political positions highlights the issue of economic and social capital and style that are needed to be a politician. Most Vijayakanth fans are from poorer socioeconomic backgrounds and are therefore not able to hold a position in politics. As a result, fans who had perhaps hoped for a political career by being converted into party cadres were overlooked because they lacked enough funds to be a politician. This was a particular problem in Puducherry, people suggested, where politicians were expected to pay voters money. For most fans it was impossible to adopt that style and enter the political field. But Vijayakanth fan clubs are not the only ones that failed in their imagined political career. R.M. Veerappan, politician and film producer, who was involved in the initial stages of organizing the MGR fan clubs, stated that most MGR club members did not receive any political benefit from their membership either. Most clubs were converted into youth wings of the party, but this did not bring them any political benefit in terms of posts.63 To provide fans with a platform for their membership Vijayakanth had reinitiated the fan club. But Vijayakanth had lost his sheen. Films were not watched as fervently as they were in the past. Most of the members I spoke to were not keen on seeing his films anymore and only went to see them after a couple of days, if at all. The highlight of the first-day show had completely gone, public visibility and generosity had no future reward in store, and politicking made no sense for similar reasons.

The (im)possibility and (un)desirability of politicking I ended this chapter with the failure of success for Vijayakanth fans in entering electoral politics to show how the lack of socioeconomic capital of most fans withholds from them the political success they aspire to. But it also shows how the cinematic enthusiasm of fans can wane, something that also becomes visible with Rajinikanth fans who after years of investing energy and money, felt they needed something in return. In this way, I have been tracing the political activities of fans as generationally and socially stratified. Sara Dickey has described how MGR fans never served in high posts in the AIADMK (1993b). Officially they became part of the political structure of 63 Personal interview with R.M. Veerappan, 20 May 2008.

152 

Intimate Visualities and the Politics of Fandom in India

the party but in reality, they remained a separate group. With MGR and Vijayakanth fans not achieving the expected rewards, there are basically no examples of fan clubs that successfully made the transition to political cadres. This makes the expectations on the part of the fan club members that being in the fan club will lead to that result all the more remarkable. While some fans do achieve positions and relationships with relevant big men that matter, this does not necessarily result in their achieving state-level political positions. This started in Chapter 1, where I show how the figure of the film fan relates to a certain age: young fans should be ardent film lovers. Older fans, on the other hand, are expected to engage in politicking, the fan club being a structure that is expected to produce rewards of advantage and fame. This advantage can vary from respect to institutional access through brokerage and fame and can benefit the politicking trajectory of fan and star alike. The reward of fandom has a spatio-temporal dimension: from seeing your star, presencing him through seeing films, and collecting and exhibiting his image to social welfare activities, politicking, and fame. Fan club members considered themselves as important webs of generosity in which they helped the poor and needy, mirroring the generosity of their film hero. The ways in which these activities were staged parallel political poetics of generosity and praise (Bate 2009; Nakassis 2017a). Social welfare events served as an important means of establishing and maintaining local patronage relationships. Fans aspired to these relationships as they felt these helped them to access institutions otherwise not accessible due to their socioeconomic background. Social welfare also generated visibility and recognition for fans who aspired to gaining access to sociopolitical networks and political power themselves. With social welfare events fans made visible to others how active and genuine they were. The stories of this chapter articulate how present activities provide, or are expected to provide, future rewards. Here I would like to draw on Nancy Munn’s work that gives insight into the ways in which value and fame are constructed (Munn 1986). Munn’s work deals with the island of Gawa, in New Guinea, where people were active in the kula chain. She argues that value ‘may be characterized in terms of differential levels of spatiotemporal transformation – more specifically, in terms of an act’s relative capacity to extend or expand what I’d call intersubjective spacetime – a spacetime of self-other relationships informed in and through acts and practices’ (Munn 1986, 9). She sees social practices as not merely going in and through time and space, but also constituting time and space. By giving food and exchanging shells and necklaces a person substantiates alliances and as such extends control

Vexed vener ation: the politics of fandom

153

over time and space. This value production is a form of self-constitution and fame can be seen as an ‘enhancement that transcends material, bodily being and extends beyond the physical body but refers back to it. Fame is a mobile, circulating dimension of the person; the travels of a person’s name, apart from his physical presence’ (Munn 1986, 105). Important in her work is the idea that fame is built up over time, including the past, present, and future in transactions, but also in the presence of a third party who hears about the transaction. Munn suggests: In sum, fame can be understood as a coding of influence – an iconic model that reconstitutes immediate influence at the level of a discourse by significant others about it. Fame models the spatiotemporal expansion of self, effected by acts of influence by recasting these influential acts (moving the mind of another) into the movement or circulation of one’s name; this circulation itself implies the favourable notice others give the person – hence the latter’s ‘influence’ with them. Acts are thus matrixed in a discourse or code that refers back to them. As iconic and reflexive code, fame is the virtual form of influence. Without fame, a man’s influence would, as it were, go nowhere; successful acts would in effect remain locked within themselves in given times and places of their occurrence or be limited to immediate transactors. (Munn 1986, 117)

What is useful in Munn’s work for understanding the ways in which fans seek visibility and fame with their public practices is the idea of the intersubjective spacetime and the futurity of rewards that come with fame. It explains how value is constructed through action, that is the activities that fans perform, but also attends to the visibility and material memorization of activities as evidence of one’s influence. But with Rajinikanth’s reluctance to start his own party or with Vijayakanth’s party’s failure to deliver social and material rewards to his fans, fan club members are faced with the experience of present practices not leading to future benefits. After many years spent in the fan club, gradually more and more fans expected political careers via Rajinikanth. As fans could be fully immersed in politics while still fan club members, they hoped that Rajinikanth would make the move into electoral politics. This would solve their sense of inbetweenness between political aspirations and loyalty to Rajinikanth. With Vijayakanth’s example I have come to close the circle by describing how this generation of fans’ expectations and desires for being a fan could fail to bring about the anticipated reward. I use ‘generation’ here in both senses of the word: as fans age and as the younger generation of fans become active,

154 

Intimate Visualities and the Politics of Fandom in India

expectations and desires shift; and while fandom produces certain expectations and desires, they all too often end in disappointment or frustration. In this sketch I must emphasize once more two defining characteristics of the phenomenon described here. The generational aspect of fandom is related to a specific era, to fans from a particular generation and at a particular moment in their lives (most informants were between twenty and forty-five years old). These were men that were living their fandom in a period that also noticed a considerable change around stars, films, and the industry around it, a change I describe more elaborately in the chapters below. For this generation, politicking was an intrinsic part of fandom but turned out differently than they expected. The generational differences of what younger and older fans were devoting their energy to differed. Young men engaging in too much politicking were seen as calculating and self-centred and older men ‘behaving like too passionate film fans’ were seen as offbeat. At the same time I have alluded periodically to the caste, class, and sociopolitical stratifications of fan club membership (see also Dickey 1993b; S.V. Srinivas 2005; Nakassis 2016). Within the fan club structure fans higher up on the social ladder were also higher up in the fan club hierarchy and subsequently in the political practices they were involved in. So even though fan club membership gave the feeling to many fans that they were stronger and could navigate structures that were otherwise difficult to access, the actual effects were much more limited. An important ambiguity of politicking was the fine line that separated patronage from taking advantage of the fan network for a person’s own advantage. This suggests that there is a desire for politicking but also an undesirability of such connections. What does this say about the mutual construction of fame that operates between star and fan? How does politicking relate back to Rajinikanth and vice versa? It seems that fans’ politicking can have detrimental consequences for Rajinikanth’s fame and image. Rajinikanth often warned that his fans should not get involved in politics in his name and doing this was then seen as getting in the way of Rajinikanth’s image building. Moreover, instead of enhancing Rajinikanth’s image and fame, politicking competes with it and therefore sets aside Rajinikanth, taking over his image. Therefore, such moments of image building that goes beyond the star must be controlled and removed. At the same time, it is through Rajinikanth’s fame and Rajinikanth’s politicking that fans feel they also have politicking power. In other words, it is Rajinikanth’s fame that impacts fans. But if he is not evolving to that expected moment of electoral politics, it lessens fans’ reputation. The disappointment of the absence of

Vexed vener ation: the politics of fandom

155

remuneration gives a sense of how reciprocity within the fan-star relation is indispensable and when this dialectic of presence and futurity is not working anymore, then fans seek different ways to engage in politicking. This suggests that a kind of imaginary politicking – the belief that someday he will become a politician – is more powerful than the real. Given the case of Vijayakanth, which shows that fans don’t necessarily ‘cash in’ on their fan club activities when their star turns politician, it seems likely that the expectation for that future utopia of Rajinikanth as political talaivar and not merely as film superstar has more power as a fantasy than it is likely to have in reality.

4

Public intimacies and collective imaginaries

In the month of June in 2006, after the first monsoon rains had fallen in Tamil Nadu, the Rajinikanth fan Thengai Selvam asked the owner of a plot of land if he could get permission to use its compound wall for a mural displaying his favourite film star Rajinikanth. The wall was located on a visible location: in the outskirts of Puducherry close to Selvam’s home and on a main thoroughfare to the next town of Cuddalore. Selvam’s mother knew the owner so he got permission to use the wall, and he was pleased that he did not have to pay any rent for using it. Along with his friend Ranjit, who worked as a cutout and billboard artist, and despite the monsoon, Selvam worked on the thirty-metre-long wall that consisted of several images of Rajinikanth and was dedicated to the release of the film Sivaji: The Boss (Figure 16). The monsoon caused difficulties in painting for Selvam and Ranjit. They constructed little shelters to cover themselves and their painting from the rain. It took them twenty days to finish the painting. Selvam paid his friend Ranjit with a small amount of money but mostly with liquor and cigarettes, which they consumed together at Selvam’s home. He spent Rs 10,000 in total (around 160 Euros at the time) on the painting (materials and the payment for Ranjit), an enormous amount considering his modest earnings selling coconuts, but he certainly wanted to do this in dedication to his superstar. Selvam explained to me that he felt a strong urge to show Rajinikanth his love for him. For Selvam, producing images of Rajinikanth felt like an obligation towards his star, but it also made his star come close. What kind of communicative act is going on here? What kind of affective mediation do public images entail as expressions of love of a fan towards a star? For whom are these images made and what does it say about the ways in which fans mediate their desires and ambitions? Selvam could use the wall for a year. However, slowly the rain, beating sun, and humidity caused the mural to degrade, and exactly a year later the mural started to be covered with posters of political parties, advertising, and other ‘competitors’. But until the wall was reserved and occupied by another user, occasionally, Selvam would remove the posters that disfigured his mural. In the first two chapters, I wrote about the filmic aspects of fandom and the ways in which fans relate to their film hero as well as their family in and via images. In Chapter 3, I focused on the politics of fandom and the ways

158 

Intimate Visualities and the Politics of Fandom in India

Figure 16 Part of the mural that banner artist Ranjit and his friend Selvam made for the film Sivaji: The Boss; Puducherry 2008

in which fans’ expectations changed as they aged. Although I described them as separate topics, in this chapter I argue that cinematic devotion and politicking coalesce and play out in the production and consumption of imagery. Four themes run through this chapter. First, the production and presence of images mediate and afford a connection between fan and star. Second, transformations have profoundly changed urban landscapes and enhanced the aesthetic qualities and efficacy of images, a fact that becomes apparent by studying the history of production of banners in Tamil Nadu and particularly the artists who produced them. Third, visibility of such imagery and what it can do for fans. Images have become more effective in making fans visible. And fourth, the tension coming from the ideas of what new cut-and-paste techniques broadening the possibilities for designs should and should not do. It brings us back to the tension between genuine devotion and ‘misuse’ of a star. I am interested in the possibilities and limitations of image technologies and what they evoke. What happens when technologies change, not only for the material object itself but for the expectations and aspirations for stars and for the self that crystallize around and are invoked by images? Images, I argue, become central in the ways in which fandom is articulated as they are produced, used, discussed, and remembered. Considering the material presence of images, and the sensorial investments that make people relate

Public intimacies and collec tive imaginaries

159

to them, will help us gain insight into the ways in which technologies create images and relations. Instead of merely attending to the ways film stars as absent figures become present for fans, newly designed and printed images bring along capacities that bring into view fans as well. The form and scale of the images are different, and so are their sensory perception and use. But we must be careful nevertheless in thinking that these changes are something radically new. Although I document the transformation in technologies and their consequences, I do not argue that the newer images are somehow sui generis. Here I draw on the work of Williams, who has called for an interpretation of technological change where technology is developed with certain practices, needs, and purposes in mind (1974). Technology in this way is not marginal but central to needs that become technically defined. At the same time technical improvements create new needs and new possibilities, with the communication systems that have developed being their intrinsic outcomes (ibid.). In other words, even though the use of digital design and printing techniques has transformed the idiom, form, and surrounding social practices of star and fan images, the desires and imaginations those images express are not themselves novel. Making a related point Jacques Attali has argued that music has anticipatory potentials, sometimes acting in advance of society (1985).64 The materiality or fabric of experience changes and reshapes practices, but the fact that these techniques are used speaks to a demand that already exists. So if a new design and print technology like the flex banner arrives, it would have, following Williams, a demand already. This demand was not necessarily created by fans but as soon as it was there, it created something new: effective images for fans and political workers alike. The images made by fans, from paper posters, plywood cutouts, murals, metal boards, and the new vinyl banners, have been an essential part of public spaces; their very publicness is crucial for their efficacy. Images need their surroundings to be seen and people must see them to be effective. The main function of the ‘repertoire of visual excitement’, one could say, is to be looked at, to engage onlookers (Holland 2004, 1). Who engages with these images? Whom do they speak to? The images represent what is important to fans and, at the same time, the public repetition and scale of these images become the source of power which makes them imperative 64 Bhatti and Pinney rearticulated this idea for photography suggesting that in India photography brought a new aesthetic that made possible forms of self-presentation. These ‘granted access to the networks and flows in which fluid beings open themselves up to forms of identification which are fundamentally undecided in the absence of the image’ (2011, 232).

160 

Intimate Visualities and the Politics of Fandom in India

Figure 17 Kumar and apprentices and helpers working on a painting in front of his house-cum-studio; Puducherry, date unknown

(Miller 2005). But what do scale and ubiquity engender with the display of a film star? Does it enhance the display’s effect, or does it diminish it? And for whom? Morgan argues that the ubiquity, sameness, and familiarity of images make them reassuring for those who use and produce them (1998). Their omnipresence and imagining others seeing these images enhance the desire for these images (K. Jain 2007, 292). Before I continue, let me briefly describe what the political and film images in public look like. The billboards and cutouts that were mostly used up to the 2000s were portraits of politicians or film stars (or both at the same time) painted on plywood structures (see Figure 17 and 19). I will have more to say about their form further below. They ranged in size from billboards that were 2 m by 3 m, to the tallest cutouts for Jayalalitha that reached 45 m. They were often adorned with so-called ‘dollars’ (coloured disks) that make the cutout shimmer and shine or with papier mâché, and often garlanded with a garland of real flowers (Jacob 1998). Flex banners, instead of rising vertically, have been considerable in size horizontally. They are usually between 2 m and 3 m but can also reach 10 m or more. During special events, political banners are sometimes displayed next to each other as one large banner. Considering the omnipresence and density of fan imagery in public, in this chapter I return to the notion of value production, presencing, and

Public intimacies and collec tive imaginaries

161

reciprocity as unpacked in Chapter 3 in terms of the politicking activities of fans. In this chapter, I show how public images produce yet again both a desire for presence and immediacy and the desire for future reward, materialized and mediated through public display. I explore how fans have been exhibiting images of their star and how changes in technologies and media have led to reflections by producers and users of such images on their aesthetic and material qualities. These reflections provide insights into the ways in which technologies and aesthetic appreciation intimate what images can do (and what they cannot). But they also give insight into the complex relationships of fans with their star, into the making of a hero-leader, and into the ways in which images encapsulate the conflicting interests of fans and Rajinikanth.

Cinematic geographies First day, first show. The cinema compound is hidden under a barrage of billboards competing for attention. Near the cinema one can find even more banners, and smaller posters can be seen everywhere. For the occasion, myriad local fan clubs create their own images. In the middle of the barrage of images at the cinema, the biggest one is produced by the district fan club leaders (talaimai manram). Around this banner local clubs try to position their own imagery. Local fan clubs, especially when their members are young and do not have a leading position inside the fan club or do not have much money to spend on banners, often produce posters instead. Fan club leaders are expected to show their position by producing banners which are grander in scale and content than others and their reputation cannot rest on merely producing a few posters. In this way, the size and content of the images can reveal what kind of position one has (or aspires to have) within the fan club. Local leaders have their hands full keeping order during this rush to put up banners and posters around the cinema. The cinemas have strict rules as to where fan imagery may be placed. They allow the banners despite the often-negative opinions they have about the way in which fans display images and the reasons why they do so. But as they can only be placed in the cinema grounds, rather than inside the cinema itself, there is often not enough space for all the clubs. So, some place their banners inside the cinema grounds, and some stack their banners above others until every spot is occupied. Fan clubs and individual fans make diverse types of images for various occasions, including cheap A1-size posters with birthday wishes, metres-high

162 

Intimate Visualities and the Politics of Fandom in India

cutouts and billboards for film releases, murals on compound walls, and vinyl banners of all sizes. My interest in the different types of media lies most of all in the difference that fans and those producing the images observed between painted murals and cutouts versus digitally designed banners. The banners and posters like I described here for the film release are made in design studios and contain images of the film star and local fan club members and a few words or phrases wishing the star well with his new film. On the night before a film release, after tickets have been distributed to the various fan clubs, all fan clubs head to the cinema in search of a good spot for their banners. At the cinema fans try to occupy a good spot by marking out the space on which they want to place their banner. It is not just the number of banners that is important but the presence of each fan club’s image of the star that is important for the club’s reputation. Although most fans I worked with emphasized that the position of a club’s banners is based on a first-come-first-served principle and almost never causes any problems, I regularly noticed that frustrations came to the fore about competition and exclusion based on hierarchy within the fan club and between clubs. The district fan club allots itself the most square metres and thereafter the local fan clubs stake out their plot by demarcating it with a piece of string. As this book repeatedly shows, one of the most important ways in which fans expressed their affective relationship towards their star and to other fans, as well as to position themselves in a wider sociopolitical field is via images. The identification of fan clubs through images gives them a certain permanence, formality, and identity. By placing an image, such as the metal board put up in a street in Puducherry (Figure 18), local fan clubs identify their presence and mark their allegiance for other fans and neighbours. The painted board on this picture, which was made in 2002, shows two images from a Rajinikanth film with, in the middle, the names of the founding fan club members. The signboard is decorated with a real flower garland to celebrate Rajinikanth’s birthday. For various occasions fan clubs or individual fans commissioned banner artists to make them a painted billboard. ‘Banner artist’ is the name for those who paint images – from advertisements on buildings, cutouts of politicians and film stars, to political murals. Confusingly, the vinyl images that are mostly used nowadays are called flex banners, but those making them are not labelled as banner artists. For film releases, their hero’s birthday, or other festive occasions, fan clubs exhibit myriads of banners or posters. During these events images are displayed around cinemas, in strategic locations or neighbourhoods where the events are taking place. As visual markers, billboards are put on view to engage their onlookers and inform them about

Public intimacies and collec tive imaginaries

163

Figure 18 Garlanded fan club metal board on Rajinikanth’s birthday; Puducherry 2002

events. By exhibiting them in public view, fan clubs completely ‘take over public spaces and literally leave their signature’ behind (S.V. Srinivas 2005, 308). The emphasis given to them by fans indicates their importance, not only for their content or meaning but also for their actual visual presence (K. Jain 2005, 9). Diane Mines and Bernard Bate have used the notions of

164 

Intimate Visualities and the Politics of Fandom in India

density and saturation of images and sound at political or religious festivals (D.P. Mines 2005, 163; Bate 2009, 80). Mines has argued that such material excesses at temples is integral to the production of value and Bate, while discussing the proliferation of images and loudness of sounds at political events, demonstrates that such sensory saturation of a space fills it with signs of the politicians’ presence. The images do not merely accompany the events; they are central to the event and therefore, coming back to Nancy Munn’s work, to the experience of intersubjective spacetime and to the production of value through action and material circulation. As we will see later, the images are stored and sent to the AIRFC in Chennai as proof of their activity. Fan imagery generates value through proof of meaningful fan activity.

The downfall of painted images When I met Selvam again in 2010, the mural had almost entirely faded. He was eager to have a new painting made but the up-coming elections discouraged him from putting all his effort and money into something that would not last long anyway. Local political supporters would now certainly deface his mural with their own political images. And to Selvam’s sorrow, his friend Ranjit had passed away so he would have had to commission another artist to do the painting, something he could not afford, given that another artist was unlikely to be willing to work for cigarettes. There was a new alternative – vinyl billboards or ‘flex banners’ – although this medium, as I detail below, elicited mixed responses from fans, producers, and passers-by. Vinyl had arrived in Tamil Nadu in the early 2000s. Before this, artists took paintbrushes and applied their paint to a primed surface such as the side of a wall or building or on huge cutouts and plywood boards. This involved, more often than not, perching on ladders or on scaffolding made from bamboo poles. In contrast, the flex banners are digitally designed in design studios (where one also designs wedding albums and prints photos) with software such as Photoshop and Windows Paint. They are then printed on vinyl sheets and fixed on a wooden structure that is put down on wooden poles. The skills for painting and digital designs are different, bringing along a different appreciation of the image and artists. So coming back to Selvam, instead of commissioning another painted image, he had already commissioned cheaper vinyl billboards from a design studio for several occasions, such as for Rajinikanth’s birthday or a film

Public intimacies and collec tive imaginaries

165

release. His late friend Ranjit would not have appreciated his choice, he realized, but what could he do without his friend around? To have his hero Rajinikanth on an image he produced was more important to Selvam than to honour the aesthetic principles of his artist friend (I will discuss the aesthetic differences between vinyl and murals below). Times had changed. Ranjit, Selvam’s friend, was said to have committed suicide for this reason. I got to know various friends and family members of Ranjit after his death, and most of them agreed that personal problems in combination with the hardship of not being able to paint anymore were the reason for his death. Even though I realize I should be careful in taking over this analysis of a complicated, tragic subject such as suicide, I do think the stories that people told me about his life and death can say something about the difficulties artists encountered in the shift away from painted images. As a banner artist Selvam hoped that the new fashion of vinyl banners would blow over soon, but it didn’t. He first did not want to think about using digital designing techniques and appealed to the Chief Minister of Puducherry with a highly emotional letter about his waning profession and the trouble banner artists were in now. Just after he registered for a computer workshop, seeming to accept the inevitable change, he committed suicide. Ranjit, his friends and family members told me, had a passion for painted and painting images, and already as a child was painting Rajinikanth’s images in his school notebooks. Ranjit was against flex banners for aesthetic reasons; just as most other banner artists I have worked with, he considered the disappearance of hand-painted images to be a loss. Vinyl had arrived and almost all newly commissioned billboards – from cinematic to political ones – were now, what are locally called, flex banners. The quality and low cost of vinyl have accelerated and multiplied the use of personal banners. Although flex banners were costly for purchasers to start off with because they require specials printers and rolls of vinyl to be produced rather than just paint and brushes, slowly the prices started to drop. The banner artists were placed in a diff icult situation as they watched seeing their income drop or completely disappear. Many of them turned to other professions, some took up computer skills and started digital-design businesses, and others determinedly hoped that the new trend would be over soon, only gradually realizing that they had missed the boat. They did not appreciate the digital portraits, seeing it as a flat-toned medium, incapable of expressing anything. Certainly, they were affected by nostalgia and disappointment about a profession on the wane. Their disappointment was frequently expressed via complaints about a lack of dedication on the part of the vinyl-banner producers. Artists who paint

166 

Intimate Visualities and the Politics of Fandom in India

usually do an apprenticeship with a more established artist after which they start a business for themselves. It takes a great deal of practice to paint skilful images (I address the ideas on what is a good image and what not further below in this chapter). Digitally designed images need mostly the starting investment of a computer and skills to use software such as Paint and Photoshop. As I will describe further below, the ease with which one can create an image on a computer is seen as a lack of dedication from the producer. It resembles the photographers interviewed in the film Photowallahs (MacDougall 1992) who nostalgically recounted the artistic qualities of black-and-white photography over colour photography in a small town in India. Black and white here was considered artistic, whereas colour photography was commented upon in terms of the skills of the artist as well as the material quality of the image. It seems to be the newness here that evokes these sentiments of nostalgia. But the observations also show us something about the qualities of painted and vinyl billboards and the affect they supposed to create for their audiences. They show a change in the communicative economy of the image and how such a change does not merely change the principal figures displayed on the image but also how the form of the images makes possible the display of new kinds of relationships with multiple figures – from stars and local big men to fans and their local leaders. In the following I will show how painted images were portrayed in opposition to digital ones and how their appreciation and affect lie both in their artistic depiction and material presence. Then I will continue to describe the efficacy of vinyl that despite being seen as representationally less effective and less attractive, still has a quality that makes it exceedingly popular. This will bring us back to fan clubs and how they welcomed vinyl as material that brought new possibilities in mediating fandom.

The painted image The aesthetics of the murals, billboards, and vinyl banners that fan clubs used for special occasions are not particular to fan clubs alone, and do not derive from just cinema but share similarities with political and religious iconography and especially, as we will see, with vinyl imagery made for wedding rituals, ear-piercing rituals, birthdays, and so forth. The styles and tropes of public culture in Tamil Nadu, even though transformed and adapted throughout the years, were in large part set in the 1960s and continue to prevail in current painted publicity forms (Rao, Geetha, and Wolf 2001,

Public intimacies and collec tive imaginaries

167

Figure 19 Cutout commissioned by fans on the release of the Rajinikanth movie Maaveeran (Rajasekar 1986) at the Anandha Cinema; Puducherry 1986

Collection N. Kumar, Puducherry, photographer unknown

131). The style can be situated within a larger genre of popular images, often labelled as calendar or bazaar art. The hand-painted cutouts and banners have, just as with film posters, largely been focused on the main stars or political leaders. Publicity for political parties came to be largely organized through the popularity of film stars such as MGR, Sivaji Ganesan, K.R. Ramaswamy, and S.S. Rajendran (Gerritsen 2013; Baskaran 1996; Dickey 1995; Jacob 2009). Political posters had previously been printed in sober colours, usually using two-coloured texts with names of those who commissioned the image and those it was intended for. They were also accompanied by short slogans, wishes, or poetic expressions, just as wall paintings were (see also Bate 2009). Following the example of film publicity, political publicity came to be depicted in different colours and increased in size. This resulted in similar pictorial conventions for displaying the main characters of both politics and cinema. Subsidiary characters and plots have literally and figuratively faded more and more into the background. The person’s face is of crucial importance to the images’ appeal, articulating emotions that are linked to the star and the role he is playing (Dwyer and Patel 2002; Jacob 2009). The artists also depicted the stars in melodramatic or realistic poses, and they added provocative text (Geetha, Rao, and Dhakshna 2007, 83).

168 

Intimate Visualities and the Politics of Fandom in India

Most banner artists I got to know in Puducherry were self-taught men with an interest in painting. The skill of painting was something that needed time and practice. Many artists, like Ranjit, started their painting career by being impressed by an actor and practised their painting skills by meticulously drawing this star, and then later joined an established banner artist as apprentice or came to the fore on their own. In Puducherry, the banner artist N. Kumar, for example, was one of the first to turn to film imagery and was hired by producers, fan clubs, and political parties and as such became an established artist (Figure 17 and 19). He started by sketching the images of film actors in 1977. He painted small images of Kamal Hassan and Rajinikanth, put them in plastic sheets and displayed them at provision shops in the market. He was admired for these images and gradually became known for his art. The art of painting cutouts and signboards lies, according to the artists I worked with, in the copying skills of the artists. They blew up sample images and copied them. Vinayagam was an artist I met in Puducherry who had learned to paint from Muthu, one of the most recognized banner artists in the city. Vinayagam’s shop is named Rajini Arts as he was a fan of Rajinikanth. It is also by painting Rajini’s image hundreds of times that he learned the skill of painting. For him, originality lies in meticulous copying: I wanted to show my originality in my works. The drawing should look like the original image. Only then will people respect your work and recognize you as an artist. If I show originality in my drawing, customers will come to me. Some artists may reproduce the character, but they cannot reproduce it as well as the original. I want my drawings to be like what is in the picture. My drawing should look like the photograph and it should be beautiful. When I see the photograph, I know which colour I need to apply for the drawing. I don’t use extra colours; I use the colours which are in the photographs.

Vinayagam argued that an image should be exactly like the photograph from which the painting is copied. Most artists, however, emphasized that artistry lies not only in the ability to copy but also in the use of colours and techniques that give the image additional strength (Geetha, Rao, and Dhakshna 2007, 109; see also Jacob 2009). Banner artists painted in a realistic style using a strong brush technique in combination with bright, saturated colours to dramatize the faces and bring structure to the paintings (Geetha, Rao, and Dhakshna 2007, 88). This contributed to the iconic characteristics through which people identified film stars and politicians,

Public intimacies and collec tive imaginaries

169

the main protagonists of banner art.65 At the same time, both artists and clients wished to stand out and especially fans like Selvam were always on the lookout for special images of their star to impress other fans and the imagined look of the Rajinikanth. It is difference that is constantly produced within such reiterations (A. Pandian 2017, 274). I will come back to this point further below. The use of colours and strokes in painted images, banner artists suggested, enlivened an image. It could be made more beautiful and livelier than the original. In complaining about flex banners, artist Vinayagam (Rajini Arts) told me how he regretted the loss of originality. With paintings you can tell a real artist in how he copies an original and makes it into an image, whereas with digital designs it is easy to assemble several photos. The distinction between the artistic qualities of paint versus photography can also be observed in how the work from photo and design studios is labelled. Photos made by photo studios for wedding albums and wedding videos were not called art, even though they were assessed on quality (Gerritsen 2006). Photographers in photo studios understandably do care about the aesthetic quality of their work, but they were not called artists. Paintings were seen as more realistic and therefore more beautiful. Paintings were said to be successful when the artist is good in using realism. Realism as it is used here indicates what the viewer should see or should experience. The image should be close to the original, clear from a distance and close up. One of the reasons why paint is seen as more appropriate for being realistic is the fact that an artist can improve upon the photo in his painting. A Rajinikanth fan named Ganapathy said to appreciate artwork explained the following: We can recognize [a good artist] from the way the painting is drawn and how the letters are written. Without a photo no one can produce a painting. But it needs a lot of skill to reproduce a photo as a painting. Our artist just sees a photo once and he paints it in a beautiful manner. Some paintings are natural. Some paintings, if you look from a distance, appear to be Rajini’s photo, but when you go closer it will appear distorted. Those are bad paintings. A good painting is one that looks beautiful even close up. See – painting requires a lot of skill. An ordinary person cannot draw a single line clearly. But an artist copies a photo very realistically. So, people prefer it. 65 Banner artists also painted shops, often also with f ilm-star lookalikes advertising the business such as hair saloons showing a film star’s face and hair. Moreover, some were hired in temples and applied a similar colourful style of images for the temple imagery.

170 

Intimate Visualities and the Politics of Fandom in India

A skilled artist is capable of painting realistic images when he adds colours, lines, and brushes, or emphasizes hairlines and eyes to make it more realistic.66 Although photography is realistic in that sense, too, it still lacks the ways in which a painter can add realism to his image, at least according to banner artists. Where a photo is unclear or dark, the painter can enlarge the photo and still work in sharp strokes and tones. This does not make the image less realistic. On the contrary, it makes it more realistic. Ganapathy values representations that are closer to being like photographs. The quote by Ganapathy reveals the way in which the ‘original’ indexical photograph gives its indexicality to the painting which, through its resemblance, takes over the photo’s indexicality and thereby constitutes the almost ‘original’ photograph/image. This relationship between the photograph or painting, between indexicality and what is created beyond the indexical, and between fan, star, and audience is lost when there is only the ‘original’ photo. Painted images have the capacity of showing the character or expressions of the person depicted, whereas photos merely show a person’s appearance. This echoes Chris Pinney’s point, referred to in Chapter 2 while discussing Selvam’s doctored images, that in India people do not assume the presence of any ‘inner’ character translated via physiognomy which makes the use of paint in photography unproblematic (1997). The specific corpothetic aura of painted images is said to be enlivened by the use of colours, props, and expressions, revealing and articulating the character played by a film star in that image (see also MacDougall 1992). The painted image is real because by improving it, it reveals the reality behind appearance. What is worthy of note here, is that the mimetic capacity of photography was said by painters and consumers to be problematic in digital designs. Photography is flat-toned in its indexical iconism, in contrast to hand-painted images that can display emotions of the depicted subject. Here, again, it is not the difference between photographs or painted images per se but about the relationship between them that is enhanced by using artistry applied to photographs. One needs the photograph to be able to paint. But the photograph lacks the emotional aesthetics that paint has, and also the digital designer who uses the photograph lacks the skill and expertise that the traditional artist uses to enhance and enliven the real. The painted images made for fan clubs are ascribed a more natural link with what is represented than photography is. Despite photography’s ascribed status of being linked to what was once there, paintings are considered to convey this in a more powerful fashion. The quality of images also relates 66 Both banner artists and studio designers are always men. I haven’t come across female artists during my research.

Public intimacies and collec tive imaginaries

171

to the work put into the images (see also Jacob 2009). Banner artists felt that digital design does not comprise any labour in the making of the image. ‘Painted work,’ several artists uttered, ‘is art whereas digital design is just a technical job.’ Muthu, as a banner artist, finds a difference in his audiences as well: ‘Manual work has its own value. It attracts people to stay for a while and look at the banner. People greet me when they see me. On the other hand, people never look at a digital banner and greet the digital banner makers.’ However, computer-based designs, some artist acknowledged, can be artistic as well if the designer puts effort into his design. Muthu suggested that ‘even where software like Photoshop is available, one must still have the artistic skills to produce a very good banner. One must have a creative mind.’ With what is available to designers, their task is to make it into a convincible image.67 Computer-based designs can rival hand-painted ones if the artist is able to use variations in his design. Banner artist Muthu is now also making digital banners to earn some money. He says: As I’m an artist at heart, my colour selection differs from others. We [artists] know what colour to choose for the picture to make our banners more picturesque. All other digital banner artists usually leave the background of the picture blank or white which I will never do. When painting banners we arrange the figures, create backgrounds, and more importantly we choose colours that are more common and, in this way, make the picture more natural. With digital images we are not able to do this. People choose their own colours and their designs too. Only people who realize that we are artists will ask us to make the designs and choose the colours. For them we will do our best.

The production of hand-painted and digitally designed banners articulates notions of aesthetic quality and taste, as becomes clear from artist Muthu’s words. He mentions that only for people who are aware of the use of colours and design will he do his best to make an artistic, attractive banner. So there is a continuity in aesthetics even if the media on which it is displayed are is different. A similar discourse underlies the idea of skill that is invested in the image and that artists – painters as well as digital designers – have or have not, want to invest or do not. But since digital designs are economically more viable for fans, they become part of a new culture of display. 67 See also Anand Pandian’s work on Tamil cinema and the moment of creation in writing, composing, and specifically his chapter on editing as a process of composing and compositing (2017, 318).

172 

Intimate Visualities and the Politics of Fandom in India

While previously artists like Muthu felt a certain authority in determining what makes a strong image, digital designs give much more authority to the clients. With paintings, one needed an artist to transfer one’s wishes for an image of one’s star onto a wall or billboard. Artists had authority in choosing powerful images and adapting them to make them into something attractive and compelling. With digital designs, clients could have their opinions about what they wanted by choosing photographs that they wanted as photographs on the image. And this was not at all considered an artistic creation.

Materiality and affect And clients indeed had their opinions. Most fans I worked with have welcomed vinyl billboards, yet some felt guilty about their preference for vinyl. Where for banner artists and fans the quality of painted images was articulated in terms of the aesthetic quality of the image, for vinyl images the quality was mostly expressed in terms of what images could do. Naturally, fans did select specific images of Rajinikanth that they found relevant for the event. The images were carefully selected. But in terms of expressing what made these flex banners attractive, these assessments were not expressed in terms of aesthetic quality of the overall image but of its after-effects. It seems that a change in the material object had also changed representational efficacy and affect. Putting to one side the notions of loss of artistry, vinyl’s advantage laid in sustaining and enhancing relationships that fans articulated with the production of billboards. The embracing of vinyl needs to be understood in terms of the enhanced possibilities that the material offered. Flex banners did have advantages that help to explain their popularity. First, they were cheaper and could be made within a day instead of the several days it might have taken an artist to paint his assignment. Fans had to visit the artist several times and discuss and select with him the images of the star they wanted to represent (Figure 20). Now, a client can simply hand over or select the images, and a few hours later the billboard might be ready. Second, despite the negative ideas about vinyl, still fans perceived the flex banners as a medium that offered the opportunity to be creative and personal. Fans could contribute to the images, and it could be totally up to them which images to use and how to use them. The generic, iconic quality of the images means that fans can personalize them. Fans select images of Rajinikanth that they consider suitable for the purpose; for example,

Public intimacies and collec tive imaginaries

173

Figure 20 Rajinikanth birthday banner by a fan club on Koot Road, a main district junction in Villupuram, 2002

Collection Saktivel

they would mostly look for ‘stylish’ images of Rajinikanth when a film is being released (Figure 20). ‘Style’ is Rajinikanth’s trademark: his gimmicks and one-liners have made him incredibly popular and almost everyone mentions his ‘style’ as a reason for his attractiveness (see also Nakassis 2017b, 2016). ‘Stylish’ images are frequently used on billboards and posters made for Rajinikanth’s birthday celebrations or film releases. Such stylish images are not always considered suitable for personal events such as fans’ weddings and birthdays, though. For fan club members’ weddings other fans often make a welcome billboard on which they use images of their film star (Figure 21). The images employed there must be more serious, so fans then often used ‘natural’ or off-screen images of a film star. The images of Rajinikanth display his ‘real’ appearance, which is very different from his filmi character in his movies. Rajinikanth fans said they specifically looked for simple images. ‘Simple’ was another characteristic often referred to when describing Rajinikanth. His modest appearance is evidence for his ascetic attitude which has not been ‘spoiled’ by stardom. Rajinikanth as film hero was also a person ‘just like us’, or bigger than us and whom we praise for his simplicity. In this way, just as in his films, his image or essence, as Nakassis has called it, ‘commutes itself within a larger political economy of cinema, continually splitting, multiplying, and disseminating itself on,

174 

Intimate Visualities and the Politics of Fandom in India

Figure 21 Wedding invitation displaying Rajinikanth and fan club members

Collection of designer and studio owner Yuvaraaj. Puducherry 2006.

across, and outside the screen’ (Nakassis 2017b, 225). This interplay between screen and natural image brings the otherwise absent or distant film star close to fans. Similarly, this fusion, informed by Rajini’s off- and onscreen image, is used by fans on their imagery. Therefore, the third advantage of vinyl is that it allows fans a more direct relation with the star, which is unmediated (or less mediated) by the artist. Vinyl allows the fan to be more in control of the image of the star, without the mediation of an artist, as the fan can direct the banner designer to use particular colours or images. So fans have access to stars in particular ways through being active in fan clubs (the star might meet with them if they are the leader of a fan club, for instance) and vinyl gives this access in a similar fashion, providing a more direct connection with the star through the image. But what does that mean; to be close to him? In Chapter 2, I have described the various ways in which fans mediated their interest in Rajinikanth in the images they stored and exhibited at home. This mediated or confirmed the intimate relationship that fans felt between themselves, their family, and Rajinikanth. The images displayed in public mediate similar desires between self, Rajini, other fans, and public, yet those images are put up under the auspices of the fan club, with different immediate and future expectations. Vinyl’s simple ‘cut-and-paste’ insertion of photographic images made it not only easy and quick to make a design. It also gave the material an essential advantage over painted billboards: the ability to add photos of those who commissioned the billboards. The main reason why flex banners became so successful was not because of its creative possibilities or aesthetic qualities

Public intimacies and collec tive imaginaries

175

per se but because flex banners could offer something that hand-painted images couldn’t. Whereas the hand-painted billboards and cutouts merely mentioned fan club members’ names, flex banners offer the possibility of easily inserting their photos (Figure 20 and 21). And this turned out to be a crucial advantage of vinyl. It resulted in fans’ attaching greater importance to being visible or realizing visibility in political terms. It is not to say that with paintings fans were previously not included, for they sometimes were (if so, mostly the head of the fan club was honoured in this way). Painting was more expensive and usually only the body or face of the star (or politician) was painted, against a background related to the message or film scene. Mostly the faces of the donors were not depicted.68 Flex banners did offer the possibility of adding the faces of donors as it takes only a few seconds to add passport-type photos onto a digital design. The low-cost availability of vinyl in conjunction with a certain period within the fan trajectories, in which older fans started to expect political rewards, also made the aesthetics of vinyl come conveniently close to that of painted political murals that did often include a limited number of political supporters (between 1 and 3 usually).69 Therefore, the change in material goes beyond the affordability of media per se. The material and aesthetic qualities of flex banners gave the possibility to express and be part of the multiple present and future desires and expectations that fans started to have of their membership. They allowed for a fusion of the filmic and political through the ways in which the content of the banners could be selected and designed: an image of the star in combination with the presence of fans. Flex banners commonly showed one or more images of the film star, and besides that they displayed photos of the fans who commissioned the banner. The inserted photographs made fans more recognizable as fans, but it also made the connection to Rajini they envision in their images much more immediate. Ibrahim, the secretary of the head fan club (talaimai manram) in Villupuram commented as follows on the change from paintings to vinyl banners: It is good for us. Before we couldn’t use many images. Now we can. We welcome this kind of change. Nowadays everyone can see their image with Rajini’s images because of the digital images. Some of the fans contribute a minimal amount of cash to make banners. But they can also see their images with Rajini. 68 However, for political murals the face of the main donor was regularly included (Bate 2002). 69 While political cutouts appear less frequently, compound walls are still painted by local party supporters throughout Tamil Nadu.

176 

Intimate Visualities and the Politics of Fandom in India

Ibrahim’s words point f irst of all to the democratizing effect of vinyl: now everyone can produce a billboard, just as calendars democratized the worship of deities (Pinney 2004).70 And this access to pictures affords the proximity of a person’s image to that of his hero. It allows people to meet and amplify an already existing desire of closeness in a way that would otherwise not be possible. The distant, absent star, that fans try to reach in several ways, by reading about him, by seeing his f ilms, by trying to go and meet him, is being brought close by displaying the star’s photo on the image and as such make the absent present (Belting 2005; Morgan 1998). And in addition, to enlarge that photo and make it public. In the face of the flatness of photographic images that was commented on earlier, in this case, the corporeality of fan and star is enhanced by the photographic reality. It is not the past reality but the proximate reality that fans wish to create in the images they produce. Selecting images for specific occasions and with specific significances enables a connection between fans and their star and personalizes the billboards and posters. It allows fans to connect to Rajinikanth by choosing or handpicking various stills of the star. It also allows fans to travel imaginatively yet publicly in Rajinikanth’s company, in much the same way as an artificial backdrop in a studio portrait, of for example the Taj Mahal, would allow you to travel there (Pinney 2003; Strassler 2010). Fantasy and naturalism merge by combining various kinds of images, creating not merely a desired fantasy but also a credibility of possibilities.71 It is the visual proximity in the image that is brought into play to represent a relationship between whom or what is shown in the image. The images and their qualities amplify the experiences of fandom, of being close to your star, just as the photos discussed in Chapter 2 showed various possibilities in seeking this intimacy. In addition to the personal satisfaction of being close to your star, fan clubs and their individual members also want to confirm their strength and fandom to their surroundings. After the arrival of flex banners, the number of fan club banners increased at fan events as well as at other events such as birthdays. By saying this, I do not want to argue that 70 Many businesses print and freely distribute calendars featuring pictures of deities, which allow worshippers who would not have been able to afford to purchase a painting or even a print of a deity to use the calendar print for decorative or worship purposes. See also the work by Kajri Jain on calendar art (K. Jain 2007). 71 A related practice can be found in wedding videos and wedding photo albums where bridal couples place romantic imagery or film stars in their wedding souvenirs to invoke an idea of romance or closeness to the star (Gerritsen 2006).

Public intimacies and collec tive imaginaries

177

distinguishing oneself as a fan club member or fan club was not important before the arrival of digital technology. Indeed, choosing an artist and images for the cutouts and signboards was a meticulous process whereby one tried to create a billboard that was different from those of others. Competition among fans and fan clubs is reflected in the activities carried out for an event and the images displayed. By means of imagery, whether it be having the biggest or most unique billboards, fans try to attract attention. Flex banners have heighted this importance. A Rajini fan for example said to me: Posters and banners are used to show Rajinikanth’s fame but with a photo of ourselves we have some recognition. In the village many people have the same name, but with photos they know who we are.

Fans felt a certain recognition by being a member of the fan club, and this power was transferred more easily if a person’s image is widely displayed. The producers of the image, usually the ones that contributed to it, are depicted next to Rajinikanth. But one had to hold on to certain hierarchical rules. In the choice of their own photos on public billboards, fans uphold club hierarchies; for instance, fan club presidents and district leaders would always be shown closest to the star, and larger than the other fans. The size and arrangement of the contributors’ images also expressed both internal fan club hierarchies of importance and the size of the fans’ financial contributions. Just as a fan’s position within the fan club determined the importance given to his image vis-à-vis that of the star within a banner, so too did the relative status of different clubs determine placement and numbers of the completed banners. For example, a head fan club in a city (talaimai manram) was obliged to exhibit more banners and spend more money on them than a local fan club. And local fan clubs always placed images of their leaders on their banner. Tharagai Raja, member of a talaimai manram in Puducherry substantiated this: [On the banners] the local fan clubs mention Rajini, the name of the film, their manram’s [fan club’s] name and us [the talaimai manram]. Mentioning us is not necessary, they can decide if they want to, but it is a plus if they do. If they place my photo on the banner, everyone who comes to watch the film will see the banners with my face. Whenever I visit a certain place, they know me: ‘He is a man from the Rajini manram.’ So, I will have some popularity.

178 

Intimate Visualities and the Politics of Fandom in India

Tharagai Raja’s comments illustrate how mentioning his name was benef icial for him, as it gave him recognition, as well as being valuable for the local fan club that mentions local leaders’ names. But displaying his photo brings more, as it is the photo that gives him popularity. These connections also link back to the relationships fans establish with local big men. Images facilitate these relationships. Tharagai Raja was a recognized f igure in the fan club and his active role as PR off icer established his connections with local politicians and other ‘big men’. He welcomed his visibility in the fan club and the way it spread via images as it helped him and his family to get access, for example to a school for his children that would otherwise never accept them considering their socioeconomic background. This should be understood in the larger context of fans considering their membership of the fan club to expand their network. The exhibition of billboards in that light could be understood as ‘an attempt to install and monumentalize a source of recognition’ (Spyer 2008b, 32) for individual fans and fan clubs alike. Their connections to local big men are also displayed on banners, as they often include them with their image. Ram, a Rajini fan, remarked: We never used Rajini’s images with politician’s images. But there are people who are very close to politicians and they used both Rajini and the politician’s image. He, for example, is a member of the DMK party. For his wedding we put up two banners, one with Rajini and the other with the politician. We cannot do anything without the support of political parties, so we make banners for them for these kinds of functions. Putting up these banners will earn us a good name among the government officials.

Showing important people on your banner, from Rajinikanth himself, to higher-up fan club leaders to politicians, did not merely honour those people; their status also rubbed off on the local fans who produced the banner. The banner validates their position and upholds and generates their status (M. Mines 1994). Billboards were also positioning fans against politicians or powerful persona. The area around Koot Road, the main junction in Vannur on the Tindhivanam-Puducherry highway, was the ideal spot for any kind of celebration because of its central location.72 For every film release or on 72 I say was because the construction of a new highway that bypasses Koot road changed the social and material fabric of the area completely.

Public intimacies and collec tive imaginaries

179

Rajinikanth’s birthday the Koot Road junction is the scene of numerous banners. Political parties used the same spot for their imagery. The ongoing enmity and competition between Rajinikanth fan clubs and the PMK party has primarily been articulated in and via the display of banners. In the past banners made by fans were destroyed, allegedly by local rowdies ordered by the PMK or by PMK members themselves. Saktivel, the (now former) Panchayat president and fan club leader in Vannur told me about the difficulties they encountered with the PMK, especially around the release of the film Baba (2002) after which Ramadoss, the PMK’s leader, criticized Rajinikanth’s drinking and smoking habits in the film. After Ramadoss’s statement, PMK members went on a rampage demolishing cinemas and film reels and several Rajinikanth fans were violently attacked as well. The hostility between the two groups had become a complicated matter in Vannur because many fans belonged to the same Vanniyar caste as Ramadoss. But Ramadoss’s strong opposition to the cine-political connection of film stars and fan activity drove a wedge between the Rajinikanth fan club and PMK members. Banners turned out to play an important role, according to Saktivel: At the time of Baba and the MP elections in 2002, they [PMK members] destroyed images of Rajini everywhere. Because this area has many PMK members, they didn’t leave even a single photo. The fan club members were very afraid at the time. I was not afraid. After I was selected, several members gathered on Koot Road and made several banners up to forty feet [twelve metres] in size and provided free food [anna dhanam] with chicken biryani. We packed the food into the five-rupee containers with a water pocket, rice, saris, and dhotis. We gave these to the people. On that day itself we opened ten branch fan clubs. They [the PMK] didn’t ask us for anything after that.

The limits of star imagery Figure 22.a shows two billboards that were put up for the occasion of the ear-piercing function of children of a Rajinikanth fan club member residing in the city of Gingee. The left side depicts Rajinikanth and fan club affiliations, the right side political leaders. I attended this event with Panchayat president and fan club leader Saktivel and some fellow fan club members from his area, Thiruchitrambalam. The Gingee access road, adjacent to the wedding hall in which the ceremony took place, was decorated with flags

180 

Intimate Visualities and the Politics of Fandom in India

Figure 22a A banner for an ear-piercing ceremony. It depicts DMK connections. In the top right corner, we see Karunanidhi, below his son Stalin, and three local DMK leaders; Gingee 2008

Figure 22b The right-hand banner shows the same family but now with Rajinikanth(left),districtfanclubleaderIbrahim(topright),theparents(below), and their children. On the left side it shows DMK affiliations; Gingee 2008

Public intimacies and collec tive imaginaries

181

and billboards for about five hundred metres and centred on the hall. One type consisted of billboards and flags related to the DMK party of which this fan club member was a member; the others depicted Rajinikanth and important leaders of the Rajinikanth fan club. As we can see in Figure 22.b, two men were still working on covering part of the billboard containing the text of the previous event for which this billboard was used. Above where they are pasting this piece of paper, another piece has already been replaced; it currently portrays the family that organized this function, consisting of the parents and their children. Additionally, the billboard portrays four images of Rajinikanth in close-up and photos of local fan club members (in the middle) and direct fan club leaders (top right). By showing images of Rajinikanth and the DMK – on separate banners – the father of this family showed his affiliation to both the Rajinikanth fan club and the DMK party. He reused the banner as he did not have the financial means to celebrate this function grandly. However, to establish himself, several fans who attended the function told me he wanted to make the celebration impressive. The images were not signs to the unknown passers-by who take this access road to enter Gingee but were more aimed at other fans and party members. In this way, the man showed his dedication towards these groups. What these two pictures – and three billboards – make visible is the spatial division of different affiliations on these billboards. While the family and children as centre of the activities are present on both kinds of billboards, one is made with Rajini present and the other with political figures. The two billboards on Figure 21 also merge in their aesthetic similarity. Hence, this act of doubling or similarity in terms of the entire layout and repeating the family and children connects these two, while also allowing them to be separate. But this was not enough. When the car in which Saktivel, his fellow club members, and I were driving towards the function approached the scene, Saktivel immediately commented upon the obvious combination of a fan club banner and political paraphernalia: the entire road was decorated with DMK flags and the large banner, so that the area was saturated as if it were part of a political event: ‘Ibrahim will not like this,’ was his immediate response. He was referring to the combination of DMK and fan club imagery which Ibrahim, the leader of Villupuram district, would not like. Both Ibrahim and Saktivel were also active in politics – the latter was Panchayat president at the time – but they never made these two coalesce in a problematic fashion, for example in the images that they produced. This person had. So even though the banners were separate, the division between own political acts and fan dedication was not clear enough.

182 

Intimate Visualities and the Politics of Fandom in India

Politics was an apparent part of being a fan club member, but using Rajinikanth for your own benefit was not accepted. In conversations I had with fan club members, images often spontaneously became a topic of our conversation. In these conversations, often, someone’s taste for aesthetics was praised yet at the same time, this was always linked to his seriousness as a fan. Someone who made good images was also seen as a genuine fan. But when someone went too far in what he displayed as images it was cited as proof he was using Rajinikanth’s name for his own benefit or was not a ‘real’ fan. They commented upon others and how they had or hadn’t used Rajinikanth or their own image appropriately. See for example the following message that was placed on the discussion board of the rajinifans.com website: Hi ss [Superstar] fans, iam from thiruvannamalai ,i did a special archana for superstar on its birthday on arunnachala temple here but my blood are boiling due to ss [superstar] thiruvannamalai fans club activities ,they did not did anyting on our ss birthday they simply kept banners ,the banners also have lots of fans photos only in big size they have minimized our ss images they kept banner as 56 th birthday in most of the places ,all the politicians are here using our superstar songs for the birthday ads ,etc.etc but nobody is asking about this,last leader of thiruvannamalai fans club(name-arulkanth ) used our ss name and songs and entered to politics ,somebody take this matter to satyanarayana [All India Rajinikanth Fan Club leader] immediatly!! !73 (Message written by KING, rajinifans.com YahooGroup. Thursday, 14 December 2006)

The author of this message complained about the self-centred banners on which photos of fans were larger than the ones of Rajinikanth. Moreover, he complained about fans using Rajinikanth’s image for their own political career. According to KING, politicians use songs from Rajinikanth’s films for their birthday and the leader of the fan club in Thiruvannamalai used Rajinikanth to enter politics. In other words, his comment is about the use of Rajinikanth’s image or excuse of a birthday for self-promotion. There was a very narrow line that separated proving fandom and a fan club’s strength from using the fan club for political ends. It is in images and in assessing images that this line became visible and articulated. It showed what is appropriate and how the placing of images is part of social importance 73 Because of the many mistakes made in this message I have chosen to keep to the writer’s own original spelling without indicating errors.

Public intimacies and collec tive imaginaries

183

within social relations and conversely, how inappropriately placed images could have significant after-effects (Edwards 2012, 226). The images, notwithstanding the efforts put into them, lasted in their capacity as billboards for only one to a few days. Murals, as we have seen with the mural made by Selvam, last much longer. Due to city regulations especially, non-political billboards74 needed approval and could not be displayed for long. Local municipalities demanded that everyone who places a banner in public should request official permission. Once this permission had been granted, the owner of the banner had to pay rent, a small amount in comparison to the cost of making the banner, for the days the banner was displayed. But these rules were not strictly complied with. Tharagai Raja explained to me that they paid for a few days but left the billboards there for a few days longer since no one would notice that or complain anyway. The short life on the street meant that the afterlife of the images was much longer than the purpose they were initially made for. After their display, the billboards were kept by fans for future occasions for which they were slightly adapted, or they were recycled and used for covering roofs, street vendor’s ware, trucks, etc.75 This latter use was not seen as disrespectful towards the star. In addition, all events and particularly the banners made for these events were filmed and photographed extensively, zooming in on the billboards of the fans who organized the event. Selvam, whom I introduced earlier, kept records of all the images he made in the name of Rajinikanth. He kept them in photo albums and plastic bags that contained his personal archive of his activities. Occasionally, for important occasions he had been organizing, such as his own wedding or his son’s first birthday, he sent the images of these events, with specific focus on the banners, to Rajinikanth with the hope that Rajinikanth would recognize and respond to his hard work. But he never did. The imagery that fans produced became proof of their dedication, and thus documentation of that imagery was sent to the fan club’s head office in Chennai. This was important in relation to other fans but also for oneself in relation to the star. Therefore, it is not just the number of images of a star that was important but each fan club’s image of the star. Even though fans realized that their star would most likely not see their individual banner, 74 It is a general complaint that it is very hard to get permission to put up images of stars, and also images made by supporters of political parties not in power. 75 There are market locations where used flex-banner materials can be bought. Thanks to Jill Reese for alerting me to this.

184 

Intimate Visualities and the Politics of Fandom in India

the idea of the sheer quantity of billboards and the idea of seeing yourself with your star on a banner, made the production of it important. This kind of imagery was proof within the fan club of dedication, which helps to select new fan club leaders, but was also a way of establishing yourself locally within your fan club and in sociopolitical networks. This was not only advantageous for a fan’s career within the fan club; it was even expected from a fan if he considered himself loyal to Rajinikanth.

Visual presencing In this chapter I have explored the ways in which media afforded certain possibilities and desires but also how such desires are part of a certain time in the life of a fan and time in the history of media options. The transformations in media brought along a new form of display that heightened the affects displayed on the image and via the image. This in turn resulted in new forms of visibility, recognition, and attempts to nurture identities. The intensities of seeing an image of the star, however, changed in two directions with the arrival of digitally designed images. On the one hand, this was seen as a loss, as photographic images are seen as less intense and as ‘flatter’ in their outlook, and as a result in what they do to us. On the other hand, however, the fact that the images were digitally designed brought along new possibilities of what the image and fan could do. The fan is no longer reliant on an artist, and he can take an active role in placing and manipulating images on banners. Digital design created a space where fans had more authority in choosing the images they desired and on top of that, they could even insert themselves. The latter was seen as the most beneficial quality of flex banners as it offered the opportunity to show yourself in proximity to your star. It allowed fans to actively imagine a different relationship to their star, to other fans as well as to the political persons they include in their fan club network. The spatio-temporal framework of images, as ephemeral objects yet circulating in the materialized memory of photo albums and DVDs, brings together the present affect and future reward. But what does it mean to be loyal and show dedication? And what does it mean to show this dedication in public? In recent years, vinyl billboards have become the standard; making painted ones is now a way to certainly stand out. Designers constantly try to find new ways to make their images stand out. They have, for instance, started to use neon colours, coloured strokes that suggest a painted image, or combinations of painted parts and vinyl. For public images to be both

Public intimacies and collec tive imaginaries

185

affective and effective, renewing and ephemerality seems to be imperative. This renewal in materiality and visual regime does not merely alert potential audiences, it is part of the public intimacy that brings new attention to the affective modes of attention that are articulated between fan and star. Rajini is present as the object which the fan desires to be near (see also Nakassis 2017b, 218). In this chapter I proposed that the public images displayed by fans mediated the desires that were articulated in Chapter 3. The images put up for fan club events do not reflect fan activity, they are actually central to these events and therefore crucial in forming the social constellations in which fans are engaged (Morgan 1998, 7). Their iconic and standardized outlook makes them not only easily recognizable but also easily transferrable to other spheres. Commercial, iconic images are made personal by framing them, transforming them, and engaging with them. The images ‘embody intentionalities’ (Hoskins 2006, 75) of their producers and users. Images express desires but they also actively give rise to desires; their technologies and materiality enhance their value and power. They create a ‘community of sentiment’, ‘a group that begins to imagine and feel things together’ (Appadurai 1996, 8) and become active agents in what they consume and desire. Images in this way are not merely a reflection of the desires, they become the desires, materialized and aesthetically produced. The difference between the two chapters and kinds of images discussed is not necessarily a difference between the relative privacy of family life and the publicness of public spaces. To the contrary, as I have shown in Chapter 2, the gaze of the fan club and notions of what intimacy between fan and star is supposed to look like is subject to self-control. Yet, the limited visibility to others gave more leeway to doctor images in the home. Moreover, for example, photo albums often circulate during visits at someone’s home and wedding invitations are certainly meant to circulate. Images in public, on the other hand, while indeed more visible, are in a sense proclamations of feelings for a star, feelings that are otherwise not able to be expressed (Taylor 2003). In addition, such images can only be effective because they mediate this affective relationship in public. This vision goes beyond simply looking and being looked at and includes the wider sensorium of bodily senses. In this case, however, the importance of the image and what it represents lays specifically in the production of the image, and the sense the fan has that his image is seen by others. The affective relationship that is established is therefore not a straightforward darshanic gaze that intimates image and beholder, star and fan, but a relationship between fan and image that needs a third person to confirm this relationship (Munn 1986; Goffman 1981). Fandom in this way

186 

Intimate Visualities and the Politics of Fandom in India

is explicitly public. One cannot be a fan without showing this publicly and being acknowledged as a fan. Images help to solidify this relationship and the acknowledgement of it by (imagined) others. The images revolve around Rajinikanth, they presence him, yet the images have also become about signposting other desires and affiliations. Through images, one cannot only show Rajinikanth what one’s dedication is; through images Rajinikanth is seeing and being seen. Nakassis has described how filmic images are not simply representations of fictive characters or even of the absent star-actor. Rather, ‘[t]here is an ontological identity between screen image and its object (Rajinikanth, the Superstar). Every avatarcharacter “played” by Rajinikanth is Rajinikanth, performatively presenced in the moment of the image’s apperception’ (Nakassis 2018, 291). Both actor and screen image, both hero and (potential political) leader are mutually present. Similarly, we can argue that there is an ontological identity between banner image and Rajini, and thus also including the fan as he is standing next to Rajini in the banner. It follows that this fan too is somehow really next to Rajini in a similar vein as the doctored photos that were created for family albums and domestic display. In the density of presence, the value of Rajinikanth and of fans is expanded. This mutual presence, where both images – banner and off-banner – mutually reinforce each other, also shed light on how we can interpret the dedication of fans towards their star and his fan club and the borders of what is considered legitimate fandom and what is self-interest. The issue here is that politicking in the name of Rajinikanth and the fan club is politicking with someone else’s name and image, a someone else who had not (at the time) entered politics (and might never have done so). Consequently, politicking was considered a political act that was precipitating something contradictory to what Rajinikanth and the fan club were supposed to be engaged in the future – and yet was not up till now engaged in. So, where politicking in itself was not problematic, the borrowing of the figure was. Through images fans do not merely intimate a relationship with Rajinikanth or presence him, they also build up his image as star and leader. And the affective affordances of flex-banner images – that is their affective quality that drives their use as mediating a relationship with Rajini – seemed to bring about the image production of the self as well. This brought the images made by fans, as politically motivated or not, aesthetically closer to the visual political landscape of Tamil Nadu in which political supporters claim public spaces with a specific aesthetics of patronage and honouring. The images in this way create distribution of the sensible, as Rancière defined it: the

Public intimacies and collec tive imaginaries

187

self-evident facts of sense perception that simultaneously discloses the existence of something in common and the delimitations that define the respective parts and positions within it. A distribution of the sensible therefore establishes at one and the same time something common that is shared and exclusive parts. This apportionment of parts and positions is based on a distribution of spaces, times, and forms of activity that determines the very manner in which something in common lends itself to participation and in what way various individuals have a part in this distribution. (2006, 12)

The distribution of the sensible creates boundaries between who has access to what is visible and invisible, sayable and unsayable, audible and inaudible. For fan clubs and their use of images, this distribution of the sensible can be understood in a double fashion. Images within the fan club highlight the boundaries of what is desirable and what not, who has access and who not. They restrict access due to explicit and implicit rules but also create participation within a community of fans. Such limitations define who engages with images, in what ways, and who for what audiences. At the same time, images also give leeway, permitting social relationships among fans (not to mention between fans and stars or famous politicians) that are not possible within the social hierarchy. Abundance and size of images engender status, while status is also related to one’s age and position within the fan club. Therefore, the flexibility of images is also restricted by what one has seen before and what is not objectable within the fan club hierarchy. It prolongs the distribution of the sensible even though they are restrained by it. This brings us back to politicking, not as a mere political act per se but as a form of agency that brings connections with social institutions that are seen as enhanced with fan club affiliations and visibility. The ways in which new media, such as those discussed in this chapter, settle at certain moments and at certain places has to be situated, following Kajri Jain, within the ‘sensory/aesthetic, social, and political ecologies in which they emerge and are mobilized’ (K. Jain 2016, 14). The newness of the banners brought along a new aesthetic and image politics that goes beyond fan clubs and points to the temporariness of and generational practices of fandom and politicking. The intersubjective space-time in which the transformations in media took place, was marked by transformations of politics, the film industry, and in expectations about stars and fans. In Chapter 5, I turn to some of these sociopolitical and material-aesthetic changes that help us situate the image politicking of fans in a larger media landscape.

5

Chennai beautiful Shifting urban landscapes and the politics of spectacle

In 2009, in the wake of extensive criticism about the defacing of public and private walls mostly by political parties but also other groups and individuals, the Chennai city administration attempted to intervene in the elaborate visual encroachment on its streets and initiated campaigns to regulate the ‘pollution’ caused by unauthorized forms of pictorial displays within the city. From mid-2009 onwards, the city decided to enforce a ban on posters, murals, and hoardings on two of the main roads running through the city. Billboards were pulled down, walls cleaned of posters and whitewashed, covering up the remains of the once-ubiquitous murals. To beautify these roads, artists were commissioned to cover the walls with images of Tamil cultural heritage and natural scenery. Chennai’s mayor, M. Subramanian, declared that ‘images of various cultural symbols would be painted on compound walls of government property on the two roads. […] This is intended to keep those who paste posters away and improve aesthetics. Posters are an eyesore’ (The Hindu, Chennai edition, 29 May 2009). Anna Salai and another arterial road in the city were chosen to launch pilot projects for a larger beautification initiative. The success of the pilot led to the project being extended to the entire Chennai Corporation76 limits a year later. Subsequently, more than 3000 public walls were prohibited from being used for posters and the like.77 Moreover, Chennai was being more and more ‘embellished’ with beautification murals: main roads, junctions, and flyovers were being decorated with images of cultural and natural settings, providing parts of the city with a new look. The cities of Tamil Nadu are the location of a vibrant street culture of publicity of which fan imagery only makes up a part. Commercial ads promoting consumer products, political parties, and films prevailed and tower above the main thoroughfares in major cities. What stands out is the scale and ubiquity of political hoardings, posters, and murals commissioned by political parties and their supporters. To give but one example: from the window of a bus travelling along a main road in Chennai or Puducherry, a commuter would encounter, in the course of a kilometre, around ten 76 The civic body that governs the city. Its responsibilities include the infrastructure and planning of the city. 77 Public walls are compound walls of government property.

190 

Intimate Visualities and the Politics of Fandom in India

posters promoting upcoming films; various billboards advertising restaurants or jewellery or sari stores; perhaps three to five political murals and sprinkled amid these, three dozen smaller political posters in various stages of disintegration. During fan events one could see fan posters and one or two billboards as well. Common for most passers-by, a nuisance and embarrassment for some, and part and parcel of their party work for party workers, continuous lines of political imagery marked the landscape of urban and rural Tamil Nadu. Near main roads and junctions, party meetings and party leaders’ birthdays were publicized and celebrated by manifold hoardings covering the adjacent buildings, shops, and traffic signs, each one bigger than the next. Their overwhelming physical presence made them difficult to ignore; their size and quantity make them ‘monumental and assertive’ (Spyer 2008b, 11). As can be understood from the mayor’s words, the reason given by the city authorities for having the beautification murals painted was the rising agitation regarding an alleged absence of what was deemed to be aesthetic due to the excessive display of banners and other political, film, and commercial imagery. The project started in Chennai and later I noted how similar initiatives were taken in Coimbatore or Madurai. It was a combination of the quantity, density, and size of imagery, mostly addressing political and film images. The once-ubiquitous images of political supporters, fans, and others were removed from several sites and instead walls were beautified by means of images showing a neo-classicist, touristic version of cultural heritage and natural scenes in what I suggest the local government’s attempt of a ‘world-class’ makeover of Chennai. However, removing images from public spaces was not a novel move, they had been controlled before as political turf rivalry and because of ‘obscene’ film scenes. These new images did not last long. What was happening here, and how do we connect this city makeover to the fan practices I have been discussing up to now? In previous chapters, I have shown how fans deploy images that evoke ways of presencing their star and thereby build up recognition among fan club members and political persons. I have also shown how such image practices and fan practices are not static but subject to change. Generations of fans have different desires, and images have changed in object and content. Within this field of change, the figure of the fan has played a double role: as a discursive figure that is disdained and celebrated. The fan, I have shown, is not necessarily the figure who reinforces the grand narratives of cine-politics in Tamil Nadu. Fans may desire it, but fandom seems to be more about the everyday politicking acts that gives meaning to fandom. In this way, change is also

Chennai beautiful

191

part of this chapter as it brings us back to the image politics of Tamil Nadu and how the figure of the fan might be of less importance in the politics of adulation than was previously presumed. This chapter shows how another kind of politics, a counter-politics, of the image, has taken a new form. It situates the fan images back into a larger politics of display. Fan imagery relates to political images through their similar politicking practices via the image and their material and aesthetic forms. Moreover, they both have roots in the Dravidian politics of Tamil Nadu and its image politics (see the Introduction). Attempts to remove or comment on such images therefore implicitly also comment on the form of (image) politics taken in Tamil Nadu. Image politics and policies have consequences for fans and lower-level party workers alike. In this chapter I use the beautification project as a moment of change in this image regime, a change that sequels even more crucial recent developments in the political landscape of Tamil Nadu. The shift in image usage has consequences for both political parties and their constituents and fans and their star (discussed in Epilogue). So where this chapter necessarily focuses more explicitly on the political image, it connects fan images in terms of the aesthetics, agency, and the figures of the ‘common man’ that are embedded in the discussion around images. In this chapter I will bring in specific responses to the visual culture of the street and how this relates to the political landscape of Tamil Nadu as well as the public spheres forming around images. I draw on the beautification initiative in Chennai as an exemplification of the ways in which images have been subject to administrative and political restrictions, possibilities, and imaginations. Following William Mazzarella on censorship, the restrictions on public images also indicate their affective potential and therefore the ‘necessity’ of control (2013, 78). These images, as well as the ways in which they arrive and disappear – and their distributors seeking bypasses to show them – reveal continual as well as new imaginations of how visual street culture could be put into play. In this chapter I show how the new beautification murals can be linked to three interrelated processes. First, the murals were aimed at rebuilding present-day Chennai and its image for an aspired future. At the same time, they embodied nostalgia rooted in the image of a collective history and identity. Second, the use of such murals is a manner to position Chennai as a ‘world-class’ city by both city government officials hoping to attract capital investors and private citizens belonging to an increasingly affluent neoliberal middle-class public who eschew the older urban aesthetic. And third, following Abidin Kusno (2010), I propose that the beautif ication images seemed to constitute new social and political identities as well

192 

Intimate Visualities and the Politics of Fandom in India

as reinforce old political ideologies. While political parties were, and in many places still are, omnipresent in Tamil Nadu’s public spaces, it seems these parties were expanding their attention to include new publics and new visions of the city, thereby symbolizing a broader ground of political practice. I see the changes as partly a move towards a neoliberal aesthetic (Searle 2016; Ghertner 2015) as well as a newer form of Dravidian political visual performance.78 The murals were part of this shift, as I will show. The beautification murals, with their focus on Tamil or Dravidian history, their mural form and the choice of the artistic form and conventions of a painted mural seemed to reinforce the parties’ focus on ideological Dravidian origins and identity, only now more focused on a generic ‘Tamilness’. As I will show, many of the image practices as enforced by the state are not univocal and demonstrate, following Gupta (2012), that state action is not homogenous and is instead often contradictory. The image practices are not dictated by rationality and do ‘not operate in a realm separate from the social worlds state actors might seek to transform’ (Anjaria and Rao 2014, 410). However, instead of seeing this shift as a neoliberal ‘world-class’ imaginary pushing out the more personalized, grassroots use of images by urban subalterns, I suggest we must think in terms of a range of articulations that produce a varied display of visual strategies. The relation between political imagery, fan images, restrictions, and ideological visions expressed on and envisaged in public spaces also make us return to the cine-political history of Tamil Nadu where images and spectacle have been central to political configurations. The Chennai beautification therefore fits into a longer history of image limitations and possibilities, of image politics, and at the same time it attends to a new era in political display. Image practices are part of the politics of display, not as a blurring of on- and offscreen personalities but as an everyday exhibitionary practice that is one of an array of strategies for the political parties and their workers. Instead of reflecting a politics of adulation, these images seem to be part of a counter-politics that presences a past that never was79 with specific contemporary goals. The murals, I suggest, turned the city into a picture postcard spectacle of aspirations, nostalgia, beauty, tradition, and moral pedagogy. Although the practice of painting murals changed from film stars and politicians to cultural and 78 I am referring here to the Introduction in which I describe the forms of visual politics performed by the main parties, the DMK and AIDMK, since their inception. (For an elaborate discussion on the Dravidian aesthetic, see Bate 2009). 79 I’m calling to mind David Lowenthal’s work The Past is a Foreign Country (Lowenthal 2015).

Chennai beautiful

193

natural landmarks in certain urban areas, its canvas remained the same. And in the meantime, in urban spaces that were less at the forefront of visibility, other visual strategies still abounded. It is this shift of practices that I explore in this chapter, as it should help us understand how fans are part of such attempts to organize public visual culture.

Aspirations for the future, nostalgia for the past While the rhetoric about image restrictions emphasized political, moral, and aesthetic justifications, the alternative images that replaced the older visual array of politicians, film stars, and fans carried their own meanings. Conceptually, there are therefore two issues at hand: there is the decision to ban certain images and there is the decision to replace them with certain other kinds of images. The bans were not new (I say more about this below) but the alternative was. They seem to be part of a world-class aesthetic in the making that the city of Chennai was pursuing alongside a larger gentrification project.80 Such world-class aspirations started with the former Mayor, M.K. Stalin, son of the DKM leader Karunanidhi, initiating the Singara [beautiful] Chennai plan, in which parts of the city were to be beautified and made attractive to economic investors. Chennai realized its economic and global aspirations with conspicuous initiatives that selectively refurbish the city: IT corridors, Special Economic Zones (SEZs), and beautification schemes involving the renovation and planning of roads and parks, the erection of large statues, and, as I show here, the embellishment of public walls. Whereas the corporate world provides the world-class buildings or gated communities within the city, the municipality does little to provide basic amenities. Similar to fans who feel that they build up an image and fame through their publicly displayed images, it seems that statues and murals evoke more appeal to politicians wanting to impress their constituents than for example providing public garbage cans or fixing potholes. ‘World class’ can be understood as a global imaginary expressed, for instance, in architecture and the built environment, in spectacular and exclusive public spaces such as shopping malls, as well as in the aspirations towards cosmopolitan lifestyles or globalized consumption (see Brosius 2010). The aspiration to become a world-class city is informed by an envisioning of the future and other city models that appeal to the 80 Chennai was not the only Indian city searching for world-class stature. Other big cities such as Bangalore, Mumbai, and Delhi actively tried to position themselves on the world map.

194 

Intimate Visualities and the Politics of Fandom in India

imagination. In India, cities such as Shanghai, Dubai, and particularly Singapore feed the imagination of what this ideal city looks like (Beelen, Gerritsen, and Srivathsan 2010; see also Brosius 2010).81 Politicians realize that the image of a place is important in attracting economic capital investors – and particularly international ones (Arabindoo 2007, 2). Partha Chatterjee and others have already observed the tendency over the last decades to clean up and gentrify Indian cities and reclaim their spaces for what Chatterjee suggestively describes as ‘proper citizens’ (2004, 131-132). Foucault has mapped out how in the emergence of Europe, legitimacy has been based on the claim to provide well-being for the population using simplified models of the world (Burchell and Foucault 1991, 100; Chatterjee 1998; Scott 1998). This discourse on developing the city for the well-being of the population is linked to the idea of rationalizing city space with proper infrastructure and a healthy environment (Nigam 2001, 42). In Chennai, this has led to the new middle classes becoming more visible in the urban space, as well as attempts to clean up selected parts of the city by razing slum areas or removing street vendors and relocating them to less prominent areas. This does not intimate that these ‘others’ of world-class city making disappeared but that the city government attempted to brush up its image on a spatial level. The gentrification of the city is part of new ‘spatial strategies’ in the urban environment that provided a different set of ‘spatial strategies’ that created and reinforced new types of social distinctions rather than merely echoing older caste-based settlement patterns (Deshpande 1998). Ghertner has argued that ‘the world-class aesthetic operates as a regime for partitioning visual attributes of space on the basis of both locally rooted quality of life concerns as well as globally circulating and ever-shifting images of world-class spaces’ (2015, 9). He sees the world-class aesthetic not as the copying of another city but as the aspirational target toward which world-class city making is oriented. It operates as a diffuse signifier, training a particular way of seeing and putting in place an aesthetically grounded form of power/knowledge – the world-class aesthetic – that inspires among its potential subjects a will to participate in its discourse and to make its visual criteria their own. (ibid.) 81 In Tamil Nadu, Singapore is often evoked as a model of a clean, efficient, and attractive city. The long relationship with the Tamil diaspora in Singapore has played an important role in conveying the image of Singapore as a city of progress as well as in reinforcing cultural and historical links between Tamil Nadu and Singapore (Beelen, Gerritsen, and Srivathsan 2010).

Chennai beautiful

195

World-class city making seems to have become the incentive for many beautification and urban renewal projects, as many of those involved in such projects are motivated by such a ‘vague sense of an improved, more beautiful future’ (ibid). This is not to suggest that this is a conscious and clearly articulated motivation on the part of city planners, government officials, and private citizens. However, given the deployment of history in these murals, at the same time it both looks back to an imaginary past and forward to an imaginary future, perhaps implicitly even commenting on the future of that world-class city. The vague sense of something better, something more beautiful, can be seen in the beautification murals; however, the beauty here actually refers to an imagined momentous history. As the city aspired to become world-class through urban renewal and innovative architecture, the beautification murals mostly referred to the ‘traditional’ past. About one out of twenty murals were contemporary scenes. I suggest that the murals stood as testament to an allegedly collective identity and memory (Rowlands and Tilley 2006) through which a uniform, idealized, and consumable history and future could be (re)installed or (re)created. As hyperreal objects (Eco 1990; Baudrillard 1994), the murals seemed to cater for the desires of the new, affluent middle classes who want to consume ‘tradition’ in a simplified ‘postcard’ history, a process which is embedded in neoliberal discourses and nostalgic references and which I therefore refer to, following Hancock (2008) and Ivy (1988), as neoliberal nostalgia or neo-nostalgia.82 As consumable historic narratives they become more potent than that to which they refer. Moreover, this history, assembled from fragments of cultural values and moralities, is deemed lost by the city authorities in urban lifestyles, and thus in need of being relearned. The aspiration to become a world-class city and to attract a middleclass citizenry is oriented towards a prosperous future and informed by a reproduction and evocation of the past through the revival of postcard images of regionally distinctive (religious) architecture and of ‘traditional’ practices (Brosius 2010; Hancock 2008). As Christiane Brosius points out, the heterogeneous group of the middle class negotiates concepts such as national identity and ‘worldliness’, or tradition and modernity (Brosius 2010, 12) in which heritage and nostalgia can be utilized as markers of ‘having tradition’. Brosius shows how being world-class is a ‘rooted’ cosmopolitanism, that is, rooted in a specific locality, and connected to a morality of a national (Hindu) past, evoking heritage as well as implicit moral instruction. 82 See also David Lowenthal 2015.

196 

Intimate Visualities and the Politics of Fandom in India

In Tamil Nadu, the evocation of the past is more specifically directed at the politics of the Dravidian or Tamil linguistic heritage of the region. Although today Dravidianism has become a generic sign of ‘Tamilness’, in the past it was much more closely tied to regionalist and linguistic projects in which Tamil Nadu distinguished itself from the north of India in religious, cultural, and linguistic traditions (Ramaswamy 1998). Political parties, particularly the DMK in its heyday in the 1950s and 1960s, gained political capital by promoting themselves as the guardians of the Tamil language and the Tamil cause (Ramaswamy 1998, 73). The placement of ephemeral yet spectacular cutouts of cinematic and political figures in the same 1960s and more permanent monuments of historic figures from the 1960s to the 1990s has played an important role in the construction of Chennai as a Tamil city as well as in establishing the political face and identity of these parties.83 Then and now, the politicization and reproduction of monuments or, as discussed here, beautification murals, actually reinforce the state’s connection to what it wants to represent and hence strengthen its power (Anderson 1991, 182-185; Kusno 2010). Just as with monuments, the beautif ication murals are a type of symbolic speech (Anderson 1978) in which the authorities convey an allegedly common past and future (in which certain social groups are erased). Earlier this was done through the symbolic language of films and the spectacular as well as through an emphasis on a historical cultural past through a literary emphasis on Tamil in political speech (Bate 2009). What is new here is the narrative that is visualized. In Chapter 4, I argued that the desire for being seen might have been there and new media speaks to such a desire (and simultaneously also creates something new). With the beautification murals, the media – its canvas – might not be new, but the form that this media takes allows for new possibilities, for new desires of nostalgia, or neo-nostalgia. What is new here is also the way in which this narrative has been visualized on walls, without an obvious reference to political parties. However, while this may seem like a city initiative without a clear reference to political colour, as we will see later, the introduction and removal of images of politicians by party workers (or fan clubs as described in Chapter 4) is part of a symbolic politics of presence and a Dravidian nationalism that museumizes its past. Jayalalitha and her party were well known for putting her image on almost every freebie (stoves, mixers, fans) and state- and city-wide introduced schemes (such as the ammaa canteens, 83 See Hancock 2008; Jacob 2009; M.S.S. Pandian 2005b; Srivathsan 2000 for detailed accounts of the use of cutouts, statues, and architecture by political parties.

Chennai beautiful

197

ammaa water). Public monuments were designed with close reference to the party symbol (two leaves) and posters, flags, and other imagery always contained her image.84 It would be almost impossible to walk down a block without encountering her image or a reference to the AIADMK party somewhere. DMK images and that of its leader Karunanidhi were also omnipresent but surely less than for Jayalalitha. The same accounts for fan images. While these can be as present as political images, they are more subject to their ephemerality, centring more than political images around events. Once political parties changed office again after elections the visual presence of the previous party was removed with great aplomb. I am thinking here specifically about the current Tamil Nadu Government Multi-SuperSpecialty Hospital, which was the former-but-never-in-use Tamil Nadu Legislative Assembly and secretariat complex. Before it was inaugurated officially during DMK rule, the AIADMK immediately changed it into a hospital once in power. Below I will say more about the political performance around this building.

Reflecting the essence of Tamil culture? The renowned banner artist J.P. Krishna was the first to be commissioned by the Chennai Corporation to paint several walls as part of the beautification initiative. The images that he painted on Anna Salai all referred to Tamil culture and heritage, village life, and the natural beauty of the state. The Corporation officials responsible for the project selected these images to use for the murals and carefully monitored the painting process. For the first few stretches of wall, they authorized the use of a book containing paintings by Tamil artists that depict scenes of Tamil heritage and nature. Initially the Corporation planned to commission students from the Government College of Arts and Crafts; they were the ones who actually suggested this plan to the government.85 They suggested heritage images with which the city could be beautified and stripped of its ubiquitous political murals and posters. However, instead of commissioning College staff or students, the city ended up commissioning banner artists to paint the scenes. 84 Recently I came across a swing in a municipal cooperation park in Chennai in the form of the AIADMK’s two-leaf symbol. 85 My thanks to K. Gandhirajan, then a teacher at the Government College of Arts and Crafts, who alerted me to this.

198 

Intimate Visualities and the Politics of Fandom in India

Figure 23 Beautification mural made by artist J.P. Krishna depicting two foreign tourists looking at the Mamallapuram heritage site; Chennai 2010

Photograph by McKay Savage

Most of the murals follow the realistic style of painting initiated by Raja Ravi Varma in the late nineteenth century, and later adapted, popularized, and commercialized in calendar art and cinematic and political banners. Among other subjects, the first images that were painted include scenes of village life, the UNESCO heritage site of Mamallapuram (Figure 23), the statue of the classical Tamil poet and saint Thiruvalluvar at India’s southernmost tip, Kanyakumari, several temples and temple sculptures, and performers of Carnatic music (Figure 24). Another stretch of paintings on one of the large intersections in the southern part of the city depicts the mythological story of Kannagi, the heroic woman character of the Tamil epic Silapathikaram. Figure 25 shows an artist working on a beautification mural using a page copied from the Amar Chitra Katha cartoon with a picture of Kannagi that he used as a model to paint one of the scenes. The story of Kannagi evokes a Tamil or Dravidian past rather than a Sanskrit one, clearly distinguishing Tamil Nadu from the Sanskrit-dominated North and fitting in with the Dravidian narrative. The artist commissioned to paint the story used the version that appeared in the popular Amar Chitra

Chennai beautiful

199

Figure 24 Beautification mural made by artist J.P. Krishna depicting a musician; Chennai 2009

Photograph by McKay Savage

Katha comics as his model.86 He made slight changes to the images of the cartoon (leaving out speech bubbles), and the last image of this series is a copy of the Kannagi statue on Marina Beach.87 Within the context of beautification, these former banner artists were being commissioned to replace their own work on city walls. This reveals how the format remained the same but the relationship between patrons and artists had changed. Instead of the lower-ranking party members communicating their linkage to their (party) leaders, now the state came to use walls to express their local yet world-class imaginations. The state took over the patronage of wall paintings, something they openly denounced 86 Amar Chitra Katha (‘immortal illustrated story’) comics have, since the 1980s, become very popular in India and with Indian migrants abroad. The stories often serve an educational purpose as they are about Indian history, religion, and mythology. See Karline McLain’s work on the Amar Chitra Katha comics (McLain 2009). 87 Ironically, the statue depicts a fiery Kannagi placing the city (of Madurai, in the story) under a curse and then destroying it. The statue on Marina beach was the source of various rumours, controversies, and agitation as it was suddenly removed for a while (M.S.S. Pandian 2005b).

200 

Intimate Visualities and the Politics of Fandom in India

Figure 25 Artist uses a copied page of the famous Amar Chitra Katha comics as a model to paint the story of Kannagi; Chennai 2010

Chennai beautiful

201

when patronized by lower-ranking party members, not only of the rival party but even of the party in office itself. Whereas fan clubs were not necessarily affected by the beautification murals on the main thoroughfares, as these were not locations where they would usually put up their images, indirectly it did affect the images politics of party workers and fans alike. On other roads, walls did become unavailable and beautification of main roads went together with both regular vinyl banner bans and citizens being more active in speaking out against the annoyance of this visual pollution. The artists received a relatively good salary for the beautification murals (around Rs 35 per square foot), a sum that is much higher than what they were receiving (around Rs 10 per square foot) for political murals over the past few years.88 Certainly, the murals could not replace their usual work, as the infrequency of painting (the murals were commissioned only once and later removed by the next party in power) and the relatively small number of artists that were selected limited the possibilities for steady income. The artists I spoke to appreciated the work, not only because of the money they were earning with the murals but also because of the positive reception they got for their work, which also put them in contact with future patrons. Passers-by often stopped at the place where they were working and praised them for their efforts. This was a new experience for the artists, several told me. Even though artists relied on the public visibility of murals to gain new customers, they were previously only approached by fan clubs, political supporters, and some other customers. But now ordinary people who liked the images approached them and thought about using such paintings to beautify their own homes as well. Moreover, several artists indicated that they enjoyed painting a new kind of imagery instead of endlessly reproducing the faces of the same politicians. I will come back to this point below. According to the Corporation officials I interviewed89 the murals had two main objectives. First, as I already noted above, the murals were intended to deter people from using these walls for political or commercial purposes; banners or billboards with this function were considered unsightly, whereas walls should be pleasant to look at. The second argument put forward by the Corporation was one of cultural promotion and education. The beautification 88 With the advent of vinyl banners and digital printing, this amount has decreased over the years. When the painted banner business was still in its heyday, an artist could earn around Rs 125 per square foot. 89 Personal conversations with several Corporation officials that are responsible for the selection or supervision of the new murals, i.e. the PRO, the deputy Commissioner, the Superintending Engineer (Bridges), and the chief engineer of Corporation zone 10. Chennai, 2010.

202 

Intimate Visualities and the Politics of Fandom in India

murals aimed to show the rich cultural tradition of the state in the form of consumable heritage sites and cultural traditions. The natural scenes depicted famous ecological sites within Tamil Nadu, such as the Nilgiris, but also more generic images of flowers and animals that have no explicit referentiality to the state. What is interesting is that despite Tamil Nadu’s well-deserved fame as a state filled with historic Hindu temples, the murals emphasized cultural and village scenes (art, music, dance) over religious sites or ritual interactions. Many sites or practices shown in the murals have some association with religion or ritual, but in the representations on the walls seem removed from this embeddedness. As postcard images, temples merely became heritage sites; and Carnatic musicians were shown performing with their shoes half on.90 There is a history of self-referentiality for murals on temple walls in Tamil Nadu, and there is a genre of calendar art and temple displays (now often also on vinyl-banner material) that displays a ‘postcard view’ of the temple. But in these cases, the image of the deity is almost always superimposed on or floating near the exterior scene of the temple; and worshippers are often included as well. Thus, the fact that the Shore Temple (a Shiva Temple) mural includes two foreign tourists brings another kind of self-referentiality with it. In the image displaying the rice cultivation (Figure 26) the Ayyanar shrine (a typical village shrine found everywhere in Tamil Nadu) is included next to the rice field, hence decoupling the mural from traditional religious iconography. The shrine is presented as part of the scenery and not as a temple artist would have depicted it, at the centre of the frame. A musician wearing shoes would normally not be appropriate because gods do not wear shoes and because Carnatic music itself is considered as having divine origins. It is usually the goddess Saraswati who is depicted with the musical instrument, the veena, just as in this picture. The absence of a shrine to Saraswati (much less Saraswati herself playing), means that rather than performing for the goddess, the musician is performing as an apparent act of (middle-class) leisure, alerting us again to the gentrification of heritage. Moreover, in a ‘traditional’ conception of performance the stage is like a temple for the musician, and thus to wear shoes is to show disrespect to the stage. Instead of the importance of the tradition as lived, the images emphasized the (touristic) importance of the state’s heritage in a universal language of heritage. Just as with museums, heightening and isolating images turns cultural materials into (art) objects (Alpers 1991). Now 90 My thanks to Sumathi Ramaswamy for alerting me to the odd fact of the shoes on this mural.

Chennai beautiful

203

Figure 26 Beautification mural made by artist J.P. Krishna depicting a rural scene of the harvesting and transplanting of rice, along with an Ayyanar shrine; Chennai 2009

Photograph by McKay Savage

the city itself had become a tourist brochure or a selection of postcards, a spectacle from which tradition can be selectively picked and consumed. The incorporation of the touristic present in some images reinforced the relevance of the monuments as heritage sites. Besides turning Tamil Nadu into a site of spectacle and cultural promotion, the Corporation officer I spoke to indicated that cultural traditions should also be kept alive within the city. The murals should teach the young about the state’s culture and historic past, something people supposedly forget when growing up in the city. Since the envisioning of the village as the repository of Indian culture by orientalist scholars and figures such as Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, it has become a privileged trope in the imagining of the ‘original’ and ‘real’ India. Following on from this vision, cities were deemed to be degraded places that seem to have lost the wisdom, morality, and harmonious lifestyle of the countryside. This rural lifestyle was believed to have disappeared with the mass movement to the city and should be passed on again to individualistic and materialistic city dwellers. Certain beliefs about the new middle classes were reflected in

204 

Intimate Visualities and the Politics of Fandom in India

stereotypes, fuelled by media coverage, stating that the rapidly growing young middle class made up of IT professionals is leading this individualistic and materialistic lifestyle with all its negative connotations of materialism, sexual affairs, and an active nightlife (Fuller and Narasimhan 2006). I am not interested in tracing and validating these stories, but I believe that the omnipresence of such rumours and opinions reinforced the beliefs about the middle-class lifestyle and the city as a place of decay that was rapidly losing its traditional values and morals. Moreover, cinema is often mentioned as another space disconnected from traditional values. Film and its advertisement has an affective potential in censorship discourse and in common parlance (Mazzarella 2013). People must be protected from the influence of obscene images, as they cause the risk of such acts being copied. Here it is not necessarily the middle class that runs the risk of taking over indecent behaviour but mostly ‘the common man’. Yet at the same time, perhaps there is also a similarity in the beautification initiative and the nativity films that have been made in Tamil Nadu since the 1990s. The nostalgia that nativity films disclose in a focus on the everyday habits, customs, and spaces, seems to find resonance in the beautification murals. Both teach the city dweller about the traditions and beauty of Tamil Nadu. As a moral-pedagogical tool, the beautification murals fit in with the nostalgia for the idealized, harmonious village and traditional way of life. This nostalgia had come to be envisaged and articulated in consumption patterns and lifestyles, and by themed sites that noticeably referred to the past or rural life in films, theme parks, handicraft exhibitions, heritage hotels, museums, craft villages, or ethnic chic (Brosius 2010; Hancock 2008; Srivastava 2009; Tarlo 1996). Therefore, the depiction of those aspects of culture that were believed to pass into oblivion in the city and consequently had to be revived, highlights a nostalgic imagination of the past and the village. In the light of the growing economy for which Chennai was selectively refurbishing its city, the pedagogical aim of the murals, I suggest, was not only directed at the younger generation but also at a wider middle-class audience. This may explain the ease with which the mural of a golf player was incorporated into the series of ‘traditional’ settings, despite the exceptionality of the mural within the series as a whole. Moreover, by addressing a wider audience, the murals were not just educational but spoke to a form of Tamil world-class. Mary Hancock has coined the term ‘neoliberal nostalgia’ to indicate how, under the banner of neoliberal globalization, heritage-themed sites rearticulate rural life for the cosmopolitan elites (2008, 148-149). These sites, she argues, have come to epitomize what modernity has displaced; they serve as sanitized reproductions of rural life and the past. Hence,

Chennai beautiful

205

heritage is something arising within capitalism and not against it; it is a counter-narrative of the city, taking place within the landscape of urban life. By showing images of Tamil heritage, rural life, and the past, the murals were part of this counter-narrative of neoliberal nostalgia. The patchwork of images from different periods, themes, and genres indicates that this is not nostalgia for a specific period or past but for an arbitrary and assembled past, which was not experienced as such by its referents themselves (Appadurai 1996; Ivy 1988). History and tradition have become postcard images drawing on stereotypical images and ‘memories’ that evoke ‘neo-nostalgia’ (Ivy 1988). Marilyn Ivy has similarly developed the concept of ‘neo-nostalgia’ in relation to tourism ads in Japan, which do not refer to a specific period but to a free-floating past in which ‘[t]he idea of the neo is a literal displacement from any original referent’ (Ivy 1988, 28). The ad-hoc assemblage and ubiquitous repetition of images, reinforced by similar genres such as calendars, postcards, or films, underpins this feeling of ‘postcard’ or ‘neo’ nostalgia. Bernard Bate has argued that modernity, something that we usually think of as something that looks forward, that embodies the future, is perhaps even more to be embodied in new things that appear very old, things that look both forward and backward (2009, 185). He describes the ways in which Tamil oratory suggests an ancient mode of speech yet can be seen as not a continuation of an old practice but as part of modern democratic practice.91 I am seeing the murals as part of a production of neo-nostalgia, of a floating past, that is not to be confused with a pastiche past that has no historical connection whatsoever. Rather the murals have no connection to a specific era; they evoke a generalized and glorified Tamil heritage and frame it into images of the future. Murals embody the future in that sense, as looking both backward, attending to a common political practice of display, and forward. According to the Corporation, the images should reflect Tamil culture. However, one of the artists who was commissioned to paint the new murals explained how not everything was considered to be Tamil culture in the view of the Corporation. Along with some colleagues, Raj was commissioned to paint a public wall of around 270 metres in length on Rajaji Salai, close to the seat of the government in Fort St George. He explained to me how he and his colleagues often sketched scenes from daily life in their own environment: a sunrise at Marina beach, a street vendor selling ice cream 91 Tamil is a disglossic language whose spoken and written forms diverge markedly. Politicians and others making speeches in Tamil use a formal, literary style of speech that would have been nearly opaque to listeners with limited or no literacy (see Bate 2009).

206 

Intimate Visualities and the Politics of Fandom in India

Figure 27 Mural of golf players that has been incorporated into the series of beautification paintings made by the artist J.P. Krishna. According to the Corporation officials this mural should not have been included as it does not represent Tamil culture; Chennai 2009

Photograph by McKay Savage

to a young boy, or a rag picker picking recyclable garbage off the streets. For Raj and his colleagues, these scenes expressed the real and typical Chennai. He suggested to the Corporation officer who oversaw the project that he would like to paint these kinds of scenes from everyday life, but the officer refused such a commission because in his view such images did not correspond to what they regarded as ‘Tamil culture’. Remarkably, however, in the light of the emphasis on ‘traditional’ culture, the Corporation permitted the inclusion of a man playing golf on one of the city walls (Figure 27). Even though this painting was commissioned by the local golf course, it was sanctioned by the Corporation and integrated into the series of paintings commissioned for this road. Later, when I asked about this particular image, the Corporation officers in charge appeared slightly embarrassed regarding what they later deemed a ‘mistake’. Such ‘mistakes’ cannot be explained merely in terms of a distinction between images of the ‘traditional’ and the ‘modern’ as various other industries or technologies have been showcased on public walls.

Chennai beautiful

207

Figure 28 Beautification mural of a doctor looking at an X-ray. This mural is on the compound wall in front of the government hospital on Poonamallee High Road; Chennai 2010

The ‘modern’ ones were mostly industries and hospitals. I haven’t come across images depicting the film industry, but I am sure they have been incorporated somewhere. The compound wall of a government hospital, for example, displays images of doctors looking at X-rays (Figure 28) and an operating cinema; these images were placed next to a panel in which healers are shown using Ayurveda (a healthcare technique with growing popularity across India, and in the southern states) (Figure 29).92 Another interesting image I noticed a year later is an everyday scene (Figure 30). Behind vendors selling vegetables and the neighbouring cobbler on the pavement, the city has painted a view of a market. The real-life scene merged completely with its backdrop. But again, what is important to note here is that the vendors who were depicted here are not street vendors – they are selling their wares in what is meant to be the Koyambedu Wholesale Market Complex in Chennai. This market, a huge complex, was developed in 1996 by the government in order to relieve heavy congestion in the trade area of George Town (Muthiah 2004) and as such could be seen as part of the modern city-making process. 92 Noteworthy is that it is Ayurveda that is shown and not the traditionally regionally local Siddha medicine.

208 

Intimate Visualities and the Politics of Fandom in India

Figure 29 Beautification mural depicting an ayurvedic healing scene; Chennai 2010

But to return to the golf player: How should we understand his image? How does it relate to Tamil culture as observed by the city authorities? The image of playing golf was privately commissioned by the golf course. Whereas doctors and X-rays reflect contemporary icons of the state, a golf player is an image of affluent consumption and urban spatial aesthetics and therefore does not fit into the range of themes that express the achievements and highlights of the state. It does however fit naturally into world-class imaginaries. The golf course is an almost symbolic part of world-class visions and is notorious for displacing slums and peasants.

Shifting publics Chennai was using the large beautification project to emphasize its own attractiveness and to root out unplanned encroachments that were seen as unsolicited uses of the city. Local authorities in Chennai were actively erasing images of the city that did not belong in this cosmopolitan view of being attractive or ‘world-class’. Publicity and visualizations are put into play in order to pursue imaginations and transformations of public spaces, and they have become crucial tools for changing the image of the city and the ways in which belonging to the city is defined (Zukin 1995). In this

Chennai beautiful

209

Figure 30 Vendor in front of a painted scene depicting a market; Chennai 2011

regard, the city selectively attempts to push back the encroachment on public space by restricting its use. Whereas on the one hand in prominent spaces a certain segment of people such as party workers and fan club members and the practice of placing images in public in the city are being curbed and set aside, on the other hand, the beautification images point to another visual strategy for

210 

Intimate Visualities and the Politics of Fandom in India

another public. By becoming an attractive city for affluent investors and citizens, Chennai seeks to reach an audience of middle-class professionals aspiring to join the ranks of a global class of similar professionals. The middle class in India is now not only much more visible, there are also more people belonging to this group. As slum dwellers are removed from sight within the city, the neoliberal middle classes are becoming much more visible instead. In concert with the administrative makeovers of the city there is a corporate conversion going on with similar aesthetic visions of the built environment. This gentrification of the city is also visible on the level of the cinema hall – from single-screen to multiplexes – and the cinema-goers associated with it. I will address this more extensively in the Epilogue. However, it is relevant to mention here as it comes along with certain ideas about the cinema hall, the figure of the fan and the figure of the lower-level party worker who makes imagery for their (film, political, or cine-political) leaders and which does not fit in the image of the gentrified city. The liberalization of the Indian economy in the 1990s brought a rise in lucrative businesses and consequently an increase in the number of affluent middle-class Indians. Several authors have indicated that the notion of middle class is used as a marker by means of practices of distinction (Bourdieu 1984), expressing the wish to be visible and to belong to a ‘worldclass’ city and community (Brosius 2010; Fernandes 2006; Jaffrelot and van der Veer 2008). This public visibility of the middle class expresses itself in conspicuous consumption (Brosius 2010, 23), but also in a political culture shifting from ‘older ideologies of a state-managed economy to a middle class-based culture of consumption’ (Fernandes 2006, XV). In this light, the golf player who has been inserted into the series of images would not be an anomaly after all. This becomes more and more evident in the material form of the city, as Chennai is increasingly becoming a city selectively made up of malls, multiplexes, exclusive housing estates, and IT corridors rather than the dispersed city of small shops and housing blocks whose walls were decorated with posters and murals celebrating politicians and film stars. In contrast, malls now house multiplex cinemas that do not allow for the array of images that fans put up, and so do gated communities that often attempt to bar posters or murals pasted on their compound walls or banners in front of those walls. I will elaborate on this point in the Epilogue. Satish Despande highlights the ‘spatial strategies’ of social processes, indicating that ‘[a] spatial strategy not only unfolds in space, it is also about space – its appropriation, deployment, and control’ (1998, 250). In this regard, when we look more closely at the spatial politics of the new interventions, we find that the city administration is specifically concerned with that section of

Chennai beautiful

211

the city whose use city officials wish to shift from poor or working-class citizens and into the hands of the growing middle class (with the leisure to golf, visit tourist sites, and strum sitars). Several areas, or corridors, of the city are being reorganized, sanitized, and beautified partly to realize the global aspirations of this new public.93 On the fringes of these corridors political and commercial imagery appear in myriad forms. The way in which the built environment is structured within the city indicates a symbolic landscape, just as during colonialism the power of public images came to the fore through architecture, parks, and statues as important markers of imperial virtue and power (Hancock 2008; Srivathsan 2000; Tartakov 2000). The commemoration of heroes as portrayed in colonial sculptures has also become a common factor in post-independent political contests. The DMK, which emerged from the DK – the former self-respect movement – initiated the use of icons in urban spaces to make Chennai a city with a Tamil identity. These icons came in the form of statues as well as more ephemeral forms such as murals, posters, or cutouts.94 Arterial roads such as Anna Salai, Marina Beach, and Rajaji Salai were chosen as the main locations for the statues.95 Benedict Anderson, in his work on nationalism, argues that the way in which the colonial state imagined its dominion was through three institutions: the museum, the census, and the map (Anderson 1991). He suggests that by museumizing monuments they become repositioned as regalia of the secular colonial state (Anderson 1991, 182-185, emphasis by the author). Mechanical reproduction resulted in a pictorial census and logoization of monuments. And it is precisely in this everyday reproducibility of regalia that the power of the state lies. The politicization of monuments through reproducibility can be pursued in the field of wall paintings. The postcard images of monuments within the beautification scheme emphasize the state’s connection to these monuments, staking an implicit ownership claim, through their endless reproducibility on images. More recently, the Tamil identity initially constructed in and embodied through cine-political icons has not been as rooted in Dravidian nationalism as before, but a glorification of the Tamil past has continued to play a role in politics throughout the 93 I would like to thank A. Srivathsan for alerting me to the ‘corridorization’ of Chennai’s beautification. 94 See Hancock 2008; M.S.S. Pandian 2005b; Srivathsan 2000; Bate 2009 for detailed accounts of the use of statues and architecture by the DMK. 95 In 1986, the DMK erected several statues of Tamil literary scholars and mythical figures (e.g. Kannagi) on Marina Beach. Annadurai and MGR are commemorated with a memorial here as well. Their memorials are popular tourist destinations in Chennai for Tamil Nadu tourists.

212 

Intimate Visualities and the Politics of Fandom in India

years as a sign of a shared Tamil identity. Dravidian nationalism lost ground in political terms but a shared Tamil identity is within the pan-Indian political and cultural landscape still an important marker of distinction. The beautification initiative, consisting of the wall paintings but also several statues displaying scenes of Tamil culture and leaders made by artists from the College of Arts and Crafts, highlights the new focus on this shared Tamil identity, channelled through the state. ‘Beautification’ is nothing new and specific to Chennai. Other Indian cities have been working on their appearance in similar ways, also commissioning new paintings depicting regional cultural scenes.96 What was happening in Chennai, however, was somewhat different, as this was not merely an attempt to beautify the city by means of wall paintings: it also involved a rigorous – and almost iconoclastic – prohibition of every kind of billboard, even commercial ones, along these ‘corridors’ in the city. While such bans have been implemented more often after the initiation of the beautification scheme – from a complete ban on vinyl banners to a more recent ban on depicting faces of living people – at the same time posters and billboards have continued to be creeping into the banned areas (I will say more about this below). Chennai’s new look indicates that city officials are claiming and restructuring forms and appropriations of public space in the form of beautifying the city through murals, and thus aligning it with a different form of aesthetic experience and urban imaginary. Because of Tamil Nadu’s specific historic background, of which political imagery has been an essential part, the restrictions on it raise questions about how the political landscape is changing. It is noteworthy that political parties such as the DMK and AIADMK and persons affiliated with them who have been trying to curb the use of political imagery in the city were the same ones who initiated such a visual regime of representation. Mostly it has been a comment on the rival party, as with the beautification scheme comment on the AIADMK, that started the objections to banners and posters. At first hand it seems contradictory that politicians were in favour of replacing their own images with those of postcard images of historic and natural scenery. This is even more surprising since in imagery issued higher up in the party – like large banners for government events, or along the road towards such an event – the images of the Chief Minister Karunanidhi and his successor Stalin appeared almost everywhere. The streets of Tamil Nadu were overloaded with their pictures during party rallies, 96 Of course, outside India there are also many examples of cities and towns in which murals have become part of beautification projects.

Chennai beautiful

213

inaugurations, or state-organized events, many compound walls are adorned with political murals, or personal banners including the leaders in familial events. The lower-rank party members who supported Karunanidhi’s DMK party, however, were not allowed to similarly adorn posters and walls with their own face, not even as a small cameo hovering below a much larger Karunanidhi and Stalin, whereas the city administration continued to use the same kind of images within the context of ‘official’ politics. Since the beautification project, the political and fan image has been on the wane; even though they have not disappeared, they are certainly less present than they were previously. Does this suggest a change in political patronage? Political parties in the state are still largely dependent on support from lower-ranking party members, but do not necessarily need the images of these lower-ranking members to garner votes. However, the political work of lower-ranking members relies on prestige that is generated via images. Therefore, the rejection of these vernacular images by political rulers reveals the ambivalent nature of leaders to their cadres, just as the ambivalent relation film stars have to their fans (see also S.V. Srinivas 2009).

The unruly potential of images Also banning public imagery is nothing new in Tamil Nadu, and it is here that this narrative brings us back to the uses of the urban canvas as I described earlier for fans. Now diverting from the beautification initiative I will show how the affective potential of images is used to justify a type of restriction that is more structural in public spaces (Mazzarella 2013). Whereas the restrictions seem to be informed by realistic decisions about dangers and distractions, I argue that the restrictions are part of the ambivalent relationship with images that political figures have, as I already briefly pointed out above. This ambivalent relationship can be explained by the dialogue that Mazzarella described around mass publicity or more specifically film censorship. Mazzarella shows how censorship indexes the ‘open-ended’ potential of mass media where debates arise about the affective potential of images.97 We can extend this argument to public images such as political and cinema banners as imbuing an affective potential that needs to be contained. However, this potential is not necessarily framed in terms of trying to protect the ordinary working-class man – ‘the pissing man’ as one 97 The other factor Mazzarella details, a concern to limit or eliminate obscenity, does not seem to have been at issue in the beautification campaign.

214 

Intimate Visualities and the Politics of Fandom in India

censor referred to this figure – but to protect public spaces from usage by this ‘pissing-man’ figure. An interesting analogy can be made here since quite literally, murals, especially depicting religious imagery,98 could also be seen as reflections of a desire to prevent urinating against a public wall, which is generally not taken as a sign of a world-class city. But the pissing man here is more metaphorically meant, as the people that would use walls to connect to political parties and/or to film stars are seen as ‘low class’. At the same time, the attempt to control seems to be ambivalent: certain areas are not under scrutiny and monumental visibility becomes one of the centres in political rivalry between (mainly but not exclusively) two parties. The content of f ilms is controlled under the Cinematographic Act of 1952, but posters and banners are not covered by this act. The Central Board of Film Certif ication considers this a problem and complains on its website about the fact that cinemas display ‘obscene’ film posters.99 Obscenity here, I should explain, is seen in displays of racy images such as of a man and woman kissing or a woman dressed in sexy clothes. In Tamil Nadu the government passed the Tamil Nadu Compulsory Censorship of Film Publicity Materials Act in 1987 to deal with obscene and indecent posters (M.S.S. Pandian 2005a, 60).100 The display of other kinds of public imagery falls under the Tamil Nadu Open Places (Prevention of Disfigurement) Act 1959 with a latest amendment in 1994.101 This act 98 See also the work by Abraham and Madheshiya on tiled gods that are applied to walls to prevent men from urinating against those walls (2008). 99 http://cbfcindia.gov.in/html/uniquepage.aspx?unique_page_id=4.htm, accessed 11 July 2012. 100 The following quote from the Central Board of Film Certification website explains clearly how Central and State legislation come together: ‘A particular complaint that has often been made is that the theatres often display obscene film posters. The Cinematograph Act 1952 does not directly cover obscene posters and these come under the common law of the land relating to obscenity, particularly section 292 of the Indian Penal Code. Enforcement under Section 292 of IPC comes within the purview of the State Governments and Union Territory Administrations, particularly their law enforcing agencies including the police. There are other Central/State legislations that cover this aspect. The Indecent Representation of Women (Prohibition) Act, 1986 is administered by the Department of Women and Child Development in the Ministry of Human Resource Development, but the responsibility of enforcement is, again, with the local authorities. The West Bengal Government have enacted the “West Bengal (Compulsory Censorship of Film Publicity Materials) Act, 1974” to deal with obscene and indecent posters. The Tamil Nadu Government has enacted Tamil Nadu (Compulsory Censorship of Film Publicity Materials) Act 1987. Various Municipalities and Municipal Corporations have laws which regulate display of posters. What is lacking is strict implementation of these laws.’ Quoted from https://www.cbfcindia.gov.in/main/posters.html, accessed 26 February 2019. 101 Its equivalent in Puducherry is the Pondicherry Open Places (Prevention of Disfigurement) Act 2000.

Chennai beautiful

215

defines advertisements as ‘any effigy or any bill, notice, document, paper or other thing containing any words, signs, or visible presentations’ in which objectionable advertisements among others obstructing pedestrian traff ic or ‘grossly indecent, or in scurrilous or obscene or intended for blackmail’.102 Moreover, for political imagery, the Election Commission has issued a code of conduct for political parties in order to prevent the defacement of public and private places. In this code of conduct it is stated exactly how cutouts, banners, banners, and flags should be displayed in order to comply with the law. In the following excerpt the High Court expressed the lack of regulation of the excessive presence of commercial advertisements: An area meant for preserving greenery by the Agricultural Department opposite to the Gemini fly-over has been completely blocked from the view of the public by huge advertisement hoardings […]. Just opposite to the High Court in front of the Bar Council Office there is an advertisement board which is placed across the pavement, causing nuisance to the traffic and the pedestrians. If one goes down the Nungambakkam Bridge towards Poonamalle High road, one can see a long advertisement board which must be about 300 feet in the length […]. We are not even worried about the obscene advertisements, mostly by film producers and Cinema theatres, which can be taken care of by appropriate existing legislation. But we are worried about the size and location of the innumerable hoardings simply spoiling the aesthetic beauty of the City and some of the modern buildings which have (been) built artistically with the help of architectural experts. (Excerpt from High Court Document 2006. Cited from Note 2007, 139)

The Court’s concerns could be situated in a larger debate on what should be part of a city and what not, what might be termed the aesthetic and normative criteria of the city (Ghertner 2015). It is not the content of these images that the Court was worried about, it was their mere presence that they found contaminating. Government authorities were increasingly trying to prevent pollution of public spaces and to discipline their citizens so that they would not put up such images and so that they would not fall prey to the messages displayed on it. Municipal signs such as the omnipresent ‘stick no bills’ signs, or ‘do not spit or urinate’ signs have, since colonial times, become weapons against spontaneous ‘indiscipline’ (Kaviraj 1997, 85). Owners of 102 (‘Laws of India : The Tamil Nadu Open Places [Prevention of Disfigurement] Act, 1959’ n.d.)

216 

Intimate Visualities and the Politics of Fandom in India

private buildings also attempt to aesthetize their environment with signs and images to prevent defacement of their property.103 Ever since their first appearance, political, cinematic, and commercial banners and cutouts in the public realm have been under scrutiny. The first recorded protests that manifested themselves around indecent publicity were against the huge ads produced by S.S. Vasan, the developer of the famous Gemini pictures in Chennai in the 1960s (Willemen in Jacob 2009, 49). The fact that Vasan was using public spaces to exhibit his ads and not merely cinema compounds made his publicity much more effective. They were visible in more public spaces, and he could select the space that he thought would be most effective. Yet at the same time their publicness also caused opposition (Jacob 2009). Citizens and local authorities object to hoardings nowadays on similar grounds, characterizing them as ugly, dangerous objects. They blight the urban landscape and force pedestrians and traffic into dangerous situations. The first move against billboards by the city’s authorities took place in 1979 when they were removed from public spaces (Note 2007, 135). The following decades witnessed a rise in opposition from more elite publics against commercial banners. The extensive use of banners by political parties and fan clubs remains frowned upon by the more elitist spheres of public opinion. These debates concern the material presence of the images as well as their content. Specifically film images, it is commonly believed, can attract attention because of their inappropriateness or indecency, which is deemed a bad influence on youth and an impediment to the development of a tasteful public culture (Geetha, Rao, and Dhakshna 2007, 95). Repeatedly, people I conversed with expressed their opinion about the harmful influence of film banners. Almost always someone was able to describe an instance in which a banner had caused dangerous situations or uproar. For example, a young woman immediately recalled one occasion when a banner caused trouble. She was referring to a huge publicity banner on Chennai’s main thoroughfare, Anna Salai, for the film Vallavan (T.R. Silambarasan, 2006) on which one could see the actor Simbu biting the lips of the actress Nayanthara. She said, and I quote: Even on the first day, the banner caused accidents so it was removed immediately. Can you imagine – a huge banner on which Simbu is biting someone’s lips! Of course it would cause accidents! It distracted the youngsters who kept staring at it. But it also influenced these youngsters. You know how people get influenced by these things. Hoardings are very bad. 103 See Madheshiya and Abraham 2008 for an account of these ‘tiled gods’ in Mumbai.

Chennai beautiful

217

The huge advertisement was removed within a day. Occasionally, in Chennai and in other places as well there is uproar in a neighbourhood when posters show allegedly indecent content.104 Particularly near schools or major junctions in the city they are seen as dangerous for the youth passing by. These are instances in which some people – for example local residents – feel that the imagery displayed is objectionable as it influences or distracts people. Here again, the idea of the ‘pissing man’ (it is always a man in this metaphor) who is unable to judge for himself and is porous – in other words, he might actually do what he sees in images (Mazzarella 2013) – is opposed by those who know how to read and judge these images. Most opponents mentioned they object because others are influenced, not because they themselves would be influenced, or even object per se. Therefore, even though it is the danger posed by banners that is often put forward by opponents, moral, aesthetic, and political reasons lie behind these motivations as well. It is above all in newspapers that these otherwise not greatly discussed opinions are aired, and banners are described as polluting and disfiguring the city. The fact that these articles are written in English-language newspapers already indicates the ‘publics’ they want to address and that journalists or commentators feel they belong to (Warner 2002).105 The people who object are not the ones who display these banners. Clearly it is mostly an objection about the political and film banner and not necessarily the commercial ones for jewellery or mobile networks. So, the choice for newspapers here is an act of disassociating oneself from another public. In an opinion article in Outlook India, the author ends his article with the following critical note: MGR might be dead for 22 years but put up a poster of him and you can be certain votes will come in. […] But no matter how many posters the parties put up, the Corporation’s job is to prevent defacing of public and private walls. It has now set up 155 teams – one for each of the wards in Chennai – to oversee the removal of poll graff iti. ‘Three hundred digital banners were removed since the date of the Lok Sabha polls was announced,’ says Corporation commissioner Rajesh Lakhoni. Many more 104 ‘Film news’ Anandan recounted several instances in Chennai when local residents opposed the hoardings in their surroundings. Interview with ‘film news’ Anandan, Chennai 2008. 105 I do not intend to suggest that all Tamil newspapers were covering such news in favour of the banners and as such addressing the other ‘public’ that uses them. Also Tamil newspapers covered news of banners collapsing and other mishaps with public imagery. However, I want to suggest here that the use of English reinforces the distance between those who comment on them by filling public interest litigations or writing commentaries in English-language newspapers.

218 

Intimate Visualities and the Politics of Fandom in India

will be put up – after all the election here is almost two months away on May 13 – and as many will come down because as Lakhoni pointed out the Election Commission had directed that the rules of the Tamil Nadu Open Places (Prevention of Disfigurement) Act, 1959, which prevented disfigurement of places open to public view by objectionable or unauthorised advertisement and pasting of posters in such places, must be strictly adhered to. And advertisements include any bill, notice, document, paper or any substance containing words, signs or visible representation. Basically, whatever! But then, who’s listening? All are all busy with the dance of democracy. (Iyengar 2009)

This quote shows how comments on the disfigurement of the city can be juxtaposed with discussions on populist politics. So, although the author criticizes the disfigurement of urban spaces, this relates directly to popular politics, which are closely bound up with the production of imagery. In 2008, the Madras High Court, following a request by the ruling DMK party, banned unauthorized and dangerously positioned banners in Chennai. Within several days the skyline of Chennai had changed radically as the city pulled down its gigantic commercial, political, and cinematic banners. Around 4,100 unlicensed banners were removed from the city centre (The Hindu, 14 April 2008). Newspapers carried stories of delighted Chennaiites who could finally see their green city again; pavements and footpaths were said to be in use again as pedestrians did not have to navigate their way around metal scaffolding; and motorists could finally see traffic signals again that had previously been hidden behind the gigantic objects (for instance, The Hindu, 14 April 2008). In the meantime, in Puducherry, banners were also banned from the historic centre of the city and restricted in other parts. Throughout the Union Territory the city had allotted particular spots where banners were allowed, however, now subject to permission from the municipality. Again, the reason given by the local authorities for the ban on banners was the possible danger of the sometimes-immense structures, which were often not properly constructed or attached, and which extended over parts of the roads and easily attracted the passer-by’s attention, causing accidents. But fans and political party workers continued to place their imagery, though now often in less central parts of the city. The cheap price of flexbanner production, as I discussed in Chapter 4, resulted not in bog losses of banners; one could easily make a new one. So now, even though most banners were placed illegally, they would not be removed that fast, especially if they were exhibited in favour of the ruling political party. Political supporters generally felt less restricted in placing their banners, as local authorities

Chennai beautiful

219

would not easily go against their party’s rule. Even in zones of the city in which banners were completely banned, such as the colonial, heritage area of Puducherry, influential politicians and their supporters placed banners for special occasions, usually without any consequences. The party in power was commonly also the one whose images were the most pervasive in the public realm. During the DMK’s last term in power, AIADMK supporters accused the party of preventing them from using certain walls. This was part of a common practice whereby, during the rule of one party, the opposition parties were blocked from using public space for their images and for rallies. In 2010, this resulted in agitations in the state capital Chennai when AIADMK supporters were blocked from painting a mural to honour their leader Jayalalitha on the occasion of her birthday. Take for example this excerpt from a Chennai Court Order in 2006: The grievance of the petitioners is that thousands of hoardings are erected on public lands, on the road sides, on the pavements and platforms, and these hoardings are not only hazardous to traffic but also to public, since the pedestrians are compelled to walk on the roads facing risk to their lives. The state Exchequer is also losing revenue, since the owners of those hoardings are not paying any ground rent or advertisement tax […]. It is also highlighted that almost all political parties in and around the city of Chennai are erecting innumerable hoardings all around the city. There are number of specifications for the erection of such hoardings within the limits of the Corporation, but none of the political parties seem to follow the rules and regulations and Corporation of Chennai is also not taking any measures either to regulate such hoardings or to collect the fees. (cited from Note 2007, 135)

The court order came out of a so-called ‘public interest litigation’ (Note 2007). A public interest litigation can be filed when the person or group of persons has no personal interest in the matter. During the last years they have been used increasingly, among other techniques, to clear out street vendors or to restrict commercial activity in residential neighbourhoods, gentrifying city spaces parallel to the rising middle class in cities like Chennai.106 Political banners, which made up the vast majority, were notorious for being placed illegally. Going back to Puducherry, posters of the Chief Minister of Puducherry and other prominent politicians appeared in places where 106 Deonnie Moodie ties the public interest litigation to a similar kind of gentrif ication in relation to the Kalighat temple in Kolkata (2018).

220 

Intimate Visualities and the Politics of Fandom in India

they were not allowed to be exhibited. Sizable banners depicting the Chief Ministers of Puducherry were regularly set up in front of the assembly hall in the historic centre of the city and events were without exception celebrated with one or more banners put up there as well. This caused frustration among political opponents but also among fans who were not able to exhibit all their images everywhere anymore. Selvam, the fan whom we encountered earlier for example, commented how in Puducherry only the ruling party was able to display its imagery; the posters of other parties and fans were forcibly removed. For ordinary people, fans, or lower-rank party members the display of imagery was liable to the same kinds of rules. But the opposition and the rules applied to curb publicity in all its forms did not seem to eradicate commercial imagery from the skylines. Owners skirted the rules and the city received – official or unofficial – revenue from putting up banners. The politics of restriction or ‘undoing’ indexes a larger set of practices that revolve around monumentalizing political parties. As I have shown in the above, the AIADMK and the DMK, among other parties, position themselves through monumental symbols and imagery. Banner and cutouts during party meetings and at special events, monuments on crucial locations, or the erection of public buildings like the assembly building-turned hospital: many of these measures are criticized by the opposition or negated once the other party comes back to rule. The most obvious and expensive measure of ‘undoing’ is what was originally designed and built as the new secretariat complex finished under DMK rule. This new building, designed by a Germany-based architect, was supposed to replace Fort St George, the colonial fort that houses the government of Tamil Nadu.107 In 2010, the Tamil Nadu Legislative Assembly and secretariat complex moved into the new secretariat under DMK rule. However, when the AIADMK was elected again in 2011, Jayalalitha decided to move back to Fort St George and transform the new building into what became (and still is) the Tamil Nadu Government Multi-Super-Specialty Hospital. These performances of ‘undoing’ are part of the political practice in Tamil Nadu and therefore also of the ways in which images are canvases of political competition (Gerritsen 2013). In the introduction I touched on the image politics of Jayalalitha after she took over power from the AIADMK. After she was elected Chief Minister in 1991, a huge number of larger-than-life cutouts and banners displaying her sprouted like mushrooms in the streets of Tamil Nadu, particularly in Chennai. At the same time, cutouts that were made for films also displayed 107 The Tamil Nadu assembly and Secretariat are housed at Fort St George.

Chennai beautiful

221

the main hero in larger-than-life images. This excessive use of public imagery by the AIADMK party prompted the opposition DMK, during its next period in office (1996-2002) to restrain Jayalalitha’s colossal presence. Instead, the DMK began to assert itself by using murals and only occasionally putting up cutouts during party rallies. This was the beginning of the decline of the ‘cutout culture’. In concert with the increasing popularity of vinyl, urban spaces of Tamil Nadu started to undergo a serious transformation. The popularity of vinyl banners and their increasing presence also caused more legislation. Now everyone can exhibit a banner for party support or other occasions. But this democratization of the use of public spaces for displaying images has resulted in new visual strategies by political parties. The DMK, many of whose members had their roots in the film industry, started to criticize the use of popular imagery related to film and the use of imagery for political publicity. They objected to all imagery, implicitly commenting on lower-level party workers. This was partly a reaction to PMK leader S. Ramadoss, who is a strong critic of banners made by political supporters and fans. Ramadoss was the most prominent opponent of the use of banners. He gave his party members strict instructions not to employ this kind of publicity. If, despite his appeal, they did exhibit banners, they were immediately suspended or expelled from the party. Let me quote Ramadoss in a personal interview in 2008:108 Wherever you are on the roadside, you can see amma’s [Jayalalitha’s] and anna’s [Vijayakanth’s] [images]. Every political party uses banners. Does this happen in any other country or state? Wherever you look, it is this birthday, that birthday etc. On any given morning when you get up and go into the street, you can see a hundred banners and cutouts within five kilometres. The people on the banners may be people you like or not. When you look at these banners, it will mentally disturb you. It has become part of a culture. But there is also danger in this because of the traffic, and so many other problems. So we don’t need such things.

In public, Ramadoss reveals his objections less fervently but he does unmistakably fight against this practice. For Ramadoss, who fiercely opposed fan clubs in Tamil Nadu (see Chapter 1), public banners by fans as well as political supporters are evidence of the populist political style of parties in the state. Remember the fights the Rajinikanth fan club in Vannur had with local PMK members as their banners were pulled down regularly. The 108 Interview 25 March 2008 at his home along the Tindivanam-Puducherry road.

222 

Intimate Visualities and the Politics of Fandom in India

larger-than-life size and ubiquitous faces of Ramadoss’s opponents annoyed him, particularly as they were taken as evidence by Ramadoss of their worship by supporters.109 His expression of annoyance relates to a larger discourse on the criticism of personality politics and the close relationship between cinema and politics in the state. The DMK leader Karunanidhi (d. 7 August 2018), probably in a reaction to Ramadoss, criticized the excessive use of banners by his party members and supporters and called on them not to use his image for DMK promotion. The former scriptwriter Karunanidhi, who used films as propaganda vehicles for his party in the past and is currently widely portrayed on banners throughout the state, called for a constraint on the number of banners and the use of his image by his party. He instructed his party members to avoid using publicity and in particular his own image. His party members seemed unwilling to comply with his request, and Tamil Nadu continued to be occupied with DMK imagery.

Conclusion These dialogues and critiques of political practice index how the uptake of images does not necessarily rest in the images itself. Instead, the idea of what images can do informs the practices around them. City officials formulate reasons to control vernacular images, in a way to control the image-space, to produce a new one – the beautification images – and to wipe away those of the competitor. The new images, as I have shown, are not completely new: the canvas (city walls) was not new; nor was the media (mural painters). The subject matter, however, was new. The subject matter draws on artistic conventions of the past; but by showing nature scenes, village scenes, and cultural heritage ‘postcards’, it strikes out in a new direction of Dravidianism and world-class aesthetics. Another way in which these images are new is that they are also unintentionally democratizing in that they celebrate ordinary (perhaps mostly middle-class) people such as dancers, farmers, sitar players, golfers, and doctors) rather than enshrining Jayalalitha or Karunanidhi. The various bans, complaints, and other moves from political parties and city municipalities to remove banners from public sight raise the question if these political moments of commentary where merely about the safety, aesthetics, and ubiquity, about a feeling of rivalry or a change in political direction. Or were the objections part of a larger political motivation that 109 Ramadoss’s supporters were nonetheless putting up billboards with his image.

Chennai beautiful

223

was dressed up in the guise of aesthetics? The images in public spaces, produced by fans or by political party members, index their patrons and by controlling them, they also control the practice that revolves around them. The figures of the fan and the lower-level party worker seem to have become less central in the image politics that has been part of Tamil Nadu politics for the last decades. Bruno Latour has coined the notion iconoclash to denote the investment in images that is not necessarily destructive, as in iconoclasm, but rather reflects a situation where ‘one does not know, one hesitates, one is troubled by an action for which there is no way to know, without further enquiry, whether it is destructive or constructive’ (Latour 2002). The coming and going of images, of the politics that are negotiated and renegotiated in them, the others that are part of the politics of display, yet in an entirely different manner; one does not know whether it is destructive or constructive. Destructive they might be for artists as their jobs rely on such images; constructive for others as they find a niche in the market. Destructive they might be for lower-level party workers and fan clubs alike, who find it more and more difficult to relate to their leaders and stars, but also constructive because it shows that fan club members, politicians, and would-be politicians have a stake and say in these images. The fact that they are removed, acknowledged not only their presence but also practices that they negotiate. Likewise these image economies are subject to time. Where some practices disappear or change, others are on the rise. Who looked at these murals? Even though, as I hope to have shown in this chapter, the city authorities seemed to be aiming at an emerging neoliberal middle-class audience, this did not necessarily mean that the murals only appealed to ‘them’ and not to ‘others’. Many middle-class people I spoke to were in fact dismissive of the ‘badly painted’ murals or ‘kitschy images’, and some people were not even aware of the new murals, and often noticed them only after I drew their attention to them. In contrast, many city dwellers of lower socioeconomic status, such as most artists themselves, expressed that they were quite happy to finally see something else instead of the endless iconic faces of the state’s two major political leaders. I showed in Chapter 4 how, unlike those of politicians, the images of film stars could deviate from their iconic appearance. The images of film stars were subject to change to keep a sense of newness and attractiveness whereas those of politicians remained similar for many years. Therefore, artists explained to me, people could enjoy looking at a poster for a new film and imagine for instance what the film would be like, whereas they would not be attracted by the faces of politicians. For political images, one could appreciate the skill of an artist or the way an image was painted; but many artists, as well as onlookers and

224 

Intimate Visualities and the Politics of Fandom in India

political party members, expressed their feelings of weariness about the faces themselves. But also, in the murals and other images of politicians, a new trend had arrived in which artists used novel, bright colours and recycled older cinematic images, particularly of film hero-cum-politician MGR and his co-star and political successor Jayalalitha. Also, in political practice images indexed a desire for renewed attention. With the beautification images popping up everywhere, I noticed that many of those travelling by bicycle or on foot paused for a while to have a closer look at the newly painted images. Thus, the newness of the cityscape, even though painted with familiar images of Tamil history, created attention. Two years after the first beautification murals appeared in Chennai’s streets, I came across the f irst signs of defacement. And then political competition had already outrun the ‘world-class’ imaginaries depicted on Chennai’s walls. After the AIADMK came to power again in 2011, one of the first actions they took was to remove the traces of the former DMK government by whitewashing all beautification murals, no matter what their content was. As an act of effective iconoclasm or perhaps better iconoclash, the contours of the old images still showed through the hastily painted white walls, which remained blank or painted with ‘stick no bill’ signs. A change in regime has led to yet another round of visual strategies. The target was slightly new, though the strategy was not. It is clear that the kind of imagery that started in the 1960s, with larger-than-life cutouts and banners and continued in the 2000s with a excess of flex banners, is not expanding but decreasing. Despite the technological possibilities that allow for a certain desire to speak, it is rather the technology that becomes a stand-in for a certain politics. The political figures that initiated the Tamil Nadu image politics are now performing an anti-image politics through images. It is part of a larger political change in direction, it seems, that does not only curb images, the desires they mediate and therefore an image politics they perform but also redirecting their attention to a new political constituency. Images come and go.

Epilogue It’s 4 am in the morning, before sunrise at Chennai’s Rohini cinema, a single-screen cinema in North Chennai. Petta (Subbaraj 2019), Rajinikanth’s latest film, is being released. Petta must share its first-day show with a parallel release of Ajith-starred Viswasam (Siva 2019). A cloud of smartphones hovers over the crowd, taking selfies in every direction. The traditional media, including various news channels from Tamil Nadu and some national channels, cover the release, too. They pursue the crowd into the courtyard of the cinema wherever a small group of men commence to act like ‘real fanatic’ fans. Once the film is running, people come out again to watch the small video bites they have captured on their smartphones with their friends. The translucent green of WhatsApp messages lights up on the court here and there. Then, for about an hour, the courtyard calms down until the next crowd starts to arrive: Ajith fans. They pour milk and beer over the banners, they throw flowers and paper snippets around and light firecrackers. The beat of the live drum makes several young men dance, and even more men capture the scene with their video cameras or smartphones. At 6.30 am, the crowd throngs inside the cinema and the excitement and energy of the courtyard dies out again. Two major film stars, two major releases. Traditionally, Pongal, Tamil New Year, has been an important date for film releases, yet two fan groups crowding the same cinema at the same times still creates an unusual scene. The Ajith banners clearly outnumber those for Rajinikanth. Playfully, Ajith fans remove the balloons and flags with which the Rajinikanth fans decorated the premises and the crowd cheers for these iconoclastic acts. In other cinemas in the city, I learn the next day, fans of the two actors fought verbally as they tried to tear each other’s banners; elsewhere six young men got critically injured after a cutout of Ajith collapsed while they were performing a milk abhishekam. The newspaper reviews of the two films and their reception at the cinemas are telling. The Hindu, Chennai’s main English-language newspaper, spends the entire second page on the release (Staff reporter 2019). One article describes two weddings conducted at cinemas in Tamil Nadu around the release of Petta, organized by the Rajini Makkal Manram (Rajini People Association, the new name given to the state-wide fan clubs after the star’s entry into politics). Another mentions the Japanese fans110 seen dancing at a release, 110 It is commonly expressed by fans and non-fans that Rajinikanth has a fan following in Japan and even fan clubs. This started in 1998, when the film Muthu was released in Japan. Recently,

226 

Intimate Visualities and the Politics of Fandom in India

the happiness of fans for seeing their star again and the cutouts and banners at the cinema premises despite the court-mandated ban on flex banners and cutouts. And yet another one mentions the assault of two persons due to an argument over seats in the cinema hall. That article ends with the story of a young man, called Ajith Kumar (just as the actor) who set his father ablaze with kerosene after he refused to give him money to watch Viswasam. Overall, about two thirds of the space devoted to the two film releases in Tamil and English-language newspapers focused not on the film itself, but on how the audience – and in particular extreme fans – reacted to the film. The review of the film itself gives a positive impression of the film as a welcome shift in direction, back to an older genre of films that Rajini used to play in. Moreover, according to one review, the film gives away political clues about Rajinikanth. A few weeks later a row starts on a video released by actor Simbu in which he asks his fans to erect huge cutouts and pour pots on milk on them. The Tamil Nadu Milk Dealer Association urged the police to protect milk dealers as milk sachets get stolen during the releases of high-profile actors, and they demanded an apology from Simbu (‘After Simbu Tells Fans to Pour Pots of Milk on His Cut-Outs, Milk Dealers Approach Commissioner for Protection’ n.d.). A commentary in The Hindu responds to this news, arguing that fan celebrations at the cinema hall are not what they used to be anymore (Pillai 2019). Where there used to be many such celebrations ‘on ground’, now they are muted compared to the early days and such ‘fan frenzy’ as Pillai terms it takes place online. Pillai observes how nowadays the ‘fan frenzy’ is toned down in comparison with earlier days, but now people go specifically to cinemas such as Rohini to watch fan celebrations and soak in the celebrative atmosphere that is unique to Tamil Nadu. So where fan celebrations of the film are less common, fan watching by others who seek the fan experience has become a popular way to experience the film. It is early 2019, and as I am rewriting the last parts of this book, I cannot leave these and other shifts in Tamil Nadu without remark. The short narrative above indicates a continuation and transformation of fandom, its experience and the emergence of social media, through which fans instantly share their celebrations with friends elsewhere. How do these phenomena – to skip an experience of viewing a film in favour of a cellphone-mediated experience of viewing the film and one’s being there on it has been announced that a re-release of the film is scheduled. Fans tell this fact proudly to indicate the height of Rajinikanth’s fame, seemingly making their own activities more important through this foreign acknowledgement (see also Chapter 1 where I describe my own presence).

Epilogue

227

low-quality videos on social media – change the fan experience? A change in media goes together with a few other changes in the kind of cinema that I would like to address in this epilogue. What does Petta and the scene above tell us about the current particularities of fandom? Is there a reconstitution of fan practices and power, visible in the generational particularities and in the image production by fans? And how can we make sense of the period in which fans were waiting for Rajinikanth to enter politics, now that he finally did? Not only did Rajini announce his entry, but that entry was mirrored by the nearly simultaneous disappearance of two of Tamil Nadu’s most persisting faces and presences. In 2016, AIADMK leader Jayalalitha passed away. Her image used to be everywhere: on water bottles, gas stoves, mixers, canteens, fans, television sets, and many other freebies that were distributed during her periods of power. Karunanidhi, the DMK leader and the other ever-present face of Tamil Nadu’s political landscape, passed away in 2018. The departure of these visible and dominant persons has left a vacuum in state politics. With the disappearance of both leaders, Tamil Nadu’s politics seem to have been emptied of the charismatic, personality leadership that it was known for, along with the persistent battle between the two political parties that dominated the Tamil political scene. At the same time, the next generation of Kollywood stars, Kamal Hassan and Rajinikanth, both announced their entry into electoral politics. Is stardom and film still a path to power? Can we still compare the paths to power from MGR to Jayalalitha to Rajinikanth in terms of the media that mattered during their ascent? It is becoming increasingly clear that new media and satellite television not monopolized by political parties111 have become new means of mobilization (Cody 2017). So where does that leave the fan clubs? And what does it tell us about the temporalities of fandom and the effectiveness of building up power? On 31 December 2016, Rajinikanth announced that he will contest in the upcoming Lokh Saba elections of 2019. Since then speculations abound about how or if he and Kamal Hassan will succeed and what kind of politics they will conduct. Many say that Rajinikanth missed his momentum in 1996 and will 111 Direct broadcast satellite television was introduced in India in the early 2000s, and changed the television landscape considerably. Since satellite television became widely available, a typical urban family has access to hundreds of channels, of which relatively only a few have a clear affiliation with state political parties (in the following list, I indicate the affiliated party in parentheses): News J (AIADMK); Kalaignar TV and Sun Network (both DMK); Captain TV (DMDK); Jaya TV (AMMK [T.T.V. Dhinakaran’s party]); Vendhar TV (IJK); Madhimugam (MDMK); Velicham TV (VCK). National political parties are linked to three channels: Lotus TV (BJP), Vasanth TV, and Mega TV (both Congress).

228 

Intimate Visualities and the Politics of Fandom in India

not succeed; other observers look on with curiosity and put question marks over what this will mean for Tamil Nadu politics. What will happen to the fan clubs, and which fans will reap the benefits of their star’s entry? Will they finally get a return on their many years of investment? Rajinikanth has been very vague up to now on his political message, mostly referring to a spiritual, clean, and straightforward politics, not clearly suggesting what this concretely means. Some fans welcome his entry, but I have heard more people, both fans and non-fans, say they think he should just stay out of politics and keep on acting in films. Similar comments are made about Kamal Hassan. In the meantime, both Kamal Hassan and Rajinikanth keep their media avatars alive. Just a few weeks before Petta was released, a sequel (called simply 2.0) to Rajinikanth’s popular Enthiran was released and is still running, an exceptional speed of releases in a period when fewer films come out. In this epilogue I want to signal several changes that took place throughout the last few years. They demonstrate how fandom is generational, subject to time and place, and part of a changing sphere around how films are produced and consumed, as well as how stars are part of this change. I will address the changes once more via the two themes that run in different ways through the chapters: cinema-cum-politics and more importantly, the ways in which fans relate to their star. The decoration and celebrations of film releases in the cinema, the experiences of fans in the cinema, feelings of loss, and the commodification or tokenization of the fan indicate the shifting perspectives, the coming and going of images, and the different strategies and relationalities that articulate around film. Let’s go back in time again for another description of a Rajinikanth film release.

The cinema In 2010, shortly after the film Enthiran (Shankar 2010) was released, fans in Tamil Nadu learned that the release was a worldwide phenomenon. The film indeed proved to be a worldwide success: it reached the top ten of popular films in the UK, and its music release scored high in the i-tunes online music store. In India it was the highest grossing film ever made up to that moment. The film’s visual effects were impressive. The multiplication of Rajini into many Rajini’s, the robot, and the high-end action scenes were all unprecedented in Tamil cinema. Before the film was released fans proudly linked their superstar Rajinikanth to these innovations. But these same

Epilogue

229

innovations also indicated a shift; a shift to a loss of the electric atmosphere and enthusiasm of watching films. Black-market tickets for Enthiran rose to thousands of rupees. People were curious to see what this new film was like. Friends of mine who had two daughters, one of whom was preparing for her final exams in secondary school, picked up their daughters from school with the excuse that their grandmother was severely ill, and the entire family headed to one of the multiplexes on the ECR road in Chennai. Normally they never watched films in multiplexes, and they usually did not allow their children to spend much time at home watching television, particularly not films. But the new Rajinikanth release was an exception. Their daughters would never have forgiven their parents if they had excluded them from this first-day glimpse of a new Rajinikanth film. It was not so much the story that they were curious about to see, as the opportunity of seeing the popular star in a celebrative environment. What was exceptional is that they could buy tickets to begin with; they paid surcharges, but it was possible nonetheless. This was in contrast to Saktivel, the fan club leader and Panchayat president from Vannur, who had until then always been assured of tickets for himself and the fans closest to him. He was in very close contact with both district leaders, Rajini Ibrahim of Villupuram and Rajini Shankar of Puducherry. Yet for Enthiran, it turned out to be difficult for the first time to actually get tickets. To Saktivel’s humiliation, he could not be sure of seeing the film on the first day, even though as a fan club leader he always had been able to get tickets before. Then the next disappointment came. The film did not meet the expectations of most Rajini fans of a ‘true’ Rajinikanth film: it was seen as too high-tech to express the character of Rajinikanth that fans liked so much. A few transformations come together, the first being the shift in public from working-class and poor young men to families, middle-class men and women, and spaces of performance from single-screen cinemas to multiplexes and related rise in ticket prices.112 Over the past decades, cinema in Tamil Nadu has gained larger public acclaim. For a long time, visitor numbers had been decreasing in cinemas, partly due to their stigma but also because of the increasing availability of films through cable and satellite television, as well as on VHS and VCD. However, the increasing export market of the diaspora has professionalized the industry (R. Vasudevan 2004). For single-screen cinemas as stand-alone businesses, a competitive real-estate market and rising maintenance costs resulted in the closing 112 See Athique (2009, 2011) for a discussion on the rise of the multiplex in India.

230 

Intimate Visualities and the Politics of Fandom in India

of hundreds of cinemas in South India in the 1990s (S.V. Srinivas 2016). Instead, distribution companies and other businesses took over single-screen cinemas and revamped them into comfortable multiscreen, air-conditioned multiplexes (ibid.).113 The following quotation articulates the ways in which a multiplex situates itself: Adlabs Cinemas […] opened its first cinema in Pondicherry today. Adlabs Jeeva Rukmani has a total seating capacity of 1178 seats across two screens and is one of the best known locations in the city. Kamal Hassan’s mega movie Dasavatharam was released in both screens with the first show starting at 6.45am and eager patrons thronged the box office as early as 6am. […] The state-of-the-art sound and projection technology comprises of crystal-clear Dolby sound and superior Xenon projection systems, with three food and beverage counters and plush push-back seats in order to provide a world class cinematic experience. (News post on Reliance website posted on 13 June 2008, http://www.rbe.co.in/news-adlabs-8.html)

The text on the Reliance website, owner of the Adlabs chain of multiplex cinemas, describes the new ‘world-class’ facilities but also contains a few traces of what once was. So just as the beautification project discussed in Chapter 5, world class is referred to here as a way to improve city life, in this case, the cinema. Yet, world class also comes with a price and experience that addresses (partly) another audience. There may be plush seats, and advanced technology, but there are still eager fans that throng the box-office as early as 6 am. The new state-of-the-art cinema was the first multiplex in Puducherry. Soon Raja Talkies followed suit. The cinema just a few metres away from Adlabs was renovated and converted into an air-conditioned cinema with the latest sound and projection technology. Tickets can be booked online. Another cinema, Anandha, which was appreciated among Puducherry’s residents for its quality films, was razed to the ground a few years ago to make way for a shopping mall.114 As for Enthiran, which was released in many cinemas at the same time, such saturation releases were only possible due to the centralization of businesses. Earlier, distributors relied on prints, which cost around Rs 67,000 per print in 2008 and now with digital projection, instead of five screenings in Chennai, more than thirty screenings can be delivered at the 113 In smaller towns, single-screen cinemas have been converted mostly into wedding halls (Pillai 2016). 114 Lakshmi Srinivas has noted a similar transformation in Bengaluru (L. Srinivas 2016, 233).

Epilogue

231

same time (Pillai 2016). This is the result of cinemas having been converted into multiplexes that all shifted to digital technology. Whereas before the projection technology was less expensive relative to the print, the digital technology made the film itself become cheaper and this easier to release simultaneously. Enthiran was screened throughout India in around 3000 cinemas, with at least four to ten shows a day, with an estimated 1.5 million people watching the film on the first day (India Today, October 2010). The development of selling a film to multiplexes and screening it as much as possible on the first day(s) of the release is a way for the producer to earn its revenue before the film enters the pirate market. In this way, the film will most likely be screened for a much shorter time than was the case previously. As fans felt an obligation to keep the film running in the cinemas as long as possible, the multiple screenings gave a feeling of less control to reach their goal of keeping the film in the cinema for at least fifty or one hundred days.115 Srinivas has pointed out how fan clubs, while they already did not impact box office collection, play an increasingly marginal role in the film economy as multiplexes but also television, computer, and cell-phone screens morph the cinema ‘into an entity we do not yet fully understand’ (S.V. Srinivas 2013). The development of multiplexes illustrates a tendency that has been felt by single-screen cinemas and fan clubs alike. Single-screen cinemas were not able to buy the latest releases anymore because they did not have the right technology and the films were too expensive. So they were bypassed by the multiplexes that had the capital and technology.116 Apart from the difficulties this brings to the smaller cinemas as far as earning sufficient revenue is concerned, it has also caused fan clubs to lose their fan privileges. The humiliation that Saktivel felt by not being able to distribute tickets to his fellow fan club members indicates that fans as an audience were not the public that multiplexes aim at. The second transformation of the cinema is the ticket price. Multiplexes charge much higher prices for tickets. Even though the first-day shows are always sold for much more than for other shows, multiplexes’ basic prices are much higher than those of the b-grade cinemas that most fans attend. Where a ticket for a multiplex started at Rs 90, a ticket at an ordinary cinema cost between Rs 10 and Rs 50 in Puducherry, a substantial difference for 115 According to Srinivas, the street-corner fan club (what I have called the local fan club) rarely impacted box-office collection (S.V. Srinivas 2013). 116 A more recent development is the rise of online platform media like Zee5, Amazon Prime, and Netflix that are side-lining ‘mainstream’ f ilm ecologies organized around multiplexes, blockbusters, and major stars.

232 

Intimate Visualities and the Politics of Fandom in India

the less affluent.117 The price of the ticket therefore excludes audiences who cannot afford such tickets. In multiplexes you pay for a world-class experience in the words of Reliance, the owner of the Adlab cinemas in the quote above.118 However, even though the multiplex comes with ticket prices that are much higher than the ones for single-screen cinemas, the Tamil Nadu government has set fixed prices for tickets with maximums up to Rs 150 per ticket, which keeps the price less exorbitant in comparison to the single screen, yet still much more expensive.119 And if fan clubs do not get the first-hand opportunity to buy tickets for the first-day first show as they had previously, they have to compete with others, for these tickets as well as for the black-market tickets that were often ten times the price of a normal ticket. These transformations do not merely change who is going to which cinema, but they also transform audience practices at large, inside as well as beyond the cinema.

Loss This brings me to the second set of transformations, that of the ‘fan’ itself. Multiplexes come with rules that prevent fan enthusiasm in the cinema. Although single-screen cinemas have rules to regulate audience behaviour on the first-day shows (see Chapter 1), multiplexes are much stricter in the kind of behaviour that is allowed. Phones must be switched off and ‘fan behaviour’ such as dancing and singing is out of the question and completely banned (see also L. Srinivas 2016). Within the auditorium audiences are observed by staff and before the film starts a screen warns against the use of cell phones. In addition, banners or posters made by fans are not allowed on the cinema compound. Arikrishnan, Puducherry’s Kamal Hassan fan club leader, voiced his disappointment about not being able to place banners anymore: The newly opened Jeeva Rukmani Theatre told us not to place any banners or posters inside the cinema. The Reliance group is imitating western style [cinemas] by not putting up banners, posters, or cutouts. Now we must put up our banners on the road somewhere. 117 These were the average prices in Puducherry around 2008-2011. 118 News post on Reliance website posted on 13 June 2008, www.rbe.co.in/news-adlabs-8.html. Emphasis mine. 119 See also L. Srinivas 2016 on the complaints about ticket rates in Bangalore.

Epilogue

233

But exhibiting banners in public spaces has also been made much more difficult by city authorities more generally as I described in previous chapters. Fans feel less incentive to put the same effort into imagery as they used to as the time of exhibition is much shorter. Before the release of Enthiran Rajini Shankar said: The expectations for Enthiran are huge because Shankar is the director. He will do well and in addition Sun Pictures are producing it. It has a good music score too. But fan involvement will be less. They’ll sell tickets mostly to people from outside [non-fans], only to rich people. […] Only if they cheer up the fans will the fans bring in the crowds to the cinema. The fan show is very important but now there is nothing for fans. It goes only to rich people and only they watch the show for the first three days. We used to do decorations which attracted the crowds but now we are not going to do anything for Enthiran.

Both Arikrishnan’s and Rajini Shankar’s words suggest a feeling of loss. Although Reliance still describes the ardent fans thronging the box office as early as 6 am, Rajini Shankar and Arikrishnan did not feel attracted to such a cinema environment because they could not perform and materialize their fandom as they could do earlier. Moreover, also the Rajinikanth they encountered was for the generations of fans that I worked with not the Rajinikanth they appreciated. The film Enthiran is a continuous display of technological fireworks: The story features Rajinikanth in a dual role, both as a scientist and as his creation, the robot Chitti. Chitti is a copy of the scientist with human emotions. When the robot falls into the hands of a competing scientist, he implants a chip into the robot and Chitti becomes a destructive force. The second half of the film revolves around the damage caused by Chitti. The film turns into a high-tech sci-fi story with countless visual special effects. The film departs here from a ‘classical Rajinikanth film’ in which he, an outsider and low-status person, fights the bad guys with his bare hands. In a ‘typical’ Rajinikanth film, he saves the heroine, a family, or an entire community from the bad guy’s evil and social injustice. Enthiran is one of the regional blockbusters in South India, ‘a relatively small number of expensively produced films which point to a constellation of features that have to do with finances, production, marketing, and exhibition’ that Srinivas traces (S.V. Srinivas 2016). The production logic up to the 1990s depended on the presence or absence of stars, and the regional blockbuster, in contrast, is characterized by its production logic. The presence of stars in earlier films was what made films expensive and in contrast

234 

Intimate Visualities and the Politics of Fandom in India

the regional blockbuster was a film where the below-the-line investments (such as special effects in the case of Enthiran) were large and in which there were no major stars acting because they were not available (as they were booked for regular films). Srinivas distinguishes between above-theline costs of salaries of actors, director, scriptwriter, music director, and producer and below-the-line costs related to shooting and post-production work. This resulted in films with more spectacular narratives and effects in comparison to the star film that relied on the presence and image of the star. In that sense it was also difficult to have stars appear in blockbusters because they bring along their image and relation to politics, which makes their pan-Indian or international distribution more difficult. The current blockbuster, Srinivas suggests, does have major star performance. For a film such as Enthiran, expensive makeovers and special effects were used for the role of Rajinikanth, ‘suggesting that the new technology had to be mounted on a body that was worthy enough of the investment’ (S.V. Srinivas 2016, 14): that is, on a body like that of Rajinikanth. Even though the film was a box-office hit in India and around the world, Rajinikanth’s fan club members were disappointed to meet this new Rajinikanth. Now Rajinikanth was not identifiable as the jovial character or the angry person fighting injustice with his bare hands who the Rajini fans I have worked with liked so much. The music in this film, and even more so in Rajinikanth’s previous film Sivaji: The Boss (Shankar 2007), also disappointed many of the fans I knew well. Even though the music was composed by Tamil Nadu’s most celebrated composer A.R. Rahman, many fans I worked with could not repress the feeling that the music was a bit too ‘foreign’ as they called it. In many respects, such criticisms of Enthiran echo the shift in cinema-going indicated earlier. The local hero is replaced by a star who is a member of a global elite, whose story is told amid a soundtrack that is ‘foreign’, and in cinemas that cater to a world-class-expecting and certainly more affluent audience.

Fan mimicry Fans and non-fans create and recreate, revise, and contest various ways of being in the world as fans and in relationship to their stars, films, politicians, and each other. There are certain strategies they adopt for doing this, and the disappointment signals that these earlier strategies do not work as well with Enthiran, for reasons that are partially due to the film (story, character of hero, soundtrack), and partially due to the circumstances of the screening

Epilogue

235

(multiplexes, expensive tickets, no banners). If we follow Dickey’s (1993a) argument that film offers a realistic yet utopian world which the urban poor audiences can connect to and dream about, Enthiran does indeed not seem to connect with such audiences. While this might be part of the way in which we can understand the disconnectedness felt by some, specifically older, fans to the film, it does not do justice to the complexity of the many other audience members that did like the film. Then too, the perceived incongruity between social position of the star and the fans cannot be sufficient for explaining the reception of Enthiran, for no such disparity existed with the film Lingaa, which featured a ‘typical’ Rajinikanth hero. In this case, the most common explanation given by film critics for the film’s relative unpopularity was that the hero was far too similar to that of his other films. The response to his films shows the complicated ways in which the appreciation of the cinema is more than the film itself (L. Srinivas 2016), more than can be explained merely by the film. Similarly, fandom is more than the investment in the star itself. I have shown how at a certain point, fans invest in fan clubs for the sake of that investment; in other words, that the personal, social, and political benefits of being a fan stems not – or not always – from the star, but from the experience of being a fan. This is because of the networking opportunity (the chance to meet others, to walk into the office of an MLA or even the star himself), as well as the chance to be a ‘big man’ – the fan club provides a way to display oneself as a fan. The appreciation of other fans, so the assessment of what a fan should be, lies in the surrounding activities, from making images together on walls, connecting to your new spouse with a common interest, to spending money and time on neighbourhood activities during set moments of time. This shows that the appreciation of a star is more than the star itself, a main argument of this book. The fan experience that has been subject of this book has transformed, faded, dis- and reappeared and been commodified just as the films and actors to which fans relate. So fans do not necessarily want a particular hero-type (the scientist hero of Enthiran) to disappear; nor do they completely reject the commodification of the star, as after all many fans expressed pride that Rajinikanth was internationally famous for this film. Fans instead have a far more complex and ambiguous position, one that looks both forward and back. In other words, the appreciation of a star and the films in which he is acting cannot be predicted by the star himself or film itself. The figure of the fan or the postcard fan experience is now also an experience of nostalgia and sought after by others than the ‘fan audience’ itself. For the film Kabali (Pa Ranjith 2016), Air Asia, official sponsor of the film,

236 

Intimate Visualities and the Politics of Fandom in India

offered total packages including flights from Bengaluru, breakfast, and film screening to those who could afford it.120 Companies booked cinemas for their employees and other employers gave their employees a day off on the first-day release, which is happening more and more. While I do not want to suggest that corporate film experiences take over the film release, it is at least suggestive about how film audiences are changing. Lakshmi Srinivas has observed that a section of the f ilm audience in Bangalore prefers the single-screen cinema as a space where one experiences ‘the electric atmosphere’ in contrast to the multiplex as sterile space (L. Srinivas 2016, 235). The fan experience here is not only observed from the outside as fanatical behaviour but is sought after, performed, and experienced by upper-middle-class men and women (see also L. Srinivas 2010, 2016). In this way, the spectacle of fandom has been commodified, to the partial exclusion of fan spectacle itself. Moreover it has become an object of nostalgia on the part of the middle class and middle-aged people taking their teenage daughters to the multiplex. And to still see a part of the real fan performance one visits the cinema where such performances takes place. People visit the peri-urban cinemas or those on the city outskirts such as Rohini where Petta and Viswasam were released and where the ‘real’ fan show still takes place. Here, the figure of the fan is not, as I argued in Chapter 1, the observed figure who shapes the larger film experience in Tamil Nadu; rather it is the fan as figure that must be re-enacted to experience the authentic film release. What is sought after is again a sort of ‘postcard’ fandom – be enthusiastic but within certain limits and without the surrounding practices that would make fandom earlier. It takes over an idea of the past of the cinema and fandom in Tamil Nadu, without linking it to the political frame through which fans are usually seen and discussed. In a similar fashion, Simbu’s video in which he asked his fans to behave as typical fans, was according to him a reaction to a comment he received about not having enough fans. In other words, he needed proof of his worth as a star by having fans who act like fans through ‘typical’ performance: erecting cutouts and performing milk abishekams. The commodification and mimicry of the fan has come to stand for the film experience. The third transformation that I have signposted above lies in the materiality of the media itself. During the release of Petta and Viswasam, I observed dozens of phones lighting up; as soon as a group of men performed ‘typical’ fan behaviour, people flocked together to watch and capture such 120 It is not very common to have a company sponsoring a film, hence this sponsorship has been covered repeatedly in the Tamil and Indian media.

Epilogue

237

performances. During the screening, various men came out of the cinema hall again, phone in hand, to share their smartphone footage of scenes from the film with their friends outside and in cyberspace. Scenes were watched again, commented upon, and sent via WhatsApp. The phone was now part and parcel of the release, there to record the figure of the fan and the first glimpses of the star. It indicates a new iteration of the older desire to perform one’s fandom and relationship with the star, but it also brings something new as the live mediation of star and oneself through a smartphone video camera and to a virtual audience brings a certain immediacy with it. It was now part of the experience of the first-day first show, and this opens up a new path of investigation. How would a digital environment bring about the closeness that fans seek as I described in Chapter 2? If altered images are more easily made with the many apps available, and images are more easily shared, what does that do to the attraction to f ilm stars? If images are more to manipulate, adapt, and share through many apps and smartphone archives than they are through photo albums, then what does this do to cinephilia? How does an app like TikTok,121 which allows users to record 15-second lip-synced videos, change the mimicry and intimacy that fans perform? If fan experience goes online, what will be the position of the cinema? And if images are no longer material, how do fans relate to their star? This seems like an even larger change than the switch from painted murals to digitally designed flex banners. All these questions must await future study. But the ways in which male and female fans use apps like TikTok to connect with both a star and with broader networks of fans, family, and friends might be taken as a preliminary case study for the ways in which modern social media and digital technology are reshaping fandom. 121 TikTok is a Chinese app that since 2017 has become increasingly popular in Tamil Nadu. First mostly teenagers used the app, but now I have observed more and more people from young to old who use it. One can record and share one’s videos and follow those of others. The lip-synchronization feature makes it possible to act and dance in scenes from films or popular songs. My current research on the app shows that it allows people, specif ically women, to pursue dreams that they would otherwise not be able to express or see themselves in. The app opens up a space for creativity and mimicry within the safe space of your home but by sharing it, it allows others to see you ‘as a star’. Stories circulate about people being spotted by the film industry and who are now acting in films, and older housemakers who now have popular videos that everyone watches. The app is much criticized within popular discourse and in the political arena as the Information Technology Minister of Tamil Nadu M. Manikandan announced that he would ban the app and PMK leader Ramadoss (who also critiqued Rajinikanth for smoking, see Chapter 1) also demanded a ban because of the app. Both political figures argued that the app is against the cultural values of Tamil Nadu.

238 

Intimate Visualities and the Politics of Fandom in India

New media, new politics? These transformations echo a parallel ambivalent political moment. Public images, as ubiquitously displayed in Tamil Nadu’s public spaces, have been recently (briefly) banned again. After a resident of a neighbourhood in Chennai lodged a complaint against a political party flag pole and banner blocking the entrance of her house, she was allegedly threatened by the party worker responsible for the object and later threatened by the local police inspector to file a complaint she would be registered under the provisions of the Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes (Prevention of Atrocities) Act of 1989 (The Hindu 25 October 2017; The Indian Express 25 October 2017).122 When the woman went to the Madras High Court, the judge ordered: ‘If at all any permission is given by the authority concerned for erecting banners, flex boards, signboards, etc., the authority concerned shall ensure that the photographs or pictures of such persons who are alive shall not be depicted by way of those banners, flex boards, signboards etc.’ (The Indian Express 2017). In other words, both living politicians and those sponsoring the banners were not allowed to be put on display. I am not sure if it is a coincidence, but since Jayalalitha had recently passed away and since the AIADMK was still in power, it would not affect the public display of Jayalalitha herself. However, soon after, this order was revoked, and posters and banners displayed the images of fan and politicians again as if nothing happened. But where banners and posters for personal use in public are ever present, for instance for birthdays, weddings, or ear-piercing functions (Chapter 4), the use of political images and fan images are on the wane (Chapter 5). In 2019, many of the fans who had, a decade before, enthusiastically produced and collected images of Rajinikanth said that it no longer seemed worth it to invest in murals, banners, or cutouts. Growing older, they had partly grown out of the fan practices they engaged in during the early 2000s. Moreover, the political future they had counted on, had not turned out as they desired. In addition, with the end of a conspicuous generation of cine-politics with the passing of Karunanidhi and Jayalalitha, no one has emerged as a clear heir to either, at least not one with the popularity or iconic status as those two figures. It is an ambivalent political moment, where no one seems to dare to predict what the future political landscape 122 While it is not entirely clear from the newspaper articles why the complainant was threatened with the Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes (Prevention of Atrocities) Act, I presume it was a way to mark caste distinctions and use this distinction as leeway to prevent her from pursuing her complaint.

Epilogue

239

of Tamil Nadu will look like. The Dravidian politics and the personality politics appear to be at their narrative end. Possible new cine-politicians as Kamal Hassan and Rajinikanth have announced their entry, and it is already clear that the actors are not necessarily relying on their fan base. However, they are famous actors, so regardless of whether they are reaching out to non-fan support – there is still a link between politics and cinema. While Rajini’s election programme remains to be announced, Kamal Hassan already proclaimed that he wants to reclaim the dignity of Tamil politics, removing casteism and irregularities in government machinery, promoting secularism, and ecological preservation, among other goals. Are these actors addressing new audiences, beyond communal ties and beyond fans? Is such politics going beyond the Dravidian political discourse of DMK and AIADMK politics as we knew it? Is the audience for these actors changing, just as the cinema hall and the experience of film? And would that mean that the image politics of Tamil Nadu would lose momentum? We cannot assume a repetition of the ways in which the image was so ever-present in the political practice by fans and local party workers (Gerritsen 2013). Images come and go, gain power or lose ground, practices fade; new ones grow, appear, and transform. They exist parallel to each other, indicating different desires, dreams, strategies that find expression in the visual or the visual finding new forms of usage. What I have tried to show in this book is how images of stars, as they have been taken up, related to, worshipped, dismissed, recreated, looked at, created, stored, or dreamed about, create as well as challenge the star and the fan. All the chapters have prefigured various shifts and transformations. First, the life trajectories of fans typically move from cinematic desires to political aspirations, and end in fatigue. Second, the book has followed the materiality of images as they fluctuate due to technological changes and the ways in which these images have conveyed and transformed fan desires and aspirations. And third, these pages have traced the varied and changing notions of what fandom looks like and should be. I have noted the fatigue of fans for the investments made by them, and their frustrations over the lack of reward. Finally, this epilogue has reflected on generational changes as fans in their forties and fifties have headed into different directions, while others are still waiting for their moment of fame, younger fans reinventing the fan show, but not necessarily as part of the fan club. Within a history of cine-political infusions this book shows how despite the strong connections between the fields of cinema and politics, and despite the expressed wish of the fans for Rajini’s entry into electoral politics, such an understanding does not help to understand the investments of fans in

240 

Intimate Visualities and the Politics of Fandom in India

their stars cannot be reduced to merely politics, or even cine-politics. While we cannot understand fan club participations without taking into account the specific socio-historic context of Tamil cinema and political practice, we cannot restrict fan practice merely into such a political context. Fan clubs, as argued in Chapter 3, are environments where political possibilities exist but are not necessarily an outcome of fan activity. The ambiguity of politicking and assessing others in terms of the investments put in the fan club show how the affect or relationship that fans establish with their star is first of all subject to time and person and therefore changing accordingly. These affects are mediated, but what they mediate is also subject to the same interdependencies of time, place, and person. Therefore, if the image ecologies transform or are recreated, moulded into new technologies, materialities, and forms, they go hand in hand with new affects and subjectivities. It remains to be seen how fans of Rajinikanth relate to the new political futures of star, fan, and Tamil Nadu at large. And let’s see how the glowing screens of TikTok and WhatsApp or any other ‘new’ technology creates new kinds of affective modes of mediation. Once more, my aim is not to end this conclusion on a nostalgic note, prefiguring the disappearance of fandom as it once was. Fans still celebrate, fans still do politicking, and fans put up images on display. Instead, the sketches allow us to see the transformative nature of such practices, which prompts us to reimagine the desires, ambitions, and narratives of fandom. They prompt us to reimagine the layered articulations of fandom on display.

References Abraham, Janaki. 2010. ‘Wedding Videos in North Kerala: Technologies, Rituals, and Ideas about Love and Conjugality’. Visual Anthropology Review 26 (2): 116-127. Adorno, T., and M. Horkheimer. 2007. ‘The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception’. In Stardom and Celebrity: A Reader, edited by Sean Redmond and Su Holmes, 34-43. London: Sage. Agha, Asif. 2005. ‘Voice, Footing, Enregisterment’. Journal of Linguistic Anthropology 15 (1): 38-59. —. 2007. Language and Social Relations. Vol. 24. Cambridge; New York: Cambridge University Press. Alpers, Svetlana. 1991. ‘The Museum as a Way of Seeing’. In Exhibiting Cultures: The Poetics and Politics of Museum Display, edited by Ivan Karp and Steven Lavine, 25-32. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press. Anderson, Benedict. 1978. ‘Cartoons and Monuments: The Evolution of Political Communication under the New Order’. In Political Power and Communications in Indonesia, edited by Karl D. Jackson and Lucian W. Pye, 282-321. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. —. 1991. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. London: Verso. Ang, Ien. 1991. Desperately Seeking the Audience. London: Routledge. Anjaria, Jonathan Shapiro, and Ursula Rao. 2014. ‘Talking Back to the State: Citizens’ Engagement after Neoliberal Reform in India’. Social Anthropology 22 (4): 410-427. Appadurai, Arjun. 1990. ‘Topographies of the Self: Praise and Emotion in Hindu India’. In Language and the Politics of Emotion, edited by Catherine Lutz and Lila Abu-Lughod, 92-112. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. —. 1996. Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. —. 2001. ‘Deep Democracy: Urban Governmentality and the Horizon of Politics’. Environment and Urbanization 13 (2): 23-43. —, and Carol A. Breckenridge. 1992. ‘Museums Are Good to Think: Heritage on View in India’. In Museums and Communities: The Politics of Public Culture, edited by Ivan Karp, 34-55. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press. Arabindoo, Pushpa. 2007. ‘A Class Act: Bourgeois Ordering of Public Spaces in Chennai’. In British Association of South Asian Studies Annual Conference and AGM 2005. Vol. 20. Athique, Adrian. 2009. ‘Leisure Capital in the New Economy: The Rapid Rise of the Multiplex in India’. Contemporary South Asia 17 (2): 123-140. —. 2011. ‘From Cinema Hall to Multiplex: A Public History’. South Asian Popular Culture 9 (2): 147-160. Attali, Jacques. 1985. Noise: The Political Economy of Music. Vol. 16. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Babb, Lawrence A. 1981. ‘Glancing: Visual Interaction in Hinduism’. Journal of Anthropological Research 37 (4): 387-401. —. 1983. ‘The Physiology of Redemption’. History of Religions 22 (4): 293-312. —. 1986. Redemptive Encounters: Three Religious Movements in Modern Hindu Tradition. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Bailey, Frederick George. 1963. Politics and Social Change: Orissa in 1959. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Barker, Joshua, and Johan Lindquist. 2009. ‘Figures of Indonesian Modernity’. Indonesia, 87: 35-72.

242 

Intimate Visualities and the Politics of Fandom in India

Barthes, Roland. 1981. Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography. New York, NY: Hill and Wang. Baskaran, S. Theodore. 1996. The Eye of the Serpent: An Introduction to Tamil Cinema. Madras: East West Books. —. 2008. The Message Bearers: The Nationalist Politics and the Entertainment Media in South India, 1880-1945. Chennai: Oxygen Books. Bate, Bernard. 2002. ‘Political Praise in Tamil Newspapers: The Poetry and Iconography of Democratic Power’. In Everyday Life in South Asia, 308-25. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. —. 2009. Tamil Oratory and the Dravidian Aesthetic: Democratic Practice in South India. New York, NY: Columbia University Press. Baudrillard, Jean. 1994. Simulacra and Simulation. Michigan, MI: University of Michigan Press. Bazin, André, and Hugh Gray. 1960. ‘The Ontology of the Photographic Image’. Film Quarterly 13 (4): 4-9. Beelen, Karl, Roos Gerritsen, and A. Srivathsan. 2010. ‘Climbing up the Rank Ladder’. Monu: Magazine on Urbanism, 2010. Belting, Hans. 2005. ‘Image, Medium, Body: A New Approach to Iconology’. Critical Inquiry 31. Benjamin, Walter. 1969. ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’. In Illuminations, edited by Hannah Arendt, 217-52. New York, NY: Schocken Books. Berenschot, Ward. 2010. ‘Everyday Mediation: The Politics of Public Service Delivery in Gujarat, India’. Development and Change 41 (5): 883-905. Bhatia, Nandi. 2004. Acts of Authority, Acts of Resistance: Theater and Politics in Colonial and Postcolonial India. Michigan, MI: University of Michigan Press. Bhatti, Shaila, and Christopher Pinney. 2011. ‘Optic-Clash: Modes of Visuality in India’. In A Companion to the Anthropology of India, 223-40. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell. Blamey, David, and Robert D’Souza. 2005. Living Pictures: Perspectives on the Film Poster in India. London: Open Editions. Boeck, Filip de, and Marie-Françoise Plissart. 2004. Kinshasa: Tales of the Invisible City. Antwerpen: Ludion. Boorstin, D.J. 1992. The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America. New York, NY: Vintage Books. Bourdieu, Pierre. 1984. Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste. Translated by Richard Nice. 2002 ed. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Brosius, Christiane. 2010. India’s Middle Class: New Forms of Urban Leisure, Consumption and Prosperity. New Delhi: Routledge. Buck-Morss, Susan. 1989. The Dialectics of Seeing: Walter Benjamin and the Arcades Project. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Burchell, Graham, and Michel Foucault, eds. 1991. The Foucault Effect: Studies in Governmentality; with Two Lectures and an Interview with Michel Foucault. 1st ed. London [u.a]: Harvester Wheatsheaf. Chatterjee, Partha. 1998. ‘Community in the East’. Economic and Political Weekly, February. —. 2004. Politics of the Governed: Reflections on Popular Politics in Most of the World. New Delhi: Permanent Black. Chopra, Vir K. 1996. Marginal Players in Marginal Assemblies: The Indian MLA. London: Orient Longman. Cody, Francis. 2011. ‘Echoes of the Teashop in a Tamil Newspaper’. Language & Communication 31 (3): 243-254. Davis, R.H. 1997. Lives of Indian Images. New Jersey, NJ: Princeton University Press. Dean, Melanie. 2013. ‘From “Evil Eye” Anxiety to the Desirability of Envy: Status, Consumption and the Politics of Visibility in Urban South India’. Contributions to Indian Sociology 47 (2): 185-216.

References

243

Derné, Steve. 2000. Movies, Masculinity, and Modernity: An Ethnography of Men’s Filmgoing in India. City: Praeger. —, and Lisa Jadwin. 2000. ‘Male Hindi Filmgoers’ Gaze: An Ethnographic Interpretation’. Contributions to Indian Sociology 34 (2): 243-269. Deshpande, Satish. 1998. ‘Hegemonic Spatial Strategies: The Nation-Space and Hindu Communalism in Twentieth-Century India’. Public Culture 10 (2): 249-283. Dhareshwar, Vivek, and R. Srivatsan. 2010. ‘“Rowdy-Sheeters”: An Essay on Subalternity and Politics’. In Subaltern Studies IX: Writings on South Asian History and Society, edited by Shadid Amin and Dipesh Chakravarthy, 201-31. Subaltern Studies, IX. New Delhi: Oxford University Press. Dickey, Sara. 1993a. Cinema and the Urban Poor in South India. Cambridge Studies in Social and Cultural Anthropology. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. —. 1993b. ‘The Politics of Adulation: Cinema and the Production of Politicians in South-India’. Journal of Asian Studies 52 (2): 340-372. —. 1995. ‘Consuming Utopia: Film Watching in Tamil Nadu’. In Consuming Modernity: Public Culture in a South Asian World, edited by Carol A. Breckenridge, 131-56. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. —. 2001. ‘Opposing Faces: Film Star Fan Clubs and the Construction of Class Identities in South India’. In Pleasure and the Nation: The History, Politics and Consumption of Public Culture in India, 2006, 212-46. New Delhi: Oxford University Press. —. 2005. ‘Still “One Man in a Thousand”’. In Living Pictures: Perspectives on the Film Poster in India, 69-78. London: Open Editions. —. 2013. ‘Apprehensions: On Gaining Recognition as Middle Class in Madurai’. Contributions to Indian Sociology 47 (2): 217-243. Doss, Erika. 1999. Elvis Culture: Fans, Faith, & Image. Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas. Dwyer, Rachel. 2000. All You Want Is Money, All You Need Is Love. London: Cassell. —. 2004. ‘De Natte Sari-Sutra: Vestimentaire Erotiek in de Moderne Hindi-Film’. AS Mediatijdschrift, 170: 26-43. —. 2006. Filming the Gods: Religion and Indian Cinema. New York, NY: Routledge. —, and Divia Patel. 2002. Cinema India: The Visual Culture of Hindi Film. London: Reaktion Books. Dyer, Richard. 2002. Only Entertainment. London and New York, NY: Routledge. —. 2004. Heavenly Bodies: Film Stars and Society. London and New York, NY: Routledge. Eck, Diana L. 1981. Darsan: Seeing the Divine Image in India. Focus on Hinduism and Buddhism. Chambersburg, PA: Anima Books. Eco, Umberto. 1990. Travels in Hyperreality. San Diego, CA: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. Edwards, Elizabeth. 2012. ‘Objects of Affect: Photography Beyond the Image’. Annual Review of Anthropology 41 (1): 221-234. Fernandes, Leela. 2006. India’s New Middle Class: Democratic Politics in an Era of Economic Reform. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Fiske, J. 1992. ‘The Cultural Economy of Fandom’. In The Adoring Audience: Fan Culture and Popular Media, edited by L. Lewis, 30-49. New York, NY: Routledge. Forrester, D.B. 1976. ‘Factions and Filmstars – Tamil Nadu Politics since 1971’. Asian Survey 16 (3): 283-296. Fuller, Christopher, Véronique Bénéï, Christopher Fuller, and John Harris, eds. 2001. ‘For an Anthropology of the Modern Indian State’. In The Everyday State and Society in Modern India. London: Hurst & Company. —, and Haripriya Narasimhan. 2006. ‘Information Technology Professionals and the New-Rich Middle Class in Chennai (Madras)’. Modern Asian Studies 41 (01): 121.

244 

Intimate Visualities and the Politics of Fandom in India

Ganti, Tejaswini. 2012. Producing Bollywood: Inside the Contemporary Hindi Film Industry. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Geertz, Clifford. 1973. ‘Thick Description: Toward an Interpretive Theory of Culture’. In The Interpretation of Cultures, edited by Clifford Geertz, 3-29. New York, N.: Basic Books. —. 1998. ‘Deep Hanging Out’, 22 October 1998. Geetha, V., Sirish Rao, and M.P. Dhakshna. 2007. De 9 Emoties van de Indiase Filmreclameborden. Rotterdam: Met & Schilt. Gell, Alfred. 1998. Art and Agency: An Anthropological Theory. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Gerritsen, Roos. 2006. ‘Tamil Wedding Souvenirs of Predictive Love: Future Memories in South India’. Etnofoor 19 (2): 5-22. —. 2013. ‘Canvases of Political Competition: Image Production as Politics in Tamil Nadu, India’. Ethnos, June, 1-26. Ghertner, D. Asher. 2015. Rule by Aesthetics. 1st ed. New Delhi: Oxford University Press. Goffman, Erving. 1978. Encounters. 1st ed. Indianapolis, in: Bobbs-Merrill. —. 1981. Forms of Talk. City: University of Pennsylvania Press. Gopalan, Lalitha. 1997. ‘Coitus Interruptus and Love Story in Indian Cinema’. In Representing the Body: Gender Issues in Indian Art, 124-39. New Delhi: Kali for Women. Gray, Jonathan, Cornel Sandvoss, and C. Lee Harrington, eds. 2007. Fandom: Identities and Communities in a Mediated World. 6. New York, NY: New York University Press. Gregg, Melissa, and Gregory J. Seigworth. 2010. The Affect Theory Reader. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Guha-Thakurta, Tapati. 2003. ‘The Compulsion of Visual Representation in Colonial India’. In Traces of India: Photography, Architecture, and the Politics of Representation, 1850-1900, edited by M.A. Pelizzari, 108-39. Quebec: Canadian Centre for Architecture. Gupta, Akhil. 2012. Red Tape: Bureaucracy, Structural Violence, and Poverty in India. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Hall, Stuart. 1973. Encoding and Decoding in the Television Discourse. Vol. 7. Birmingham: Centre for Cultural Studies, University of Birmingham. Hancock, Mary E. 2008. The Politics of Heritage from Madras to Chennai. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. Hansen, Miriam Bratu. 1999. ‘The Mass Production of the Senses: Classical Cinema as Vernacular Modernism’. Modernism-Modernity 6 (2): 59-77. Hansen, Thomas Blom. 2005. ‘Sovereigns beyond the State: On Legality and Public Authority in India’. In Religion, Violence, and Political Mobilisation in South Asia, edited by Ravinder Kaur, 109-44. New Delhi: Sage Publications. Hardgrave, R.L. 1964. ‘The DMK and the Politics of Tamil Nationalism’. Pacific Affairs 37 (4): 396-411. —. 1973. ‘Politics and the Film in Tamilnadu: The Stars and the DMK’. Asian Survey 13 (3): 288-305. Harrington, C. Lee, and Denise Bielby. 2010. Soap Fans: Pursuing Pleasure and Making Meaning in Everyday Life. Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press. Harriss-White, Barbara. 2003. India Working: Essays on Society and Economy. Vol. 8. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Hawkins, Sophie. 1999. ‘Bordering Realism. The Aesthetics of Sai Baba’s Mediated Universe’. In Image Journeys: Audio-Visual Media and Cultural Change in India, edited by Christiane Brosius and Melissa Butcher, 139-63. New Delhi: Sage Publications. Hills, Matt. 2002. Fan Cultures. London and New York, NY: Routledge. Hirsch, Marianne. 1999. The Familial Gaze. Hanover, NH: University Press of New England.

References

245

Hirschkind, Charles. 2006. The Ethical Soundscape: Cassette Sermons and Islamic Counterpublics. New York, NY: Columbia University Press. Hoek, Lotte. 2013. Cut-Pieces: Celluloid Obscenity and Popular Cinema in Bangladesh. New York, NY: Columbia University Press. Holland, Patricia. 2004. Picturing Childhood: The Myth of the Child in Popular Imagery. London and New York, NY: I.B. Tauris. Hoskins, Janet. 2006. ‘Agency, Biography and Objects’. In Handbook of Material Culture, edited by Christopher Tilley, Keane Webb, Susanne Kuchler, Michael Rowlands, and Patricia Spyer, 74-84. London: Sage Publications. Hughes, Stephen. 1996. ‘The Pre-Phalke Era in South India: Reflections on the Formation of Film Audiences in Madras’. South Indian Studies 2: 161-204. —. 2000. ‘Policing Silent Film Exhibition in Colonial South India’. In Making Meaning in Indian Cinema, edited by Ravi S. Vasudevan, 39-64. New Delhi: Oxford University Press. —. 2006. ‘House Full: Silent Film Genre, Exhibition and Audiences in South India’. The Indian Economic and Social History Review 43 (1): 31-62. Irshick, E.F. 1969. Politics and Social Conflict in South India: The Non-Brahman Movements and Tamil Separatism 1916-1929. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Ivy, Marilyn. 1988. ‘Tradition and Difference in the Japanese Mass Media’. Public Culture 1(1): 21-29. Jacob, Preminda. 1997. ‘From Co-Star to Deity: Popular Representations of Jayalalitha Jayaram’. In Representing the Body: Gender Issues in Indian Art, 140-65. New Delhi: Kali for Women. —. 1998. ‘Media Spectacles: The Production and Reception of Tamil Cinema Advertisements’. Visual Anthropology 11 (4): 287-322. —. 2009. Celluloid Deities: The Visual Culture of Cinema and Politics in South India. New Delhi: Orient Blackswan. Jaffrelot, Christophe, and Peter van der Veer. 2008. Patterns of Middle Class Consumption in India and China. New Delhi: Sage Publications. Jain, Kajri. 2005. ‘Figures of Locality and Tradition: Commercial Cinema and the Network of Visual Print Capitalism in Maharashtra’. In Bollyworld: Popular Indian Cinema Through a Transnational Lens, edited by Raminder Kaur and Ajay J. Sinha, 70-89. New Delhi: Sage Publications. —. 2007. Gods in the Bazaar: The Economies of Indian Calendar Art. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. —. 2016. ‘Gods in the Time of Automobility’. Current Anthropology 58 (S15): S13-26. Jeffrey, Craig. 2010. Timepass: Youth, Class, and the Politics of Waiting in India. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Jenkins, H. 1992. Textual Poachers. New York, NY: Routledge. Jenson, Joli. 1992. ‘Fandom as Pathology: The Consequences of Characterization’. In The Adoring Audience: Fan Culture and Popular Media, edited by Lisa A. Lewis, 9-29. New York, NY: Routledge. K.S. Ravikumar. 1995. Muthu. City: Publisher. Kaviraj, Sudipta. 1988. ‘A Critique of the Passive Revolution’. Economic and Political Weekly 23 (45/47): 2429-2444. —. 1997. ‘Filth and the Public Sphere: Concepts and Practices about Space in Calcutta’. Public Culture 10: 83-114. —. 2010. The Imaginary Institution of India: Politics and Ideas. New York, NY: Columbia University Press.

246 

Intimate Visualities and the Politics of Fandom in India

—, and S. Khilnani. 2001. Civil Society: History and Possibilities. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Kellner, Douglas. 2003. Media Spectacle. New York, NY: Routledge. Kohli, Atul. 1990. Democracy and Discontent: India’s Growing Crisis of Governability. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Kopytoff, Igor. 1988. ‘The Cultural Biography of Things: Commoditization as Process’. In The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective, edited by Arjun Appadurai, 64-94. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Kusno, Abidin. 2010. The Appearances of Memory: Mnemonic Practices of Architecture and Urban Form in Indonesia. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Larkin, Brian. 2008. Signal and Noise: Media, Infrastructure, and Urban Culture in Nigeria. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Latour, Bruno. 2002. ‘What Is Iconoclash? Or Is There a World Beyond the Image Wars?’ In Iconoclash, edited by Peter Weibel and Bruno Latour, 14-37. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Liang, L. 2005. ‘Cinematic Citizenship and the Illegal City’. Inter-Asia Cultural Studies 6 (3): 366-385. Lowenthal, David. 2015. The Past Is a Foreign Country-Revisited. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Madheshiya, Amit, and Shirley Abraham. 2008. ‘Tiled Gods Appear on Mumbai’s Streets’. 2008. http://tasveerghar.net/2008/shirley-amit/. Accessed 13 July 2013. Mankekar, Purnima. 2002. ‘Epic Contests: Television and Religious Identity in India’. In Media Worlds: Anthropology on a New Terrain, edited by Faye Ginsburg, Lila Abu-Lughod, and Brian Larkin, 134-51. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. —. 2004. ‘Dangerous Desires: Television and Erotics in Late Twentieth-Century India’. The Journal of Asian Studies 63 (02): 403-431. Marshall, P. David. 2001. Celebrity and Power: Fame in Contemporary Culture. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. —. 2002. ‘Cinematic Apparatus and the Film Celebrity’. In The Film Cultures Reader, edited by Graeme Turner, 228-40. London and New York, NY: Routledge. Massumi, Brian. 1995. ‘The Autonomy of Affect’. Cultural Critique, 31 (October): 83-109. Mazumdar, Ranjani. 2007a. Bombay Cinema: An Archive of the City. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. —. 2007b. ‘The Bombay Film Poster’. In India’s Popular Culture: Iconic Spaces and Fluid Images, edited by Jyotindra Jain, 90-103. New Delhi: Marg Publications. www.india-seminar. com/2003/525/525%20ranjani%20mazumdar.htm. Mazzarella, William. 2009. ‘Affect: What Is It Good For?’ In Enchantments of Modernity: Empire, Nation, Globalization, edited by Saurabh Dube, 291-309. New Delhi: Routledge. —. 2013. Censorium. Durham [u.a.]: Duke Univ. Press. McKernan, Brian. 2011. ‘Politics and Celebrity: A Sociological Understanding’. Sociology Compass 5 (3): 190-202. McLain, Karline. 2009. India’s Immortal Comic Books. Bloomington [u.a.]: Indiana University Press. Messner, Michael A. 2007. ‘The Masculinity of the Governator: Muscle and Compassion in American Politics’. Gender and Society 21 (4): 461-480. Meyer, Birgit. 2011. ‘Mediating Absence – Effecting Spiritual Presence: Pictures and the Christian Imagination’. Social Research 78 (4): 1029-1056.

References

247

Miller, Daniel. 2005. ‘Introduction’. In Materiality, edited by Daniel Miller. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Mines, Diane P. 2005. Fierce Gods: Inequality, Ritual, and the Politics of Dignity in a South Indian Village. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. —, and Sarah E. Lamb, eds. 2010. Everyday Life in South Asia. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Mines, Mattison. 1994. Public Faces, Private Voices: Community and Individuality in South India. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. —, and V.A. Gourishankar. 1990. ‘Leadership and Individuality in South-Asia – the Case of the South Indian Big-Man’. Journal of Asian Studies 49 (4): 761-786. Mitchell, Lisa. 2009. Language, Emotion, and Politics in South India: The Making of a Mother Tongue. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. Mitchell, W.J.T. 2007. Picture Theory. 6th ed. Chicago, Il [u.a.]: Univ. of Chicago Press. —. 2005a. ‘There Are No Visual Media’. Journal of Visual Culture 4 (2): 257. —. 2005b. What Do Images Want? The Lives and Loves of Images. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Moodie, Deonnie. 2018. The Making of a Modern Temple and a Hindu City: Kalighat and Kolkata. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Morgan, David. 1998. Visual Piety: A History and Theory of Popular Religious Images. Berkeley, CA: University of California press. —. 2005. The Sacred Gaze: Religious Visual Culture in Theory and Practice. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Mulvey, Laura. 1989. Visual and Other Pleasures. Theories of Representation and Difference. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. Munn, Nancy D. 1986. The Fame of Gawa: A Symbolic Study of Value Transformation in a Massim (Papua New Guinea) Society. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Muthiah, S. 2004. Madras Rediscovered. Chennai: EastWest Books (Madras) Pvt. Ltd. Nakassis, Constantine V. 2014. ‘Suspended Kinship and Youth Sociality in Tamil Nadu, India’. Current Anthropology 55 (2): 175-199. —. 2016. Doing Style: Youth and Mass Mediation in South India. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. —. 2017a. ‘Poetics of Praise and Cinematic Encompassment’. In Working Papers of the Chicago Tamil Forum – Poesis/Politics of Language and Place in Tamilagam. —. 2017b. ‘Rajini’s Finger, Indexicality, and the Metapragmatics of Presence.’ Signs and Society 5 (2): 201-242. —. 2018. ‘Indexicality’s Ambivalent Ground’. Signs and Society 6 (1): 281-304. —, and Melanie A. Dean. 2007. ‘Desire, Youth, and Realism in Tamil Cinema’. Journal of Linguistic Anthropology 17 (1): 77-104. Nandy, Ashis. 1998. ‘Introduction: Indian Popular Cinema as a Slum’s Eye View of Politics’. In The Secret Politics of Our Desires: Innocence, Culpability, and Indian Popular Cinema, 1-18. New Delhi: Oxford University Press. Nigam, Aditya. 2001. ‘Dislocating Delhi: A City in the 1990s’. In Sarai Reader 01: The Public Domain, 40-46. Sarai Reader 01. New Delhi and Amsterdam: Sarai: the New Media Initiative, CSDS. Note, Osamu. 2007. ‘Imagining the Politics of the Senses in Public Spaces: Billboards and the Construction of Visuality in Chennai City’. South Asian Popular Culture 5 (2): 129-143. Osella, Caroline, and Filippo Osella. 2004. ‘Young Malayali Men and Their Movie Heroes’. In South Asian Masculinities: Context of Change, Sites of Continuity, edited by Radhika Chopra, 224-63. New Delhi: Women Unlimited.

248 

Intimate Visualities and the Politics of Fandom in India

Pandian, Anand. 2008. ‘Cinema in the Countryside: Popular Tamil Film and the Remaking or Rural Life’. In Tamil Cinema: The Cultural Politics of India’s Other Film Industry, edited by Selvaraj Velayutham, 124-38. New York, NY: Routledge. —. 2015. Reel World: An Anthropology of Creation. Durham, NC [u.a.]: Duke University Press. —. 2017. Reel World. Gurgaon: Penguin Books. Pandian, M.S.S. 1992. The Image Trap M.G. Ramachandran in Film and Politics. New Delhi: Sage Publications. —. 2005a. ‘Picture Lives’. In Living Pictures: Perspectives on the Film Poster in India, edited by David Blamey and Robert D’Souza, 55-62. London: Open Editions. —. 2005b. ‘Void and Memory: Story of a Statue on Chennai Beachfront’. Inter-Asia Cultural Studies 6: 428-31. —. 2007. Brahmin and Non-Brahmin Genealogies of the Tamil Political Present. Delhi: Permanent Black. Pinney, Christopher. 1997. Camera Indica: The Social Life of Indian Photographs. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. —. 2001. ‘Piercing the Skin of the Idol’. In Beyond Aesthetics: Art and the Technologies of Enchantment, edited by Christopher Pinney and Nicholas Thomas, 157-80. Oxford: Berg Publishers. —. 2003. ‘Notes from the Surface of the Image: Photography, Postcolonialism, and Vernacular Modernism’. In Photography’s Other Histories, edited by Christopher Pinney and Nicholas Peterson, 202-20. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. —. 2004. Photos of the Gods the Printed Image and Political Struggle in India. New Delhi: Oxford University Press. —. 2006. ‘Four Types of Visual Culture’. In Handbook of Material Culture, edited by Christopher Tilley, Webb Keane, Susanne Küchler, Michael Rowlands, and Patricia Spyer, 131-44. London: Sage Publications. Pongiyannan, Dhamu. 2015. Film and Politics in India. Film Cultures. Bern; Berlin; Frankfurt am Main; Vienna [u.a.]: Peter Lang. Poole, Deborah. 1997. Vision, Race, and Modernity; A Visual Economy of the Andean Image World. New Jersey, NJ: Princeton University Press. Prasad, M. Madhava. 1999. ‘Cine-Politics: On the Political Significance of Cinema in South India’. Journal of the Moving Image 1: 37-52. —. 2014. Cine-Politics: Film Stars and Political Existence in South India. New Delhi: Orient Blackswan. Price, Pamela. 1996. ‘Revolution and Rank in Tamil Nationalism’. The Journal of Asian Studies 55 (2): 359-383. Punathambekar, Aswin. 2007. ‘Between Rowdies and Rasikas: Rethinking Fan Activity in Indian Film Culture’. In Fandom: Identities and Communities in a Mediated World, edited by J. Gray, C. Sandvoss, and C.L Harrington, 37:198-209. 6. New York, NY: New York University Press. Rajadhyaksha, Ashish, ed. 2009. Indian Cinema in the Time of Celluloid: From Bollywood to the Emergency. New Delhi: Tulika. Rajagopal, Arvind. 2001. Politics after Television: Religious Nationalism and the Reshaping of the Indian Public. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Rajanayagam, S. 2015. Popular Cinema and Politics in South India. New Delhi [u.a.]: Routledge. Ramaswamy, Sumathi. 1997. Passions of the Tongue Language Devotion in Tamil India, 1891-1970. Studies on the History of Society and Culture. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. —. 1998. Passions of the Tongue: Language Devotion in Tamil India, 1891-1970. New Delhi: Munshiram Manoharlal Publishers.

References

249

—, ed. 2003. Beyond Appearances? Visual Practices and Ideologies in Modern India. Contributions to Indian Sociology Occasional Studies. New Delhi: Sage Publications. —. 2010. The Goddess and the Nation. Mapping Mother India. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Rancière, Jaques. 2006. The Politics of Aesthetics: The Distribution of the Sensible. Translated by Gabriel Rockhill. New York, NY: Continuum. Rao, Sirish, V. Geetha, and Gita Wolf. 2001. An Ideal Boy: Charts from India. Stockport: Dewi Lewis Publishing. Raqs Media Collective. 2002. ‘The Street Is The Carrier And The Sign’. In Sarai Reader 02: The Cities of Everyday Life, edited by Ravi S. Vasudevan, Jeebesh Bagchi, Ravi Sundaram, Monica Narula, Geert Lovink, and Shuddhabrata Sengupta, 93-106. Sarai Reader 02. Delhi, Amsterdam: Sarai: the New Media Initiative, CSDS. Rivers, William H.R. 1968. Kinship and Social Organization. Monographs on Social Anthropology. London [u.a.]: Athlone Press [u.a.]. Rogers, Martyn. 2009. ‘Between Fantasy and ‘Reality’: Tamil Film Star Fan Club Networks and the Political Economy of Film Fandom’. South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies 32 (1): 63-85. —. 2011. ‘From the Sacred to the Performative: Tamil Film Star Fan Clubs, Religious Devotion and the Material Culture of Film Star Portraits’. Journal of Religion and Popular Culture 23 (1): 40-52. Rojek, Chris. 2001. Celebrity. London: Reaktion Books. Rowlands, Michael, and Christopher Tilley. 2006. ‘Monuments and Memorials’. In Handbook of Material Culture, edited by Christopher Tilley, Webb Keane, Susanne Küchler, Michael Rowlands, and Patricia Spyer, 500-515. London: Sage Publications. Scott, J.C. 1998. Seeing like a State. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Searle, Llerena Guiu. 2016. Landscapes of Accumulation. Chicago, IL; London: The University of Chicago Press. Sivathamby, Karthigesu. 1981. The Tamil film as a medium of political communication. Madras: New Century Book House. Spencer, Jonathan. 1997. ‘Post-Colonialism and the Political Imagination’. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 1-19. Spitulnik, Debra. 1993. ‘Anthropology and Mass-Media’. Annual Review of Anthropology 22: 293-315. Spyer, Patricia. 2008a. ‘Blind Faith: Painting Christianity in Postconflict Ambon’. Edited by Charles Hirschkind and Brian Larkin. Social Text 96 26 (3): 11-38. —. 2008b. ‘Christ at Large: Iconography and Territoriality in Postwar Ambon’. In Religion: Beyond a Concept, edited by Hent De Vries and Samuel Weber, 524-49. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. —, and Mary Margaret Steedly. 2013. Images That Move. Santa Fe, NM: School for Advanced Research. Srinivas, Lakshmi. 2010. ‘Ladies Queues, “Roadside Romeos”, and Balcony Seating: Ethnographic Observations on Women’s Cinema-Going Experiences’. South Asian Popular Culture 8 (3): 291-307. —. 2016. House Full: Indian Cinema and the Active Audience. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Srinivas, S.V. 1999. ‘Gandhian Nationalism and Melodrama in the 30’s Telugu Cinema’. Journal of the Moving Image 1 (1): 14-36. —. 2003. ‘Film Culture, Politics and Industry’. Seminar 525: 47-51. —. 2005. ‘Devotion and Deviance in Fan Activity’. In Making Meaning in Indian Cinema, edited by Ravi S. Vasudevan, 297-317. New Delhi: Oxford University Press. —. 2007. ‘Is There a Public in the Cinema Hall?’ www.sarai.net/mediacity/f ilmcity/essays/ srinivas.htm.

250 

Intimate Visualities and the Politics of Fandom in India

—. 2009. Megastar: Chiranjeevi and Telugu Cinema after N.T. Rama Rao. New Delhi: Oxford University Press. —. 2016. ‘Rajinikanth and the “Regional Blockbuster”’. In Chicago Tamil Forum. Srivastava, Sanjay. 2009. ‘Urban Spaces, Disney-Divinity and Moral Middle Classes in Delhi’. Economic & Political Weekly 44: 26-27. Srivathsan, A. 2000. ‘Politics, Popular Icons and Urban Space in Tamil Nadu’. In Twentieth-Century Indian Sculpture: The Last Two Decades, edited by Shivaji K. Panikkar, 108-17. Mumbai: Marg Publications. Stern, Karen B. 2018. Writing on the Wall: Graffiti and the Forgotten Jews of Antiquity. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Stewart, Kathleen. 2007. Ordinary Affects. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Strassler, Karen. 2010. Refracted Visions: Popular Photography and National Modernity in Java. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Subramanian, Narendra. 1999. Ethnicity and Populist Mobilization: Political Parties, Citizens, and Democracy in South India. New Delhi: Oxford University Press. Sundaram, Ravi. 2009. Pirate Modernity: Delhi’s Media Urbanism. 1st ed. New Delhi: Routledge. Swaminathan, Roopa. 2004. Star Dust: Vignettes from the Fringes of the Film Industry. New Delhi: Penguin Books India. Tarlo, Emma. 1996. Clothing Matters: Dress and Identity in India. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Tartakov, Gary Michael. 2000. ‘The Politics of Art: Maharashtra’. In Twentieth-Century Indian Sculpture: The Last Two Decades, 100-107. Mumbai: Marg Publications. Taussig, Michael. 1993. Mimesis and Alterity: A Particular History of the Senses. London and New York, N.Y.: Routledge. Taylor, Woodman. 2003. ‘Penetrating Gazes: The Poetics of Sight and Visual Display in Popular Indian Cinema’. In Beyond Appearances? Visual Practices and Ideologies in Modern India, edited by Sumathi Ramaswamy, 297-322. New Delhi: Sage Publications. Thimsen, A. Freya. 2010. ‘Populist Celebrity in the Election Campaigns of Jesse Ventura and Arnold Schwarzenegger’. The Velvet Light Trap 65 (1): 44-57. Thomas, Rosie. 1985. ‘Indian Cinema: Pleasures and Popularity.’ Screen 26 (3/4): 116-131. —. 1989. ‘Sanctity and Scandal: The Mythologization of Mother India’. Quarter Review of Film and Video 11: 11-30. —. 1995. ‘Melodrama and the Negotiation of Morality in Mainstream Hindi Film’. In Consuming Modernity: Public Culture in a South Asian World, edited by Carol A. Breckenridge, 157-82. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Thoraval, Yves. 2000. The Cinemas of India. Delhi: Macmillan India. Trawick, Margaret. 1990. Notes on Love in a Tamil Family. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Uberoi, Patricia. 1990. ‘Feminine Identity and National Ethos in Indian Calendar Art’. Economic and Political Weekly (25) 17: 41-48. —. 2006. Freedom and Destiny: Gender, Family, and Popular Culture in India. New Delhi: Oxford University Press. Ulrich, Katherine. n.d. ‘Diet and Deities: Food Themes in Indic Religions’. Unpublished manuscript. Vāsanti. 2006. Cut-Outs, Caste, and Cine Stars: The World of Tamil Politics. New Delhi: Penguin Books India. Vasudevan, Ravi. 2003. ‘Cinema in Urban Space’. www.india-seminar.com. —. 2004. ‘Disreputable and Illegal Publics: Cinematic Allegories in Times of Crisis’. In Sarai Reader 04: Crisis/Media, edited by Monica Narula, Shuddhabrata Sengupta, Ravi Sundaram,

References

251

Ravi S. Vasudevan, Awadhanedra Sharan, Jeebesh Bagchi, and Geert Lovink, 71-79. New Delhi and Amsterdam: Sarai: The New Media Initiative, CSDS. Velayutham, Selvaraj. 2008. Tamil Cinema: The Cultural Politics of India’s Other Film Industry. New York, NY: Routledge. Warner, Michael. 2002. Publics and Counterpublics. New York, NY: Zone Books. Widlund, Ingrid. 1993. A Vote for MGR: Transaction and Devotion in South Indian Politics. Uppsala: Uppsala University. —. 2000. Paths to Power and Patterns of Influence the Dravidian Parties in South Indian Politics. Acta Universitatis Upsaliensis Skrifter Utgivna Av Statsvetenskapliga Foreningen i Uppsala. Uppsala, Sweden: Uppsala Universitet. Williams, Raymond. 1974. Television: Technology and Cultural Form. London and New York, NY: Routledge. Zukin, Sharon. 1995. The Cultures of Cities. Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell.

Films A.M. Rathnam (Producer), & Perarasu (Director). 2006. Dharmapuri [Motion Picture]. Chennai. A. Subaskaran (Producer), & S. Shankar (Director). 2019. 2.0 [Motion Picture]. Chennai. Kalaipuli S. Thanu (Producer), & Pa Ranjith (Director). 2016. Kabali [DVD]. Chennai. Kalanithi Maran (Producer), & Karthik Subbaraj (Director). 2019. Petta [Motion Picture]. Chennai. —, & S. Shankar (Director). 2010. Endhiran [Motion Picture]. Chennai. MacDougall, David & Judith MacDougall (Producers), & David MacDougall (Director). 1991. Photo wallahs [DVD]. London: Royal Anthropological Institute. M.S. Guhan & M. Saravanan (Producer), & S. Shankar (Director). 2007. Sivaji: The Boss [Motion Picture]. Chennai. Puspha Kandasamy (Producer), & Suresh Krishna (Director). 1992. Annamalai [DVD]. Chennai. Rajinikanth (Producer), & Suresh Krishna (Director). 2002. Baba [DVD]. Chennai. Ramkumar Ganesan (Producer), & P. Vasu (Director). 2005. Chandramukhi [DVD]. Chennai. R. Venkataraman (RMS Films) (Producer), & K. Balachander (Director). 1976. Moondru Mudichu [DVD]. Chennai. R.M. Veerappan (Producer), & Suresh Krishna (Director). 1995. Baadsha [DVD]. Chennai. T.G. Thiyagarajan, Sendhil Thiyagarajan & Arjun Thiyagarajan (Producers), & Siva (Director). 2019. Viswasam [Motion Picture]. Chennai.

Secondary sources Adlabs News post on Reliance website posted on 13 June 2008, www.rbe.co.in/news-adlabs-8. html. Accessed 11 July 2012. ‘After Simbu Tells Fans to Pour Pots of Milk on His Cut-Outs, Milk Dealers Approach Commissioner for Protection’. n.d. The New Indian Express. www.newindianexpress.com/entertainment/ tamil/2019/jan/23/after-simbu-tells-fans-to-pour-pots-of-milk-on-his-cut-outs-milk-dealersapproach-commissioner-for-1929119.html. Accessed 4 February 2019.

252 

Intimate Visualities and the Politics of Fandom in India

Cody, Francis. 2017. ‘Is There a Future for Film Stars in Tamil Politics?’ 14 October 2017. https:// thewire.in/film/future-film-stars-tamil-politics. Accessed 14 October 2017. Film posters. http://cbfcindia.gov.in/html/uniquepage.aspx?unique_page_id=4.html. Accessed 16 April 2010. Iyengar, Pushpa. 2009. ‘Chennai Corner’. Outlook India, 19 March 2009. www.outlookindia.com/ article.aspx?239993. Accessed 23 March 2009. ‘Laws of India: The Tamil Nadu Open Places (Prevention of Disfigurement) Act, 1959’. n.d. http:// lawsofindia.org/statelaw/5384/TheTamilNaduOpenPlacesPreventionofDisfigurementAct1959. html. Accessed 27 February 2019. Menon, Sadanand. 2010. ‘Flip That Ciggie’. Outlookindia. 18 October 2010. www.outlookindia. com/article.aspx?267389. Accessed 19 October 2010. Pillai, Sreedhar. 2016. ‘Out with the Old’. The Hindu, 27 February 2016, sec. Cinema. https:// www.thehindu.com/features/cinema/how-film-distribution-has-changed-with-times-inkollywood/article8289535.ece. Accessed 13 March 2017. —. 2019. ‘Will the Real Kollywood Fan Please Stand Up?’ The Hindu, 1 February 2019, sec. Movies. https://www.thehindu.com/entertainment/movies/will-the-real-kollywood-fan-pleasestand-up/article26146973.ece. Accessed 1 February 2019. Ravikumar, R. 2010. ‘Rajini Mania Grips Chennai as Enthiran Hits Screens’. Newspaper. Business Line: The Hindu. 1 October 2010. www.thehindubusinessline.com/todays-paper/article1005646. ece?ref=archive. Accessed 1 October 2010. S.V. Srinivas. 2013. ‘Hero Worship’. Frontline, 18 October 2013. Sivarajah, Padmini. 2016. ‘Women Panchayat Presidents Hail 50% Reservation – Times of India’. The Times of India. 21 February 2016. https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/city/madurai/ Women-panchayat-presidents-hail-50-reservation/articleshow/51074944.cms. Accessed 10 February 2019. Staff reporter. 2019. ‘Double Delight for Fans as Petta, Viswasam Release’. The Hindu, 11 January 2019, Chennai edition, sec. Chennai. The Hindu. 2017. ‘HC Cracks down on Hoardings, Flex Boards’. 25 October 2017, sec. TAMIL NADU. https://www.thehindu.com/todays-paper/tp-national/tp-tamilnadu/hc-cracks-down-onhoardings-flex-boards/article19915255.ece. Accessed 10 December 2018. The Indian Express. 2017. ‘Madras High Court Bans Photos of Living Persons on Banners’. 25 October 2017. https://indianexpress.com/article/india/madras-high-court-bans-photosof-living-persons-on-banners-4905172/. Accessed 10 December 2019. Virus. 2009. In Merriam-Webster Online Dictionary. http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/virus. Retrieved 29 April 2009.

Index abhishekam 55, 64, 74, 76-79, 225 ads 182, 189, 205, 216; see advertisement advertisement 204, 215, 217-219 after-effects 24, 172, 183 agency 21, 23-24, 31, 36, 39, 45, 112-113, 118, 134, 136, 138-139, 187, 191 Agha, Asif 65-66, 89 Agila India Rajinikanth Rasigar Manram see AIRFC AIADMK 30, 33-34, 43, 115, 117, 138, 145-147, 150-151, 197, 212, 219-220, 224, 227, 238 AIRFC 67-69, 107, 164 Ajith 27, 60, 225 All India Anna Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam see AIADMK All India Anna Dravidian Progressive Party see AIADMK All India Rajinikanth Fan Club see AIRFC Amar Chitra Katha 198-200 ambiguity 22-23, 62, 65, 113-114, 146, 154, 240 Amitabh Bachchan 59, 79, 103 Anderson, Benedict 211 Andhra Pradesh 28, 69, 147 Armbrust, Walter 74 aspiration 193, 195 banner 20, 23, 30, 41, 47, 49-50, 52-54, 70-73, 78, 102, 115, 119, 121, 124, 131-132, 135, 149-150, 158-162, 164-167, 169, 171-172, 174-179, 181-184, 187, 190, 198, 201, 210, 212-222, 224-226, 232-233, 235, 237-238 Banner artist 162, 168-169, 171 Barthes, Roland 105, 113 Baskaran, Theodore 29 Bate, Bernard 29, 137-138, 152, 163-164, 167, 175, 192, 196, 205, 211 beautification 52, 54, 189, 190-193, 195-199, 201, 204, 206, 208-209, 211-213, 222, 224, 230 Benjamin, Walter 44, 112 Bhatti, Shaila 44, 159 big man 34, 124, 127-129, 132, 136-138, 145, 152, 166, 178, 235 billboard 78, 106, 157, 162, 172-173, 176-177, 181, 212 Bollywood 25, 59 Bourdieu 36, 62, 64 Brahmin see caste calendar 45, 86, 95, 167, 176, 198, 202 calendar art 176, 198, 202 caste caste hierarchies 117 caste-specific fan clubs 26 Dalit 140 celebrity 22, 28, 32, 39, 47, 60, 62, 94-95

charisma 23, 26, 31, 60, 129 Chatterjee, Partha 194 Chennai 14, 20, 24, 27-28, 43, 47-50, 54, 67-69, 92, 94, 120, 134-135, 144, 147, 164, 183, 189-194, 196-201, 203-204, 206-212, 216-220, 224-225, 229-230, 238, 241 Chief Minister 28, 115-116, 165, 212, 219-220 cinephilia 21-22, 61, 237 cine-politics 28, 31, 40, 57, 190, 238, 240 class 24, 26, 28-29, 35-36, 48, 54, 57, 61-62, 64-65, 74, 79, 83, 102, 117, 120, 128, 130, 133-134, 154, 193-195, 203-204, 208, 210, 213, 219, 223, 229-230, 236 lower class 128 middle class 133, 194-195, 210 C.N. Annadurai 29 Coimbatore 41, 190 coming-of-age ceremony 115-116, 147 compound wall 157, 207 corpothetics 45, 47, 76, 110 cutout 19-20, 24, 30, 46-47, 50-51, 70, 72-73, 78, 157, 159-160, 162, 164, 167-168, 175, 177, 196, 211, 215-216, 220-221, 224-226, 232, 236, 238 Danush 60 darshan 43-45, 76 de Certeau, Michel 71 design studio 162, 164, 169 digital design 159, 171, 175 DMDK 33, 149-150, 227 DMK 29-30, 33-34, 143, 150, 178, 180-181, 192, 196-197, 211-212, 218-222, 224, 227, 239 Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam see DMK Dravidian 29, 31, 89, 117, 191-192, 196, 198, 211, 239, 251 Dravidian movement 29 Dravidian Progress Party see DMK Dwyer, Rachel 44 Dyer, Richard 22, 38, 40 ear-piercing ceremony 75, 77, 180 electoral politics 23, 26, 28, 31, 34-35, 118, 151, 153-154, 227, 239 enthusiasm 14, 16, 44, 61, 66, 74, 150-151, 229, 232 ephemeral 21, 48, 184, 196, 211 ephemerality see ephemeral E.V. Ramaswamy 29 excess 37, 56-57, 62, 80, 83, 117, 224 fame 29, 47, 117-118, 128-129, 132, 134, 137, 139, 142, 148, 152-154, 177, 193, 202, 226, 239, 247 Family pictures 95 fanatic 83; see fanaticism fan subjectivities 13, 21-23, 35, 37 female fan clubs 29, 121, 166

254 

Intimate Visualities and the Politics of Fandom in India

Ferguson, James 62 figure of the fan 22, 52, 54-58, 62-63, 65, 74, 79, 82-83, 118, 131, 137, 190, 210, 235, 237 film audience spectator 100, 102, 111 film audiences 21, 57, 64, 75, 84, 236 film release 25, 55, 70, 74, 92, 121, 162, 165, 178, 228, 236 footing 66 gender 35, 51 framed photos 88, 95-96 futurity 117, 136, 153, 155 generation 190 generosity 129, 136 Ghertner, Asher D. 24, 192, 194, 215 Gingee 179-181 Goffman, Erving 65-66, 185 Gudalur 139-141 Hancock, Mary 195-196, 204, 211 hand-painted 23, 165, 167, 170-171, 175 Hansen, Thomas Blom 35-36, 79, 128 hyperreal objects 195

mass hero 26, 39, 60, 72 Mazzarella,William 58, 64, 83-84, 191, 204, 213, 217 Menon, Sadanand 55-56, 74 Meyer, Birgit 43, 45-46, 96 M.G. Ramachandran 28 MGR 28-31, 33, 37, 41, 67, 69-70, 134, 138, 151-152, 167, 211, 217, 224, 227 middle-class 24, 26, 33, 36, 57, 64, 130, 191, 195, 202, 204, 210, 222-223, 229, 236 mimesis 65, 112-113 mimicry 112, 234, 236-237 Mines, Mattison 90, 128-129, 136-138, 148, 163-164, 178 Mitchell, W.J.T. 41, 43-44, 147 M.K. Stalin 193 MLA 122-123, 126-127, 129, 132, 142-143, 235 mobility 21, 23, 36, 42, 139 Mumbai 27-28, 59, 102, 193, 216 Bombay 28 Munn, Nancy 117, 134, 136-137, 152-153, 164, 185 mural 50, 157-158, 164, 183, 192, 198-199, 202-204, 206-208, 219, 222

Nakassis, Constantine 15, 26, 39-40, 44, 59-60, iconical 96 64-65, 71, 74, 76-77, 87-89, 91, 112, 130-131, 137, image politics 123, 187, 191-192, 220, 223-224, 239 152, 154, 173-174, 185-186 immediacy 117, 161, 237 neoliberal 54, 191-192, 195, 204, 210, 223 indexical 39, 65, 93, 96, 104, 107, 109, 170 Paattali Makkal Katchi see PMK Jacob, Preminda 22-23, 29, 43, 47, 160, 167-168, Pandian, Anand 40, 171 171, 196, 216 party cadres 26, 33, 150 Jain, Kajri 15, 23, 41-43, 45, 160, 163, 176, 187 patronage 21, 23, 26, 53, 127, 129-130, 138, 143, 152, Jayalalitha 30-31, 33, 43, 115, 123, 138, 147, 160, 196, 154, 186, 199, 213 219-222, 224, 227, 238 Periyar see E.V. Ramaswamy Jeffrey, Craig 26, 36, 128, 130 personality politics 22, 24, 150, 222, 239 Jenkins, Henry 62, 71-72 photo studio 101, 104, 140 J.P. Krishna 197-199, 203, 206 Pinney, Christopher 15, 21, 41, 43-45, 109-110, 112, 159, 170, 176 Kamal Hassan 17, 32, 60, 70, 79, 101, 121, 168, 227, pissing man, the 58, 64, 83, 213-214, 217 230, 232, 239 PMK 80, 134, 179, 221, 237 Kannagi 198-200, 211 political leader 149-150 Karnataka 25, 28, 146 political subjectivities 23-24, 47 Karunanidhi 33, 180, 193, 197, 212, 222, 227, 238 political supporters 20, 54, 164, 175, 186, 190, 201, keeping in control 58, 80, 82, 117 221 Kerala 27, 139 politician 28, 32, 47, 115, 123, 133, 140, 144, 146, Kodambakkam 25 149, 151, 155, 175, 178, 224 Kolkata 28, 219 politicking 13, 22, 32, 34, 36-38, 41, 46, 53-54, Calcutta 28 117-118, 123, 131, 134, 137, 144, 148, 151-152, 154, Kollywood 25, 59, 227 158, 161, 186-187, 190, 240 Kushboo 27, 131 politics of adulation 22, 191-192 Pondicherry see Puducherry Madhava Prasad 28, 45 posters 19, 21, 23, 34, 40, 47-49, 52-53, 80, 85-86, Madras 19, 28, 63, 147, 218, 238 95-96, 103, 119, 121, 124, 131, 140, 157, 159, Madras Presidency 19 161-162, 167, 173, 176, 189, 197, 210-212, 214, 217, Madras Province 19 219, 232, 238 Madras State 19 praise 53, 58, 90, 137-138, 143, 146, 152, 173 Madurai 38, 190, 199 Prasad, Madhava 26, 28, 31-32, 35, 39, 45, 60, Mamallapuram 198 64, 73

Index

presence 20-23, 28, 37, 39, 43, 49, 51, 55, 60, 76, 88, 91, 95-96, 110, 116-118, 120, 127-129, 136-138, 140, 144, 150, 153, 155, 158, 161-163, 166, 170, 175, 186, 190, 196-197, 215-216, 221, 223, 226, 233 presencing 40, 96 proximity 21-22, 45, 94, 104, 112-113, 176, 184 public figure 115 public space 209, 212, 219 public sphere 24, 96 Puducherry 13, 17, 19, 49-50, 65, 67-68, 70, 76, 85-86, 92, 98, 101, 105-106, 111, 115-116, 123-126, 133, 147-150, 157-158, 160, 162-163, 165, 167-168, 174, 177-178, 189, 214, 218-219, 221, 229-232 Union Territory of Puducherry 19 puja 75-76, 123 Punathambekar, Aswin 63 rajinifans.com 81, 182 superstar 25, 56, 59-60, 155, 157, 182, 228 Ramadoss 80, 135, 179, 221-222, 237 Rancière, Jacques 186 Raqs Media Collective 19, 48 rasigar manram 26, 61, 63 rasika 63 rasikan 63 role alignment 66 role distance 66, 83 Sara Dickey 22-23, 26, 28-29, 31, 37-40, 61, 64, 87-88, 120, 130, 137-138, 151, 154, 167, 235 signboard 17, 43, 66, 162 Simbu 60, 216, 226, 236 social position 21, 57, 235 spectacle 24-25, 32, 41, 52, 95, 115, 149, 192, 203, 236 Spencer, Jonathan 36-37 Spyer, Patricia 14, 21, 23, 42, 46, 178, 190 S. Ramadoss 80, 221 Srinivas, Lakshmi 22, 38-39, 74-75, 91, 230, 232, 235-236 Strassler, Karen 21, 24, 96, 176 Structures of feeling 58

255 style 46, 53, 60, 62, 65, 74, 77, 91, 101, 112, 126, 139, 142, 151, 167-169, 173, 198, 205, 221, 232 Surya 27 S.V. Srinivas 15, 26, 31, 35, 39, 60-61, 64, 74, 79-80, 130, 138, 154, 163, 213, 230-231, 233 tactical 94 talaivar 26, 34, 155 tamil film 55 Tamil film 21-22, 27-28, 34, 37, 39, 55-57, 59-60, 62, 73, 118 Tamil Maanila Congress see TMC Tamil Nadu 13-14, 16-17, 19-28, 31, 33-38, 41, 46-47, 49-51, 53-59, 61, 65, 68-69, 74, 81-82, 84, 89, 109, 111, 115, 120, 123, 128-130, 136, 138-141, 145-146, 150, 157-158, 164, 166, 175, 186, 189-192, 194, 196-198, 202-203, 211-215, 218, 220-221, 223-229, 232, 234, 236-238, 240 Taussig, Michael 112 Teni 139-140, 142 theatre 29 Thiruvannamalai 182 TikTok 237, 240 TMC 34 Trawick, Margaret 89-90, 136 Trichy 27 Trisha 27, 131 veneration 21, 24, 43, 85, 93, 96, 137, 143 Vijay 27, 60, 90, 92 Vijayakanth 27, 33, 118, 140, 146, 149-151, 153, 155, 221 Villupuram 49, 81, 108, 134, 139, 141-142, 173, 175, 181, 229 vinyl 20, 24, 41, 54, 159, 162, 164-166, 172, 174-176, 184, 201-202, 212, 221 visuality 20, 41, 43-44, 54 wedding 88, 90-91, 97-101, 108-109, 134, 164, 166, 169, 176, 178-179, 183, 185, 230 Williams, Raymond 21, 58, 159 world-class 24, 48, 54, 190-195, 199, 204, 208, 210, 214, 222, 224, 230, 232, 234