ABSTRACT
Significant changes in the political, socio-cultural sphere affected Tamil cinema in the late 1970s and 1980s. With Backward Castes gaining political authority, the contribution of the artists in cinema who arrived from this background found natural access to film industry. Local personalities became characters; local stories and landscape became narratives in films. Village narratives became the predominant theme in the 1980s. Thus, caste which remained a local reality entered film narratives. Never before we could find films centring on caste and its myriad forms as in the 1980s. In Tamil Nadu, there are numerous local deities and their accounts related to inter-caste marriages and honour killings. Such stories were found apt to portray love, woe, and adventure and were adapted into commercial cinema. The chapter deliberates on how along with the emergence of the local narratives, Tamil films of the period expressed a faith in modernity that gets represented in the ‘love beyond caste’ as a tool for social change. This trope began to fade in the mid-1990s. This chapter will discuss such a change in Tamil films in connection with the rise of the Dalit and caste question in Tamil Nadu.
