Abstract
Regional-language game shows enable audiences to forge complex links between global and national identities, links that confound local/global, tradition/modernity binaries. Through an analysis of Tamil game shows I argue that this transnationally mobile genre of programming simultaneously permits the assertion of a vernacular nationalism and a cosmopolitan sensibility. The commodity culture of game shows foregrounds a Tamil cultural affiliation that is glossy and depoliticized, one sharply at odds with the separatist claims that underpinned the turn-of-the-century Dravidian nationalism.
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