Maoism to Mass Culture: Notes on Telangana’s Cultural Turn

Abstract

Like other “regional” cinemas of southern India, Telugu cinema too has grown on the strength of its intimate linkages with both language politics and the linguistic state. In the more recent past, the relatively stable, if contentious, equilibrium between cinema, the linguistic state, and its official language was disrupted by a political movement demanding the bifurcation of Andhra Pradesh, which coincided with the proliferation of post-celluloid forms and modes of engagement with the moving image. This movement foregrounds the importance of region—understood as territory—as the site for nurturing, but more importantly producing, “cultural” differences among speakers of a single language. Telugu cinema came to be imbricated with a political mobilization engaged in, and driven by, the production of cultural difference, while the Telugu film industry as a whole came under sustained attack by activists and politicians supporting bifurcation for prejudicial and stereotypical representations of Telangana. The article focuses on a curious aspect of the movement for a separate Telangana state: the hypervisibility of communist and radical left propaganda forms, to examine how a minor film genre became a resource for the production of a territorially bound political community that reinforced the cultural logic of the linguistic state even as Andhra Pradesh, which was once ruled by a film star-turned-politician, was bifurcated.