Isas Departmental's video: S Shankar Poor Stories: Discourses of Development in Tamil Film Play Thaneer Thaneer

November 2, 2020 Speaker: S. Shankar, Chair and Professor, Department of English University of Hawai'i at Mānoa Moderator: Vasugi Kailasam, Assistant Professor, Department of South and Southeast Asian Studies, UC Berkeley Sponsors: Institute for South Asia Studies, Tamil Studies Initiative The Institute for South Asia Studies and the Tamil Studies Initiative at UC Berkeley invite you to a talk by novelist, critic, translator and professor in the English department at the University of Hawai'i at Manoa, S. Shankar. _________________ Abstract What stories do we tell about “the poor?” How are “the poor” depicted in the powerful cultural fictions that shape our public imagination? These questions are at the heart of my ongoing work on representations of the poor in film and fiction. My talk draws from this material to discuss two linked Tamil texts: Komal Swaminathan’s play Thaneer, Thaneer and the film adaptation of it by K. Balachander. Swaminathan wrote and staged Thaneer, Thaneer, one of the most famous Tamil plays of the twentieth century, in 1979; and in 1981 Balachander adapted the play into a tremendously successful and award-winning Tamil film (available unsubtitled on YouTube). Together, play and film were a cultural phenomenon. Coming at the end of a tumultuous decade in India, they posed incisive questions about the poor: how have the poor been treated by the governmental machinery of postcolonial India? what agentive possibilities are available to them? what would it mean for them to take their destiny into their own hands? In exploring these questions, I first engage sociologist Georg Simmel’s work to offer some general thoughts regarding the study of representations of the poor. I proceed then to read Thaneer, Thaneer (both play and film) for the hypervisible but also elusive figure of the poor. And I conclude with remarks on the lessons Thaneer, Thaneer teaches us about discourses of development in relation to the agency of the poor. Today, as forty years ago in Thaneer, Thaneer, the poor continue to incarnate as the destitute, the aspiring and the rebel within the biopolitical regime of control that is development. Regrettably, these lessons from nearly half a century ago remain relevant. Speaker Bio S. Shankar is a novelist, critic, and translator. He is the author of Flesh and Fish Blood: Postcolonialism, Translation, and the Vernacular (University of California Press; Orient BlackSwan India; both 2012), and Textual Traffic (SUNY Press, 2001) and the novels Ghost in the Tamarind (2017), No End to the Journey (2005) and A Map of Where I Live (1997) and a co-editor, with Louis G. Mendoza, of Crossing into America (New Press, 2003). He is a professor in the English department at the University of Hawai'i at Manoa.