Cardboard monuments: City, language and 'nation' in contemporary Telugu cinema

摘要

This paper looks at how the city of Hyderabad, the capital of the south Indian state of Andhra Pradesh and production centre of the Telugu film industry, has been represented in recent popular cinema. It outlines the history of a new mode of representing the city in Telugu cinema and argues that its significance lies in the tendency to delocalize the city. Criminalization of the city's older inhabitants, who are marked by either religion (Islam) or their 'non-standard' dialect of Telugu, often accompanies this move. In the process, any claims that they might have on the city are delegitimized. Okkadu, a major commercial hit, restaged the country versus city dichotomy and the antagonisms complicated by cultural and political tensions between the three constituent regions of Andhra Pradesh. This film follows the late 1990s trend in the film industry to recreate entire cityscapes within the Studio, ensuring that location shooting in busy city streets and neighbourhoods merely returns us to the grandeur of lavish and 'realistic' studio sets. It reconstructs Hyderabad's most recognizable monument, the 400-year-old Charminar, in addition to its obviously imaginary residential neighbourhood. This paper looks at how and why the city of Hyderabad, especially its older parts, for which Charminar is a metonym, is rendered into a fantasy space in the film.