Red flags in Tamil cinema: agitprop and art-house during the Cold War

This essay argues that the narratives in Indian Tamil cinema's 'revolutionary art films' of the 1980s were symptomatic of the social conflicts and ideological civil wars of the cold war. If the global nature of the cold war is to be found in the societal domain because of revolutionary conditions from the unevenness of capitalist development in states, these revolutionary art films intended to reflect these political realities, and were intertextually based on cultural memories of local working class struggles. As such, the revolutionary art films became plenipotentiaries of the Left, inveighing against capitalism in the cultural theatres of the cold war. The epistemic frames used by the avant-garde intelligentsia who shaped these films reveal that the dynamic of the cold war influenced cultural production even in regions where there was no direct superpower confrontation. Finally, by looking at the reasons for the limited run of these films, it becomes clear that local restrictions and cultural presuppositions diminished the potential of the revolutionary art films to promote the development of an alternative Tamil cinema. Thus, this study sheds new light on the rarely acknowledged issue of how societies, seemingly isolated from the cold war were also shaped by the ideological discourses that dominated the international system.