The city of Hyderabad was distinct in being a princely city under the rule of the Nizam unlike Madras, Calcutta, Bombay and Lahore which were the colonial cities and also in being at the crucial intersection of the transport and communication networks from the north to the south. Focusing on the film practises in cities like Hyderabad presents the possibility of bringing alternative histories to the fore which enhances the understanding of cinema as a complex network. This absence could be attributed to a multiplicity of reasons like the prominence of film production in these cities and the availability of archival evidence. In all these histories details of film production happening in cities like Hyderabad is a curious absence.
The more recent scholarship has looked at cities like Pune and Kolhapur. Most of the film historiography has originated from the cities like Bombay, Madras, Calcutta and Lahore. 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.
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. 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. 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. In the processes any claims that they might have on the city are de-legitimized.Ībstract 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. The 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. The paper outlines the history of this mode of representing the city in Telugu cinema and argues that its significance lies in the tendency to de-localize the city. 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. *Okkadu* goes a step further by reconstructing Hyderabad’s most recognizable monument, the four hundred year old Charminar, in addition to its obviously imaginary residential neighbourhood (Charminar is actually located in congested commercial area). More importantly, it 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. The film is thematically interesting in that it re-stages the country versus city in contemporary terms.
This paper looks at the manner in which 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 the recent commercial hit *Okkadu* (Gunasekhar, 2003).
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