Cinema as politics, politics as cinema

To the grossly underexplored field of Telugu cinema, S V Srinivas' Politics as Performance: A Social History of the Telugu Cinema is a significant contribution. As one of the first works on the topic it is likely to gain historical value and become a reference book. Andhra Pradesh, too, is under-studied within the social sciences and humanities in India. The Telugu film industry is the second largest in India, but there had previously been no full-length books written in English on Telugu cinema, except for one on Telugu film star Chiranjeevi (popularly known as Megastar) by the same author, Srinivas. But under-representation aside, scholarly work on Telugu cinema at this time is important: Indian cinema is usually reduced to Bollywood, and South Indian cinema to Tamil cinema.

Politics as Performance is not written in the style of a specialist 'film history', which falls within the 'film studies' genre in a narrow, conventional sense. Employing an interdisciplinary approach, it studies film culture not in isolation but in the intersection of history, economy and politics. It provides a detailed account of Telugu cinema and argues that this cultural industry is directly implicated in the emergence of a new idiom of politics. By specifically focusing on the career of one of the most charismatic stars of Telugu cinema, N T Rama Rao (NTR), who became, in 1983, the first non-Congress Chief Minister of one of the largest Indian states, Andhra Pradesh, Srinivas tries to demonstrate that cinema is crucial to understanding politics in India, particularly the south. In doing so, the author also claims an autonomous role for cinema in constituting modern identities rather than simply reflecting the existing ones.