Synopsis:
This essay engages with Tamil’s iconic writer Ramaswamy Krishnamurthy alias Kalki’s reviews of Tamil films, particularly in the popular Tamil weekly Ananda Vikatan, to argue for his preeminence as an early film critic. Generally, Kalki’s informed criticism of cinema and his profound cinephilia is not acknowledged. The main reason being, his stature as a popular writer of historical novels like Ponniyin Selvan and Sivagamiyin Sabatham has subsumed his prowess as a film critic. My focus is on recovering Kalki’s passionate involvement with Tamil cinema, in its early decades of the 1930s, after the arrival of sound. Though Kalki was heavily criticized for his subjective and lop-sided criticism of K.B. Sundarambal’s performance in Nandanar, he later tried to make amends with his laudatory comments on her performance as the titular Avvaiyaar. Thus, one could argue that Nandanar provided a moment of reflexivity to Kalki about his casteism
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