Introduction

The year 2013 marked the centenary of cinema in India, following the screening of the first Indian silent film Raja Harishchandra (The King Harishchandra) on 3 May 1913 at Coronation Theatre in what was then Bombay. In recent years, Tamil cinema itself has undergone a generational change with the entry of new and young film practitioners reaching out to a millennial audience, a shift in the technologies used, and a dispersal of the platform of screening. As we enter the third decade of the twenty-first century, it is an opportune time to revisit some of the persistent themes and indeed explore emerging trends within Tamil cinema. It can be argued that the Bollywood/Hindi cinema’s disregard for the particular histories and contributions of South Indian/Tamil cinema to the corpus of Indian cinema is also evidenced by the limited engagement with these cinemas in Indian scholarship. The chapter also provides an overview of the key concepts discussed in this book.