ABSTRACT
In contemporary Tamil films, the representation of North Chennai as a spatially distinct, masculine, homogeneous, and violent urban ghetto has turned the slums and kuppams in the neighbourhood to dangerous spaces that feed the casteist anxieties and desires of Tamil imagination. This chapter discusses such contested narratives focusing on key films based in North Chennai. Chennai is the fourth largest Indian city and the main business and commercial hub of South India with India’s fourth biggest port. It examines how North Chennai has been stigmatised in recent popular commercial films, but before that the people will discuss how it formed part of these filmic representations. Most pre-1980s Tamil cinema had a decidedly anti-urban bias. The countryside was presented as a pastoral idyll, while the city featured as a metaphor for social decay. As Wacquant notes, there is a strong correlation between symbolic degradation and environmental neglect.
