ABSTRACT
Tamil television, like Tamil cinema and their other media counterparts, are intertwined deeply in their form, content, and political economies in strange modes. The terms ‘political economy’ and ‘strange political economy’ are problematic sites in their use on media in Tamil Nadu. The author invoked the logic of ‘strange political economy’ to engage with the rise of political television in Tamil Nadu more than a decade ago. It is time to revisit the burden and beauty of the term as a site of critical reading. Tamil Nadu, as is obvious, has an extensive history to provide meaningful and meaningless impressions, depending on one's intellectual and commonsensical orientation, on the linkages between politics and cinema on the one hand, and politics and other media on the other hand, besides politics as a site of social reform. One of the first frontline scholars to invoke the problematic linkage between form, content, and political economy of television was Raymond Williams (1974). Even when television was taking halting steps to woo the audience in the West, Williams was prophetic about the road ahead for the viewers in their experiences of choices and freedom with television. He felt that it was meant to be a road strewn with limited choices and experiences for the viewers when at the end of the road “individual and collective response to many different kinds of experience and problem became almost limited to a choice between their programmed possibilities.” If Williams was around in Tamil Nadu, he would have got us a treatise on Tamil television and its form, the content, and the ‘strange political economy’ in a more cerebral manner than us. However, this chapter seeks to match the gap by turning the present opportunity into a site of critical readings of Tamil television in its coexistence with Tamil cinema in seemingly impossible states—as a child, as a sibling, as a distant relative, as a media rival, and as a celebrating fan—in its form and content, keeping the spirit of what Williams said in his magnum opus on television, Television, Technology and Cultural Form.
