Pushpa Arabindoo: Idhuvaa Chennai? Reading a city’s public in a newspaper’s publicity campaign
In April 2008 a considerable amount of buzz was created by an attractively titled ad film A day in the life of Chennai, a minute-and-a-half commercial that was a central part of a vast multimedia campaign to promote the Chennai launch of the Mumbai-based English daily, The Times of India (TOI). As local editions of national dailies become increasingly popular in an extremely diversified market, TOI’s marketing campaign was keen to emphasise its understanding of local culture and an ability to capture every nook and corner in the daily life of this Tamil/Dravidian city. Thus, the film’s protagonist/antagonist is a cut-out, in a homage to a unique feature of Chennai’s urbanscape, whose ups and downs in a day are narrated through the colloquial text of a local kuthu song (a Tamil cultural speciality), nakka mukka, as it winds through supposedly localised circulatory spaces in the city. Interestingly, the timing of the commercial intersected a particularly bourgeois moment in the city where hoardings were increasingly illegitimsed and nearly half of them were removed by the city authorities. And strangely enough, this incrimination was enforced by the Dravidian state that had at one point relied on these very cut-outs to assert its political ideologies and leadership to the Tamil public. The objective of this paper is not only to highlight such attempts of the state to globalise a Dravidian city, but also to use the TOI campaign to underline the several stereotypical portrayals of Chennai as a local aka Dravidian city. For instance, the relationship between cinema and politics is not only parochialised as a Dravidian characterisitc but also the local public sphere is shown as being dominated by subaltern figures characterised by irrational, violent behaviour. Also, given that the city’s name change in 1996 from Madras to Chennai has gone beyond being a mere political gimmick to reflect a real divided geography between its northern and southern parts, the ad film’s visual repertoire of the city’s locality is narrowly confined to the gritty parts of north Madras with little indications of the globalising south Chennai, an aspect that will also be analysed in this paper.
Biographical Statement:
Pushpa Arabindoo is a lecturer in geography at University College London (UCL), and is based in its newly formed UCL Urban Laboratory. Her research investigates several aspects of urbanisation and development of Chennai, including the role of the city’s middle class in promoting the tenets of bourgeois urbanism and the changing nature of urban environmental movements following the 2004 tsunami and 2005 floods. She recently contributed a chapter titled Geogrpahy of lingua-franca, history of linguistic fracas to AR Venkatachalapathy’s edited volume, Chennai, not Madras (Marg Publications, 2006). Journal articles include Falling apart at the margins? Neighbourhood transformations in peri-urban Chennai (2009) and City of sand: Stately re-imagination of Marina Beach in Chennai (forthcoming).
