Tamil identity and diasporic desire in a Kollywoood comedy: Nala Damayanti (2003) Srilata Ravi* School of Humanities, University of Western Australia, Australia The aim of this paper is to explore how ethnic and linguistic identities intersect with national identity in Indian cinema through a ‘diasporic’ reading of the film Nala Damayanti (2003) produced by Kamal Hassan. Tamil cinema or ‘Kollywood’ may share common genre conventions with Bollywood (duration, stylized exaggerations of speech and plot, song and dance sequences). However, unlike Bollywood, which is most often neither ethnicized nor geographically situated, Tamil cinema first promotes Tamil pride (feminized in Tamil culture as Tamil Tazhi, guardian deity of Tamil culture) before national chauvinism. Through a reading of the Tamil screen comedy, Nala Damayanti, this paper will explore how Indianness is produced within the cultural constraints of Tamil cinema. To this end, the paper will first examine two issues, (a) existing paradigms of Tamil identity in India and overseas; and (b) caste and comedy conventions in Tamil cinema, before investigating how Tamilness, Indianness and South Asianness intersect around the politics of culinary culture in Tamil screen comedy. Introduction At ‘home’, I had always prided myself on being the perfect pan Indian, being fluent in Tamil, Hindi and Bengali and having spent my ‘Indian’ life equally between the North of India (Bengal and New Delhi) and Tamil Nadu. However, as a diasporic viewer watching the Tamil film Nala Damayanti for the second time in Australia last year, I experienced confusing sensations of a vague Tamilness sometimes over- lapping, sometimes subsuming what I had accepted as a secure sense of Indianness. Confusion, I had not experienced when viewing the film in the emotional comfort of the family lounge of my mother’s house in Chennai. Confusion, that led me then to think more critically about consuming Indian cinema in diasporic space. Viewing the film as a diasporic subject brought home to me that my self-conscious fashioning of Indianness was intricately linked with my polemical understanding of being Tamil. Radhakrishnan’s observations about ethnicity in the age of Diaspora aptly point to the reason for my bewilderment: When people move, identities, perspectives and definitions change…. If the category Indian seemed secure, positive, and affirmative within India, the same term takes on a reactive, strategic character when it is pried loose from its nativity. The issue then is not ‘‘just being Indian’’ in some natural, self evident way … but ‘‘cultivating Indianness’’ self-consciously for certain reasons…. To put it simply, one’s very being becomes polemical. (Radhakrishnan 123) The main aim of this paper is to explore how ethnic and linguistic identities intersect with national identity in Indian cinema through a ‘diasporic’ reading of the ISSN 1474-6689 print/ISSN 1474-6697 online ß 2008 Taylor & Francis DOI: 10.1080/14746680701878547 http://www.informaworld.com *Email: sravi@cyllene.uwa.edu.au South Asian Popular Culture Vol. 6, No. 1, April 2008, 45–56