Of Stars and Firmaments, Politics and Life
C.S. Venkiteswaran
MEGASTAR: CHIRANJEEVI AND TELUGU CINEMA AFTER N.T. RAMA RAO by S.V. Srinivas Oxford University Press, 2010, 293 pp., 695
January 2010, volume 34, No 1

Here then is a short description of Telugu cinema: it is a cinema in the Telugu language made with borrowed plots, for ten crore speakers of the language, by an industry that makes politicians because it cannot make profits.’ This is how Srinivas concludes his book on the megastar Chiranjeevi. It is a ‘conclusion’ that sums up the trajectory of the book and its analysis. For, it traces not only the evolution of an actor into a star, a megastar and then a politician and idol of the masses, but also places it in the film-industrial and socio-political context that envelops it. Woven through the analysis are the film texts and the multiple discourses surrounding them, and in the process, the book throws up scintillating insights into the work of cinema in our popular imagination and society. Though the phenomenon of ‘stars’ and stardom have been a topic of study especially since the advent of cultural studies, these explorations were and are predominantly Hollywood-centric.

If at all ‘other cinemas’ found a place here, more often than not such analysis also employed concepts and theories developed in the Hollywood context, which were applied onto the milieu in question. Such exercises only serve to ‘universalise’ certain film theories all over again, by making other cinemas—Asian, African or Latin American—mere ‘examples’ and ‘proofs’ of an overarching theory.

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