BEYOND THE SCREEN: THE SUBALTERN LIBRARY OF NARRATIVES IN TAMIL CINEMA

Abstract

This study conceptualizes contemporary Tamil cinema as a subaltern library, arguing that films can preserve, organize, and circulate lived experiences, cultural memories, and resistance narratives that are weakly represented in official historical records. Although scholarship has examined Tamil cinema through caste, identity, political resistance, and social justice, less attention has been given to cinema as an alternative knowledge institution that combines representation with audiovisual preservation. Using Fairclough’s three-dimensional Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA), complemented by Foucault’s power–knowledge perspective and Spivak’s concept of the subaltern, the study analyses Visaranai (2015), Pariyerum Perumal (2018), Kaala (2018), and Jai Bhim (2021). The findings indicate that the films construct counter-discourses around caste, institutional violence, spatial displacement, and constitutional justice while preserving embodied and cultural dimensions of marginalized experience. The study proposes the subaltern library as an interdisciplinary framework that connects film studies, Subaltern Studies, cultural memory, and archival scholarship, shifting analytical attention from representation alone toward preservation, circulation, and contested knowledge production.