Tamil cinema's other homelands: how Kollywood conquered Malaysia, Singapore — and Japan

Today Tamil films have one of the widest overseas distributions of any Indian cinema, released not only across South-East Asia but through the Middle East, western Europe, North America, Africa and Oceania. Malaysia, home to some two million people of Indian descent — most of them Tamil — and Singapore, with its large Tamil community, are core markets where a big Rajinikanth, Vijay or Ajith release opens the same week it does in Chennai, to the same first-day-first-show frenzy.

The Japan miracle

And then there is Japan — a country with almost no Tamil diaspora at all, which nonetheless fell in love with a Tamil superstar. In 1998 Rajinikanth's 1995 hit Muthu was released in Japan under the title Muthu Odoru Maharaja — "Muthu, the Dancing Maharaja." It was a sensation. The film ran for twenty-three weeks in Japanese cinemas, grossed around 1.6 million dollars, and became the highest-grossing Indian film in Japan — a record it would hold for twenty-four years.

Muthu sparked a short-lived boom of Indian films in Japan and, more durably, a genuine Rajinikanth cult: Japanese fan clubs, subtitled retrospectives, a 4K re-release decades later. Here was the strangest proof of Tamil cinema's reach — an audience with no ancestral tie to India, no diaspora nostalgia to satisfy, simply delighting in the physics-defying charisma of a Chennai megastar. The diaspora had opened the door; the film walked through it into a country that had never heard of Madras.

The stars who are gods

To understand Tamil cinema abroad you have to understand Tamil stardom, which travels with an intensity Bollywood rarely matches. In Kuala Lumpur and Singapore, as in Chennai, the release of a Rajinikanth, Vijay or Ajith film is not a night out but an event with the charge of a festival: fans queue overnight for the first-day-first-show, pour milk over giant cardboard cut-outs of their idol in a ritual borrowed straight from temple worship, and set off firecrackers when the hero makes his entrance. For the estate Tamils of Malaysia and the Tamil community of Singapore, the megastar on the screen is a shared inheritance, a thread back to a homeland most of them have never seen.

The estate and the screen

That bond was forged in hardship. The Tamils who cut rubber and laid railway across British Malaya lived hard, segregated lives, and the Tamil film — watched in makeshift halls on the estates — was one of the few pleasures and one of the strongest cultural anchors they had. It kept the language alive in the ear, the songs alive on the lips, the idea of Tamil-ness alive in a generation that would never return. When Malaysia's Indians later moved from the estates into the cities and the middle class, they carried the habit with them, and the Tamil release stayed a fixed point in the community's calendar. Cinema, for a scattered people, became something closer to a church than an entertainment.

The satellite and the stream

Technology has only tightened the bond. Tamil satellite channels — Sun TV chief among them — beamed films and film music into diaspora living rooms from the 1990s, and streaming now delivers a Chennai release to a phone in Kuala Lumpur or Toronto in the same week it opens in India. The audience has broadened, too, from the old plantation belts to the newer professional migrations in Australia, Britain and North America. A community that once waited weeks for a print to reach an estate hall now watches with the mother country, in real time.

A cinema that migrated with its people

Tamil cinema's global model is a different one from Bollywood's, and an older one. Where the Hindi NRI film was built in the 1990s to flatter a recent, affluent Anglo-American diaspora, Tamil cinema's overseas audience was seeded by indenture and labour migration across a century, and concentrated in South-East Asia rather than the West. Its stars are gods to communities in Kuala Lumpur and Colombo who have never lived in India and never will.

That deep base has also produced something Bollywood's has less of: an independent diaspora cinema of its own. Sri Lankan Tamil, Malaysian Tamil and Western Tamil film-makers have begun making their own films, in their own accents, about their own communities — the plantation, the civil war, the migrant's double life — rather than only importing Chennai's. The audience that started as a market is becoming a source.

The point

There is a lesson in it for how the diaspora's culture actually travels. The Hindi film reached the West and stayed, largely, with Indians. The Tamil film reached South-East Asia because Tamils were already there, then reached Japan because a good film is a good film. A cinema that migrated with its people, over a century and five oceans, turned out to have built a global audience almost without noticing — one that a Mumbai producer, fixated on London and New York, could easily miss.

Part 6 of The Diaspora Screen*. On the language that travelled with those films, see Tamil in Malaysia and Singapore; and Part 1: the NRI film.*