“Mass” Media: Cinematic Narratives and Archaeological Presents in Federal Indian Politics

Join the MHRC for their last Montreal Media History Seminar of the year. Assistant Professor Sowparnika Balaswaminathan will talk about how the Tamil Nadu government uses archaeology to create a counter-narrative to Hindu nationalism.

ABOUT THE TALK:

In January 2025, M.K. Stalin, the Chief Minister of the south Indian state of Tamilnadu, made a dramatic announcement befitting his cinema-industry lineage: the Iron Age, hitherto dated to the Fertile Crescent, in fact, had its earliest beginnings “on Tamil soil.” This temporal recalibration, crafted into a “news event” (Cody 2023), carries profound implications for contemporary Indian political discourse. Modern statist archaeology in India navigates between neoliberal rationalism and romantic patriotism, seeking to maintain scientific rigor while constructing narratives of an enchanted past. This tension is further complicated by India’s current Hindu nationalist regime, which seeks to establish a direct correlation between territory and religion, such as in the Indus Valley Civilization (IVC)—South Asia’s oldest known state-level society— which needs to be Hindu, Sanskritic, and continuous with the Indo-Aryan identity claimed by contemporary (caste) Hindus. Stalin’s announcement directly challenges this narrative by foregrounding southern archaeological sites that suggest a non-Hindu proto-Dravidian history, with potential links to the IVC itself.

This paper examines the orchestration of media events related to archaeology by the Tamilnadu state apparatus in recent years and analyzes the cinematic stylizations used in their construction. Balaswaminathan argues that the deployment of melodramatic excess in support of the government as a “mass” hero must be read against the coimbricated histories of cinema, oration, and politics in Tamilnadu .

ABOUT THE SPEAKER:

Sowparnika Balaswaminathan is an Assistant Professor in Religions and Cultures at Concordia University, Montreal. She researches the politics of art and craft, artisanal identity and labor, and the intersection of ethics and aesthetics. Her methods include ethnography, collections and archival research, and arts and media analysis. She is currently working on her monograph based on her dissertation research, Casting Craft: Ethics, Aesthetics, and Sensible Labor in South Indian Bronzecasting. She was the Peter Buck Postdoctoral Fellow (2019-2021) at the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History, Washington DC, where she researched the role of Smithsonian museums as diplomatic agents during the Cold war and the politics of culture-area representation of newly independent Asian nations. She is currently starting a new project on the mediascape and political mobilization around archaeology and antiquities in India.

  March 13, 2026

3:30 -5 PM

Resource Room EV 11.705

🎟️ Make sure to reserve your spot, seating is limited!