"This book provides a historical and theoretically informed perspective on how Telugu cinema was implicated in, and contributed to, the rise of a new ruling caste-class constellation, the emergence of the star-politician, and a new idiom of mass politics in the Andhra region ... It skillfully weaves strands of economic, political, and social history with film history and textual analysis"

"S.V. Srinivas's Politics as Performance is an ambitious historical account of the agrarian background, caste profile, and political functions of the Telugu film industry, including a sustained narrative of the rise of N.T. Rama Rao. An exemplary text of film industrial history and political analysis" RAVI VASUDEVAN "S.V. Srinivas's long awaited book on Telugu cinema, seen from the vantage point of movie star-politician N.T. Rama Rao's career, radically repositions the very concept of a star, and indeed that of the cinema, within modern politics ... provides a completely new frontier for the discipline of film studies"

"Unusually for these times, this is a work of film history that does not ignore the larger socio-economic realities of which any culture industry is a part. Indeed it seeks to demonstrate how the channels of mutual determination between socio-economic, political, and cultural instances work in practice. The Telugu film industry, one of the biggest in India, will now be assured of its place in Indian film history with Srinivas's comprehensive, interdisciplinary study"

Book's Contents and Sample Pages