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The folklore film was very popular in Telugu between the 1940s and the late 1960s and played an important role in the careers of both Akkineni Nageswara Rao and N. T. Rama Rao. Folklore films sometimes drew on popular plays or fantasy and romances already in print. They were often produced from stories generated by the film industry itself. Strictly speaking then, the folklore film has very little to do with ‘folk tales’ which are supposedly timeless, of indigenous origin and transmitted orally.

The folklore film was strongly influenced by Hollywood’s ‘orientalist’ fantasies as well as the Douglas Fairbanks style stunt films (Rajadhyaksha and Willemen 1999). The popular press in Telugu has generated a large volume of ‘folklore’ which like the folklore film is a modern product and is not directly linked to ‘authentic’ folk tales. For example, Chandamama, packed with ‘inauthentic’ folktales, was started in July 1947 by B. Nagireddy and Chakrapani who later established Vijaya Pictures, the makers Patala Bhairavi (K. V. Reddy, 1951). But popular ‘folklore’ in the printed form also had a significant adult readership for a while and seemed to have grown in tandem with the detective novel as is evident from the advertisements for folklore novels in detective novels in the seventies.

The publishers and writers of the detective novel produced these novels.[1] We are therefore dealing with an industrial genre—a creation of the film and print industries feeding on each other. The eminent Telugu film critic Kodavatiganti Kutumba Rao has argued that the folklore film was the film industry’s response to the huge spurt in the popularity of the cinema during World War II as well as rising costs of film production. Pre-war production companies could not cope with the new situation which demanded a large volume of films that had the potential to generate profits proportionate to increasing investments and, ‘in such a situation the so called “folklore” pictures provided the solution to a really acute problem’ (Kutumba Rao 1964: 5). In fact, the folklore film proved to be such a viable commercial proposition that all major production companies and studios made folklore films in the forties and the fifties.

Throughout the forties and fifties, even as successful folklore films were being made, film journals and other magazines condemned folklore films. A columnist of the reputed film magazine Roopavani stated, ‘It is common practice in folklore films for producers, relying on the backwardness of the people, to openly display avineeti [immorality, corruption] and depict women’s organs as close to nudity as possible, to rake in money’ (Roopavani July 1948: 7). An article in Telugu Swatantra called folklore films a ‘disease’ (Bruhaspathi1949). Unlike the mythological and the historical, which had their moments of respectability, the folklore film was never considered respectable in its own time [2].

1 The list of publications by the publisher of Tempo Rao’s Shoot to Kill (Madras: MVS Publications, 1971) contains folklore novels and serials written by famous detective novelists like Bhayankar and Krishnamohan.

2 In recent times, however, almost all films made before the mid-sixties have become respectable due to their wholesale appropriation by peddlers of nostalgia.