Body As Infrastructure: Spatial Retooling and Insurgent Citizenship in VELAIKKARAN and Vada Chennai

Abstract

Recent cinematic shifts in the new wave era have facilitated North Chennai films in moving away from the ‘rooted stereotypes’ of the past, re-spatialising them through the lens of insurgent realism. Filmmakers like Pa. Ranjith and Vetrimaaran transformed North Chennai from a site of uncertainties into a sovereign geography by replacing ‘violence as spectacle’ with ‘violence as means of survival’ . Here, the physical body does not merely inflict force rather it endures, labours, and asserts presence within a landscape that the state has attempted to erase. This is deeply rooted in what Jay terms ‘scopic regimes’, in which power and ideology dictate who is seen and how, thereby functioning as a platform for the formation of urban identities (Mitchell, 2003). In this paper, I argue that in the absence of state agency and functional infrastructure, the subaltern body serves as a somatic substitution, refiguring North Chennai from a site of slow violence into one of communal empowerment.