Looking Back at the Land: Discourses of Agrarian Morality in Telugu Popular Cinema and Information Technology Labor

This article takes Anand Pandian's notion of “agrarian civility” as a lens through which we can begin to understand the discourses of morality, merit, and exclusivity that color both popular Telugu film and Telugu IT workers' understanding of their technologically enabled work. Popular Telugu film binds visual qualities of the landscape and depictions of heroic technological proficiency to protagonists' internal dispositions and moralities. I examine the portrayal of the landscape and of technology in two Telugu films: Dhee…kotti chudu , and Nuvvostanante Nenoddantana , in order to more clearly discern the nature of this agrarian civility and—more importantly for thinking about Telugu IT workers— to make explicit its attribution of morality to “merit” and to technological proficiency.