Reel World

"[A]  delightful combination of thought and description is a unique ethnographic account that is both autobiographical and participant-observational. ... In this book, we are made privy to this enigmatic and elusive interface between the creator and the nothingness that confronts him/her in the act of creation."   -- C.S. Venkiteswaran * Frontline *
"Decoding the phantasmagoria on-screen while navigating the labyrinthine networks of India’s Tamil cinema calls for inspired writing. Thankfully, the cicerone who takes us through these oneiric protean worlds can reconcile the recondite with the banal, the sublime with the quotidian, and the real with the mythological… The taut prose, the espial documentation, and cogitations make Reel World a work of superfluous quality.” -- Kumuthan Maderya * PopMatters *
"Reel World is probably unlike any book on cinema production you have read. It takes seriously the felt reality of the myriad of writers, directors, producers, assistants, art directors, painters, ADR artists, lyricists—name the craftsperson—that collectively bring to the screen 800 or so films annually out of 'Kollywood.' . . . The book sifts expertly and enigmatically across all three levels: daily life, cinematic life and life in the universal. Reel World is actually Pandian’s anthropological paean to creation." -- Ritesh Mehta * MovieMaker *
"Pandian delivers an adventurous and boldly written pursuit of how ideas become the sights, sounds, stories, emotions, and realities that flicker onscreen in a movie.”  -- Bret McCabe * Johns Hopkins Magazine *
"In this book, which follows the various paths through which Tamil films are made, another kind of dream emerges—one that allows us to re-envision the anthropological (by which I mean the human) project as one concerned with learning to open oneself to the wild world beyond what we think we can control.”  -- Eduardo Kohn * Somatosphere *
"Pandian interweaves the insights of an exceptional variety of thinkers, from medieval Indian poets, European philosophers, and anthropologists to South Asianists, film scholars, and critics.... [O]ne of the book’s delights remains the frolic across time, genre, discipline, field, and emotions that these many references gather and synthesize." -- Sara Dickey * American Ethnologist *
"Pandian’s writing simulates the formal properties of cinema, conjuring the sounds and sights of films many of us may never see, but feel as though we have seen through his writing, while intimating that much of our apprehension of the world is already irrevocably cinematic.”   -- Stephanie Spray * Somatosphere *
"[A]n engaging text that introduces the reader to the film industry of a distinct cultural landscape in the southern Indian state of Tamil Nadu." -- Aparna Sharma * Critical Inquiry *