This research project is a critical enquiry into Tamil Modernity, situating it within a transitional phase from an Indian nationalist discourse to a regionalist identity politics in Tamil Nadu in the first half of the twentieth century that corresponded to a shift in culture. The most popular writers and film makers of the 1940s—often perceived as an extremely turbulent decade in both the history of individual states and the Indian nation as a whole—created an archive of films, novels, magazines and short stories. In the representative novels and films of these decades, reformist values coexist with cultural orthodoxies and Dravidian regionalism is offset by a nationalist agenda. The main aim of this research project is to examine the different and sometimes contradictory manifestations of modernity in the popular literature and media of this era. So, modern innovations in the form and theme of literature will be read in relation to the traditionalist impulse to recapture a glorious past –which in this context is in keeping with the Dravidian political project of foregrounding a Tamil pride that often sought to be established through a historical narrative. The ‘fictions of memory’ (Brigit Neumann), ‘compensatory and contestatory’ forms of classicism (Sumathi Ramasami), and nostalgic tales (Svetlana Boym) that this process inspired, will be examined, primarily through the works of three writers—Kalki, Pudumaipittan and Karunanidhi. The three writers in examined in this study were engaged in the ideologies and economies of modernity in Tamil Nadu, represented by the novel, the short story, the magazine and the film. While they are emphatically ‘modern’ in their self-fashioning, they strategically used antiquity to highlight presentist concerns and produced what may be considered as 'iconic' texts that continue to be referenced in Tamil popular culture today. The objective of this analysis of popular literary and cinematic texts that intersect with the political transformations in the context of mid-twentieth century Tamil Nadu, is to delineate the primary aspects of Tamil modernity as revealed through these texts.