The paper outlines the history of this mode of representing the city in Telugu cinema and argues that its significance lies in the tendency to de-localize the city. This paper looks at how and why the city of Hyderabad, especially its older parts for which Charminar is a metonym, is rendered into a fantasy space in the film. *Okkadu* goes a step further by reconstructing Hyderabad’s most recognizable monument, the four hundred year old Charminar, in addition to its obviously imaginary residential neighbourhood (Charminar is actually located in congested commercial area). More importantly, it follows the late 1990s trend in the film industry to recreate entire cityscapes within the studio, ensuring that location shooting in busy city streets and neighbourhoods merely returns us to the grandeur of lavish and ‘realistic’ studio sets. The film is thematically interesting in that it re-stages the country versus city in contemporary terms. This paper looks at the manner in which the city of Hyderabad, the capital of the south Indian state of Andhra Pradesh and production centre of the Telugu film industry, has been represented in the recent commercial hit *Okkadu* (Gunasekhar, 2003).
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