Storing tuples in a column isn't usually a good idea; a lot of the advantages of using Series and DataFrames are lost. That said, you could use converters
to post-process the string:
>>> df = pd.read_csv("sillytup.csv", converters={"colA": ast.literal_eval})
>>> df
index colA
0 1 (a, b)
1 2 (c, d)
[2 rows x 2 columns]
>>> df.colA.iloc[0]
('a', 'b')
>>> type(df.colA.iloc[0])
<type 'tuple'>
But I'd probably change things at source to avoid storing tuples in the first place.