‘It’s all about loving your parents.’ The Reflection of Tradition, Modernity and Rituals in Popular Indian Movies. In: Marburg Journal of Religion 9 (1/2004), (E-Journal) (original) (raw)

Indian Cinema and Modern Hinduism

2019

This chapter looks at how issues of modernity and Hinduism have been treated in a key modern medium: film. Chatterjee looks closely at several important Indian films that all reveal changing ideas on the place of Hinduism in modern India. Several of these films are historical. For instance, Rammohun Roy, the subject of Killingley’s chapter, is the hero in the 1965 film bearing his name. It shows the reformer as an enlightened man fighting social ills, insisting that Hinduism should exist peacefully with Islam. According to Chatterjee, the portrayal also glosses over several other, and important, aspects of his life. The social and religious movements of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries inspired a large body of Indian films in the early decades of Indian cinema, and these are one of the main foci of Chatterjee’s chapter.

Dharma and the Religious Other in Hindi Popular Cinema

2020

This essay examines common representations of religious minorities in Hindi popular cinema within the context of dominant post-Independence Indian religious and political ideologies—from a religiously pluralist secular socialist framework to a Hindu nationalist late capitalist orientation. We begin by examining the more recent turn to film as a legitimate conveyor of middle-class Indian values worthy of interpretation, and the coeval shift among Indians from embarrassment to pride in film as the industry followed the liberalizing nation-state onto the global stage. Equipped with this interpretive strategy, we turn to the dhārmik, or religious elements within the Hindi sāmājik, or social film, demonstrating concretely how particular notions of Hindu dharma (variously if imperfectly translated as “duty,” “law,” “cosmic order,” “religion”) have long undergirded Hindi popular cinema structurally and topically. Finally, and most significantly, we examine representations of religious mino...

Devotional Transformation: Miracles, Mechanical Artifice, and Spectatorship in Indian Cinema

Postscripts, 2005

This article focuses on the specic Indian cinematic form of the Hindu devotional lm genre to explore the relationship between cinema and religion. Using three important early lms from the devotional oeuvre-Gopal Krishna, Sant Dnyaneshwar, and Sant Tukaram-as the primary referent, it tries to understand certain characteristic patterns in the narrative structures of these lms, and the cultures of visuality and address, miraculous manifestation, and witnessing and self-transformation that they generate. These three lms produced by Prabhat Studios between the years 1936 and 1940 and all directed by Vishnupant Damle and Syed Fattelal, drew upon the powerful anti-hierarchical traditions of Bhakti, devotional worship that circumvented Brahmanical forms. This article will argue that the devotional lm crucially undertakes a work of transformation in the perspectives on property, and that in this engagement it particularly reviews the status of the household in its bid to generate a utopian model of unbounded community. The article will also consider the status of technologies of the miraculous that are among the central attractions of the genre, and afford a reection on the relation between cinema technology, popular religious belief and desire, and lm spectatorship.

The Magical Heritage of Hindi Movies

Crossings: A Journal of English Studies

In Salman Rushdie’s Shame the narrative epicenter is a mysterious town called Q where three mysterious sisters give birth to a son called Omar Khaiyam who, rather accidentally, goes on to meddle in the military affairs of Pakistan. The magical son of a-unit-of-three-mothers, Omar keeps claiming himself as a peripheral man, yet finds himself in the political mire notwithstanding the aesthetic reputation of his Persian namesake. While the blurring of boundaries between fantasy and reality is common in texts that espouse magic realism, seldom do we get to find serious academics adopting a “fantastical” approach in their critical analysis of real life phenomena. Anjali Gera Roy’s search for an Arab-Persian tradition in Hindi films exemplifies one such attempt.