‘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 specic 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 reection 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.
It has been always an important debate- do films reflect culture or does culture reflect films? In an attempt to understand the same with respect to mainstream Hindi movies from India- the present research work was undertaken especially concentrating on the frequent movie-goer age-group- 25-50 years from India. Thus framing- “How Culture Affects Films and vice versa”, attempts to encompass all the perspectives with respect to the relationship between culture and films. Films, akin to cultures, have changed over the decades the world over and so has Indian mainstream Hindi movies. Cinema that solely concentrated on family values has changed to films dealing with more socially relevant topics. Films that were only action centric and promoted male chauvinism have changed to films now that equally promote feminism. What was that brought about this change in the perception of films? Are the changing societal and cultural values responsible for reshaping India’s changing cinema over the decades? Thus, some of the significant questions explored within the present research include- “In today’s fast paced life, the traditional Indian culture is changing at a rapid speed. Are today’s children still taking care of their parents? Does an Urban family visit the temple every week, leave alone every day? Do we help a blind man cross the road every time we see him? Do we really know who are neighbours are? etc. Questions are many and the attempt has been to analyse what they signify as an underlining of the cultural changes in today’s modern India. The present research also aims to study the relationship between culture and films thus and if films in today’s world are coherent with the cultural beliefs of the people. To understand the same the work is based on an exhaustive ethnographic study keeping in mind specifically six parameters- 1. Religious tolerance 2. Choice of sports 3. Women Portrayal and Stereotyping 4. Corruption in Public Sphere and Public Services 5. Politics 6. Tolerance towards the Weak An analysis of this study entailed an understanding- whether culture affects modern Indian Hindi films in reality or the exist as independent entities- with little or almost no influence on each other.
Indian Classical Movies: A Cultural Heritage
CENTRAL ASIAN JOURNAL OF LITERATURE, PHILOSOPHY AND CULTURE, 2022
Art reflects life in different forms, whether painting, music, poetry and even movies. Amongst all the forms of art available, none has a farther reach than films. For many years, movie producers have used human emotions to captivate people and educate them. India’s Bollywood film industry has been up and doing in this regard, releasing movie scripts that show the rich culture of India. Everyone, especially outsiders and foreigners, can tell the beauty of the Indian culture. Without stepping foot in India, one can tell that the significant elements in the country’s culture –dance, music, mathematics, language, cuisine, and interestingly gambling.
Bhakti and Ashiqi : The syncretic heritage of Hindi cinema
Studies in South Asian Film & Media, 2010
The thematic and formal difference between Hindi cinema and other cinemas is predicated on its being structured by the principles of oral narrative traditions. South Asian film scholars have convincingly located its origins in indigenous narrative and performing arts. Their examination of Indian epic, narrative, visual and theatrical traditions underpinning cinematic texts has elevated Hindi cinema from a bad copy of Euro-American cinema to an alternative cinematic genre with a distinctive visual and narrative grammar derived from a diversity of ancient and modern sources. While these studies engage in great depth with the ancient legacies of the epics the Mahabharata and the Ramayana and with more recent ones such as Parsi theatre and calendar art, which reveal a certain intermediality, their privileging of the Hindi film's Hindu Sanskritic sources over others marginalizes those producing a homogenous discourse of indigeneity. While acknowledging the contribution of the dominant Hindu Sanskritic tradition to the shaping of popular Hindi cinema, this article aims to explore the alternative narrative streams that have irrigated storytelling in Hindi films, particularly the alternative Perso-Arabic legacy that has been erased or marginalized in the studies of Hindi cinema. Through tracing the imbrication of the Perso-Arabic heritage with the Hindu Sanskritic, it aims to show that its inherent syncreticism makes a diverse variety of cinematic audiences identify with the narrative conflicts in Hindi cinema. SAFM_2.1_art_Roy_41-56.indd 41 SAFM_2.
The present paper suggests in the light of the various developments in film theory why most of these do not fit the case of the Indian popular cinema. Given the circumstances of origin of cinemas in India and in the West, the differences in democratic politics between them, theories which suit Hollywood cinema or European cinema may not apply congruently for the Indian films. The paper explores the points of difference between Hollywood and Bollywood and attempts to build a new theoretical approach to the Indian popular cinema using the conventional theories as tools. The end result of this paper is to be able to put a context to the Indian popular cinema.
Anglo-Indian/Christian Middle-Class and Consumerist Modernity in the 1970s Hindi Cinema
South Asian Review, 2024
The paper analyses class negotiations in Hindi films of the 1970s, which conflate Anglo-Indian identity, Christianity, and middle-class subjectivity in three distinct social forms, viz., middle-class cinema, mainstream cinema, and art-house cinema. Films of the 1970s employ the Anglo-Indian identity to map the negotiations taking place along the class boundaries of a feudal order and an emergent bourgeois order, rather than limited to being the "other." The community's mediations with consumerist modernity, which is a marker of the bourgeois lifestyle, and how it gets articulated in the public narratives about them become crucial as Anglo-Indians are identified with the values of the capitalist West and therefore also for being "icons of commodity culture" in the Hindi filmic world right from the 1920s and 30s. The paper examines how the cultural representation of the Anglo-Indian/Christian community in films of these three categories responded to the consumerist modernity of the times while negotiating class boundaries. The first section on middle-class cinema discusses Basu Chatterjee's Baton Baton Mein (1979); the second section deals with K. S. Sethumadhavan's mainstream film Julie (1975); and the third section on art-house cinema analyses Saeed Akhtar Mirza’s Albert Pinto Ko Gussa Kyun Aata Hai (1980).
ACTA ORIENTALIA VILNENSIA 9.2 (2008): 159–174, 2008
the present paper concentrates on particular mytho-religious symbolism and mythological structures used in two popular films by famous contemporary Indian film director Ashutosh Gowariker: Lagaan (2001) and Swades (2004). These films are significant in the history of Indian popular cinema not only for their complex problems related to the sensitive topics of anti-colonialism, nationalism and patriotism, but also for their widely used mytho-religious symbolism. My goal in this essay is to analyse these two films, identifying the mythological symbols and mythological structures used in the films, and to see how they organise the films' narrative and how they are connected with the issues of anti-colonialism, Hindu nationalism, and the construction of (idealised) indian identity. in this paper i argue that the usage of mythological and mytho-religious symbolism functions as a useful tool for the director to transfer ideas related to national identity, nationalism, and anti-colonialism to the viewer effectively, as well as to express a political and social critique of contemporary India and to construct the images of idealised indian identity in response.
The 'Bollywoodization' of Popular Indian Visual Culture: A Critical Perspective
tripleC: Communication, Capitalism & Critique. Open Access Journal for a Global Sustainable Information Society, 2014
The roots of popular visual culture of contemporary India can be traced to the mythological films which D. G. Phalke provided audiences during the decades of the ‘silent’ era (1912-1934). The ‘talkies era of the 1930s ushered in the ‘singing’ /musical genre which together with Phalke’s visual style, remains the hallmark of Bollywood cinema. The history of Indian cinema is replete with films made in other genres and styles (e.g. social realism, satires, comedies, fantasy, horror, stunt) in the numerous languages of the country; however, it’s the popular Hindi cinema (now generally termed ‘Bollywood’) that has dominated national Indian cinema and its audiovisual culture and hegemonized the entire film industry as well as other popular technology-based art forms including the press, radio, television, music, advertising, the worldwide web, the social media, and telecommunications media. The form and substance of these modern art forms, while adapting to the demands of the new media...
De-Westernizing Visual and Communication Cultures: Perspectives from the Global South, 2020
The author argues that a Westernized approach has so far failed to offer a holistic image of Indian cinema. Hindi and Telugu cinemas together constitute the greater part of the Indian film industry. Since the dawn of the talkie era (1931), both these cinemas have reflected a pan-Indian culture largely drawn from an ancient Indian heritage, including fine arts. However, approaching Indian cinema through the Western theories of psychoanalysis and Marxism since 1980s has resulted in underrating of early Indian cinema and, further, overlooked the contributions of Indian classic cinema to world cinema. As a result, several awkward theories to interpret Indian cinemas have emerged. Murthy offers not only an overview of the lacunae in such theories, but also a de-Westernized approach as a holistic cultural model that subsumes both Indian semiotics and phenomenology. The chapter is predicated on the argument that negotiating the frames of Indian cinema from the perspectives of semiotics and phenomenology is a real challenge that calls for a rich knowledge of ancient Indian heritage, its culture and aesthetics. It thus argues that a de-Westernized approach to Indian Cinema is an ideal way to understand it in its entirety.