Performing Deities and Devotees

Chapter 5 adopts the framework suggested by Partha Chatterjee for the study of popular culture wherein the critical focus is on disciplinary practices rather than underlying beliefs or concepts. Therefore, it continues the previous chapter’s reflections on affect and embodiment through an anthropology of film-making and film-screening practices. Drawing on biographies and memoirs of film-makers and actors as well as personal interviews it tracks the debates within the disciplinary field of cinema and brings into view the diversity of perceptions and changing production and performance practices when it comes to representing divinity and religiosity. It also pays special attention to the unique modes of publicity and tailor-made marketing strategies adopted for these religious genres.

Embodied Engagements

Through ethnographic explorations of the question of viewership, this chapter shifts the focus from film texts to film-viewing contexts. It critically reflects upon the embodied character of viewer engagement with mythological and devotional cinema through a special focus on the figure of the possessed spectator. It theorizes the interesting intersections between film viewership and religious practice through the concept of habitus. It engages with the question, does affective engagement necessarily preclude critical and rational engagement with the narrative? It argues that viewers bring with them to the cinema embodied dispositions and sensibilities, that is, a particular habitus that has been cultivated in traditional performative contexts and this shapes their responses. However, this does not necessarily render them passive or uncritical in their engagement with film.

Introduction

The introduction outlines a genealogy of how cinema and other media created new cultural contexts and new cultural subjects in the twentieth century India, thereby transforming religion and producing the hybrid figure of the citizen–devotee. The first section presents conceptual debates on secularism, citizenship, religion and media, embodiment and affect that frame this study. The second section is a detailed account of the mythological and devotional genres in Indian cinema and the predominant critical frameworks. The third focuses on the history of Telugu cinema tracing the different performative traditions and oral and printed texts that form a basis for these genres. It argues that both cinema technology and new political contexts mediate existing texts and traditions significantly. The final section describes the historical and ethnographic methods adopted in the study and the range of materials—film texts, publicity material, interviews, memoirs, and biographies of film-makers—used.

The Exemplary Citizen–Devotee and the Other

Chapter 2 begins with a theoretical discussion of majorities and minorities within a secular liberal nation. Later it examines two saint films, Bhakta Ramadasu (1964) and Sri Ramadasu (2006) in which the story of a seventeenth century devotee-poet who was an administrative official under the Muslim Qutub Shahi rulers of Golconda, is mobilized at different moments in Indian history to deal with the question of difference both within Hinduism and outside it. More specifically it demonstrates the ways in which Muslims and the Urdu language are ‘made minor’ in mainstream cinema and thereby in the Telugu cultural imaginary. The first film is representative of the syncretic approach to the Muslim presence while the later film reflects the majoritarian Hindutva logic. Despite this crucial difference, both films are unable to imagine modes of toleration that overcome the limitations of liberal secularism.

From Representing Gods to Representing the Telugu People

This chapter focuses on the film and political career of N.T. Rama Rao to discuss the ways in which the mythological film was central to the emergence of the male star into the position of a populist leader, one who appears capable of representing the interests of the Telugu people. Through the mythological and the socio-fantasy genres, NTR emerges both as the embodiment of Telugu heritage as well as the pre-eminent modern citizen–subject. In this chapter, I draw upon Ernesto Laclau’s idea of populist reason as well as recent anthropological work on affect to think through the relation between politics and affect and also to point to the fact that there are spill-overs between the fields of politics, popular entertainment, and religion which need our critical attention.

Conclusion

As Walter Benjamin observed, modernity ushered in not only new political forms, but also new audio–visual technologies which revolutionized human perception. While Foucault reveals the new political rationalities which come into operation in the modern era, Benjamin alerts us to the fact that this operation is made visible in particular ways by film and other media technologies. Therefore, this concluding chapter focuses on the significant ways in which the new perceptual apparatus of the cinema and the media partake in the production of the citizen–devotee. This chapter begins by examining the significance of the use of double endings, voice-overs, and documentary footage in many mythological and devotional films. It then proceeds to examine the shifting relation between cinema and other media to demonstrate the ways in which they produce the ‘reality’ of popular religion. It argues that cinema becomes a key audio–visual archive in this process.

The Good Wife and the Goddess

Chapter 3 examines the question of gender in the cinematic conceptions of the citizen–devotee. The contradictions that traverse the nationalist ideal of femininity manifest themselves in the cinema of the 1950s and 1960s in the form of a conflict between two figures which have been central to the Telugu devotional genre—the sati and sakti—the good wife and the goddess. Hindu mythic characters of ideal wives provided the role models for imagining the ethics of good wifehood. In many of these films the goddess in her fierce and terrifying aspects, whose worship is usually associated with the superstitious lower castes, is dismissed as a sign of primitive nature. In later decades, however, there are perceptible shifts and lower caste village goddesses begin to make an appearance. Drawing on feminist film theory and anthropology of embodiment, I examine the implications of these thematic and generic shifts.