Page 108 - Aesthetic Formations Media, religion, and the Sense

Chapter 4

Tamil Mythological Cinema and the

Politics of Secular Modernism

Stephen Putnam Hughes

Since the 1990s the relationship among religion, media, and politics in South
Asia has attracted considerable attention from a wide range of scholars. This
is to a large extent due to convergence of the highly successful Indian televi-
sion serialization of Hindu epic stories and the rise of Hindu nationalism
during the late 1980s and early 1990s. At the time the only TV available in
India was offered by the state-run television broadcaster, known as
Doordarshan. They broadcast 78 weekly episodes of the Ramayana between
1987 and 1989 and then followed it up with a serialization of the other great
Hindu epic story, Mahabharatha, during the early 1990s. The popular suc-
cess of these Hindu epic TV serials coincided with the first large-scale expan-
sion of television and the watching of their weekly telecasts became something
like a collective national ritual, which marked the moment when television
first became a mass medium in India. Suddenly, the newly emergent medium
of television appeared to be the privileged means for constituting a national
Hindu community, which would also be invoked politically as part of the
mass mobilization that led to the demolition of the Babri Masjid (mosque),
widespread communal violence, and the eventual electoral victories of the
Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party.
Many have argued that this new articulation of media and religion was
part of a profound reconfiguration of nation, community, and culture in
relation to the politics of Hindu nationalism (Mankekar 1999; Rajagopal
2001). At the time it seemed that television had created a sudden and spec-
tacular resurgence of religion in a public media domain that had previously