Page 109 - Aesthetic Formations Media, religion, and the Sense

94 Stephen Putnam Hughes

been monopolized in the service of a state-sponsored secularism. This new
public presence was even more striking because the Indian film industry
had for the most part stopped making Hindu mythological films and had
long presumed that they were no longer a viable commercial investment.
But when the surprising success of religious materials on television was
followed by electoral success of a Hindu nationalist political party, it
seemed to many critics to be a profound failure of Indian liberal democ-
racy to live up to the teleology of secular modernity. Thus the success of
Hindu television serials was caught up in a complicated causal chain that
seemed to unleash religion into the public sphere and push secularism into
crisis.
While this unique historical conjuncture during the late 1980s and
1990s has undoubtedly served to help underscore the importance of the
relationships between religion, media, and politics in South Asia, most
critics have overlooked the fact that this moment was also implicated
within much longer and complex historical relationships. I contend that if
we want to appreciate the contemporary reconfigurations between reli-
gion, mass media, and politics, we also need to be more attentive to how
they have been part of the ongoing, shifting, and mutually constitutive
relationships throughout the twentieth century. As part of an ongoing
effort to rethink historically the recent scholarship on religion, media, and
politics in India, this chapter examines how the emergence of an earlier
“new” mass mediation of Hindu epic stories in the 1930s produced its own
cultural politics of secular modernism. To do this I am, in part, following
up on the work of the anthropologist Milton Singer, who writing about
research undertook in the south Indian city of Madras (now known as
Chennai) during the 1950s, claimed that the development of the mass
media of print, radio, and film had not eliminated the older cultural media
of traditional religious themes but transformed and incorporated them.
Writing during the heyday of modernization theory, one of Singer’s main
arguments was that the development of mass media had not led to a secular
culture, which was distinct in values and organization from traditional
religious culture in south India (Singer 1972, 148–149 and 161). Indeed
more recent scholarship has shown that contrary to the expectations of

modernization theory, the introduction of new media technologies in India
over the course of the twentieth century has very often led to the emer-
gence of new and spectacularly successful forms of religious expression
(Babb and Wadley 1995; Pinney 2004; Dwyer 2006). Rather than con-
forming to an orderly and linear teleology, the religious and secular have
been mutually interrelated as part of the emergence of modern mass media
in India in ways that have produced a complicated and unstable cultural
politics.