Page 119 - Aesthetic Formations Media, religion, and the Sense

104 Stephen Putnam Hughes

extremely appeal to the religious instinct of the average cinemagoer in India.
On important religious festival occasions when films of the kind of Krishna
Janam, Krishna Lila and Keechaka Vadha, people throng to these shows because
they feel they are stories of Indian origin with which they are very familiar and
which they appreciate better. Such films with a highly moral purpose behind
them cannot but help raising the moral standard of the public.

Lakshmi Pathi concisely made the case for mythological films as appealing
to what she assumed were the essentially religious instincts of average Indian
cinema audiences. On this account film-going was equated with public
Hindu devotion, festivity, and higher moral purpose. This quote also attests
to how Hindu devotional practices offered a powerful model for understand-
ing the early success of mythological films. Mythological themes infused
cinema with religion as a form of worship, as a sensuous and emotional
engagement with the divine, and as a form of moral uplift and improvement.
This formulation effortlessly embedded modern cinema technology within
the terms and priorities of traditional Hindu practice, which in turn were
equated with and enabled a certain kind of nationalist politics. 5
The beginnings of talkie cinema precisely coincided with a period of
intense nationalist political agitation in south India sparked off by events
in other parts of India. Under Gandhi’s leadership the Indian National
Congress launched a movement of Civil Disobedience (satyagraha) in 1930
as a means of defying colonial civil authority and forcing Britain to grant
complete independence (Brown 1977). In sympathy with Gandhi’s well-
publicized protest march in Gujarat, western India, against the salt tax, the
Tamil Congress organized a wave of deliberately provocative protests
throughout south India in order to invite a predictable heavy-handed
response from local authorities and thereby gain support for their cause.
Following on from the initial salt march, local activists aggressively pick-
eted liquor shops and foreign cloth shops purposely courting arrest. In
addition to Congress organizers and volunteers, large numbers of unem-
ployed port laborers, textile mill workers, and weavers, laid off by
Depression era cuts, joined in numerous Civil Disobedience agitations,
which resulted in many thousands being arrested and almost 3,000 con-

victions over several years (Sarkar 1983). By the time Congress called off
the protests in 1934, the British colonial government had already effec-
tively and often brutally crushed the movement. But in south India, the
nationalists had emerged stronger than ever having mobilized new recruits,
organized local committees, and gained widespread support from new
sympathizers. 6
All the political energy of the Civil Disobedience movement poured
into the Tamil drama with song writers taking the lead in composing