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relationships among media, religion, and politics in India. In focusing on
how the introduction of the “new” medium of sound cinema changed the
complex and productive relationships between film, religion, and politics
in the 1930s, I want to suggest that the emergence of another “new” mass
medium in the 1980s and 1990s was not as new as it seemed to commenta-
tors at the time. The articulation of media and religion in contemporary
India are part of a long history of political representation and contestation.
If we understand and study media as “unique and complicated historical
subjects” (Gitelman 2006, 7), we will be in a much better position to crit-
ically evaluate what is new about “new” media configurations of religion
and politics. To paraphrase Bolter and Grusin (1999, 15), what is new
about new media are the specific ways people refashion older media as well
as the ways people refashion older media to answer the challenges of new
media. The new relationships among religion and media must be read
against the grain of the past.

Notes

1. Recently the work of Philip Lutgendorf (2003) and Rachel Dwyer (2006) are
important exceptions that have done much to change this perception and open
Indian film scholarship in important directions.
2. This proliferation of numerous linguistically specific cinemas within the cate-
gory of Indian cinema is unique among world cinemas. As a “national cinema”
there is no other that can match the range and volume of linguistic and regional
diversity, which constitutes Indian cinema.
3. Paula Richman (1991) convincingly makes the case for the multiplicity of these
epic traditions. Also see Rachel Dwyer (2006, 18) for a useful discussion of
how these mythological materials relate to the history of cinema in India.
4. This was not limited to just media technology; it included transportation and
electricity. The development of transportation—automobiles, buses, trains,
airplanes—all contributed to major changes for pilgrimage. And electric light-
ing was immediately extensively used within temples and at religious festivals
to visually enhance the ritual practices of worship. See Milton Singer (1972,
140) and Babb and Wadley (1995).
5. For a more extensive discussion of this position see Hughes (2005).
6. For a detailed account of this period see Arnold (1977).
7. The translated songs title/first lines are roughly as follows: “Why are we
Indians fighting among ourselves?” and “The charka is a weapon in Gandhi’s
hand.”
8. This is from a film review of Dhruva at Kinema Central in The Hindu, 24 May
1935.
9. In the weekly film column, “Stardust” in Merry Magazine, 27 April 1935, 16.