Page 262 - Religion, Media, and the Public Sphere

12 Gods in the Sacred Marketplace:

Hindu Nationalism and the Return

of the Aura in the Public Sphere

Sudeep Dasgupta

Mankind loses religion as it moves through history, but the loss leaves its
mark behind.
—Max Horkheimer, Critical Theory

Mass media imagery has become a seductive site where one glimpses the com-
plexity of the “Nostalgia for the Present” (Jameson 1994, 279) in contemporary
society. And what better place to begin than with that postmodern phenomenon
par excellence—television. Let us begin, then, with a fragment from Indian tele-
vision. The glitzy, hybrid globalized programming that preaches the resurgence
of local, pan-Indian identity and India as an equal (if not superior) partner in
global culture can be glimpsed in a popular MTV music video entitled “Jai Jai
Shiv Shankar.” From the opening close-up shot of a pair of feet that casts off
its wooden chappals to don Adidas sneakers, the video speeds through a high-
tempo song that combines the rhythms of the ghatam, techno, and Bollywood
musical styles as it narrates the happy marriage of tradition and modernity and,
in the process, calls both into question. The little novice monk in his Adidas
shoes is speeding through the landscape toward the door of a matronly, white-
haired Indian woman, where he delivers the message that she has just won the
“Video Ga Ga” contest. As she collapses to the ground in pleasurable disbelief,
a muscular bare-chested man clad in a dhoti launches into the ¤rst chords of
“Jai Jai Shiv Shankar” aided by his buxom muse. As the man and woman swap
clothes ranging from golden swimsuits and mini-skirts to rural clothing remi-
niscent of Ram’s exile in the forest, a bemused ascetic under a banyan tree rocks
to the infectious beat. Mobile phones, Karl Lagerfeld sunglasses, gym-toned
male and female bodies all vie for space among the faces of religious ¤gures in
the acoustic space of folk drumbeats and the popular verses of old Hindi-¤lm
classics redone as a techno-mix. The enduring popularity of such representa-
tions of modern India where traditional markers of a recrudescent past are