Page 284 - Religion, Media, and the Public Sphere

13 The Saffron Screen? Hindu

Nationalism and the Hindi Film

Rachel Dwyer

In his groundbreaking work on Indian anticolonial nationalism, Partha Chat-
terjee argues that the nationalist struggle in India focused on the state and po-
litical power, while cultural nationalism was located in the inner domain of tra-
dition (Chatterjee 1993, 116–134). The current (post-1980s) and dominant
form of Indian nationalism is Hindutva, or Hindu nationalism. In its latest
guise, based on a reworking of earlier forms of Hindu national thought dating
back to Veer Savarkar and his followers, it comprises a new politics of militant
1
Hinduism based on ethno-religious mobilization. Hindutva is not about the
presence of Hinduism in Indian secular politics but rather is a politics of com-
2
munal identity. Thomas Blom Hansen argues that it has grown not just through
its political organization (Jaffrelot 1996) or through existing religious elements
of nationalism (van der Veer 1994) but rather within the domain of public cul-
ture. He shows how, since the 1980s, symbolic language and rituals have been
used to promote Hindutva ideology, concentrating on yatras (“pilgrimages,
journeys”) and the building of a temple at the birthplace of Rama (Ramjan-
mabhumi), supposedly on the site of a previous temple where a Mughal mosque
then stood. Using a Lacanian framework, Hansen locates various Hindutva dis-
courses in already existing forms of subjectivity (1999, 203) around communal
identities built on constructions of self, community, and nation with the Mus-
lim posed as Other. He does not, however, discuss India’s dominant form of
public culture, the Hindi ¤lm. 3
The rise of Hindu nationalism was simultaneous with a media invasion (sat-
ellite and cable television since 1991 [Merchant 1996]), a communications revo-
lution (the mobile phone and the Internet), and a ®ood of Western brands into
India. To get its message across, the BJP (Bharatiya Janata Party, the political
party of Hindutva) and its allies harnessed the media via televised religious
soap operas (Lutgendorf 1995; Mitra 1993; Rajagopal 2001), popular visuals
4
(Kapur 1993), and cheap technology such as the music cassette. Religious soaps
that may not have set out with a political agenda or been overtly chauvinistic
have been used by Hindutva supporters to foment nationalism. 5
The simultaneous rise of Hindutva and of the new media has also seen the