Page 289 - Religion, Media, and the Public Sphere

religious and other genres remained popular after Independence, they were
largely eclipsed by the epic melodrama (Rajadhyaksha 1993), the omnibus genre
of the social ¤lm, where a central protagonist seeks to incorporate his romantic
love into his family and to ful¤ll his kinship duties. The social is made in the
melodramatic mode, where traditional hierarchies and concepts of the sacred
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are transposed onto the domain of nationhood and its key icons. It upholds
Nehruvian ideology, where secularism is not an absence of religion but a sepa-
ration of religion and culture from politics as suggested by Chatterjee (1993).
The social does not show a plurality of religions but rather the Hindu norm.
The normative role in the Hindi ¤lm was usually that of the upper-class,
upper-caste, male Hindu. As in the wider sphere, Hindu is loosely equated with
Indian. Within the group of religious practices that are labeled “Hindu,” it can
be hard to distinguish the religious from the cultural. In other words, the pre-
sentation of the upper-caste Hindu as the norm dominates the Indian public
sphere so it is not surprising to see it also in Indian public culture.
Indian cinema underwent radical changes in the 1970s, associated with the
breakdown of a political consensus that led to the Emergency and the weaken-
ing of the Congress Party (Prasad 1998). It is striking that the 1970s is the ¤rst
time ordinary or subaltern Muslims are depicted in cinema, a trend that con-
tinued into the 1980s.

Hindutva and Hindi Films in the 1990s

Hindi cinema in the 1990s was dominated by the plushy romance, ex-
empli¤ed by the banners of Yash Raj Films (see Dwyer 2002a), Rajshri and
Mukta Arts, whose ¤lms promoted the romantic couple under the aegis of the
traditional Indian joint family, where consumerist lifestyles are celebrated and
religiosity is valued. These values share some features with Hindutva, but this
does not automatically make the ¤lms locations for Hindutva propaganda.
The social ¤lm’s focus has always been the family, often as metaphor for the
nation or as a location for traditional values, love and happiness, for example.
However, in the 1990s the ideal of the joint family came back with a vengeance,
none more so than in Sooraj Barjatya’s Hum aapke hain kaun . . . ! (What am I
to you . . . !) which was entirely plotted around engagement, marriage, child-
15
birth, and death (Uberoi 2000). The younger generation is prepared to sacri-
¤ce love for the welfare of their loving and supportive families, who are the en-
tire focus of the ¤lm. The hero does not womanize but follows the guidance of
his older brother, and drives a jeep emblazoned with the graf¤tto “I love my
family.” This big-budget, family-oriented ¤lm amazed the experts by becoming
one of the greatest box of¤ce hits of all time.
Religion is present in these ¤lms, often as a consumerist lifestyle, with houses
containing ever larger and more elaborate puja (worship) rooms, where the
family gathers, often around the central ¤gure of the mother, suggesting an-
other source of family authority beyond patriarchal economic power. The ethos
of consumerism in the ¤lm reaches into religious practices which become more

278 Rachel Dwyer