Page 293 - Religion, Media, and the Public Sphere

are the most Hindutva yet seen in Hindi ¤lms, especially when the hero, dressed
in a dhoti and a caste-thread (janoi), ¤res arrows in an image that consciously
echoes the chromolithographs of Rama used in the Ramjanmabhumi cam-
paign, showing him as the muscled, angry warrior, very different from his ear-
lier gentle images (A. Kapoor, 1993). Vasudevan (n.d.) notes that it is only the
cinematic form that keeps the audience at a distance from identi¤cation at this
part of the ¤lm, and although Hey! Ram does not promote Hindutva, it is deeply
ambivalent about it. 27

The Return of the Historical Film

Some of the biggest hits of 2001, which became some of the most pro¤t-
able ¤lms of all time, are historicals, a genre that was considered defunct. These
included Gadar (Turmoil), which is hostile to Pakistan but not to Islam, and the
“Oscar”-nominated Lagaan (Once upon a Time in India), the story of a cricket
match between the British and local villagers, including a Dalit and a Muslim,
set in the late nineteenth century (Dwyer 2002c). Among a crop of ¤lms about
nationalist leaders that found little success was one about the founder of Hin-
dutva, Veer Savarkar, Ambedkar (dir. Jabar Patel, 2000), which drew a small
audience, as did several ¤lms on Shaheed Bhagat Singh in 2002. The biggest hit
¤lm of 2001 followed the values of the 1990s consumerist ¤lms, Karan Johar’s
Kabhi khushi kabhie gham, more popularly known as K3G. It directly promotes
Indian nationalism or chauvinism, with one of the heroines taking on a humor-
ous role as a promoter of Indian culture in the United Kingdom and a fanatical
supporter of the Indian cricket team, within the religiously inclined Hindu joint
family. Yet it does not espouse Hindutva overtly, and indeed has a Muslim char-
acter and an overtly “Muslim” song, “Yeh ladka hai Allah” (“O Allah, This
Boy”). The historical ¤lm may once again provide grounds for depicting nation-
alism, but the Hindi cinema has yet to produce a truly Hindutva ¤lm.

The Audiences for Hindi Films
The Hindi ¤lm constitutes its audience through its combination of vi-
sion and narration which organize forms of knowledge, through its mecha-
28
nisms of pleasure and involvement. Melodrama plays an essential role in in-
volving the spectator in the ¤lm, where music, dance, the star, and structures of
the spectacle play their own unique roles. The Hindi ¤lm audience is little stud-
ied, but some idea of the new middle-class community of Hindi ¤lm viewers
can be seen in the construction of a community of such readers by the ¤lm
magazines (Dwyer 2000a, chapter 6). There are many audiences for these ¤lms,
and it cannot be said that there is any one reading of the ¤lms. The problem of
interpretation and the location of meaning remains, and so not all mentions of
Hinduism and religiosity during the rise of Hindutva necessarily re®ect this
ideology.
Industry personnel have a clear notion of their audience, seeing it made up

282 Rachel Dwyer