Page 294 - Religion, Media, and the Public Sphere

of a loose assemblage divided along the lines of class and region (both within
India and overseas). The audiences in which they are most interested are the
elite metropolitan Indians and the diasporic South Asians, their hope being that
within the next decade Hindi ¤lms will ¤nd a mainstream audience in the
West (Dwyer 2002c). The impetus is largely economic as such audiences may
pay more than twenty times the price of a ticket than the provincial Indian au-
dience.
Many of those in the Indian metropolitan elite audience belong to the new
middle class so closely associated with the Hindutva parties. One might there-
fore expect a slant toward Hindutva imagery and ideology in these ¤lms. How-
ever, the ¤lmmakers still wish to maximize their audience, rather than ex-
cluding sections, and the proportion of Muslim viewers and others averse to
Hindutva policies is signi¤cant enough that it is not going to alienate this sector.
Nor is the ¤lmmaker going to risk cuts by the censors, as mentioned above. Per-
haps the ¤lms are also context-driven in that the up-market, aspirational ¤lm
is more concerned with the Indian’s place in the world rather than with domes-
tic communal tensions, and with romance and the family rather than with social
problems. This can be dealt with by promoting Indian chauvinism or national-
ism rather than attacking minority communities or looking at serious social
issues beyond the family. Moreover, many ¤lms that show Indians overseas have
little reason to take a Hindutva stance, as their romantic and familial concerns
rarely allow for relationships with various communities.
The patriotic surge in Hindi ¤lms in the 1990s is also part of a wider mani-
festation of national devotion, which undoubtedly had Hindutva overtones, such
as the celebration of India’s detonation of a nuclear device in 1998, for which
greetings cards were issued with the slogan “Hum kisise kam nahi ” (“We’re not
inferior to anyone”). Hindutva has no monopoly on patriotism, and such feel-
ings are more likely a manifestation of insecurity less over Pakistan than with
the fear of pan-Islamic resurgence within India and beyond.
While Hindi ¤lms are undoubtedly anti-Pakistani, they are not anti-Muslim.
This would prejudice sales in the international market, in particular, in the Gulf
States where these ¤lms have a huge market, as well as the large Muslim South
29
Asian diaspora in the United Kingdom. The ¤lm is, as Adorno reminds us, a
commodity.
More complicated is the orientation of the Hindi ¤lm to the diasporic mar-
ket. Films featuring diasporic Indians returning “home” have almost become a
sub-genre of the social (Dwyer 2000b), which has lately become more con-
cerned with endorsing “Indian values,” centered around the family, food, reli-
gion, and nationalism, as in Hum aapke hain kaun . . . ! (Dwyer 2000b). A strik-
ing if sometimes heavy-handed approach to the nonresident Indian (NRI) ¤lm
can be seen in Pardes (Overseas; dir. Subhash Ghai, 1997), which featured an
Indian girl, Ganga (her name is that of the goddess of the River Ganges, imply-
ing her purity), whose family want her to marry the son of a wealthy family
friend, who lives in America but still sings “I love my India.” The ¤lm’s slogan
is “American dream: Indian soul.”

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