Page 295 - Religion, Media, and the Public Sphere

Hindutva has to confront a paradox in its policy toward disaporic Indians
and the NRI. Many diasporic Indians are supporters and ¤nanciers of Hindutva
policies (Rajagopal 2001), but Hindutva has to reorient its policy of Indianness
to accommodate them. Proponents of Hindutva have attacked Muslims and
Christians because the latter groups do not regard India as their pitribhumi /
punyabhumi (“fatherland / holy land”), but for those in the diaspora, while In-
30
dia remains their punyabhumi, it is only remotely their pitribhumi. This may
explain the growing use of the slogan “vasudhaiva kutumbakam” (“the world is
one family”), so while India may be one’s fatherland and one’s holy land sym-
bolically, one does not have to live there to be Indian. Arvind Rajagopal (2001,
64–68) argues that in the United States, the Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP), one
of the most virulently anti-Muslim Hindutva groups, has marketed itself not
as Hindu nationalist, as it does in India, but as a global religious movement that
is pro-family and celebrates traditional values.
While the Hindi ¤lm that wants to reach the diasporic market supports In-
dian nationalism, presented through the dominant Hindu symbols and forms,
and risks alienating the Pakistani diaspora, it reasserts the inclusive identity of
Indianness. Hindutva may be a powerful force in India and among those in the
diaspora, but it cannot compete with global market forces. If the Hindi ¤lm
wishes to keep its overseas audiences and to break through into the wealthy
markets of Europe and America, it cannot be hostile to its minority communi-
ties and it is unlikely that it can bene¤t from the West’s increasingly antipathetic
attitudes toward Islam.

This brief look at Hindi cinema and Hindutva ideology needs to be concep-
tualized in a wider frame. Public culture in India is full of signs of the religious
in its complicated interactions between visual culture, religion, and perfor-
mance. These have been studied very little in the Hindi cinema beyond dar-
shana, a hierarchical way of looking, which is acknowledged by many scholars
of cinema yet not analyzed in depth (see note 13). This may be because this
non-modern, culturally speci¤c gaze contradicts other arguments about the lack
of essential speci¤city in the Hindi ¤lm. Perhaps it is the fear of Orientalizing
India by ¤nding all manifestations of Indian culture in religion, which has con-
tributed to the absence of scholarship on religion in Hindi cinema.
Although the relationship between other media and religion has been dis-
cussed in the Indian context, notably in Babb and Wadley (1995), this volume
does not touch on important aspects of the public sphere and of politics. While
the presence of religion in Hindi cinema continues unabated, its wider signi¤-
cance has yet to be interrogated. Although Rajagopal (2001) examines how tele-
vision in India, notably religious soaps, brought Hindutva ideologies closer to
the realm of public culture, existing theories of the public sphere provide few
insights into the relationship between religion and Hindi cinema. While reli-
gion, as visuality and narration, plays a central role in “imagining the nation”
(Appadurai 1997; Pinney 2000), its relationship to Appadurai’s concepts of the

284 Rachel Dwyer