Page 297 - Religion, Media, and the Public Sphere

6. See, for example, Raja Babu, directed by David Dhawan, 1994, in which female
Congress party workers lift their saris suggestively throughout a dance number.
7. This is not to take one of the antisecularist positions critiqued by Amartya Sen,
such as “non-existence” (of secular India), or “prior identity” or “cultural.” See Sen 1998,
but, more important, Hansen’s view that “public spheres in India remained full of reli-
gious signs and practices, packaged and represented as culture, making up a nationalized
central realm represented as unpolitical, pure and sublime” (1999, 53).
8. Including Amitabh Bachchan, Rajesh Khanna, Vinod Khanna, and Raj Babbar.
9. This naming of the industry is owing in part to the fact that the languages can
be barely distinguished on formal terms in their spoken, colloquial form. Since ¤lmmak-
ers wish to reach the broadest possible audience, they tend to use a simple, widely un-
derstood form of Hindi-Urdu. Since Hindi is India’s national language and Urdu is Paki-
stan’s, this cinema is labeled “Hindi.”
10. Different religious groups had different sacred and religious languages.
11. Few of these singers are Muslim, and not all are educated in Urdu literature al-
though they are trained in Urdu pronunciation.
12. Available online at http://www.umiacs.umd.edu/users/sawweb/sawnet/news/¤re.html.
13. This may draw on the religious practice of darshana (“seeing”), a term used most
often in the context of religious worship, where it is a two-way look between the devotee
and the deity that establishes religious authority. However, it is also used to establish so-
cial and political authority. It is a look that establishes an authoritative ¤gure or icon and
the space around him or her, assigning positions in a hierarchy although these are open
to negotiation and change. See Prasad 1998, 76–77, which draws on Babb 1981 and Eck
1985; see also Vasudevan 1993, 2000b, 139–150.
14. The exposition of melodrama in Brooks 1995 [1976] and Elsaesser 1985 [1972]
has been elaborated in Indian cinema in Vasudevan 2000b, n.d.
15. An English-language play based on the ¤lm was a great success in Britain in 1998.
It ironically called itself Fourteen Songs, Two Weddings, and a Funeral.
16. Shyam Benegal, who was closely associated with the growth and development of
“middle” or noncommercial cinema, directed three Muslim socials (see above) during
the last decade: Mammo, Sardari Begum, and Zubeidaa. These three ¤lms, loosely auto-
biographical, were written by Khalid Mohamed, who also directed Fiza (2000), again a
female-centered ¤lm (unusual in the 1990s), concerned with the search of a Muslim girl
for her brother who became a terrorist after the riots of 1992–93.
17. One of the few ¤lms to engage with this issue was Gulzar’s Maachis (1997), in
which four young men become terrorists during the insurgency in Punjab in the 1980s.
18. This scene nevertheless caused the ¤lm to be withdrawn from cinemas in the
north of England, where South Asian populations of Pakistani and Indian origins live in
close proximity.
19. I was surprised to ¤nd that many British Asians of Pakistani origin enjoyed this
¤lm.
20. In Rajiv Menon’s 2000 hit, made in Tamil but screened with English subtitles,
Kandukondein kandukondein, the hero who was wounded ¤ghting in the Indian Peace-
keeping Force, says that Indian talks of Kargil heroes but has forgotten those who fought
in Sri Lanka.
21. On the controversy surrounding this ¤lm, see Vasudevan 2000a.
22. Another ¤lm that attempts to address the issue of Kashmir is Mission Kashmir
(2000), although it fails to do so.

286 Rachel Dwyer