Page 298 - Religion, Media, and the Public Sphere

23. Here I look at the ¤lms but in my public and private conversations with Mani
Ratnam I have seen no manifestations of a Hindutva ideology.
24. Roja itself uses a composite of other mountainous scenery in India to represent
Kashmir.
25. I am unsure whether the Hindi version of this song is a direct translation of the
Tamil.
26. In his reading of this scene, Nicholas Dirks also sees references to public self-
immolation suicides by students protesting against the Mandal Commission’s af¤rmative
action for lower castes.
27. A disturbing ®irtation with violence was also present in Kamalahasan’s earlier
¤lm contrasting modern-day corruption with the sacri¤cial heroism of the freedom
movement (Indian [Tamil], dubbed into Hindi as Hindustani [1997]).
28. See Pinney 2000, on pleasure in Indian public culture.
29. See also Larkin 1997, on ¤lm among the Hausa in Nigeria.
30. According to Orthodox tradition, the Hindu loses caste on traveling overseas un-
til he undergoes a ritual puri¤cation. The increasing number of temples in the diaspora
and the regular visits of religious leaders has reduced, if not eliminated, the importance
of India as the holy land. See Dwyer 2003.

References

Appadurai, Arjun. 1997. Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization. Delhi:
Oxford University Press.
Babb, Lawrence A. 1981. Glancing: Visual Interaction in Hinduism. Journal of Anthropo-
logical Research 37 (4): 387–401.
Basu, Tapan, et al. 1993. Khakhi Shorts and Saffron Flags: A Critique of the Hindu Right.
Hyderabad: Orient Longman.
Bharucha, Rustom. 1994. On the Border of Fascism: Manufacture of Consent in Roja.
Economic and Political Weekly 29, 23 (June 4): 1390–1395.
Brooks, Peter. 1995 [1976]. The Melodramatic Imagination: Balzac, Henry James, Melo-
drama and the Mode of Excess. New Haven: Yale University Press.
Chatterjee, Partha. 1986. Nationalist Thought and the Colonial World: A Derivative Dis-
course? London: Zed Books for the United Nations University.
1. 1993. The Nation and Its Fragments: Colonial and Postcolonial Histories. Delhi:
Oxford University Press.
Dirks, Nicholas B. 2000. The Home and the Nation: Consuming Culture and Politics in
Roja. In Pleasure and the Nation: The History, Consumption and Politics of Public Cul-
ture in India, ed. R. Dwyer and C. Pinney, 161–185. Delhi: Oxford University Press.
Dwyer, Rachel. 2000a. All You Want Is Money, All You Need Is Love: Sex and Romance in
Modern India. London: Cassell.
1. 2000b. “Indian Values” and the Diaspora: Yash Chopra’s Films of the 1990s. West
Coast Line, Autumn 2000. Also in Figures, Facts, Feelings: A Direct Diasporic Dialogue,
ed. Parthiv Shah, 74–82. Catalogue to accompany a British Council exhibition, No-
vember 2000.
1. 2002a. Yash Chopra. London: British Film Institute.

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