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For my late father, Venkata Rama Sarma and my mother, Sakuntala who dreamed big for their daughter
Genealogy does not pretend to go back in time to restore an unbroken continuity that operates beyond the dispersion of forgotten things; its duty is not to demonstrate that the past exists actively in the present, that it secretly continues to animate the present, having imposed a predetermined form to all its vicissitudes. Genealogy does not resemble the evolution of a species and does not map the destiny of a people. On the contrary, to follow the complex course of descent is to maintain passing events in their proper dispersion; it is to identify the accidents, the minute deviations—or conversely, the complete reversals—the errors, the false appraisals, and the faulty calculations that gave birth to those things that continue to exist and have value for us; it is to discover that truth or being do not lie at the root of what we know and what we are, but the exteriority of accidents.
Michel Foucault, Language, Counter-Memory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews (1977)
Figures
I.1 Prabhat Films, Led by Damle and Fatehlal, Is Best Known for Its Saint Films 16
I.2 Print Advertisement for Prabhat’s Sant Dnyaneshwar (1940) 17
I.3 Advertising Early Mythologicals: One Promises Romance and the Other Promises History 19
I.4 First Telugu Talkie, 1931: The Mythological Bhakta Prahlada 28
I.5 Print Advertisement for Maya Machindra (1945): An Early Telugu Mythological 29
1.1 S.V. Ranga Rao Playing Ghatothkacha Enjoys the Wedding Feast in Mayabazaar (1957) 51
1.2 NTR as Krishna in Mayabazaar (1957) 53
1.3 Star as God: Framed for Worship in Sri Krishna Pandaveeyam (1966) 61
1.4 NTR as Duryodhana in Sri Krishna Pandaveeyam (1966) 65
1.5 NTR’s Triple Roles: Krishna, Duryodhana, and Karna in Dana Veera Soora Karna (1977) 65
1.6 NTR Confronts the God Yama in the Socio-fantasy Yamagola (1977) 74
1.7 Many NTRs: Still from Yamadonga (2007) 84
2.1 Nagaiah in and as Bhakta Ramadasu (1964) 93
2.2 Nagarjuna in and as Sri Ramadasu (2006). ANR as Kabir Displays His Rama Bhakti 101
x 2.3 Nagaiah in Bhakta Potana (1942) 111
2.4 Nagaiah as Saint Tyagaraja in Tyagayya (1946) 112
2.5 Nagaiah in Yogi Vemana (1947) 113
2.6 Playing Ramadasu as Ethical and Political Citizen–Devotee in Sri Ramadasu (2006) 114
3.1 A Benign Goddess Appears Amidst the Ruins of the Patala Bhairavi Idol in Patalabhairavi (1951) 126
3.2 The Crowd Demands the King Worship Their Goddess in Nagula Chavithi (1956) 128
3.3 The King Tries to Persuade the Crowd of Devotees in Nagula Chavithi (1956) 129
3.4 Jamuna as Sati Vipula in Nagula Chavithi (1956) 130
3.5 Janaki as the Malevolent Goddess Manasa in Nagula Chavithi (1956) 130
3.6 Driven Out of the House, Sakhu Walks Towards the Group of Bhajan Singers in Sant Sakhu (1941) 134
3.7 Alternating Close-ups of Her Bust and Feet as She Strides with Determination in Sant Sakhu (1941) 134
3.8 Lord Vitthala Pounding Grain in Sant Sakhu (1941) 135
3.9 Lord Vitthala Fetching Water in Sant Sakhu (1941) 135
3.10 Lord Vitthala Serving Sakhu’s Mother-in-Law in Sant Sakhu (1941) 136
3.11 Goddess Film Devi Lalithamba (1973) Starring K.R. Vijaya 139
3.12 Karuninchina Kanakadurga (1992) Starring K.R. Vijaya as the Goddess 139
3.13 The Subaltern Goddess Makes an Appearance in Ammoru (1995) 142
3.14 Computer-Generated Special E ects in Ammoru (1995) 146
3.15 Crowds of Devotees Gather to Acknowledge the Appearance of the Goddess in Ammoru (1995) 152
3.16 Arundhati (2008), DVD Cover 153
4.1 Poster of a Goddess Film with Possessed Viewer Being Blessed by the Goddess 169
5.1 Tirumala Temple Set Created for the Film Sri Venkateswara Mahatyam (1960) Where Regular Pujas Were Apparently Conducted during the Period of Shooting
193
5.2 Idol of a Goddess Installed in Bengaluru Theatre Premises during the Screening of a Goddess Film in the 1990s 194
5.3 Early Mythological Urvashi (1946) Promises Music, Spectacle, and Dance 200
C.1 Poster of Sri Venkateswara Mahatyam (1960) Urging Viewers to Come for Documentary Footage of Rituals
210
C.2 The Violent Goddess Ramya Krishna in Ammoru (1995) 215
C.3 Painting on the Wall of a Secunderabad Goddess Shrine Inspired by the Still from the lm Ammoru (1995) 215
Preface
This book is a genealogical study of the intersections between popular cinema, popular religion, and politics in South India. Focusing on the mythological and devotional genres, it argues that cinema’s mediation of religion presents us with an opportunity to explore the a ective dimensions of citizenship.
The predominance of the ‘religious’ genres was unique to early Indian cinema. Both in the silent cinema period and well into the late 1940s, these genres were extremely popular with audiences. The lms participated in elaborating the discourse of nationalism, albeit by positing a glorious Hindu past. However, they also participated in the project of social reform and regeneration. Despite this, their popularity produced anxiety among the elite that the Indian masses would remain mere devotees and never fully attain the status of free citizens.
While the mythologicals and devotional lms declined in Hindi cinema in the 1950s, in Telugu (and Tamil too) they remained popular well into the later decades of the last century. The political success of the lm star Nandamuri Taraka Rama Rao (also referred to as N.T. Rama Rao or NTR), well-known for his portrayal of gods and kings, posed afresh the problem of cinema’s mesmerizing power that seemed to persuade viewers of the divinity of lm stars. In later decades, the gure of another kind of viewer haunted the discourses around cinema, that of the female viewer who got possessed in the lm theatre during screenings of goddess lms.
xiv By using the questions around viewership as a focal point, this book analyses lmic texts to foreground the ways in which they mediate questions of mythology, history, and devotion. At the same time, it also examines the practices of viewership in which religious practice intersects with entertainment. Using Talal Asad’s re ections on the concept of habitus, the book seeks to elaborate the context within which cinema leads to cultivation of new sensory modes and the reorientation of sensibilities. The changing disciplines of lm practice too are made the subject of analysis.
A central argument the book makes is about the production of the gure of the citizen–devotee through cinema and other media discourses. Through the use of this word, citizen–devotee, this study points to the mutual and fundamental imbrication of the two ideas and concepts. In our times, the citizen and devotee do not and cannot exist as independent gures, but necessarily shape each other. On the one hand, the citizen–devotee formulation indicates that the citizen ideal is always traversed by, and shot through with, other formations of subjectivity that in ect it in signi cant ways. On the other hand, it points to the incontrovertible fact that in modern liberal democracies, it is impossible to simply be a devotee (bhakta) where one’s allegiance is only to a particular faith or mode of being. On the contrary, willingly or unwillingly, one is enmeshed in the discourse of rights and duties, subjected to the governance of the state, the politics of identity, and the logics of majority and minority, and so on. Religion as we know it today is itself the product of an encounter with modern rationalities of power and the modern media. Hence, the modern hybrid formation—the citizen–devotee.
The rst full-length study of Telugu mythological and devotional lms, this book combines an account of the history and politics of Telugu cinema with an anthropology of lmmaking and viewership practices. It examines a wide variety of sources—Telugu lm texts along with Telugu and English lm journals, media reports, memoirs and biographies of actors and lm-makers, as well as select interviews with lm-makers and viewers. It draws on lm and media theory to foreground the speci city of the cinematic medium and other allied technologies, such as the gramophone, the radio, tape recorders, and television,
and to describe the new kinds of publics created by these technologies. Anthropological theories of religion, secularism, and the formation of embodied and a ective subjects are combined with political theories of citizenship and governmentality to enrich our understanding of the overlapping formations of lm spectators, citizens, and devotees.
Acknowledgements
It gives me great pleasure that I can nally place on record my deep gratitude towards the many people and institutions who have helped, supported, and sustained me over the many years it took to complete this book.
First, this book is based on my PhD thesis, and I would like to thank my dissertation committee members at the Department of Anthropology in Columbia University—Nicholas Dirks, Partha Chatterjee, and David Scott—and my external readers Sudipta Kaviraj and William Mazzarella. Their generous and insightful engagement with my thesis laid the foundation for this work. Two fellowships that I received at that time—the SSRC-IDRF grant and the Columbia University Travelling Grant—allowed me to do much of the eldwork for this project. My thanks are also due to the sta at the National Film Archives of India, Pune; the Tamil Nadu State Archives, Chennai; the libraries at the Centre for the Study of Culture and Society, Bengaluru; and Anveshi Research Centre for Women’s Studies, Hyderabad.
My sincere thanks to my colleagues in the Department of Cultural Studies at the English and Foreign Languages University, Hyderabad— rstly to M. Madhava Prasad for his exemplary scholarship and warmth and generosity, and to K. Satyanarayana, Satish Poduval, and M. Parthasarathi, whose intellectual camaraderie and friendship make the department a nurturing and hospitable place. I also deeply appreciate the warm friendship of other colleagues at the university, B.S. Sherin, Asma Rasheed, Madhumeeta Sinha, Sri Vani, Maya Pandit, and H. Nikhila. I would also like to thank
xviii my students whose enthusiasm and intelligence have enriched my teaching and research over the years.
My special thanks to Yamini Krishna, lm studies research scholar at the English and Foreign Languages University, for her invaluable help with scanning part of my archival material and identifying images for the book. I would also like to thank Pritha Chakrabarti, research scholar in our department, for ready help with some of the images used in the book.
Many, many years ago, it was the pioneering work of scholars such as Tejaswini Niranjana, S.V. Srinivas, and Ashish Rajadhyaksha that sparked a critical interest in the study of cinema. Their continued support and friendship over the years is something I highly value.
In Hyderabad, Anveshi has been an intellectual home where I am constantly reminded of the work that knowledge production does in the real world. I have learnt so much from the wonderful friends I gained here that it would be hard to express my gratitude. First of all, I wish to mention Susie Tharu for her warmth, intellectual presence, and constant inspiration to do more and to do better. I also greatly appreciate R. Srivatsan for reading the full dissertation and o ering invaluable comments and encouragement when I rst began working on this manuscript. I would like to especially mention the deep and abiding intellectual and emotional bond that I share with A. Suneetha, Vasudha Nagaraj, and Lakshmi Kutty that has proved especially nourishing over the last few years. So many other friends have enriched my world with a ection, challenging ideas, and the example of their own work: K. Lalitha, Rama Melkote, D. Vasanta, Sheela Prasad, K. Sajaya, Gogu Shyamala, N. Manohar, Shefali Jha, Deepa Srinivas, and Deeptha Achar.
Parts of this work were presented in di erent seminars and conferences at the Centre for the Study of Culture and Society, Bengaluru; The Sarai Programme at the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies, New Delhi; the English and Foreign Languages University, Hyderabad; Centre for Women’s Studies and Centre for Regional Studies, University of Hyderabad; Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, Indian Institute of Technology, Hyderabad; Department of English, M.S. University,
Vadodara; and the Centre for Performance Research and Cultural Studies in South Asia (CPRACSIS), Thrissur. I thank the organizers and the audience at these di erent places for their interest and engagement with my work. I hope some of their insights have found their way into this book.
Some parts of this book have appeared in di erent versions as articles in the Critical Quarterly and in BioScope: South Asian Screen Studies published by SAGE. My heartfelt thanks to Colin Macabe and Ravi Vasudevan for encouraging me to publish these articles. The BioScope article has been reprinted in the four-volume set, Film and Religion, edited by S. Brent Plate and published by Routledge. My sincere thanks to all these publishers for their kind permission to use these articles in this book.
My sincere gratitude to Sri Maturi Suri Babu of Creative Links Publishers and Sri H. Ramesh Babu for images used in this book.
I really appreciate the patience and commitment of the team at Oxford University Press (OUP), and special thanks to Rachel Dwyer, who rst recommended the manuscript to OUP.
I should mention Kiranmayi Indraganti, my sister-in-law and fellow cinema enthusiast, whose love, encouragement, and readiness with help of all kinds is something I have come to rely upon so much over the years. My parents-in-law, Indraganti Janakibala and Indraganti Srikanta Sarma’s scholarship and creative writing have been inspiring, and their unconditional love has played such an important part in my life. Special thanks to Balaram, my brother-in-law, for constant encouragement.
How can I even begin to thank Singaraju Ramadevi, my twin sister and soulmate; my brother, Singaraju Sadanand; and sisters, Varalakshmi and Sarada; and other loving members of my family—A. Vidyadevi, my sister-in-law, my brothers-in-law, R. Naganathan and M. Chakradhar, and my lovely nephews and nieces, Sandeep, Nikki (Parimala), Sruthi, Aishwarya, Karthik, and Shanmukh. And, of course, I always appreciate the quiet loving presence of Vadina.
And nally, Mohanakrishna, the music of my life, whose unfailing love sustains me every day, and whose passion and enthusiasm are a constant source of energy and inspiration! And Neelima and Nishanth who ll my life with their wondrous
xx worlds every day and bring so much joy and ful lment. I wish I had worried less about work and spent even more time with the two of them.
Acknowledgements
And last but not the least, thanks dear reader for reading this book. I hope it will be worth your while.
Introduction
Cinema and Religion—New Genres, New Publics, and New Subjectivities
A goddess lm that does not move the female audience into a trance, one that does not induce possession among at least some of them ought to be considered a failure.
—Kodi Ramakrishna, lm director
There was no question of God not being elected…. The cinema has stood the traditional relationship of myth and fact on its head. Myth has become fact. The lm star who plays God has become God.
—Chidananda Dasgupta, lm critic
The genesis of this book lies in a couple of puzzles that have engaged me for a long time—one is the gure of the possessed female spectator, which became a subject of discussion with the popularity of goddess lms in the 1990s; and the second is the role of mythological cinema in the political success of the lm star N.T. Rama Rao (NTR) in the 1980s. Pondering over these puzzles has led me to consider the history of genres in Telugu cinema, as well as the practices of lm-making
Deities and Devotees: Cinema, Religion, and Politics in South India. Uma Maheswari Bhrugubanda, Oxford University Press (2018). © Uma Maheswari Bhrugubanda. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780199487356.003.0001
2 and viewership. It pushed me to re ect upon the links between religion, cinema, and politics, which subsequently opened up the terrain of the a ective in politics, and helped in understanding cinema’s centrality in shaping the a ective dimension of citizenship.
In the early 1990s, I had just joined university, and had found a proper name for all the incoherent ideas and the sense of injustice and outrage that I had felt, thought about, discussed, and debated intensely; that name was feminism, and among the new set of friends, teachers, and activists that I met, the question of women’s agency was a major concern. In the mid-1990s, when the lm Ammoru turned out to be a major success, I initially refused to watch the lm. In fact, I was actually in deep despair about its popularity, worrying about how easily women seemed to participate in their own subordination. To my secular feminist sensibilities, the lm sounded entirely predictable—an ultra-faithful pativrata, an avenging goddess, lots of weeping and screaming, and melodrama at its worst. In any case, the genre had con rmed its low-budget B movie status a while ago. However, then there were stories about Ammoru’s special e ects, about its success, and the thronging women viewers, many of whom were supposedly getting possessed in theatres. This posed a series of questions—how to understand the appeal of the lm? How to approach the question of religion, without simply seeing it as an instrument for women’s oppression? Was the goddess gure somehow empowering for women? How do we understand empowerment itself? Was there more to this genre that needed closer attention? How to study religion in cinema? These were some of the initial questions that confronted me.
Telugu cinema continued to produce mythological and devotional lms based mostly on Hindu myths and legends, many decades after they ceased to be major genres in Hindi and many other Indian languages. The period from the 1950s to the late 1970s witnessed the successful production of a number of these ‘religious’ lms, and while examining them, it is impossible not to think of the star NTR, and his association with some of the bestknown lms in these genres. Also, it is equally impossible to avoid the puzzle of his success in politics within months of entering the eld and setting up a political party. In 1982, NTR, a lm star who starred in the roles of Hindu gods like Rama and Krishna in
many mythologicals, set up a political party, contested and won elections, and became the chief minister of the state, all in the space of a year. For many political and social commentators and lm critics like Chidananda Dasgupta cited earlier, this whirlwind success could only be explained through the power of his cinematic image as god and hero! This kind of argument assumes it knows the answers to the questions it needs to probe and explore. It is based on two mistaken views— rst, that mythological lms are full of piety, and second, that the lm audience is religious and naive, mistakes the actor for the divine characters he plays on screen, and, what is more, even votes him to power on that basis. These lms thus came to be seen as major contributing factors in the unusual and undesirable alliance between cinema, religion, and politics in this part of the country.
Scholars like Madhava Prasad (2004, 2014) and S.V. Srinivas (2006, 2013) attempted to move past such explanations to probe questions of stardom, and the ideological role of cinema in legitimizing authority. However, it seemed as if in these e orts, mythological cinema was being set aside as incidental, if not completely irrelevant to understanding the true ‘political’ nature of NTR’s ascendance to representative status. So, here was another puzzle, about the contingent ways in which cinema articulated religion and politics.
Implicit in the two instances that I have discussed earlier, instances that produced an anxiety about the excessive a ective power of cinema, is the question of viewership. How do we understand the practices of viewership in relation to cinema? If cinema has a power to persuade people, to mesmerize them, even induce possessions, how do we understand that power? These are some of the questions I seek to explore in the following pages.
Hence, this book is a genealogical study of the intersections between popular cinema, popular religion, and politics in postIndependence South India which produce, what I call, the gure of the citizen–devotee. The book argues that the overlaps between citizens, devotees, and lm spectators over the decades need to be viewed not as non-modern or irrational aberrations that demand an explanation, but as an opportunity to revise our understanding of citizenship and religiosity itself. Citizenship is not merely a political subjectivity that overrides all other a liations and
4 identities, but is an embodied a ective way of being that is shaped crucially by ideas of national belonging and national history (and even regional and linguistic histories and identities), as well as by processes of governmentality, and developments and discourses in cinema and other media. In modern times, the religious mode of being too, is by no means a private a air as liberal secularism decrees, but is crucially mediated by modern political formations like the nation, the state, and mass media. Hence, I use the term, the citizen–devotee to indicate the mutual imbrications of the two categories.
The primary focus of the book is the discursive eld of Telugu cinema in the period starting roughly from the 1940s to the 2000s, although I do discuss lms from other languages, and debates that occurred in the decades before the 1940s. By the discursive eld of cinema, I refer to not only lmic texts, but also disciplines of lm-making, practices of publicity, modes of lm criticism, as well as practices of viewership, all of which are an inalienable part of the institution of cinema. Through tracking the emergence of the gure of the citizen–devotee, and the transformations, interruptions, reversals, and challenges that have marked the career of this gure at di erent moments, this study also contributes to the project of mapping the terrain of contemporary politics in South India.
This introductory chapter is divided into four sections. The rst section outlines the theoretical frameworks and conceptual debates that I draw upon to elaborate my argument. The second section provides a detailed introduction to the central object of my research—the mythological and devotional genres in Indian cinema, and the predominant frameworks within which they have been understood. The third section has a more speci c focus on the history of these genres in Telugu cinema. It traces the various performative traditions, as well as oral and printed texts that have provided a basis for this cinema. At the same time, by paying close attention to the formal and narrative aspects of these lms, I argue that cinema’s technology as well as the new political context mediate existing texts and traditions signi cantly. Therefore, these lms are contemporary lms, not simply carriers of ancient myths and beliefs. The fourth and nal section describes brie y the overall method adopted in the study, and the range of materials that I have used. It also provides brief descriptions of the
chapters that follow to show how each chapter seeks to extend and elaborate the central thesis of the book.
Citizenship and Politics in Heterogeneous Times
Two important lines of thinking emerged from the critical work that was produced in the wake of the crisis in secularism in India. The rst was an attempt to unpack the dominant secular ideology to reveal that the abstract citizen–subject, despite its disavowal of all particular identities, was invisibly marked as Hindu, male, and upper caste; and that it was this subject which was rendered normative (Dhareshwar 1993; Dhareshwar and Srivatsan 1996; Menon 2006; Nigam 2006; Niranjana 2000; Pandian 2002; Tharu 2000; Tharu and Niranjana 1997). The second line of thinking was an attempt to interrogate the concept of secularism itself as it emerged in the Western context, to outline its limitations and impasses, and to map its particular history in India (Bhargava 1998; Needham and Sunder Rajan 2007; Tejani 2007).
Partha Chatterjee (2004) has recently extended this investigation to think about the tensions between ‘unbound serialities’ like citizenship, and ‘bound serialities’ like caste and religious identity. He proceeds to probe the very dynamics between modernity and democracy in India by theorizing popular politics in what he calls ‘the heterogeneous time of modernity’. Questioning some fundamental assumptions of classic social and political theory, he argues that the supposed ‘empty homogeneous time’ of modern politics is merely the utopian time of capital. It is an ideal that sustains the teleological historicist imagination of identity, nationhood, and progress. In the actual workings of modern life, according to him, we nd that ‘time is heterogeneous, unevenly dense’ (Chatterjee 2004: 7). While modern political theory has endorsed identities such as citizens, workers, nations, intellectuals, and so on, as universal identities, and therefore considers them liberating, it designates other identities based on ethnic or racial origin or religious community as constricting and con ict-producing. Benedict Anderson’s The Spectre of Comparison (1998) is a good example of
6 this faith in the universalist critical thought of the Enlightenment. Anderson names the former ‘unbound serialities’, and the latter ‘bound serialities’. Chatterjee takes issue with this conception. He argues, ‘to endorse these “unbound serialities” while rejecting the “bound” is, in fact, to imagine nationalism [and democratic politics] without modern governmentality’ (Chatterjee 2004: 23). He proceeds further to argue that this is the inevitable way in which democratic politics unfolds in a country like India. Most often there is a con ict between the demands of modernity and the demands of democracy. Hence, we nd such phenomena as religious assemblies, cultural festivals, and even lm fan clubs becoming the grounds of political mobilization. As he describes it: ‘what we see is the importation of the disorderly, corrupt, and irrational practices of unreformed popular culture into the very hallways and chambers of civic life, all because of the calculations of electoral expediency. The noble pursuit of modernity appears to have been seriously compromised because of the compulsions of parliamentary democracy’ (Chatterjee 2004: 47–8).
Nevertheless, he argues, we ought to attend to such practices with seriousness, as they tell us something about the way in which popular sovereignty struggles against the normalizing practices of governmentality to create real ethical spaces where the terms of justice maybe reworked.
I think that it is possible to perceive the new kinds of politics and citizenship that are forged in the heterogeneous times of Indian democracy in the intersections between popular cinema, religion, and politics that I will be exploring through this book.
Cinema and Politics
The cinema–politics link in South India has been recognized for some time, given the extraordinary phenomenon where in at least two states—Tamil Nadu and Andhra Pradesh—political leaders like M.G. Ramachandran and NTR, respectively, emerged from the eld of cinema. Although he never entered active politics, Raj Kumar of Karnataka was both a superstar of Kannada cinema as well as the pre-eminent representative of Kannada identity and pride. This has been the subject of some very important studies
(Elder and Schmitthenner 1985; Pandian 2000; Prasad 2004, 2009, 2014; Srinivas 2006, 2009a, 2009b, 2013). These studies have provided rich and complex accounts of the ways in which cinema is used as a means for propagating political ideologies and consolidating regional linguistic identities. They give detailed descriptions of how star images are constructed. They have also studied the ways in which fan clubs become the basis for political mobilization, and the overlaps between the identities of a cinema fan and political subject, namely, the citizen. However, what remains poorly appreciated and unexplored in these cinema–politics studies, is another important dimension, namely popular religion, especially the crucial role it plays in the case of Telugu cinema and the Andhra Pradesh context. As mentioned earlier, this book argues that an examination of this dimension will allow us to appreciate how popular religious and secular traditions are being constantly shaped and reshaped through di erent mass media, especially cinema, and the kinds of ethical and political subjects that such technologies and related discourses produce. Furthermore, this examination will have implications for any e ort to rethink some of the most fundamental terms of our contemporary political vocabularies such as citizenship, representation, and secularism.
Citizenship and Devotion
What is the relationship between citizenship and devotion? The term deshbhakti in many Indian languages, for example, gives us a sense of this modern demand for bhakti, that is, devotion and willing submission towards the nation, and by extension, the state. Hence, earlier forms of bhakti towards a divine authority (daiva bhakti), or towards an earthly master or lord (swami bhakti), or in the case of the woman, devotion towards her husband (pati bhakti), are now to be subordinated to this new deshbhakti, which is towards the nation. However, as I try to demonstrate in the pages that follow, in our times, citizenship and the various forms of devotion do not and cannot exist as independent categories, but necessarily shape and mould each other.
Recent work in political theory has sought to rework the Kantian lineages of the citizen as a free, individual, reasoning sovereign
8 agent.1 This work has attempted to show that people act as political subjects not merely as reasoning agents, but also as embodied and a ective beings, who are shaped by particular histories and contexts. As the political theorist Chantal Mou e argues, the problem with many theories of democracy today, including the deliberative model of democracy, is that they presume a certain kind of democratic subject who is imagined to be either a bearer of natural rights, or a rational subject, or a utility-maximizing agent. This subject is believed to be free of history, language, culture, and religion, all conditions which crucially shape the kind of democratic subject that emerges in particular contexts.2
Commenting on the importance of cultivating certain attributes in the historical formation of the citizen gure, David Burchell argues that citizens are socially and historically shaped. He points out that Michel Foucault’s work on governmentality demonstrates this by focusing both on the social discipline imposed from the outside by governments as well as the internal techniques of self-discipline and self-formation undertaken by individual subjects themselves (Burchell 1995).
The cultural politics of cinema gives us a glimpse into the terrain of struggle between governmental disciplines, the ambiguous e ects of mediatization, and the counterpractices of di erent individuals and groups. The Indian citizen is then the creation of di erent discourses—some complementary but others which are con icting. Therefore, despite her enmeshment in governmental practices, the subject of religion and cinema remains a citizen but a citizen of a particular kind, the citizen–devotee.
The term ‘citizen–devotee’ allows me to demonstrate that the abstract ideal of the citizen never remains untouched by other modes of subjectivity like religiosity. The religious mode of being a ects citizenship, at the same time, in a modern liberal democracy, the religious beliefs and practices of citizens are not outside the purview of the government. Despite, freedom to practice one’s religion, one has to submit to the state’s discourse
1 For an illuminating discussion of this idea, see Balibar (1988, 1991).
2 Chantal Mou e (2000), in The Democratic Paradox, cited in Laclau (2005).
