Page - 75 - in JRFM - Journal Religion Film Media, Volume 06/01

ligions) from the University of California, Santa Barbara. With expertise in Indian religions and Global Christianities, he has scholarly interests that include religion and film, South Asian bhakti, vernacular Hinduisms, inter-religious interaction and exchange, and theory and method in the study of religion. Recent publications include “Scorsese’s Kundun as Catholic Encounter with the Dalai Lama and His Tibetan Dharma”, in Scorsese and Religion, ed. C. B. Barnett and C. J. Elliston (Brill, 2019), “Between Christian and Hindu: Khrist Bhaktas, Catholics, and the Negotiation of Devotion in the Banaras Region”, in Constructing Indian Christianities, ed. C. M. Bauman and R. F. Young (Routledge India, 2014), and the co-edited volume, with R. G. Monge and R. J. Smith, Hagiography and Religious Truth (Bloomsbury, 2016), which explores sanctity across Abrahamic and Dharmik religious traditions. He is the President of the Society for Hindu-Christian Studies. This essay examines common representations of religious minorities in Hindi pop- ular cinema within the context of dominant post-Independence Indian religious and political ideologies – that is, from a religiously pluralist secular socialist frame- work to a Hindu nationalist late-capitalist orientation. Thus, we might identify the historical boundaries of this essay as the time between the prime ministership of Jawaharlal Nehru in 1947, the year of Indian independence, through that of Nar- endra Modi, which began in 2014 and continues today. We begin by examining the more recent turn to film as a legitimate conveyor of middle-class Indian values wor- thy of interpretation, and the coeval shift among Indians from embarrassment to pride in film as the industry followed the liberalizing nation-state onto the global stage. Equipped with this interpretive strategy, we turn to the dhārmik, or religious elements within the Hindi sāmājik, or social film, demonstrating concretely how particular notions of Hindu dharma (variously if imperfectly translated as “cosmic order”, “duty”, “law”, “religion”) have long undergirded Hindi popular cinema structurally and topically. Finally, and most significantly, we examine representa- tions of religious minorities in Indian popular film against the backdrop of evolving religious and cultural ideologies up to the electoral victory of Prime Minister Modi of the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party, or BJP. It is argued that minority representation in popular Indian cinema, like other aspects of Indian public life, can be interpreted as an index of majority concerns about the religious Other. While such representations have never been static, more current depictions present the viewer with a troubling, even ominous picture of the place (or lack thereof) of reli- gious minorities in contemporary Indian society, revealing majoritarian chauvinism and sectarian tensions that call into question the identity of the Indian Republic as a pluralistic secular nation, as well as the easy elisions between Hindu and secular Indian nationalisms. When we now look at past films cognizant of the Hindu nation- alist dispensation to come, discontinuity is not the only striking feature. Ideological inconsistencies, tensions, and contradictions have long been manifest on the silver 74 | Kerry P.  C. San Chirico www.jrfm.eu 2020, 6/1, 73–102