Page - 76 - in JRFM - Journal Religion Film Media, Volume 06/01

screen, particularly with regard to the religious minorities. The present ascendance of Hindutva (lit.: “Hinduness”), or Hindu nationalism as a national (indeed interna- tional) religio-political ideology forces us to reconsider past films and the ideologies embedded therein. From Meaningless Kitsch to Meaningful Export Once upon a time, the Indian middle class as well as academic elites in India and abroad relished the denigration of popular Indian film. Branded masālā (spicy mixed) kitsch for the unwashed, an escapist spectacular as numbing as any opiate of the people, it was long rejected as either artistically hollow or discursively ane- mic. Researching in the early 1990s, Steve Derné found it difficult to find even loyal viewers giving films their due. One 29-year-old male explained, “I get nothing out of films. When I have no work, I go sit in the cinema. I spend five rupees and nothing seems good.”1 Still another equated viewing with an addiction: “At first I saw [Hin- di] films for entertainment, now it has become a habit (like smoking cigarettes).”2 There was a certain discomfiture regarding film and a general sense that these films were morally dubious.3 Embarrassment, not pride, was a popular sentiment. But changes were afoot. Popular cinema was no longer something to be dis- missed – by either intellectuals or the public. Shortly after Derné’s filmic ethnog- raphy, a change in public opinion finally made itself obvious, first to intellectuals, then among the middle class itself. Vinay Lal and Ashish Nandy attribute the new intellectual interest in popular culture and popular cinema in particular to events beginning in the 1970s, especially to the Emergency, that 21-month period when Indira Gandhi instituted martial law for the purposes of shoring up political power, suspending constitutional law and democratic norms. The press and artists were censored, political foes were jailed, and human rights violations peaked. From this time on it became increasingly difficult to understand the Indian public by means of older ideologies. Theories of secularism and Marxist historicist readings seemed to be of little interpretive assistance. Why, for example, did political parties like the Sikh Akalis, the DMK, and the RSS – all organizations labeled by modern intellectuals as “ethnonationalists”, “fundamentalists”, and “fascists” – oppose the Emergency so strongly, while Gandhian successors like Vinoba Bhave capitulate with such alac- 1 Derné 1995, 208. 2 Cited in Derné 1995, 208. 3 This was Gandhi’s judgment of popular or “social” films. Interestingly, this savvy exploiter of media only viewed one film in his lifetime; Derné 1995, 208. Dharma and the Religious Other in Hindi Popular Cinema | 75www.jrfm.eu 2020, 6/1, 73–102