Page - 78 - in JRFM - Journal Religion Film Media, Volume 06/01

portable cultural product, simultaneously an international money-maker and a dis- seminator of Indian cultural values and neo-liberal economics around the world. It should come as no surprise that Hindi films have become purveyors of the zeitgeist. Theirs is a hand-in-glove relationship. By the late 1990s, then, with economic liberalization, globalization, and the con- sequent advent of satellite television, the middle class had become media-exposed, urban, and striving. Indian cinema was a popular art form reflecting middle-class sensibilities. Ganti notes, “There is in it [Indian cinema] an attempt to capture and keep the past alive, tame the new, and make a virtue out of the transient bonds that the uprooted forge between experience and hope, the past and future.”10 The kitsch produced by middle-class auteurs apparently had something to teach us about the state of India, the Indian state, and the conflicted actors who animate the nation. Nandy explains with his typically insightful panache: True, this cinema is also simultaneously a form of kitsch – albeit a powerful, pan-Indian, politically meaningful kitsch – of ideas derived from the dominant ideology of state, categories thrown up by the clash between memories of the encounters between India and the West during the past two hundred years, and the various surviving vernacular constructions of desirable life and society […] The kitsch is after all meant to entertain and be consumed by people who car- ry within themselves the contradictory pulls on the one hand, the experience of living with a functioning nation-state desperately trying to modernize itself and join the global political economy and mass culture, and, on the other, the experience of living with the myriad vernacular cultures and traditional lifestyles associated with the civilizational entity called India.11 Popular Indian film, including the Hindi variant known since the mid-1990s as the de- rivatively named “Bollywood”, provides the exegete a text of modern middle-class India, exhibiting ideological and sectarian tensions, imaginaries, hopes, and night- mares in the form of prets (ghosts) and Pakistanis. “Midnight’s children”12 – and 10 Ganti 2004, xxv. 11 Ganti 2004. 12 The term “midnight’s children” refers to those Indians born at midnight on August 15, 1947, the moment of Indian independence from the British, and is taken from the 1981 prize-winning novel of the same name by Salman Rushdie. I am using it to refer to the first generation born in the Republic of India. Given these fears, there is particular irony to the popularity of Hindi cinema in Pakistan and within the Pakistani and South Asian diaspora, as audiences are willing to put up with perceived negative portrayals even as the Pakistani government is not. Apparently, Pakistanis are willing to overlook disagreeable Muslim representation in Hindi popular cinema, with enjoyment trumping offense. But a public is one thing, its government still another. In 2019, as a result of the most recent military clashes along the Line of Control and in retaliation for the revocation of the longstanding Dharma and the Religious Other in Hindi Popular Cinema | 77www.jrfm.eu 2020, 6/1, 73–102