Page - 81 - in JRFM - Journal Religion Film Media, Volume 06/01

Gopal Torne, IN 1912),17 and Raja Harishchandra (King Harishchandra, Dhundiraj Gopal Phalke, IN 1913). “Whichever of the two films was made first”, Rachel Dwyer explains, employing generic categories slightly different from my own,18 “it is not disputed that the mythological […] and the devotional are the founding genres of Indian cinema.”19 The dhārmik nature of Indian film origins is itself significant, as the Purāṇas20 and epics have framed Indian film narrative since the industry’s incep- tion, regardless of particular subgenre. We may variously understand these classical works as “pools of signifiers” through which South Asians interpret their lives, or as Foucault’s “founders of discursivity”, which can be continuously rewritten, though not necessarily endorsed.21 Vijay Mishra argues that for Indian cinema the epics Mahābhārata and Rāmāyaṇa are crucial cultural “intertexts” or “precursor texts”.22 Scriptwriter Anjum Rajabali described – sans philosophical jargon – the genesis of the epic political drama Raajneeti (Politics, Prakash Jha, IN 2010): Hey, Prakash Jha and I weren’t even thinking of the Mahabharat when we began conceptualizing Raajneeti. It was like “here’s this man who wants to join politics, and here’s the man he sees as his rival … and voila!” The story came to take the same course of the Mahabharat. This shows that the stories have stood the test of time. No matter what the actual content has been, they point to how a person behaves in the face of a dilemma.23 17 Pundalik is the name of the famed saint of the Varkari sect said to have brought the god Vithoba to Pandharpur in the modern Indian state of Maharashtra. 18 Rachel Dwyer differentiates between mythological and devotional film genres, arguing that the differ- ence lies in the relationship of the gods to the human realm. She argues that in the mythological genre there remains an impenetrable distance between divine and human, whereas in the devotional genre the deity is more approachable since the stories generally involve sants and bhaktas (saints and devo- tees) and the intervention of the deity in human affairs. Nevertheless, in Hindu “mythology”, an exog- enous term, there is indeed devotion shown between deities. For example, one immediately thinks of Hanuman’s paradigmatic devotion to Rama, which in turn serves as models of bhakti for adherents. While this differentiation makes sense in terms of Western categories, where the real difference turns on modern Western notions of history and the historical, such classification does not make as much sense on Indian soil. A more indigenously appropriate designation is the dhārmik genre. For a discussion of generic categories, see Dwyer 2006, 1–11. 19 Dwyer 2006, 63. 20 Purāṇa, in Sanskrit, literally “old”, “ancient”, or “ancient story”; it is a literary genre found in Hindu, Buddhist, and Jain traditions, generally consisting of five topics: the creation of the cosmos, the dissolution of the cosmos, the world ages, the genealogies of the gods, and the history of kings. There are some eighteen Hindu Purāṇas, whose treasury advanced (and reflects) the development of various sects and popular Hinduism. 21 Mishra 2002, 3. 22 The Mahābhārata and Ramāyaṇa constitute the epics of South and Southeast Asia, which for ages have existed in oral-aural, textual, and performative modalities. Traditionally they are placed in the category of itihās, literally “thus occurred” or conventionally “history”. 23 Chandra 2010, 4. 80 | Kerry P.  C. San Chirico www.jrfm.eu 2020, 6/1, 73–102