Page - 82 - in JRFM - Journal Religion Film Media, Volume 06/01

The popular or “social” (sāmājik), as it has been called, has always borne the marks of dharma either in content or form. Much like the Ramāyaṇa, popular films operate on a continuum of dharma-adharma-dharma.24 A film begins with the initial dhār- mik state of nature, perhaps the Indian pastoral, followed by the moment of crisis (adharma), then concludes leaving no one fearing dharma’s ultimate degradation. Though the story may allow for some degree of innovation, questioning, and cri- tique, dharma tends to obtain. According to Mishra, The flexibility of the genre makes for a notion of dharma to be transgressed in a regular manner, as irruptions in the text, as presentiments of alternative (and even superior) critiques, rather than as the construction of a radically new world order. Suggestively, Bombay Cinema interprets to the point of change but never changes the ethical order itself.25 Film critic Shubra Gupta refers to this dhārmik structure when, in the context of con- sidering the film Johnny Gaddaar (Sriram Raghavan, IN 2007), she writes: The “greed is good” principle is still quite alien to Bollywood, though we’ve has a series of con men (and a few women). But an avaricious stockbroker (as pictured in the Hollywood Wall Street) will never be the central character in a Hindi film, because we are still not happy seeing amoral characters in the lead. Immorality is still all right, because we know an outright bad guy will get his just deserts in the end; but amorality, with its ambiguous outlines, is hard for us to handle. We like our movies to have emotional and moral payoffs. Anything else makes us uncomfortable.26 This “discomfort” relates to the implicit challenge to a moral universe, like a musical chord that is never fulfilled; it leaves one uneasy, even repulsed. Brahmanical Hindu conceptions of dharma are thus foundational, immanent, and invasive. As such, there seem to be real ideological controls at work in Indian popu- lar cinema, a fact to which we shall return.27 We must pause here only to note two 24 This continuum signifies the depicted movement from social and moral equilibrium to unrighteous- ness and disequilibrium and finally to social and moral equilibrium that is part of the narrative arc of the story. 25 Mishra 2002, 14. 26 Gupta 2017, 195. 27 This is one reason why the semantic content of much Indian cinema moves along fairly traditional lines, even those films considered radical. Transgression is itself always circumscribed by that which it is transgressing. The presence of boundaries need not be understood negatively, as it has been since the Western Romantic period. Traditionally (in both the East and the West) constraints – a.k.a. that required by any “discipline” – have been understood as central to the creative project. Hence, Dharma and the Religious Other in Hindi Popular Cinema | 81www.jrfm.eu 2020, 6/1, 73–102