Mantras of the Metropole: Geo-televisuality and Contemporary Indian Cinema

This doctoral work scrutinizes recent popular Indian cinemas (largely Hindi cinema) in the light of three epochal changes in the sub-continental situation since the early nineties: the opening out of the economy, the political rise of the Hindu right, and the inauguration of a new transnational electronic media universe. It is argued here that contemporary Indian films should not be read in terms of a continuing, agonistic conflict between polarities like 'modern' selves and 'traditional' moorings. Instead, the thesis demonstrates how, in popular Indian films of our times, an agrarian paternalistic ideology of Brahminism, or its founding myths can actually enter into assemblages of cinematic spectacle and affect with metropolitan lifestyles, managerial codas of the 'free market', individualism, consumer desire, and neo-liberal imperatives of polity and government. This involves a social transmission of 'cinema effects' across the larger media space, and symbiotic exchanges between long standing epic-mythological attributes of Indian popular cinema and visual idioms of MTV, consumer advertising, the travel film, gadgetry, and images of technology. A discussion of a new age 'cinematic' in the present Indian context thus has to be informed by a general theory of contemporary planetary 'informatics.' The latter however is not a superstructural reflection of economic transformations; it is part of an overall capitalistic production of social life that is happening on a global scale in our times. This dissertation attempts to make two important contributions to the field: it opens out the Eurocentric domain of traditional film studies and suggests ways in which studies of Indian films can enrich a global understanding of the cinematic; it also offers a possible explanation as to how, in the present age, a neo-Hindu patriarchal notion of Dharma (duty, religion) can actually bolster, instead of impeding, a techno-managerial-financial schema of globalization in India

The Passion of the Digital: the Ontology of the Photographic Image in the Age of New Media

Using Mel Gibson’s 2004 film and cultural phenomenon The Passion of the Christ as a launching pad, this essay meditates on some questions about the twentieth century legacy of competing realisms, the graphic imperative of contemporary digital image cultures, and the ontological conundrums involving technology and mass media. Passion is an onto-theological filmic ‘event’ that derives equally from an almighty religiosity as well as a cultish process of being enraptured by certain ritual values of a new-age technologism of sound and image. This endographic writing out of the Gospel narrative at the level of the tissue and nerve of the committed viewer affirms a transcendental truth already there in an internal cosmos of belief instead of working in terms of an externally navigable ‘realist’ representation of the world that seeks to ‘bear away our faith’. This is rendered possible when unquestioning belief in Christ and in his momentous sacrifice is met by an embracing of technology without the skepticism of a scientific temper.Le film La Passion du Christ de Mel Gibson, phénomène culturel de l’année 2004 sert de point de départ à cet article. À partir de ce film, nous examinons l’héritage que laisse le XXe siècle en ce qui concerne le conflit des réalismes, l’impératif graphique des cultures de l’image numérique contemporaine et des dilemmes ontologiques impliquant la technologie et les médias de masse. La Passion est un ‘événement’ filmique onto-théologique qui découle autant d’une religiosité toute-puissante que d’un processus cultuel d’extase lié à certaines valeurs rituelles propre à un technologisme “Nouvel Âge” du son et de l’image. Cette écriture endographique du récit évangélique qui affecte le spectateur de manière viscérale affirme une vérité transcendantale déjà présente dans un cosmos de croyances qui dès lors se substitue à une représentation ‘réaliste’ et ‘extériorisée’ du monde, laquelle ne conduirait qu’à contester la Foi. Or, la condition de possibilité de cette écriture tient au fait que la croyance inconditionnelle dans le Christ et dans son sacrifice s’associe à une technologie (le numérique) affranchie de tout scepticisme à caractère scientifique

Orientalism’s Hinduism, Orientalism’s Islam, and the Twilight of the Subcontinental Imagination

Using the figure of the ethnic Pathan/Pashtun as a trope in South Asian culture, this essay provides a genealogical account of the modern emergence of Hindu–Muslim “religious” conflicts played along the lines of nation-thinking in the Indian subcontinent. This modern phenomenon begins in the late 18th century, with the orientalist transcriptions of a vast conglomerate of diverse Indic faiths into a Brahminical–Sanskritic Hinduism and a similar telescoping of complex Islamic intellectual traditions into what we can call a “Mohammedanism” overdetermined by Islamic law. As such, both these transcriptions had to fulfill certain Christological expectations of western anthropology in order to emerge as “religions” and “world religions”, that is, when, as Talal Asad has shown, “religion” was constructed as an anthropological category within the parameters of European secular introspection and the modern expansion of empire. Both Hinduism and Islam therefore had to have a book, a prophetic figure, a doctrinal core, and a singular compendium of laws. Upper caste Sanskritic traditions therefore dominated Hinduism, and a legal supremacist position dominated the modern reckoning of Islam at the expense of philosophy, metaphysics, poesis, and varieties of artistic self-making. Together, the two phenomena also created the historical illusion (now industrialized) that Brahminism always defined Hindu societies and the Sharia was always a total fact of Islam