Globalization and Religion: Identity and Power
INAES (Institute for North American and European Studies), University of Tehran
15-16 November 2005
Abstract
Between Islam and Hinduism in the Age of Globalization: the Case of Contemporary Bombay Cinema
Kaushik Bhaumik
Open University, UK
K.Bhaumik@open.ac.ukHe is a research fellow at The Ferguson Centre for African and Asian Studies, The Open University, UK. He has a DPhil from Oxford (where He was a Felix scholar) as well as degrees from Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, India. He has worked on various projects for the British Film Institute and Pitt Rivers Museum, Oxford. His research interests include South Asian history, film history, visual cultures, and popular literature in the 19th and 20th centuries.
In my PhD thesis on the history of early Bombay cinema I had argued that Bombay films are in the main inextricably rooted in the Indo-Persian cultural tradition thus giving this cinema a clearly Islamicate character. Bombay cinema’s heterodox nature was hardly surprising given the complex and non-linear employment of religious identity and linguistic practices where a substantial proportion of literate Hindus communicated in Urdu and wrote in the Arabic script. In the post-independence era this cultural heterodoxy became the bulwark of the secular ideology of the Indian nation state. Despite attempts by Hindu reformists to rid Bombay cinema of its ‘Islamic’ elements Bombay films maintained strong links with its Indo-Persian roots not least because of a sizeable involvement of Muslims in all sectors of Bombay film culture. However paralleling this heterodoxy of popular Indian culture was the slow but politically enormously significant process of Hindu-ising syncretic symbolic complexes, those that were never clearly identifiable as being either Hindu or Muslim. The principal example of this in the overtly cultural political domain would be the unquestioning equation between Rajput (a warrior caste located in western South Asia) identity and Hinduism, a phenomenon patently problematic given that a substantial and politically extremely powerful segment of Pakistani landholders as well as a number of Muslim peasant groups in India come from Rajput clans.
With the ascent of Hindu right wing fundamentalism in the 1990s the onslaught against ‘Muslim’ cultural symbols reached unprecedented levels. While on the whole staying away from any direct involvement with communal politics an extremely popular and globally disseminated strand of Hindi films has substantially reconfigured as the mainstay of the new global face of Hinduism tropes of earlier Hindi cinema unmistakably linked with the Indo-Persian tradition or a strategic deployment of syncretism to create an Indian cultural ecumene. Amongst the cultural and expressive registers mined by ‘Hinduism’ from the Indo-Persian are metaphors for romantic love and traditional family values and feminine sartorial codes to project the quintessence of contemporary lay Hinduism. Crucial to this process are the operations of global consumerist trends linking the complex historical temporalities of the South Asian diaspora with the religious politics of the middle class in South Asia itself and the processes of modernization. In this crises-crossing of historical times Bombay cinema finds itself tantalizingly poised between a prehistory of a heavily Islamicate ‘Hindu’ past and the contradictory pulls of the need to define Hinduism more concretely than ever before against the drift away from tradition of the younger ‘Hindus’ under the effects of modernization and global consumerism. Through an analysis of certain key films of the last decade and a half I intend to analyse the processes by which of cultural translation by which the Indo-Persian cultural ecumene has been increasingly converted into a ‘Hindu’ one, at least in rhetoric, as well as the implications such processes have had for the cultural politics of the period.