Visualizing Secularism and Religion: Egypt, Lebanon, Turkey, India

5. Mediating Secularism: Communalism and the Media Assemblage of Hindi-Urdu Film

5 ✦ Mediating Secularism Communalism and the Media Assemblage of Hindi-Urdu Film amit s. rai What is the relationship between ‹lmic representations of “difference” (caste, gender, religion, sex, region, nation, etc.) and the system of transformations that over the past twenty years has communalized everyday life in much of north India? As Kidwai points out in her contribution to this volume, secularism and fundamentalism in India have actually developed hand in hand over the past thirty years, blurring the once obvious lines demarcating their social ‹elds. This blurring, Kidwai argues, has been accomplished through the ‹gure of woman—the veiled Muslim woman has been both agent and palimpsest in an ongoing struggle to de‹ne secular India in the era of transnational fundamentalisms (both Hindu and Islamic). These de‹nitions, so sacred to the seemingly secure identities of representatives of the fundament and the nation, have proliferated across heterogeneous populations through newly globalized media contagions (de‹ned as capitalist technologies of image-sound-sensation and habituated practices of consumption). As is well known, the dawn of economic liberalization in India also saw the opening up of national(ist) broadcasting to transnational media conglomerates in the early 1990s. This historical conjuncture created a media ecology molded to the new consumerist ethos of the ascendant middle classes across India. Yet, as Öncü’s contribution to this volume makes clear, popular media assemblages are ordered as contradictory sites where domination, opposition, and cultural creation coexist; moreover, as an assemblage of bodies, technologies, capital, and evolving social forces, globalized media is a multiplicity accreting in different spheres of daily life. 113 Thus, as the Indian nation fragmented in terms of coherent economic planning, state control, and nationalist development, seemingly archaic identities, transnationalized and yet thoroughly chauvinist, were reinvented through these media contagions. It is in this context that we must situate the system of transformation of “secular” India’s contemporary media assemblage. No doubt, ‹lm has for the past ‹ve decades formed a shifting “basin of attraction” for this media assemblage, and it is only in the past ‹ve to seven years that satellite television , video gaming, and FM radio have come to shift the media assemblage toward something more multicentered. Media in India is in the process of a de‹nitive phase transition. This media phase transition (a process of reassembling practices, new technologies, exhibition strategies, populations, and state policy) has established volatile feedback loops with the discursive and material struggles of (religious, sexual, caste) minorities in their efforts to rede‹ne the very nature of secularism in India. The project of secularism in India can be related to what Öncü, in the Turkish context, has called “a totalizing enterprise,” in which all religious or communal thought and activity was centralized and monopolized under state auspices. In that sense, secularism in India is indistinguishable from the failed modernization of the postcolonial development state. The slogan so common among Hindu chauvinists in their interested de‹nitions of the failed modernizing Indian state—pseudosecularism—has become a catchall for all the many and muddled critiques of the so-called favoritism toward minorities embedded in postcolonial “reservation” (in a North American context, af‹rmative action) policy. And yet the term is an apt, albeit over-general description of the history of minority representation in mainstream Hindi-Urdu cinema.1 The dominant Bombay ‹lm has most often reduced minority representations to what can be translated into countable slots of identity, and the form of that identity has always been predetermined by the nation’s (upper-caste Hindu, male, heterosexual) citizen. It is that “mold” of the secular citizen (as Öncü notes) that fragmented de‹nitively over the past decade. Something else— a qualitatively different assemblage—is now in the process of becoming the new dominant, and it is, as Alev Çinar argues, in the ‹eld of performances, appearances, images, and displays—that is, the contemporary public sphere—that this fraught negotiation is unfolding. Yet Hindi-Urdu popular cinema in India is a hybrid industry: born of the collaborative energies of Parsis, Muslims, Sikhs, Hindus, and Christians , its aesthetic form (melodrama, social realism, “masala,” “art,” musical -music video), its political ideologies (secular, nationalist, cosmopolitancapitalist , socialist, popular-religious), its collective mode of production, 114 ✦ visualizing secularism and religion and its economic infrastructures (‹nance, production, distribution, and exhibition ) are all deeply marked by the legacies and struggles of diverse communities ‹ghting over the contexts and contours of ‹lm...