Resurrection, Remediation, and Religious Fundamentalism in Contemporary Indian Sci-Fi/Fantasy Films

In recent decades, as Indian society’s digital modernization has continued apace and Indian cinema has completed its transition to digital, Hindu fundamentalist nationalism has been resurrected in the mainstream socio-political arena. This fundamentalist political ideology, also known as “Hindutva 2.0,” has found a happy and dangerous convergence in the narrative and aesthetics of contemporary Indian sci-fi/fantasy films.

This essay traces the contours of this convergence by juxtaposing the ideological resurrection of Hindutva alongside the popular Krrish and Baahubali franchise films in contemporary India. These franchise films, I argue, harness the entanglements between religion and cinema technology to produce a speculative and spectacular Hindu cosmology that resonates with Hindu fundamentalist ideology. The expansive visuals and excessive spectacle of these films encompass the theological and technological all within themselves, serving the technophilic avatar of Hindutva 2.0. Remediated by digital technology and abetted by the photorealist effects of digital cinema, this fundamentalist ideology has become inextricable from the aesthetics of contemporary sci-fi/fantasy films. As contemporary cinema gets embroiled in the process of sensing and sense-making of this iteration of religious fundamentalism, that has suffused India’s socio-political arena, Walter Benjamin’s warnings about the “aestheticizing of politics” has become ever more relevant.¹

Religion and Hindi popular cinema

That there exists a connection between religion and Hindi popular cinema is not a novel proposition. Even a cursory survey of Indian cinema scholarship will show that religious ideology, religiosity, and notions of faith are crucial to the composition and the consumption of Hindi popular cinema. Indeed, the catch-all term “religion” has been variously deployed to make claims about the aesthetic distinctions of this cinema. Scholars like Ashish Rajadhyaksha and Geeta Kapur, among others, have underscored the religious symbolisms of early Indian mythological films to typify the aesthetics of Indian popular cinema as vernacular.² Similarly, film critic, Andre Bazin, argued that the success of Satyajit Ray’s Pather Panchali (1955) can be attributed to its aesthetic, which is markedly different from the “religious, social, and melodramatic music hall” of Indian popular cinema.³ Hindi popular cinema revels in inexplicable miracles and divine interventions rendered through over technological manipulations. The oft-referenced sequence in Manmohan Desai’s Amar Akbar Anthony (1975), depicting the miraculous restoration of vision represented through superimposition, exemplifies the fact that elements of deus ex machina have prevailed in this cinema.

Over the years, Hindi popular cinema’s relationship with religion has changed alongside the socio-cultural and political impetus of the Indian nation. Its predilection for Hinduism and Hindu culture has remained a constant throughout, even as this cinema has incorporated Islamicate culture and Urdu language into its folds. In the early 1900s, Hindu mythologicals and devotionals provided the stories and the spectacles for the first films made in the Indian subcontinent. Hindu mythologicals, thus, became the formative genre of Indian cinema. Even during the Nehruvian era, arguably the most secular phase in the history of post-independence India, mainstream Hindi films retained their alignment with Hinduism. Mehboob Khan’s Mother India (1957) is perhaps the most widely and bestknown example from this period. During the 1970s Emergency Era, amidst communal strife and sectarian violence, films like Amar Akbar Anthony engaged with notions of religious harmony albeit under the auspices of a Hindu nation. Following economic liberalization in the 1990s, overt engagement with religion seemed to disappeared from Hindi popular cinema. Instead, films like Dilwale Dulhaniya Le Jayenge (Aditya Chopra, 1995) relied on Hindu overtures to establish the NRI protagonist’s sociocultural affiliation with the Indian nation-state.

Post-2000, Hindu fundamentalist ideology and popular cinema have collided in spectacular and, often, violent fashion, both on and off-screen. Emboldened by the political ascendency of Narendra Modi and the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), right-wing Hindu extremist groups moved into the center, appointing themselves the cultural and moral overseers. Against the exacting standards of Hindu fundamentalist ideals, popular cinema and its role in imaging and imagining the Indian nation has come into stark focus. On the one hand...