Discussions of the early choice of subject matter in north Indian cinema are usually dominated by an exploration of the modern politics of swadeshi or cultural nationalism. Phalke, director of the early Hindi films on Krishna, is said to have wondered, after seeing The Life of Christ in 1909: ‘Could we, the sons of India, ever be able to see Indian images on the screen?’ (Rajad- hyaksha 1993: 49; Zutshi 1993: 83). What is less often noted is that this nationalist impulse to find quintessentially Indian images was accompanied by another legacy of modernity, namely, a realist epistemology that equip- ped middle class Indians with a discourse quite at odds with the palpable potency of the relationship between audiences and the religious images on the screen. As the content of Indian cinema diversified, this genre of cinema came to be known as ‘mythologicals’. Even as religious images moved on to celluloid animation, the dominant intellectual framework heralded their irrelevance to modern concerns. The term ‘mythological’ prefigures our judgement, telling us we are dealing with a subject matter belonging to a superseded and antiquated past.
From such a position, we cannot even begin to even apprehend the power of such films. Even those of us who grew up with Indian cinema receive, as if it were information about a distant place, the news that Amman films ‘get good viewership from women and rural folk’ (Natarajan, The Hindu, 2003). More often, the middle class glimpses the power of such cinema only in the discourse of hostile critics. Writing for the internet, Balaji B. regularly casts
a supercilious eye on the latest offering of the Amman goddess film industry. For all his own evident fascination with the genre, he understands it only as a conscious ploy of filmmakers who prey on backwardness and illiteracy:
Movies like Hey Ram and Alaipayuthey stand testimony to the fact that Tamil cinema is definitely making big strides in quality and content. But then there are movies. . . that refuse to budge even an inch from the cliche´s that have defined Tamil cinema. Now comes another movie that pushes Tamil movies even further backward along the progressive line [sic] . . . Rajakali Amman is another of those devotional movies that contains the standard story of the deity protecting her devotee from evil . . . As long as there are viewers who pat their cheeks in devotion whenever Ramya Krishnan appears on screen as Amman, there will be directors and producers who take advantage of people’s gullibility and offer up such movies. All we can do is hope that people become more literate and reject these movies.
(Balaji 2006) The class divide that separates filmmakers from watchers is, according to Dickey, a very real one. Filmmaking in Tamil Nadu has been described as ‘the province of people who belong almost exclusively to the middle and upper classes’ (Dickey 1995: 131). But for the likes of Balaji, the class dis- tance between filmmakers and viewers is measured in somewhat different terms. It appears to him as a distance between those who know, at all times, how to correctly distinguish the difference between reality and illusion, and those who confuse the two. Filmmakers, as members of the educated middle-class, know there is a difference between the actress and the role she plays. Balaji, of course, also knows the difference. In addition, he also knows what is progressive, and what is backward, thus making him a watchdog of the class to which he belongs, as well as an authority on the gullibility of the poor. The viewers, on the other hand, betray their gullibi- lity and illiteracy in their evident predisposition to confuse the actress with the goddess herself, responding to the former with behaviour that correctly belongs to the temple, foolishly ‘patting their cheeks’ in devotion when the actress appears on the screen. The middle class comes to be divided in this scenario between those who exploit the gullibility of the poor, and those who speak up on their (admittedly misguided) behalf. Both sections, how- ever, appear to share a knowingness that relentlessly excludes the possibility of any blurring of distinction between real and non-real, between cinema and other contexts such as religion or real life.
Even on the face of it, this description of an inexorably clear-eyed gaze that entertains no intermediary possibilities between truth and falsehood, which knows its own motivations and is in entire control over the produc- tion and content of a film, is an unlikely description of any process of cul- tural production and indeed, of any conceivable type of human subjectivity.
It certainly does not provide an accurate description of the subjectivity or practices of the postcolonial Indian middle class, which has been far more eclectic in its retention of certain favoured indigenous medical practices such as Ayurveda and yoga, and in its selective enthusiasms for a national- ism that is Hindu as well as modern; nor does it capture the conscious efforts of Indian nationalism to forge a unitary synthesis of indigeneity and western science by re-locating the roots of science in its own cultural past (Prakash 1999). Certainly when it comes to gender and women, the edu- cated middle class has been remarkably selective in its adoption of ‘moder- nity’. But these are not the contexts where the middle class characterises its own subjectivity in terms of rationalism. Rather, such formulations emerge in specifically cross-class contexts, where they function simultaneously as a form of class distinction and gender distinction. Here I draw on my ethno- graphic work on cross-class relations between the rural poor in Tamil Nadu and professionals such as teachers, social workers, health professionals and clergy (Ram 1996, 1998a, 1998b, 2001). Any doctor or nurse in a public hospital maternity ward in Tamil Nadu, any non-government health worker who has dealings with the poor can readily and automatically rattle off the muda nambikkai or foolish, superstitious beliefs of their patients and the backward orientations of poor women.