Screening gods
S. THEODORE BASKARAN
FILMING THE GODS — Religion and Indian Cinema: Rachel Dwyer; distributed by Foundation Books, 4381/4, Ansari Road, Daryaganj, New Delhi-110002. Rs. 350.
When movies featuring gods and demigods were first screened in rural cinema houses, some from the audience lit camphor and offered puja. Others broke coconuts and went into an ecstasy. Thus began the fascination of filmgoers in India with screen gods. Gods and goddesses became a persistent feature in Indian films. Religion has become an integral part of cinema in India and was often used for political purposes.
A seasoned India hand and a prolific writer on Hindi cinema, Rachel Dwyer of the School of Oriental and African Studies, London, played an important role in introducing Hindi cinema to western audience. Her works include 100 Bollywood Films. This book, it is claimed, is both a guide to the study of film in religious culture as well as a historical overview of Indian religious film. It attempts to examine the religious dimension in Indian cinema (read Hindi cinema). Of the four chapters in the book, the first three deal with films that are explicitly labelled "religious". The fourth examines the religious contents in other genres such as socials. The author looks at films that depict India's Islamic culture. The book thus fulfils a felt need in Indian film studies.
Insights
Dwyer comes with bright insights. She points out that Hindi cinema is among the few that provide a space for Urdu culture. Such observations are juxtaposed with some simplistic remarks also. The author says Christian places of worship are depicted with respect in Hindi films because many in the industry are convent-educated. She includes Gandhiji in the list of saints of India and deals with Attenborough's film "Gandhi". There have been a number of films centring on Gandhiji and they find no mention in the book . There are also questions that need to be addressed . What were the political uses to which religious films were put to? Was there any religious propaganda through the films?
The discussion on films is on most occasions not from the point of view of cinema. For instance, what are the cinematic devices used by the filmmaker in these god films? Carl Dreyer for instance made important use of close-up in his film "Trial of Joan of Arc". Such an approach — found in film historian R.Hollowway's Beyond the Image: Approaches to the Religious Dimension in the Cinema (1977) — is essential to understand cinema and deconstruct it. The author does not mention anything about the kind of language used in religious films. How does it differ from spoken Hindi? What is its significance? Factual errors stand out like sore thumbs. For instance Vyjayanthimala's debut in Hindi cinema was in "Bahaar" (1951) and not in "Nagin" (1954) as mentioned.
One lacuna in the study is that the author has not used any source material in Hindi language. All the sources are in English. I think the local language sources - film magazines, publicity brochures and songbooks — provide a better understanding of that cinema. This of course is a handicap that most books on film studies in India suffer from.
The book is replete with evidences of poor copyediting. There are numerous errors in names. In the case of some names there is no uniformity in spelling. Similarly, in some contexts the Indian Cinematograph Committee Report is referred to as Rangachari Report. The reader may not know that both are one and the same. The exhaustive bibliography provided will be useful to researchers. In a book on cinema, an index of film titles featured in the book is as much a necessity as the bibliography. It is missing in this book.
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