Idols and Ideologies

Abstract

The contributions to the latest issue of BioScope place Indian cinema in the field of moral, reformist and democratic ideals, suggesting an enduring hold of a notion of the political on film journalism, spectatorship and star phenomenon. A deceased actor, who has long been celebrated as Hindi cinema’s first superstar and a heartthrob, is placed at the confluence of two differing ideologies that once sustained the Indian National Congress. An ever-green singing idol’s claim to a secular style is re-evaluated in the light of multiple marginalities that he has managed to dispense with. A genre, referred to as the ‘mass hero film’, is scrutinised for its troubling gender ideology in a region where cinema has been pivotal to mass politics. Finally, the neglected history of Urdu film journalism is recovered with an eye to vernacular print media’s insistence on its corrective role and moral vision for both filmgoers and filmmakers in colonial India. In this issue, the terms of critique have shifted—we are not reading about the political significance of cinema (Prasad, 2014; Rajadhyaksha, 2009; Srinivas, 2018), but rather the cinematic co-optation of politics in India. Among the earlier modalities of the relationship between cinema and politics is a long-standing, though not uncontested, view working through aspects of identity and focussed on the ideological links between Indian cinema and the state (Chakravarty, 1994, on national identity; also see Nisha, 2020, for mapping an oppositional ‘Bahujan gaze’). Another register in which the said relationship has been explored is through subaltern fan bhakti, which potentially partakes in collective sovereignty through star adulation (Prasad, 2009). While retaining the emphasis on idols and ideology, the featured articles suggest an altered modality involving sacrifice, reform and empowerment through which the political is promised. What is suggested here is a deliberate, imperfect yet powerful harnessing of political drives by cinema and its ancillary bodies. The issue is