ABSTRACT
This chapter will explore certain ideological and affective transitions in contemporary Hindu nationalist cinematic imaginings of a glorious past in the era of the digital image. In recent times, the long-dormant historical genre has made an emphatic return to Bollywood cinema. Films like Bajirao Mastani (Sanjay Leela Bhansali, 2015), Mohenjo Daro (Ashutosh Gowariker, 2016), or the recent controversial film Padmaavat (Bhansali, 2018) variously present a new Hindu will to the past. This involves not just the insertion of marketable myths into the field of the historical or the faux-historical; that is, for example, the introduction of the horse and unicorn in the Indus Valley setting of Mohenjo Daro. Other than the monumental canvases and antiquarian mise-en-scènes, what distinguishes this will be a phatic re-texturing of the pictures of the bygone. The phatic-textural is in line with the Lyotardian figure that Christopher Pinney invokes qua politics of popular images in the Indian context. As an assemblage of affectations, this Hindu digital orientalism presents the thrill of two temporal visions – that of a techno-determined future of the nation and the ornaments of a great Hindu forgetting. A technologically emboldened Hindu nation is finally able to birth pictures and an invasive experience of sound that are adequate to the profound nature of Hindu remembrances. Once it was only Hollywood that could plausibly part the Red Sea.
