ABSTRACT
Can an examination of Bombay cinema disclose its renditions of sovereignty in films that address religio-secular coexistence? What’s love got to do with sovereignty and conversion? Priya Kumar has suggested that Bombay cinema is a “crucial realm of representation and refraction around the issues of nationalism, religion, and minoritarian identities” (2008: 178). Taking up Kumar’s suggestion, the first segment of this chapter reads the concern for religio-cultural sovereignty in Bombay cinema through a historical context. This history, I argue, inflects Bombay cinema’s religio-secular depictions. How does a concern for secularism in a post-1990s context of the rise of Hindutva politics find expression in Bombay cinema? Through analysis of two contemporary films, Jodhaa Akbar (2008) and Saat Khoon Maaf (2011), I focus on the role that conversion plays in these films. Jodhaa Akbar explicitly refers to conversion in a historic epic tale of an interreligious romance. Saat Khoon Maaf, a dark comedy about the search for romantic love also refers to conversion, and can be read as an indirect critique of patriarchal nation-state and Hindu nationalist forms of sovereignty. I will discuss how emphasis on conversion’s affective dimensions in the two films point to two different ways of thinking about sovereignty. I begin with an engagement with academic scholarship on the religio-secular in Bombay cinema which will provide a basis for my analysis of the two films. The relationship between the religio-secular and the affective dimensions of cinema will enable me to discuss how conversion is addressed through the politics of love in the two films. This discussion will also make visible, I hope, a brief history of the manner in which Bombay cinema has mediated an Indian religio-secular.
