ABSTRACT
This chapter examines a highly successful and much discussed film of the mid-1970s, Jai Santoshi Maa, along with a comparably celebrated hit released two decades later. Popular Hindi films contain a great deal of visual, aural, and thematic content that may be termed 'religious', and most often Hindu, in character. The screenplay of Jai Santoshi Maa, attributed to Pandit Priyadarshi of Hardwar, is unusual in that it is based on the genre of popular literature known as vrat-katha, usually encountered as inexpensive and crudely printed chapbooks sold in religious bookstalls and used primarily by women in the performance of domestic rituals. The conventional assumption that film-viewing belongs to a 'secular' sphere of human activity that is categorically separated from the 'sacred' or 'religious' sphere, has been challenged by a number of recent studies that call attention not simply to the mythic and theological content of films, but to the formalized practices that surround their reception by audiences.
