E-Books →Deities and Devotees Cinema, Religion, and Politics in South India

Through engaging with these questions, this book presents a genealogical study of the intersections between cinema, religion and politics in South India. Through a study of Telugu mythological and devotional films, this book combines a history of these genres with an anthropology of film making and
viewership practices. In the decades from the 1940s to the 2000s, it examines film texts, as well as methods of film making and publicity, modes of film criticism as well as practices of viewership. The book draws on film and media theory to foreground the specificity of new technologies and the new
kind of publics they create. Anthropological theories of religion, secularism, embodiment and affect are combined with political theories of citizenship to complicate our understanding of the overlapping formations of film spectators, citizens and devotees. It argues that the cinema offers a unique
opportunity to explore the affective dimensions of citizenship and the formation of citizen-devotees.
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