By Shalini Kakar
The practice of worshipping film stars in India and even dedicating shrines to them is not new. There are examples of devotional practices and sacralised spaces in which South Indian film stars, such as M. G. Ramachandran, N. T. Rama Rao and, more recently, Chiranjeevi are worshipped by fans. This deified persona sustained by the fans outside the cinematic space has helped these stars to win elections. In Tamil Nadu, the last five chief ministers since 1967 have been associated with cinema in one way or another (Jacob, 2009: 9). Scholars such as Robert Hardgrave (1971, 1979/1993), M. S. S. Pandian (1992), Sara Dickey (1993, 2008), Madhava Prasad (2004, 2009), S. V. Srinivas (2000, 2009) and Preminda Jacob (2009) have addressed this phenomenon. The phenomenon of worshipping Bollywood film stars in this way is, however, more recent. One example is a form of temple in Tatanagar (Jharkhand) dedicated to the actress Madhuri Dixit.
The Madhuri Dixit Temple is actually an eatery or chaat shop owned by ardent fan and worshipper, Pappu Sardar (Plates 8.1 and 8.2). Numerous large posters adorn the walls, juxtaposed against images of Hindu Goddess Durga. Pappu Sardar holds grand public pujas for the posters of the celluloid goddess whom he considers an incarnation of Durga (Plate 8.3). The temple also has an inner Madhuri sanctum, accessible only to the ‘priest’, Pappu Sardar.1
The striking display of huge posters in the Madhuri Dixit Temple also alludes to the exhibition practices of a museum. The customer-spectator who comes to Pappu Sardar’s shop to enjoy a snack is surrounded by deified images of Madhuri that consume his or her visual space. The close proximity and accessibility of the consumer-spectators to these images ‘invades’ their space, redirecting their gaze to the divinised posters on the walls, along with accompanying text such as the name and cast of Madhuri’s films and descriptions of Pappu Sardar’s meeting with her.
Since 1996, every year on 15 May, Madhuri’s birthday, Pappu Sardar’s eatery is converted into a full-fledged temple in which elaborate Hindu rituals are performed. Hindu priests hired by him perform yajnas and chant mantras for Hindu God Ganesha before the puja for ‘Goddess Madhuri’ commences. Donning a saffron robe akin to Hindu priests and chanting ‘Jai Shree Madhuri Devi Aye Namaha’, (‘Hail to Goddess Madhuri’), Pappu Sardar conducts puja for Madhuri’s posters (Plate 8.3). Thereafter, he navigates the streets of Tatanagar in a Madhuri rath, an open-air truck adorned with deified posters of the star while thousands participate in the divine festivities by chanting ‘Madhuri Dixit ki Jai’ (‘Hail to Madhuri Dixit’). This is followed by collective dancing to the star’s popular Bollywood songs, which become Madhuri bhajans in this ‘religious’ context. In the end, free chaat, sweets and birthday cake are distributed as prasad to everyone.
In every event at the Madhuri Dixit Temple, Pappu Sardar actively involves the marginalised sections of Tatanagar, such as people from the local old age home, disabled and eunuchs. For more than a decade now, he has been engaged in social work for the underprivileged, especially in Cheshire Home, a place for physically and mentally challenged women, and the old age home in Tatanagar. These otherwise sidelined sections of society participate in all his major public pujas in which he directly shares media space and the limelight with them, especially with eunuchs who engage in frantic ‘devotional’ dancing with him.
To prepare for the event, Pappu Sardar rearranges the inside of his shop by taking out the entire furniture (tables and chairs used by customers) to prepare the whole space of the shop as a sacred site for his devotional activities and for the media to capture the event. The temple is then lavishly decorated with flowers and temple bells hanging in front of Madhuri’s images, similar to that of deities in Hindu temples. The emphasis on the inside sacrosanct space of the temple is reinforced when the visitors who come to pay their respects to the ‘goddess’ on her birthday are allowed inside only after they remove their shoes, a practice commonly followed in Hindu temples. As priests chant mantras, Pappu Sardar performs the puja of Madhuri posters in a solemn worshipful mode. After the puja, the sacral identity of the temple space extends to encompass an active media space in which a question and answer session takes place in front of ritualised images. Here, Pappu Sardar poses for photographs and explains his devotional fandom. After interviews, the temple space erupts into a rapturous festive zone signalled by the cake cutting ceremony and the uninhibited dancing of Pappu Sardar to Madhuri’s famous numbers. Just as the inside of the shop is modified, the outside of the shop is also marked for the event. An extended pandal is set up occupying the street and also the space of adjoining shops. Through these activities, Pappu Sardar of course receives plenty of publicity for his shop on local and national media. In addition, the Madhuri Dixit Temple becomes an advertising site both for small and large businesses that put up their advertisements and hoardings all along the road prior to the birthday celebration, in the hope of local and national coverage.
As well as fusing the role of shop and temple, the space also borrows from the conceptual paradigm of the museum. Although the arrangement of the space on regular days is like any other ordinary chaat shop, what sets this eating joint apart is the display of Madhuri’s images on all the walls, the close proximity of customers to them and most importantly, the sequence and organisation of the images, designed to communicate a set of ideas. Many of the posters have textual references detailing the name of the film and other information, similar to the description of artefacts in a museum (Plate 8.4). Some of these posters make a direct reference to Pappu Sardar’s devotional fandom (Plate 8.5). Pappu Sardar changes these posters as in rotating exhibits, though the Madhuri theme persists. The people who visit the chaat shop may not come specifically to see the displayed images, but the heightened impact of the blown up huge posters encircling the visual space of the customers is inescapable, directing the viewer towards a particular reading of these images rooted in devotional fandom.
Through the convergence of cinema, religion and popular culture, the Madhuri Dixit Temple reconceptualises the site of the Hindu temple, constructing new deities and rituals from the world of Indian cinema. Pappu Sardar employs Hindu worship practices to express his devotional fandom as they are part of a larger and dominant mode of cultural expression and work as an effective mode of communication. Encouraging mass participation from people of different religions, classes and gender in this temple, Pappu Sardar breaks away from conventional caste dynamics. His ‘ritual’ of cake cutting and offering it as prasad to the posters of his cinematic goddess while singing ‘Happy Birthday to Madhuri’ in front of the media stems from a convergence of cultural practices and popular modes of Hindu religiosity that are also being adopted in temples in India and the diaspora. His hallmark frenzied dancing to the music of Madhuri bhajans in front of divinised posters of the star is similar to collective dancing of devotees in front of the murti in Hindu temples, especially during festivals. Likewise, the Madhuri rath yatra has the festive and processional trappings of a regular rath yatra navigating the city. Although it appears as a momentary occupation, this claiming of city space as a devotional ‘fanscape’ has power as a media event with an after life, in the form of news snippets that are circulated in the media and cyberspace.
In the shop/temple, poster images of Madhuri are aligned with images of Durga and Guru Nanak, creating a particular structure of knowledge through the strategy of visual display. In reference to museum display practices, Eileen Hooper-Greenhill points out that the process of selection of images, their presentation and the sequence of their display in the museum constructs and communicates a particular kind of knowledge that is related to issues of power and control (Hooper-Greenhill, 2000: 3–4). Pappu Sardar arranges the posters of Madhuri, Durga and Guru Nanak in a sequential manner, with the multiple images of the film star visually dominating the space—the cinematic goddess surrounded by her ‘pantheon’, framed by the devotional fandom of Pappu Sardar. Madhuri posters are regularly ritualised in front of customers through the performance of morning and evening arati, projecting the posters as murtis, Madhuri as a goddess and, perhaps most importantly, Pappu Sardar as her bhakt or devotee.2 By looking at deified posters of the film star in the Madhuri Dixit Temple, the spectators also consume the projected meaning behind it: of Madhuri as a form of Durga, which is produced, controlled and manoeuvred by her fan-bhakt, Pappu Sardar.
Although the Madhuri Dixit Temple alludes to a museum-like space, the ‘cinedivine’ spectacle in the Madhuri Dixit Temple is more in tandem with the populist, entertaining, playful and immersive mode of the post-museum.3 Whereas the conventional museum is imagined as a building, the post-museum may be imagined as a process or experience (Hooper-Greenhill, 2000: 152–53). The visual culture of the Madhuri Dixit Temple is also founded on popular practices of display that include the image-centric cultural practices in India such as exhibition-cum-sales, melas, Durga Pujas, Ganesh Utsav, Dahi Handi celebrations where popular religious practices mix with new technology and modern forms of display to produce new forms of cultural production. Thus, Pappu Sardar’s Madhuri Dixit Temple may be understood as a polysemic space combining aspects of a Hindu temple, museum-like display strategies, the post-museum and practices from popular festivals.
With its multifarious, complex layering of the cinematic, religious, popular, commercial and technological, the Madhuri Dixit Temple opens up a new social and a possible political space. Pappu Sardar has garnered recognition through his divinisation techniques and his social work has earned him the nickname, ‘Pappu Bhaiya’, seen as a local hero in Tatanagar. Even though scorned by the elite, Pappu Sardar emerges as a social force with the potential to wield political influence in Tatanagar.4 The power of this devotional fandom is derived from the ability to transform a cinematic image into a divine one, using various cultural forms to connect both to the local people of Tatanagar and to a larger segment of the population through national televisions coverage, media and Internet. Though the case of Pappu Sardar and his Madhuri Dixit Temple may seem idiosyncratic and exceptional, it is part of a larger phenomenon of ‘cinedivinisation’, apparent in the emergence of film star politicians who have significant political influence in contemporary India. This short chapter provides an insight into the forms of devotional practices which enable this development.5
Dickey, Sara. 1993. ‘The Politics of Adulation: Cinema and the Production of Politicians in South India’, Journal of Asian Studies (MI, USA: Association for Asian Studies), 52 (2): 340–72. http://www.jstor.org/stable/2059651 (accessed 10 July 2010).
———. 2008. ‘The Nurturing Hero: Changing Images of MGR’, in Selvaraj Velayutham (ed.), Tamil Cinema, pp. 77–94. London and New York: Routledge.
Duncan, Carol. 1995. Civilizing Rituals. London and New York: Routledge.
Hardgrave, Robert. 1971. ‘The Celluloid God: MGR and the Tamil Film’, South Asian Review, 4 (4): 307–14.
———. 1979/1993. ‘When Stars Displace the Gods: The Folk Culture of Cinema in Tamil Nadu’, in Robert L. Hardgrave (ed.), Essays in the Political Sociology of South India, pp. 92–124. New Delhi: Manohar.
Hooper-Greenhill, Eilean. 2000. Museums and the Interpretation of Visual Culture. New York: Routledge.
Jacob, Preminda. 2009. Celluloid Deities. Lanham: Lexington Books.
Kakar, Shalini. 2009. ‘“Starring” Madhuri as Durga: The Madhuri Dixit Temple and Performative Fan-Bhakti of Pappu Sardar’, International Journal of Hindu Studies, 13 (3): 391–416.
———. 2010. ‘“Fashioning the Divine”: Star Deities, Devotional Fandom and Cultural Politics in Contemporary India’, PhD dissertation, University of California, Santa Barbara.
Marstine, Janet. 2006. New Museum Theory and Practice: An Introduction. MA, USA: Blackwell Publishing Ltd.
Pandian, M. S. S. 1992. The Image Trap: M.G. Ramachandran in Film and Politics. New Delhi: SAGE Publications.
Prasad, Madhava M. 2004. ‘Reigning Stars: The Political Career of South Indian Cinema’, in Lucy Fischer and Marcia Landy (eds), Stars, The Films Reader, pp. 97–114. New York: Routledge.
———. 2009. ‘Fan Bhakti and Subaltern Sovereignty: Enthusiasm as a Political Factor’, Economic and Political Weekly, 44 (29) (18 July–24 July): 6–76.
Srinivas, S. V. 2000. ‘Devotion and Defiance in Fan Activity’, in Ravi Vasudevan (ed.), Making Meaning in Indian Cinema, pp. 297–317. New Delhi: Oxford University Press.
———. 2009. Megastar: Chiranjeevi and Telugu Cinema after N.T. Rama Rao. New Delhi: Oxford University Press.
1 The interior Madhuri sanctum is located at the rear end of the Madhuri Dixit Temple. Adorned with deified images of Madhuri posters (bearing a vermilion mark) and calendars with that of other divinities, it is an enclosed exclusive space, primarily used by Pappu Sardar for conducting daily worship practices for his goddess.
2 The performance of rituals for Madhuri posters in a museum-like space of his shop echoes with Carol Duncan’s argument in which she proposes to situate museums and museum practices within the domain of ritual, though not specifically Hindu rituals (Duncan, 1995: 2).
3 A post-museum can be understood as ‘an utopian display institution that rejects patriarchal authority in order to become a flexible, constantly changing social space prioritizing audience choice, interactivity and pleasure’ (Marstine, 2006: 129).
4 In his 14 years of devotional fandom, Pappu Sardar has mastered a number of domains—the art of public speech (interviews), performance (devotional dancing), use of cultural practices (borrowing from popular festivals), media management (getting constant media coverage for his events), use of images to further his own agenda and social work programmes. Most importantly, he has been able to capture the attention of both local and national population year after year, making people listen to and act in accordance with his devotional fandom. Although he has not formally entered the local political arena yet, he has systematically cultivated and mastered these tools of power.
5 For further detailed studies, see Kakar (2009, 2010).