^ The old type of movie.
^ The new type of movie.
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India is undergoing significant changes. It is everywhere. One change is in its movies.
I don't watch old Indian movies, but I do catch sections of them while on the elliptical at the gym. I have noticed something interesting that is changing.
In the old movies, it is almost a standard element to have a god or goddess visit one of the characters. Hanuman will appear to a woman as she wakes up from a dream crying. Krishna will fly into a room and sit on the window sill while a family spills their hearts to him. Or even baby Krishna will play a flute and magically reassemble broken flower pots with a smile, a chuckle and a few toots of his instrument. It happens in so many films from the 1950's and prior.
You don't see this any longer in Indian movies. Today, gods and goddesses or God are in the movies, but they have shifted from a direct and local participant in the plot. Now, these gods and goddesses are either an unseen force that impact the events, or they are somewhat personal in a funny sort of way.
In the West, we underwent a change like this to some degree years ago. Think of George Burns as God, or Morgan Freeman as God in the Bruce Almighty or Evan Almighty movies. Then think back to some of the older movies where organ music and light coming through a window would follow the main character praying.
Things changed.
Please don't interpret what I am saying as a statement about a creeping secularization of Indian culture or thought. This is still a country that is deeply focused on things spiritual. But there is a change and certainly an element of this change is the Indian mind reckoning with a world where the secular perspective is emerging in more places than ever before.
An excellent example of the new kind of movie is Om Shanti Om, a fun movie that we own. In it, there is a love triangle followed by a murder. This all works itself out in a subsequent lifetime for the main character - reincarnation, traditionally a very Eastern and Indian belief.
During the movie, one of the characters who has spent nearly twenty years in America comes back and scoffs at the ceremony and religiosity of his fellow Indians (he is the bad guy, by the way). The good guy connects with his prior life (at the end of a vigorous dance scene!) and realizes that he must exact revenge for his dead love by killing the bad guy. Suffice it to say that in the end of Om Shanti Om love, spiritualism, reincarnation and tradition defeat modernity, secularism, greed and deceit.
And not a god or goddess is seen during the whole film. But they seem to have been assigned the most important role.
Then there are those movies where the divine agent is a friendly guy in a white suit. I have not yet seen one of those, but it is of note that this is happening in Indian now.
So, things change and things stay the same. So it is.
Fascinating....
