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Beyond Bollywood: how Indian cinema depicts Christians

India’s film industry tackles the complexities of life, morality, harmony and violence, as experienced by its Christian community. Indo-Christian Culture’s Sha reviews.
A man sits on the top of a building and looks out over the view of an Indian city as the sun sets.
Ashand Raju, the taxi driver in Ave Maria, contemplates.
Eka Cinemas.

Introduction

For many people, Christianity and India appear as two distinct identities with Christianity being as foreign to India as India is to Christianity. They are surprised to learn that Indigenous Christians have maintained a continual existence in India since the time of the Apostles. And that, for centuries, Christianity has played a tremendous, yet underrecognized role, in shaping India’s artistic and intellectual history.  

Examples of this include the vast collection of Christian artworks, produced by Hindu and Muslim court artists, of the Mughal Empire.  And the synthesis of Christian social teaching and Gandhi’s political and philosophical views into a field now known as Gandhian economics, initially developed by the Indian-Christian, J.C. Kumarappa, who was an economist an activist for Indian independence.  

This centuries old interaction between Christianity and broader Indian society continues into the present day with Indian cinema being a major arena for this. Despite its enormity and tremendous success across the Global South the attitude of many Westerners towards Indian movies lies somewhere between apathy and condescension. With the industry often erroneously perceived as a homogenous genre defined by three-hour run-times, over-the-top dance routines, syrupy dialogue, melodramatic acting, and campy fight scenes.  

These stereotypes mask the sheer diversity of Indian cinema which since its inception, more than a century ago, has sought to depict the diversity of India and explore a vast array of ideas, including Christian themes and ideals, through creative storytelling. In many cases these films defy clear cut genres. We typically imagine a Christian film as possessing an explicitly religious message which it aims to impart on an exclusively Christian audience. These films exist in India but coexist with a parallel stream of movies featuring authentically Christian characters and themes targeting a primarily non-Christian audience where the aim is to illustrate Christian ideals to an unfamiliar audience. This creates a sense of subtlety in the film’s messaging that can be hard to find in many Western Christian films.  

The goal of this article is to introduce readers to the relatively unknown world of contemporary Indian Christian cinema by highlight five films which depict the lives of Indian Christians and explore the challenge of living by Christian ideals in a chaotic world where right and wrong are not so clear cut. For context, the term Indian cinema refers to all cinema produced in India and encompasses films made in over two dozen languages. Bollywood is a nickname given to India’s Hindi language film industry which coexists alongside several other competing linguistic industries. For example, the 2022 film RRR, which one Best Song for the musical number Naatu Naatu at the 2023 Oscars, is a Telugu language film. This makes it an Indian movie, but not a Bollywood movie. 

Kuttram Kadithal  

A woman in a classroom stares intensely at a person in front of us.
Radhika Prasidhha plays a teacher, who is haunted by her mistake.

Kuttram Kadithal is an independent Tamil language film which serves as a thought-provoking meditation on the complexities of morality, guilt and blame in an era where the public discourse is dominated by social media and 24/7 news cycles. Directed by Bramma, a newcomer director, and starring newcomer Radhika Prasidhha the film received significant film festival attention going on to receive several awards including the 2014 National Film Award for Best Feature Film in Tamil. 

Merlin, a schoolteacher, administers corporal punishment, a practice that remains relatively common and accepted in India, on a student with an undiagnosed health condition. Though the actual punishment itself, a single slap on the cheek, was relatively harmless it causes the child to fall into a coma. The incident quickly erupts into a full-on media circus with Merlin, being advised by her school’s administration, to go into hiding until the situation calms down.  

All the while, Merlin must come to terms with the range of emotions. Overcome by tremendous guilt and desperate for redemption she is also keen to avoid falling into the cross hairs of the media who have whipped up the incident with outrageously false allegations. It’s an interesting exploration of how people’s personal notions of right and wrong must be reconciled with society’s own judgement, regardless of how accurate or fair that assessment is. Merlin does feel remorse for her actions, but her assessment of the situation differs drastically from the sensationalist condemnations she was dealt from the media. Ultimately Merlin realizes that the path to forgiveness lies not with the media driven public perception of her by her own relationship with her victim and his grieving mother. 

Ave Maria

Looking through the windscreen of a taxi to see a man and a woman talking.
Road trip to Velankanni.

Ave Maria is a 2018 Malayalam language film, not to be confused with a 2015 Palestinian short film with the same name. Set in Velankanni, a famous Roman Catholic pilgrimage site in South India, which attracts millions of pilgrims annually the film, follows the unlikely friendship of two very different people.  

Maria Gomez, a young woman and devout Catholic from a well-off background, is now contemplating an abortion due to exceptional, and highly unique, circumstances. Believing it to be a sin, she decides to pre-emptively seek forgiveness and atone for the planned abortion by making a pilgrimage trip to the Catholic Shrines of Velankanni where she also plans to use her money to help transform the lives of a select few individuals in poverty or crisis. To do this, she enlists the help of Rex, a taxi driver and lapsed Christian, and the two set off to achieve Maria’s plan for atonement which goes disastrously and forces Maria to reevaluate her faith more closely.  

At its core the film is an exploration on whether you can offset the harm of one sin, as Maria believes abortion is a sin even though she intends to have one, by committing good deeds elsewhere? Theologians will likely have a lot to say on this topic but the movie is more interested in the perspective devout but theologically uninformed believer. Her objective is further complicated by the messy reality of life. In one instance, Maria makes a sizable donation to a charitable old age home in exchange for housing an elderly beggar who has spent years on the streets of Velankanni. She is dumbfounded when she discovers the elderly woman back on the streets a little while later. When questioned, the old lady apologetically confesses that after years on the streets she simply cannot adjust to the regimented life of the old age home. Maria is now unsure as to whether this development undoes her previous good deed. 

 Kunju Daivam  

A child astride a stopped bicycle stares to the side.
Adish Praveen plays Ouseppachan.

Kunju Daivam is a 2018 Malayalam language children’s film. The film begins with a young boy, named Ouseppachan, who believes his prayers to postpone a math exam by any means necessary led to the death of his beloved grandfather, whose demise gets him pulled out of class right before the math exam begins. Upset by this, the boy takes to reading Bible scripture which leads him down the path of trying to find a kidney donor for a terminally ill neighbor, something most would agree is beyond the capacity of a young child. Along the way he eventually learns to make peace with his previous conviction that he was responsible for his grandfather’s sudden demise.  

The film is an interesting exploration of the parable of the Good Samaritan, as understood by an innocent child. We all agree it’s good to help others, but society has also conditioned us to believe there are unspoken practical limits to helping others.  Ouseppachan encounters this time and again in his quest, which the adults in his life look upon with admiration that turns to irritation when he refuses to give up. In one scene a priest, losing patience with his antics, admonishes the boy’s fixation on finding a kidney donor and directs him to more age-appropriate concerns like doing well in school. Ultimately Ouseppachan’s childlike dedication, forces us to reconsider our own attitude towards charity and helping others. 

The Sky is Pink

Parents and teenagers with their arms around each other stand on a beach and stare out to sea.
The Chaudhary family at the heart of the film.

This 2019 Hindi language film retells the love story between a married couple from the perspective of their daughter who is living with terminal pulmonary fibrosis and a severe immunodeficiency. The film is based on the true story of Aisha Chaudhary (1996 – 2015), whose memoir My Little Epiphanies was released just one day before her death.  

The film is a depiction the struggles that families and children living with severe chronic illnesses and also a meditation on the inherent value of human life, even in the face of severe illness and hardship. These beliefs are most strongly held by Aisha’s mother, Aditi, whose conversion to Christianity allowed her to embrace the perspective that all human life is inherently valuable. This allows Aditi to come to terms with Aisha’s health issues and the death of a previous child who died shortly after birth. Aisha herself credits this belief as being the reason for her own existence. 

I was also personally impressed by the decision of director Shonali Bose to depict Aisha’s mother’s conversion to Christianity and how these Christian beliefs impacted her parenting and perspective on life. Religious conversions, particularly to Christianity, had always been a contentious topic in India and at the time of this movie’s release the issue had transformed into an all-out moral panic with conspiracy theories claiming foreign funded churches had converted hundreds of millions with the intent of fueling social discord and separatist violence. Bose isn’t Christian and The Sky is Pink was never intended to be a Christian film. Bose was likely aware that by including the Christian aspect of this true story in her film she was opening herself up to the possibility of public outrage, boycotts and even political censorship, which have all grown increasingly common since India’s post-2010 majoritarian turn. Despite these risks, she opted to incorporate Aditi’s Christian beliefs into the film which aside from ensuring the film’s authenticity introduced many non-Christian viewers to an alternative perspective on Christian conversion. 

Kaya Taran 

A standing nun points towards a seated mother and child.
Neelamari and Neeta Mahendra play the mother and son.

Explorations of religious violence and interreligious harmony are nothing new to Indian cinema. Even Western films set in India, like the 2008 British blockbuster, Slumdog Millionaire, feature depictions of the brutal violence that interreligious riots periodically unleash 1992. But the majority of these films tend to focus solely on the experiences of Hindus and Muslims during these riots.  

The 2004 Hindi language film Kaya Taran takes an alternative approach. Set in a Catholic convent during the 1984 anti-Sikh riots which led to the deaths of hundreds of innocent Sikhs at the hands of rioters seeking revenge over the assassination of then Prime Minister Indira Gandhi by her Sikh bodyguards. It follows the lives of a group of nuns who offer shelter to a Sikh woman and her eight year old son seeking refuge from the riots and killings outside.  

The film explores the growing relationship between the Sikh mother, her son Jaggi, and the nuns who especially grow to adore Jaggi and the shared sense of vulnerability they all face as religious minorities in a country where discriminatory violence is a very real threat. This is especially true for those who wear outward identifiers of their faith. For the nuns, it’s their religious habits, and for Jaggi it’s his long uncut hair and turban which the nuns initially cut to conceal his Sikh identity. The film concludes with a nun helping the young boy retie his turban, the boy no longer willing to hide his religious identity in the face of majoritarian intimidation and discrimination. His convictions serve as an inspiration for the viewers, many of whom have never experienced a situation where we were made to choose between our religious beliefs and our personal safety. 

Conclusion

In this article we explored five Indian movies and their engagement with Christian themes. However, I should also mention that not all Indian cinema’s depictions of Indian Christians have been positive ones. For example, the long-standing trend of depicting Indian Christian women as hypersexual hedonists, whose behaviour is usually contrasted negatively against a more virtuous Hindu woman.  

There is also the tendency to reverse exoticize Indian Christian society as White people in brown bodies for an audience that has had little personal contact with Indian Christians and tends to view the religion as a foreign import. One trope is to have Indian Christian characters speaking Indian languages in an inexplicably foreign sounding accents despite having grown up entirely within India. 

The Indian audience is unique for its willingness to watch movies that present deeply spiritual messages from faith traditions which they themselves do not adhere to. 

But, in an era where the Indian Christian community finds itself increasingly maligned in the public discourse, movies like the ones discussed above can play an important role in helping to present an alternative narrative. One rooted in the authentic, diverse experiences of Indian Christians themselves. The Indian audience is unique for its willingness to watch movies that present deeply spiritual messages from faith traditions which they themselves do not adhere too. A quirk which speaks to the inherently multicultural nature of Indian society where which has always consisted of diverse communities living side-by-side one another. 

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Is empathy really a weapon?

Musk and Fonda disagree on whether empathy is a bug or a feature.
A montage shows Elon Musk wielding a chain saw, Jane Fonda flexing her muscles and Hannah Arendt smoking.
Wordd Wrestling Empathy.

You may have heard that you can kill a person with kindness, but in recent weeks have you also heard that you can bring about your own death through empathy? In an interview recorded with podcaster Joe Rogan in February, Elon Musk added his voice to a cohort of American neo-capitalists when he claimed, “We've got civilizational suicidal empathy going on” and went on to describe empathy as having been “weaponized” by activist groups.  

“The fundamental weakness of western civilization is empathy, the empathy exploit… they’re exploiting a bug in western civilization, which is the empathy response.”  

In recent weeks empathy has become one of the hot topics of American politics, but this is not the first time that Musk has shared his thoughts about empathy, and it should be noted that on the whole he is not really against it. Musk identifies, rightly, that empathy is a fundamental component of what it means to be human, and in previous interviews has often spoken often about his vision to preserve “the light of human consciousness” – hence his ambition to set up a self-sustaining colony of humans on Mars.  

But he also believes that empathy is (to continue in Musk’s computer programming terminology) a vulnerability in the human code: a point of entry for viruses which have the capacity to manipulate human consciousness and take control of human behaviours. Empathy, Musk has begun to argue, makes us vulnerable to being infected:  

"The woke mind virus is fundamentally anti-science, anti-merit, and anti-human in general. Empathy is a good thing, but when it is weaponized to push irrational or extreme agendas, it can become a dangerous tool." 

Strangely, on certain fundamentals, I find it easy to agree with Musk and his contemporaries about empathy. For example, I agree that empathy is essential to being human. Although, far from empathy leading us to “civilisational suicide”, I would say it is empathy that saves humanity from this fate. If consciousness is (as Musk would define it) the brain’s capacity to process complex information and make a rational and informed choices, then empathy, understood as the ability to anticipate the experiences, feelings, and even reactions of others, is a crucial source of that information. Without empathy, we cannot make good decisions that benefit wider society and not just ourselves. Without it, humanity becomes a collection of mere sociopaths. 

Another point on which Musk and I agree is that empathy is a human weak point, one that can be easily exploited. Ever since the term “empathy” was coined in the early twentieth century, philosophers and psychologists have shown a sustained fascination with the way that empathy causes us to have concern for the experiences of others (affective empathy), to think about the needs of others (cognitive empathy), and even to feel the feelings of others (emotional contagion). Any or all of these responses can be used for good or for ill – so yes, I agree with Musk that empathy has the potential to be exploited.  

But it is on this very question of who is exploiting empathy and why, that I find myself much more ready to disagree with Musk. Whilst he argues that “the woke mind virus” is using empathy to push “irrational and extreme agendas”, his solution is to propose that empathy must be combined with “knowledge”. On the basis of knowledge, he believes, sober judgement can be used to resist the impulse of empathy and rationally govern our conscious decision making. Musk states: 

“Empathy is important. It’s important to view knowledge as sort of a semantic tree—make sure you understand the fundamental principles, the trunk and big branches, before you get into the leaves/details or there is nothing for them to hang on to." 

What I notice in this system is that Musk places knowledge before empathy, as if existing bits of information, “fundamental principles”, are the lenses through which one can interpret the experiences of another and then go on to make a conscious and rational judgement about what we perceive.  

There is a certain realism to this view, one that has not been ignored by philosophers. The phenomenologists of the early twentieth century, Husserl, Heidegger, Stein – those who first popularised the very idea of empathy – each described in their own way how all of us experience the world from the unique positionality of our own perspective. Our foreknowledge is very much like a set of lenses that strongly governs what we perceive and dictates what we can see about the world around us. The problem is: that feeling of foreknowledge can easily be manipulated. To put it another way – we ourselves don’t entirely decide what our own lenses are.  

To graft this on to Musk’s preferred semantic tree: empathy is a means by which the human brain can write brand new code. 

In The Origins of Totalitarianism, another great twentieth century thinker, Hannah Arendt, explored how totalitarian regimes seek to control not just the public lives but also the thought lives of individuals, flooding them with ideologies that manipulate precisely this: they tell people what to see. Ideologies are, in a sense, lenses – ones that make people blind to the unjust and violent actions of a regime:  

"The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists." 

A big part of the manipulation of people’s sense of foreknowledge is the provision of simplistic explanations for complex issues. For example, providing a clearly identifiable scapegoat, a common enemy, as a receptacle of blame for complex social and economic problems. As we know all too painfully, in early twentieth century Europe, this scapegoat became the Jewish people. Arendt describes how, whilst latent antisemitism had long been a feature of European public life, the Nazi party harnessed this this low-level antipathy and weaponised it easily. People’s sense of foreknowledge about the “differentness” of this group of “outsiders” was all too manipulable, and it was further cultivated by the Nazis’ use of “disease”, “contagion” and “virus” metaphors when speaking about the Jews. This gave rise a belief that it was rational and sensible to keep one’s distance and have no form of dialogue with this ostracised group.  

But with such distance, how would a well-meaning German citizen ever identify that their sense of foreknowledge about what it meant to be Jewish had been manipulated? Arendt identified rightly that totalitarian systems seek to eliminate dialogue, because dialogue creates the possibility of empathy, the possibility of an exchange of perspectives that might lead to knowledge – or at least a more nuanced understanding of what is true about complex situations. 

When I look at Musk’s comments, I wonder if what I can see is a similar instinct for scapegoating, and for preventing dialogue with those who might provide the knowledge that comes from another person’s perspective. In his rhetoric, the “woke mind” has been declared a common enemy, a “dangerous virus” that can deceive us into becoming “anti-merit” and “anti-human.” In dialogue, those who claim to be suffering or speaking about the suffering of others might be enabled to deploy their weaponized empathy, trying to make us care about other, to the potential detriment of ourselves and even wider humanity’s best interests. Therefore, it is made to seem better to isolate oneself and make rational judgements on behalf of those in need, firmly based on one’s existing foreknowledge, rather than engage in dialogue that might expose us to the contagion of wokeness.  

Whilst this isolationist approach appears to wisely prioritise knowledge over empathy, it misses the crucial detail that empathy itself is a form of knowledge. The experience of empathising through paying attention to and dialoguing with the “other” is what expands our human consciousness and complexifies our human decision making by giving us access to new information. To graft this on to Musk’s preferred semantic tree: empathy is a means by which the human brain can write brand new code.  

In these divisive and divided times, there are, fortunately, those who are still bold enough to make the rallying cry back to empathy. At her recent acceptance speech for a Lifetime Achievement Award, actor and committed Christian Jane Fonda spoke warmly and compellingly in favour of empathy:  

“A whole lot of people are going to be really hurt by what is happening, what is coming our way. And even if they are of a different political persuasion, we need to call upon our empathy, and not judge, but listen from our hearts, and welcome them into our tent, because we are going to need a big tent to resist successfully what's coming at us.”  

Fonda’s use of the tent metaphor, I’m sure, was quite deliberate. One of the most famous bible passages about the birth of Jesus describes how he “became flesh and dwelt among us.” The word “dwelt” can also be translated “tabernacled” or, even more literally, “occupied a tent” among us. The idea is that God did not sit back, judging from afar, despite having all the knowledge in the world at his disposal. Instead, God came to humanity through the birth of Jesus, and dwelt alongside us, in all our messy human complexity.  

Did Jesus then kill us with his kindness? No. But you might very well argue that his empathy led to his death. Perhaps this was Musk’s “suicidal empathy.” But in that case Musk and I have found another point about empathy on which we can agree – one that is summed up in the words of Jesus himself: “Greater love has no one than this: to lay down one’s life for one’s friends.”   

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