Review

Culture

Film & TV

22 May 2023

10 min read

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.

'Sha'

'Sha' serves as the administrator of Indo-Christian Culture, a Twitter account and Medium blog.

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.

Molly Worthen on the charismatic leaders of America's cosmic drama

The plots and plotters that hold us spellbound

Nick Jones

Nick is the senior editor of Seen & Unseen.

Viewed from behind, Trump raises a fist.

Trump on the stump.

White House via Wikimedia Commons.

What happens when Americans lose faith in their religious institutions—and politicians fill the void? In Spellbound: How Charisma Shaped American History from the Puritans to Donald Trump, Molly Worthen sweeping history helps us understand the forces that create leaders and hold their followers captive.

Everyone feels it. Cultural and political life in America has become unrecognizable and strange. Firebrands and would-be sages have taken the place of reasonable and responsible leaders. Nuanced debates have given way to the smug confidence of yard signs. Worthen asks just how did we get here?

Worthen, a historian argues that we will understand the present moment if we learn the story of charisma in America. From the Puritans and Andrew Jackson to Black nationalists and Donald Trump, the saga of American charisma stars figures who possess a dangerous and alluring power to move crowds. They invite followers into a cosmic drama that fulfils hopes and rectifies grievances—and these charismatic leaders insist that they alone plot the way.

Author and historian Tom Holland loved this book.

“The great story of charisma in American history, from the Massachusetts Bay Colony to MAGA, has never been more thrillingly told, never more learnedly explicated.”

In this extract, entitled Plotlines, Worthen introduces her four categories of charismatic leader: Prophets. Conquerors, Agitators, and Gurus.

Plotlines

Over the past several years, whenever I told friends or family that I was writing a book about charisma, they responded with a reasonable question. Which charismatic figures would I include? They peppered me with suggestions: What about Elvis Presley, or Dolly Parton? Michael Jordan or Muhammad Ali? Surely I had to say something about Taylor Swift, right?

None of these fascinating people appears in this book. As you read it, you will probably think of a dozen others whom you wish I had included, and I’m sure you’ll have a point. I have mostly stuck to individuals who worked to build a movement in organized religion or politics, rather than musicians, artists, or athletes. Even within the spheres of religion and politics, I’ve been selective in order to craft a manageable story and bring into focus the patterns and transformations of charismatic leadership over the course of American history.

Sometimes this is an inspiring story, because charismatic leaders often turn up—and people decide to follow—out of a desperate response to alienation and injustice. People in anguish seek a savior. Yet charisma has no fixed moral standing. It can carve a path to freedom or to enslavement; it can lead people to embrace the rule of law or to sneer at it. Charisma causes problems for democracy as well as for authoritarian regimes. Without a sustained analysis of charisma over the long haul of American history since European settlement began, we are doomed to bumble along, blandly observing that ordinary people declare many allegiances that seem to contradict their own material interests and sabotage democracy—but never understanding why.

Over the past four centuries, five types of charismatic leaders have surged to dominance, each offering a variation on the great paradox, a different way for followers to hand over control while feeling liberated. I use these categories both to classify leaders and their movements, and to chart historical change: each type reacts to the type that came before, and responds to the pressures and anxieties of its own era. Like all typologies, this one maps imperfectly onto real people. Almost no one is a “pure” example of these categories, and some leaders are interesting precisely because they react against their age’s dominant type. But these categories have compelled even leaders who defied easy labels—that’s most of them—to respond to the ascendant charismatic style of their age.

The Prophets take us from the end of the Middle Ages into something beginning to resemble our own world. They drew on ancient patterns of contact with the divine to challenge authorities and captivate followers with the terror and ecstasy of God’s presence. They hewed close to tradition, operating in a time when Old World strictures still constrained life in the New World rather tightly. But some used those traditions to undermine reigning institutions, whether by violent rebellion or illicit gatherings—and so provoked a backlash. If the Prophets conceived of freedom in terms of divine salvation, they often harnessed mystical power for this-worldly ends. Usually this meant dismantling any structure that stood in God’s way.

The Prophets were, essentially, destroyers. In their wake they provoked an age of builders.

The Conquerors rose to prominence in the early nineteenth century—an age of mythology, mass media, and frontier enthusiasm in the European American imagination. They swung away from the age of the Prophets, who had so much to say about how powerless humans are.

Some of the Conquerors wielded military power, but all of them pursued what we might call metaphysical conquest. They fought to control spiritual forces. As the predestinarian Puritanism of earlier generations lost its appeal, more people placed an almost fundamentalist faith in the power of free will. It was tempting to think of spiritual forces—perhaps even the Holy Spirit— as a kind of technology, ready for manipulation. The stakes in these campaigns were high at a time when new advances in science impinged on everyday life. Waves of immigration made the country more religiously and ethnically diverse. Americans felt both freer and yet more confined than ever before.

The Agitators gained sway at the turn of the twentieth century, protesting modernity as a raw deal and democracy as tyranny in disguise. The Conquerors had, overall, expanded government authority over Americans’ lives and advanced a golden idea of progress. Now the pendulum swung back toward calls for destruction. The Agitators found a market for attacking the state and denouncing so-called progress as a lie. They defined themselves as outsiders whether they were or not, and discovered that gaining material power does not mean that one must stop telling a story of exile and affliction. This proved to be an important lesson in an age of world war and economic disaster: global crises have a way of transfiguring an outcast dissenter into a credible threat tot he standing order. Meanwhile, Christians grew wilder in their displays of New Testament charisma—because, paradoxically, it was easier to grapple with what Max Weber called the “iron cage” of modernity by embracing ever more outlandish signs of divine power.

The Experts were, on the face of things, the Agitators’ opposite in charismatic style. They were builders. In the wake of World War II, they capitalized on a backlash against the nightmare years of fascist demagogues, embraced the zenith of traditional institutions’ authority across Western culture and politics, and nurtured Americans’ faith in the power of technology and bureaucracy to solve large-scale problems.

They claimed the mantle of reason and procedure and did their best to relegate the political or religious clout of charisma to the distant past or primitive cultures.

But in fact, the three decades after World War II witnessed an explosion of religious revival in America—led by Christians who spoke in tongues, looked for the end times, and claimed to heal through the power of the Spirit. Even in the domain of credentialed and supposedly secular healing, the line between medicine and spirituality grew fuzzier. These years were the Experts’ apogee of cultural prestige, but Americans’ long- standing ambivalence about intellectual elites persisted. The most successful leaders capitalized on those mixed feelings. They nursed the tension between the Cold War celebration of science and freedom and, on the other hand, the lurking sense that technological leaps obscured eternal truths and needed the organizing power of a good story.

By the end of the twentieth century, as Americans lost faith in established media, churches, government, and nearly every other bulwark of modern society, the destructive strain of charismatic leadership re-surfaced in the form of the Gurus: preachers of self-actualization and get-enlightened-quick schemes, promoting God’s new temp job as personal assistant. Old-fashioned Pentecostal revival persisted too, but its leaders struggled to prevent the culture wars from capturing the Holy Spirit.

The Gurus looked, at first glance, like the Prophets and the Agitators. But in the generations since those earlier eras, it had become harder to pay obeisance to tradition—which was just fine, since the erosion of institutions had weakened traditions anyway, and opened a path for Gurus to achieve more influence than their destructive predecessors. Religious and philosophical tradition, in the hands of the Gurus, was no longer a firm guide but a palette for painting illusions of independence. Sometimes they used it to depict a new reality impervious to fact-checkers.

“Guru,” which means “remover of darkness” in Sanskrit, was originally a religious term. But in the third decade of the twenty-first century, the most prominent guru in the country was a businessman named Donald Trump. Trump was not, personally, a paragon of conventional religious devotion. Yet his political career depended on a hunger among his most dedicated supporters that can only be called spiritual. Like so many relationships between charismatic leaders and their followers, it stumped and angered those on the outside. Against the backdrop of the American charismatic tradition, however, his success makes perfect sense.

How, then, did early modern mystics and Puritan heretics who heard the voice of the Holy Spirit give way to devotees at a modern presidential rally, jostling toward the candidate iPhone-first, praying for a selfie? By the early twenty-first century, most religious institutions in the West had declined into husks of their former authority—at least by the usual measures. Today commentators turn more than ever to materialist explanations for political dysfunction, polarization, and the culture’s general crisis of confidence. They cite growing social inequality, impassable disagreements on policy, persistent racism and xenophobia, evil automated forces lurking on the internet. All true—yet all insufficient accounts. If we define the religious impulse as a hunger for transcendent meaning and a reflex to worship, then it is a human instinct only slightly less basic than the need for food and shelter, and Americans are no less religious than they have ever been. They will always find a way to satisfy these desires, even if charisma carries them down strange and costly paths.

Spellbound: How Charisma Shaped American History from the Puritans to Donald Trump, Penguin Random House, 2025.