Divine effects: Techno-religious realism and the aesthetics of Indian popular cinema

This dissertation develops the framework of “techno-religious realism,” to inquire into realism as a historical category embedded within material and socio-cultural practices of technology and religion. Techno-religious realism emerges in the intersections between religion and technology—two categories that are held in opposition within secular discourses of modernity. The bifurcation of religion and technology is also the bifurcation of East and West. As a symptom of modernity, cinema is tied to the process of secularization.

Identifying cinematic special effects as the locus where religion and technology converge, I examine special effects in Indian popular films from 1910- 2017. I argue that techno-religious realism privileges a sensorial aesthetic experience, wherein lived religion, audiovisual media, and the social body coalesce. Moving through superimposition, prosthetics, and digital effects, I demonstrate how the aesthetics of Indian popular cinema has been a repository of the shifting terrains of modernity. Broadly this dissertation presents techno-religious realism as a response to the question: What can technological cultures of the global South add to the emergent discourse of digital modernity today?