The Deified Celebrity: Understanding Representations of
Celebrity Worship in India
A Dissertation Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Award of the Degree of
Master of Philosophy in English by Vidya Balakrishnan (Reg. No. 1334111)
Under the Guidance of
Renu Elizabeth Abraham Assistant Professor
Department of English CHRIST UNIVERSITY BENGALURU, INDIA
December 2015 i
Approval of Dissertation
Dissertation entitled The Deified Celebrity: Understanding Representations of Celebrity Worship in India by Vidya Balakrishnan, Reg. No. 1334111 is approved for the award of the degree of Master of Philosophy in English.
Examiners:
1. ______
2. ______
3. ______
Supervisor(s):
Renu Elizabeth Abraham
Chairman:
Dr. John Joseph Kennedy
Date: ______
Place: Bengaluru ii
DECLARATION
I Vidya Balakrishnan hereby declare that the dissertation, titled The Deified Celebrity: Understanding Representations of Celebrity Worship in India is a record of original research work undertaken by me for the award of the degree of Master of Philosophy in English. I have completed this study under the supervision of Renu Elizabeth Abraham, Assistant Professor, Department of English.
I also declare that this dissertation has not been submitted for the award of any degree, diploma, associateship, fellowship or other title. It has not been sent for any publication or presentation purpose. I hereby confirm the originality of the work and that there is no plagiarism in any part of the dissertation.
Place: Bengaluru Date:
Vidya Balakrishnan Reg No. 1334111 Department of English Christ University, Bengaluru
iii
CERTIFICATE
This is to certify that the dissertation submitted by Vidya Balakrishnan (Reg. No. 1334111) titled The Deified Celebrity: Understanding Representations of Celebrity Worship in India is a record of research work done by him/her during the academic year 2013-2015 under my/our supervision in partial fulfillment for the award of Master of Philosophy in English.
This dissertation has not been submitted for the award of any degree, diploma, associateship, fellowship or other title. It has not been sent for any publication or presentation purpose. I hereby confirm the originality of the work and that there is no plagiarism in any part of the dissertation.
Place: Bengaluru Date:
Renu Elizabeth Abraham Assistant Professor Department of English Christ University, Bengaluru
Signature of the Head of the Department Department of English Christ University, Bengaluru
iv
Dedication To Amma and Achan who will never let me stop from learning
v
Acknowledgements
This dissertation has been a long time in the making and there are many individuals who need to be thanked for their support and guidance who in one way or another contributed and extended their valuable assistance in the completion of this research.
My parents deserve the first set of words of gratitude for egging me on in their own special way to always keep moving forward and continue studying no matter the workload, the long hours or the vein that was threatening to pop out of my skull. They got me started on this journey and it has been two years since then and despite all my shortcomings towards this programme, they never gave me the option to quit, ever. I write this for them.
I am indebted to my guide Ms Renu Elizabeth Abraham, Assistant Professor, Department of English whose patience was truly tested during this duration with my manner of working.
Her guidance and suggestions despite the rushed execution of this project were timely and helped shape this work to its final outcome. My gratitude to my internal guides Dr Neeraja S and Mr Padma Kumar for taking the time to clear the clutter and provide direction and help through words of motivation and encouragement mixed with a high sense of what was practical and “what can she do now”?
I am deeply grateful to all the faculty members of the Department of English, Christ
University, Bengaluru for their support and assistance. I would like to thank Dr. John Joseph
Kennedy, Dean- Humanities and Social Sciences and Dr. Abhaya N B, Associate Professor,
Department of English and Dr Sushma V Murthy, Associate Professor, for their support.
I am truly grateful to Mr Joshua. G who served as the course coordinator for MPhil, when
I began and who has been nothing but patient with all the questions and extensions on my part. I am grateful for all the advice and support.
I would also like to extend my gratitude to Mr Edward Felix who serves as the current course vi coordinator and had to bear with constant disturbances of a ward who was suddenly enthusiastic to complete her work. Your patience and concern is highly appreciated.
This would not have been possible without the support of the members of my department of English and Student Welfare Office at Christ Junior College. I am grateful for the support I received. At this point, my students deserve a special mention. A number of them have moved on since I began the course. To those who left and still remembered to ask, the batch of 2014, ‘15 and ‘16, Christ Junior College, thank you for your reminders constantly inquiring if I was done, over and over and over again. I am.
I am truly grateful to my colleague Arnilla Kumar for getting me started on this long journey that has finally come to an end, my teacher Mr P M Varghese who offered himself as an example on ‘how not to go about an MPhil’ and from whom I learnt and my friend Gaana
Nair, for always being the spell check to my flawed dictionary.
The other good outcome from this dissertation, apart from the final bound copy, is a friendship that was formed and strengthen during the times leading to the final bound copy and I am grateful for that. Lakshmi Dileep, we survived!
There are no words to thank the last set of people whom I don’t need to thank anyway and the only reason I am writing their names is so that they can be published somewhere!
Lakshmi B, Sujitha V P, Raja Rajalakshmi K, Raja Rajeshwari K, Santhosh C A, Karthik M,
I am indebted to all of you. A ‘thank you’ would overly underestimate what you mean to me, so I will not.
Finally, my gratitude to God. I have faltered many times in the process of ensuring this research sees the light of day, and I am thankful for the guidance to finally reach the finish line.
vii
Abstract
This research concerns itself with the study of celebrity worship and its representations. It will seek to study acts of deification as performed by the celebrity and analyse how these acts have been constructed and represented by the media. Celebrity culture has inundated our way of life courtesy the ubiquitous presence of the media rendering us a forced audience. The celebrity is a product of the media that works in tandem with the mass. While questions regarding the already present means of construction, production, and dissemination of the celebrity have probably been asked and answered, this research titled The Deified Celebrity:
Understanding Representations of Celebrity Worship in India aims at analysing the image of a very specific category of celebrity: The deified.
In doing so, this research will aim to ask and answer questions on what goes into deifying a celebrity? Celebrity worship is the fan’s devotion towards the celebrity that results in the star being treated god-like. The researcher aims to examine the existence of means or markers unique to celebrity deification and investigate if they are extrapolated from already existing and recognisable systems of worship. Is every celebrity treated god-like or is there an underlying mechanism working at the creation of only few venerated ones? Are the media and the audience equal partners or do the scales favour one side particularly and why?
The framework used to further this research will borrow from Stuart Hall’s theory of encoding and decoding. Through textual analysis, the researcher will observe the process of meaning making construction of identities of the celebrity to the deified and the fan to the devotee.
While celebrity worship can be witnessed over a large demographic, this dissertation will limit itself to analysing the construction, production, and dissemination of deified celebrities in India. In a country that houses over 33 million Gods— and that is just Hinduism— and viii hosts the largest movie industry in the world – 1,200 films per year— it shouldn’t come as a surprise that creating more gods in the name of celebrity worship has become an almost mundane practice.
The research argues that while the fans and audience use the medium of religion to express their fervour and adoration of a celebrity, they do not actually imply the celebrity to be God and are instead creating a new ‘class’ of mortals that oscillate between their real and reel identities (both of which the audience is aware); a new age god perhaps?
Keywords: Celebrity; Celebrity worship; Fan; Deification; Celebrity religion; Media; God
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Approval of Dissertation i Declaration ii Certificate iii Dedication iv Acknowledgments v Abstract vii
Chapter I: Introduction 1-16 Chapter II: Understanding Celebrity Worship 17-34 Chapter III: Narrativizing the Celebrity: Reading Representations Of Celebrity Deification 35-67
Chapter IV: Discussion and Conclusion 68-73
Bibliography 74
Balakrishnan 1
Chapter 1
Introduction
Fame is a fickle friend, Harry. Celebrity is as celebrity does. Remember that.
-Gilderoy Lockhart J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets (1998)
This dissertation explores the process of meaning making within celebrity culture. It concerns itself with understanding representations of deified celebrities in India. The researcher will attempt to understand the narativization of these deified celebrities by reading representations from mainstream media and fan pages that showcase these celebrities as
‘more than human’. The fan requires a means to deify the celebrity, the researcher terms these means as markers of deification. In the process, the researcher seeks to examine the mechanism behind how certain ‘markers’ get encoded with certain religious significance and how these are then decoded. Which marker servers as a means for the fan to perform his devotion towards the celebrity and from where is it borrowed? What has been identified as markers by the media? Furthermore, it will look into certain markers rendered as most identifiable within the borrowed religious practices thus creating a hierarchy of markers within this ‘pseudo-religion’. The researcher seeks to examine the transition of the fan to a devotee and what determines or enables this to occur. The researcher also seeks to understand the creation and sustenance of a celebrity’s deified image through these representations.
The dissertation argues that celebrity religion is primarily conveyed through media.
The celebrity is a construction which is encoded with meaning that is then decoded by the audience. The media enables the dissemination of this constructed to be consumed.
Depending on the manner of decoding the construction, the audience can be viewed as a fan Balakrishnan 2 or spectator. It further argues that by performing a particular marker, the fan is creating a new class of celebrities within the already existent celebrity culture.
Drawing from the science of signs or Semiotics, a simple understanding of the construction, representation and dissemination of the image of the celebrity emerges. Jessica
Evans calls this image the celebrity’s mediated persona.
Persona is the distinctive image of a person built up from the sum of their mediated
appearances. It cannot be reduced to the idiosyncrasies of the real embodied person…
Rather than being simply a meaning contained within one individual text, persona
involves the circulation of meanings across different media, genres and formats
(Evans 19).
The celebrity is absolutely dependent on the media to create and disseminate a persona to an audience, she argues. This directs our attention towards the celebrity’s personal relations along with the exposure provided by the media as the tools that run the ecology of a celebrity.
It is further indicative of the ambiguity in the nature of the field allowing one to believe that the mediated persona is open to interpretation and meaning making by the audience, giving them an equally important role in the ecology that is responsible for sustaining the celebrity.
This is crucial in taking this research forward as it lays the foundation for an argument based on the representations of this mediated persona. If the celebrity’s image is completely dependent on the media, then the manner of representations would invariably affect the outcome of understanding this persona. To strengthen her argument, she traces the idea of the celebrity over time. Has the celebrity always been there or is it a product of the latest entrant into the field of persuasion: The Media? Have fame and celebrity always been dependent on media of its time? She provides the example of silver tetradrachm coins bearing the face of
Alexander the Great, noted by many as the first real celebrity, which were minted by his successors and notes how emperors who ravaged and ruled kingdoms have monuments built Balakrishnan 3 to honour their accomplishment and the public adoration (as important as it was) was deemed secondary to the accomplishment itself (Evans 21).
The key word here seems to be of action, any action that was deemed positive by the society at large. These positive actions of the personality made him/her a celebrity and thus worthy of being celebrated and thus was born the idea of a ‘hero’. Braudy on the other hand argues that no accomplishment would ever reach the desired audience without intentional media management. He dismisses the idea that fame was not sought after by these ‘heroes’ and the means of disseminating these images was through monuments, coins or buildings.
According to him Alexander had a strong celebrity-manufacturing- mechanism. Behind
Alexander’s claim to fame was “not only his need to be unique, but he wanted to tell everybody about it, and he had an apparatus for telling everybody about it. He had techniques for doing famous things. He had historians, painters, sculptors, gem carvers on his battles”
(Neimark).
The assumptions raised by Braudy are essential in understanding the workings of a celebrity ecology that would allow the worship of a mere mortal into a demi god. Actors who essayed roles of gods and mythological figures in South Indian cinema were the first ones to be recognised as the celebrity-god. Their later actions always being judged on the basis of their portrayal of a divine character. These suggestive tools are pointers in enabling meaning making between the celebrity and the divine.
This research will be exploring the various religious practices that validate the celebrity’s status as one that has transcended across border to the deified. Rojek notes how celebrities are made of individuals due to the public’s keen interest in their personal life
(Nayar 5). This again stems from the argument that the media is an innate part of the production and consumption of a celebrity. If there were no media, the celebrity would cease to exist. Balakrishnan 4
While ‘creating false needs’ and ‘a passive audience’ formed the crux of their theory on the industry that had sold its soul to the capitalist devil, celebrity culture has since then moved away from a submissive audience. Critics such as Frow and Marshall note how the emergence of the movie fan magazines generated the current celebrity industry. While admitting that a phenomenon as pervasive as celebrity culture must have numerous points of origin, he locates the nearest one with the American motion pictures’ change in practice in
1910 that resulted in the screening of credits and enabling the audience to better know the names of those who had graced the screen. Earlier movie theatres were hesitant of revealing the names of their actors in the fear that a rival production company would poach them. Here the fan would attempt to receive more details from the theatre owners directly, they wanted to know the face behind the image, though it was the image that drew them to the theatre in the first place. Rojek notes that “...the identification of the masses with celebrity is always false consciousness, since celebrities are not regarded as reflections of reality, but fabrications designed to enhance the rule of the capital” (Rojek 173).
However, these falsified images created within the ambit of the celebrity industry seem to stem from the audience thus contending the Culture Industry’s theory of a passive spectator. The desire to know the occurrences of the larger than life star has led the audience to not only manufacture the needs but also the expectations from this culture. This creation of exaggerated expectations has been dealt in detail by Boorstin in his work The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America (1961). Exaggerated expectations, according to him are what lead mankind towards these unrealistic images. “When we pick up our newspaper at breakfast, we expect - we even demand - which it bring us momentous events since the night before. We turn on the car radio as we drive to work and expect "news" to have occurred since the morning newspaper went to press” (Boorstin n.p). This excessive expectation from every field forces man to concoct falsified needs or pseudo-events in order to appease his Balakrishnan 5 never ending desire to be amazed by what can be otherwise described as a mundane world he has created for himself. He argued that the creation of simulated and scripted events (pseudo- events) in the American society provided very little relation between the real and the fabricated images leading to a subverted understanding on the part of the audience who is unable to discern between the illusion of the superficial and artificial from the reality of original and authentic. Written in context of the representation of American politics, this
‘menace of unreality’ can be utilized to understand the workings of the celebrity ecology in tandem with religion. Evans notes how one historian (Burke, 1992) claims that Louis XIV was quite adept at staging pseudo-events such as the public rejoicings on the news of French victories (Evans 22), thus the ‘sung heroes’.
Celebrity Religion
Celebrity worship begins with an understanding of religion. Deena Weinstein and
Michael Weinstein speak of the rise of the deification of the celebrity in their essay Celebrity
Worship as Weak Religion (2003). They trace the history of religion to Polytheism that revered a pantheon of gods who intervened with the human world only when required, such as the Greek Gods. This soon moved to Monotheism- the practice of worshiping one God.
This God was credited to have created the universe and had interactions with His people through his works. However, the idea of following only one God came at a cost of following the rules (commandments) and accepting them as absolute. This led to an eventually weakening of faith as noted by German sociologist Georg Simmel. According to Simmel, religion was discarded; however, religious needs still existed and hence people began look into themselves to fill this void. The idea of mysticism and spirituality, he notes, arises from
“the will of life to possess itself ... Denial of the transcendent God of monotheism as the focus of worship leaves spirituality floating freely, sometimes to consume itself in pious feelings, but more often to attach itself transiently to finite objects immanent in the world” Balakrishnan 6
(Weinstein and Weinstein 295). While monetary needs took a special place in this ‘church of man’, he still needed someone onto whom he could attach his personal beliefs and thus was born the celebrity-god. Thus man was worshiping versions of himself, not creation but his creation to be more specific. Moreover, this idea of celebrity worship suited the pragmatic reader who could now choose which celebrity he wanted to revere based on the qualities he exhibited. It draws from the idea of the pantheon of god where each god served a specific purpose. In the case of India, the idea of monotheism may not apply precisely because the nation is accepting of the idea of more than one god. Thus, the religious sentiments of the largely Hindu sub-continent have always leaned towards the idea of Polytheism. This would make it all the more acceptable for the people to include one more God into the pantheon of gods already created for him. This time however, the devotee chooses his God of choice based on a value system he would like to revere.
There are celebrities for all purposes and according to Weinstein, in this case, celebrity gods are also disposable. Once done with the need of achieving a sense of
‘spirituality’, the gods use is complete and the devotee many dispose that god and look for a new one without a sense of guilt. The idea of this god who can be worshipped and at the same time be judged by the audience as not worthy could be viewed as a ‘liberal religion’ handing over the reins of power and control to the ordinary. Noting that writers on celebrity have identified psychological, social, and spiritual motives for celebrity worship, all of which concerns the effort of a weak and discontented self to achieve stability and peace, Weinstein and Weinstein close the essay by placing the celebrity worshipper in the realm of a physiologically fanatic individual who holds these images, he knows not to be true as the closest he can get to achieving a sense of transcendence.
The circulation of this personality or image, as fabricated as it may be. Jill Neimark notes the psychology behind this circulation and selling of persona in her article The Culture Balakrishnan 7 of Celebrity (1999). She traces the trend back to American journalist Walter Winchell who worked for the New York Daily Mirror and is credited for having the first ever syndicated gossip column in 1929. Till then, she notes, newspapers were very wary of publishing personal information about people in the fear of crossing the ‘boundaries of good taste’.
Winchell introduced a revolutionary column that reported who was romancing whom,
who was cavorting with gangsters, who was ill or dying, who was suffering financial
difficulties, which spouses were having affairs, which couples were about to divorce,
and dozens of other secrets. He suddenly and single-handedly expanded the purview
of American journalism forever…Winchell helped inaugurate a new mass culture of
celebrity (Neikmark).
Celebrity journalism has since then been a substantial part of the newspaper culture.
The Page 3 phenomenon (journalism that involves itself with entertainment news) that provides the readers with images of wealthy strangers enjoying a lavish and enviable lifestyle creates in the mind of the reader a world that is different from their ordinary and mundane ones. This interest in the famous soon became synonymous with the circulations of images.
Thus fame becomes a manufactured product by the mass media for public consumption (Nayar 8). Rojek notes that an individual becomes a celebrity only when the public takes a keen interest in his or her personal life. Their stories are sold, a narrative accompanying these packaged images to the audience in exchange for fame and celebrity- hood. This, according to Braudy, is where the culture of the biographer thrives. Interestingly enough, Neimark remarks that the interest of the fan to learn more about his celebrity stems from a desire to promote an understanding of his own self. Quoting the work of Christopher
Lasch The Culture of Narcissism (1978), she brings to our attention the dominant psychological trend of the American culture as one that was fixated on narcissism or
“"transcendental self-attention” (Neikmark). The tendency of a narcissist was to identify Balakrishnan 8 himself with things associated with grandeur and hence the celebrity. The images on Page 3 or the glossy film magazines that held stories of the rich and famous served as a staple diet for a society starved on self-attention.
This availability of personal information of celebrities enabled the fan to develop a new kind of intimacy with the persona in question. Rojek termed this as a para-social relationship. In his essay titled Celebrity and Religion (2001), he defines this ‘second-order intimacy’ as relations of intimacy constructed through the mass media rather than direct experience and face-to-face meetings. The more we got to know these famous people, the more we realise we are different from them creating at once a level of proximity and distance:
Extimacy (Nayar 7). The celebrity thrives on this ambivalence. This particular tension is caused due to the ‘physical and social remoteness of the celebrity which is in turn compensated for by the glut of mass-media information, including fanzines (fan magazines), press stories, TV documentaries, interviews, newsletters and biographies, which personalise the celebrity, turning a distant figure from a stranger into a significant other.’ This relation of knowing and not-knowing is akin to that of the relationship the devotee shares with God. In an interview with David Gadd, Rojek seems to concur with Weinstein and Weinstein's theory of a collapsed religion. The absence of having saints or role models, according to him, is being filled in by celebrity culture.
Another of Weinstein’s idea that the worshipped celebrity is an example of commodity fetishisim, is termed by Rojek as an ‘aura like ectoplasm’ about the celebrity.
The idea of the silver coins traded by Alexander the Great to posters of movie stars used as
‘idols’ in makeshift temples seem to hold true to this concept of a material object emitting an aura of ‘speciality’. Thus autographs, signed photographs, a movie ticket may have value that may seem nonsensical to the non-moviegoer. He reworks the idea of collective effervescence as proposed by Emile Durkheim in his study of religion, to suit the idea of celebrity worship. Balakrishnan 9
The idea of the celebrity serving a social cause. The condition that a celebrity renders its fan into frenzy, a collective frenzy enables society an opportunity to come together and celebrate a similar emotion (Rojek 172) While Durkheim speaks of New Year’s Eve celebrations or
Mardi Gras, the South Indian movie going population would be familiar with the idea of a
‘first day, first show’. An occasion for the fans to get together and celebrate their unity in idolising the same celebrity. It serves as platform to strengthen camaraderie towards the same cause and provides ‘establishes conventional codes through which cultural relations are constructed.’ The idea of collective effervescence can be further studied to suit this research on celebrity worship. Rojek draws the reader’s attention to funerals and death rites of celebrities and its ability to serve as a platform to witness the performative aspect of fans.
Death rites and more importantly hoarding of reliquaries belonging to the celebrities are important in establishing the ‘fandom’ of the fan and divinity of the celebrity. He cites the examples of Princess Diana’s dress, President John F Kennedy’s golf clubs all being sold at an exorbitant rate at auction houses and traces this practice back to ancestor worship in shamanism where relics of the dead, like the bone or excrement were deemed holy and preserved for posterity (Rojek 173). These serve as validations to the celebrity’s divinity in question. In the largely Hindu context of South India, it is easier to view one as a celebrity worshipper through replication and appropriation of Hindu temple rituals onto the stars.
Psychologists such as Stuart Fischoff of the American Psychology Association note the disturbing development of a fan turning fanatic. The Celebrity Worship Syndrome has been recognised by many who study the mind as a mental health problem and one that would require medical attention. Psychologists have gone far enough to conduct tests to determine if one was suffering from CWS (Carr 1). Fischoff notes how anthropologically man has the idea of celebrity worship built into his DNA through the acceptance of the alpha male of the pack.
‘Following the leader’ is a very natural idea that draws the ordinary towards what seems Balakrishnan 10 extraordinary to them, here the larger than life constructed image of the celebrity (Carr 2).
The fan then is at the foundation of a celebrity’s status being promoted and then upheld as deified. There is no celebrity without the fan.
Fan Culture
Though the culture industry implies the passivity of the fan, the fan is the one who dictates terms as noted by Film critic S. V Srinivas. In his article Hero Worship (2013) and
Devotion and Defiance in Fan Activity (2008), he looks at the workings of a rasigar manram
(fan club in Tamil Nadu) and the role of a fan in determining the outcome of the image of the celebrity. He draws on the often used argument that the fan club was the creation of the film industry to ensure free publicity to the actors and who then went on to become dependent on the fans for repeat audience in theatres (Srinivas 1). Drawing only on South Indian cinema goers, he covers the functions of a fan club including celebrating the release of a movie to unrelated social welfare work such as blood donation camps. The loyalty of the fan is unquestionable, he argues, citing the example of Chiranjeevi’s fans who threatened to immolate themselves if his movie Alluda Majaaka (1995) would be banned. So effective was the large procession carried out by them that the ban was revoked and the movie released (3).
However, what is interesting about Srinivas’ study on the devotion of the fan is the defiance that comes along it. The fan believes that they have the best interest of the actor in their mind to an extent of objecting the actor’s own decisions. It is a myth, he notes, and that actors dictate the fan clubs. In fact, sometimes, it is the fan who is calling the shots. The fan has moved on from the expectations set by the industry to creation new functions (2) He cites the example of two actors from the Telugu movie industry, Chiranjeevi and Mahesh Babu, who had to recall few of their decisions as it did not have the backing of the loyal fan following.
Ranging from the climatic end of the movie, to the alliance provided by either celebrity in politics, the fan had a say and would not eschew from reminding the former of who Balakrishnan 11 controlled this status. Srinivas calls the fan the guardian of this image that has been constructed and disseminated. “In fan activity we notice highly developed notions of entitlement that encompass not only what the fan can do in the cinema hall but also what the star ought to be doing in the film and, at times life too.” They are the carriers of the celebrity's image and would not want anything to hamper, change or tarnish what they are so devoted towards (5). This kind of audience response- one that is reactive and responsive- will be crucial in determining the outcome of this research.
Film scholar Theodore Bhaskaran notes the deep connection of the image constructed and propagated by the celebrity and its rise from cinema into politics in his opinion piece The
Rooster Needs a Calling (2005). Studying the effect of Tamil movie stars and their presence in politics, he notes the impact that cinema has had on the formation of the governing body in
Tamil Nadu. He brings to light the fact that the five chief ministers who have governed Tamil
Nadu originate from the film industry. Cinema was initially used as a tool to bring together a pre-independent India to help mobilise them against the British Raj and the cinema hall served a sight of inclusion for the Tamil population as it did not adhere to distinctions of caste. Since then, the cinema and the celebrity can be studied as tools used to propagate party values and the fan club then is used as a camp to ‘house’ the loyal electorate (Bhaskaran). He borrows from M S S Pandian’s detailed analysis of MGR and Sivaji Ganesan who enjoyed a similar and strong fan following. At one point, Sivaji had around 3,000 fan clubs dedicated to his cause and the actor himself ensured the publication of Sivaji Rasikan a magazine on the actor dedicated for his fans. However, despite this stronghold, Sivaji failed to establish a strong political career. Pandian and Bhaskaran attribute this to the fact that while MGR essayed only positive roles on the large screen and shied away from images of him smoking and drinking on the screen as well as public, Sivaji was more experimental and engaged in negative roles that need not have put him across in the best light to a family audience Balakrishnan 12
(Bhaskaran). This draws us to question the idea of the image. The fans are caught in this
‘image trap’ unable to distinguish it from reality. It would not be completely wrong to assume that MGR’s dedication to his image (on screen and off) garnered him the approval of the guardians of this image. The icon assumes crucial importance to fans possibly because they deploy it to negotiate their social, political and cultural location in the public sphere. In the process they often invest the star-icon with a valency that has little to do with the ‘real’ or official version of the star (Srinivas 8).
This idea spills over to his book Megastar: Chiranjeevi and Telugu Cinema after N T
Rama Rao (2008). The first in-depth study of Telugu cinema (Srinivas n.p) analyses the transition of Telugu actor Chiranjeevi from his role as an actor to a politician. The fan-club here works as a precursor to the political support required by the actor. S. V Srinivas’ work traces the three decade presence of the actor who went to release a political party Praja
Rajyam Party in 2008, quite like the earlier icon of Telugu cinema NTR who inaugurated
Telugu Desam Party after a very successful stint in the movie industry. This scenario could be applied in the current research in studying the fan’s ability to discern celebrities and create a class of defied celebrities within the realm of celebrities.
Shalini Kakar’s paper “Starring” Madhuri as Durga: The Madhuri Dixit Temple and
Performative Fan-Bhakti of Pappu Sardar (2009) studies the psyche behind Papu Sardar’s undying devotion for Madhuri Dixit. She traces his chaat-shop in Jamshedpur, Punjab that also serves as a shrine to the Bollywood diva. She examines the framework that enables this fan turned bhakt’s shop to also function as a temple. Terming this site as a polysemic one,
Kakar addresses the changing nature of the temple-space (Kakar 329). She analyses the
‘temple’ built for Madhuri Dixit and for Bharat Mata (Mother India). The former serving as a fan-club and the latter a museum. However, both have their boundaries intertwined with the religious and hence offer more than the traditional space. Jai Shree Madhuri Devi Aye Balakrishnan 13
Namaha (Hail to Goddess Madhuri) chants Papu Sardar in his sanctuary as larger than life images of the actress loom over him and every visitor from walls (398). These images of her serve as makeshift idols to which Sardar religiously conducts pujas. Songs from her movies serve as bhajans to which Sardar and his fellow devotees dance to in religious rapture. On her birthday, free chaat and sweets are presented to everyone as prasad or religious offerings.
The Bharat Mata temple located in Varnasi personifies the nation as a woman and serves as a shrine that celebrates not only the nation, but also the patriot. Working as a museum as well as a temple, the ‘holy’ place becomes a ‘ritual site of nationalism’. She further notes how such temples further display new forms of Hindu deities and this informal site of star worship then becomes a hybrid space that incorporates various other elements from popular culture.
Papu Sardar’s temple only reinforces the idea of the temple being a fluid concept.
Compared to the fluid religion that is Hinduism, Kakar concludes that the notion of a temple can be applied both to architectural and non-architectural ritualised spaces created around the murti (Kakar 406). This holds great weightage to the ensuing research as it suggests that any space could be converted into a temple as long as it bears resemblance to the rituals of a traditional space of worship. The fan clubs with the fans gathered together, the cinema hall with the fans throwing coins and chanting the celebrity’s name, the site where any poster or image of the celebrity receives a palabhishekam, the chaat shop with posters or a room in the corner of the house, such as the case with Sanjay Patodia’s temple for Amitabh Bachchan, could transform itself into a temple with the mere presence of a devotee. The presence of this
‘temple’ in its various forms becomes site for the fan to validate his belief in the celebrity deity. It also raises an important question: Is it necessary for a celebrity turned god to have a temple to be deemed god-like? Does every celebrity who has a ‘temple’ to his/her name become god-like or does it require a certain social backing and performance as in the case of
Papu Sardar? Balakrishnan 14
The literature available on the topic of celebrity worship and the deification of celebrities is sparse and rely more on opinion pieces than academic research. One reason for this could be the ‘frivolous’ nature attached to the idea of ‘reading’ a celebrity despite its overwhelming presence in India. Another could be the seemingly varied responses to celebrities over varied regions of the sub-continent. This may lead to discrepancies in findings over population studies of a larger demographic. Moreover, this indicates a need for further research to delve into this field of popular culture. The substantial amount of literature found dealing with this subject is largely opinion pieces and will be used to support the cause of this dissertation.
Chapter Division
In order to analyse the research objective and to arrive at arguments, the dissertation is structurally divided into four main chapters. The first chapter, Introduction, states the research objectives and the argument, literature review and methodology. It gives an account of how the popular idea of celebrity has undergone a change over time.
The second chapter titled “Understanding Celebrity Worship” aims to understand celebrity worship across geographical and cultural sections to arrive at common and unique markers of deification.
The third chapter titled “Narrativizing the celebrity: Reading representations of celebrity deification” seeks to read representations of deified celebrities as they appear in mainstream media. It aims to understand representations of celebrity worship in India through certain identified markers and analysing the control of the interpretation of such representations
The fourth chapter will present the conclusion and discussions of the findings undertaken by this dissertation. Balakrishnan 15
The researcher will employ the methodology of encoding and decoding as theorised by Stuart Hall in Encoding and Decoding in the Television Discourse (1973). The representations will be textually analysed for the manner in which they have been encoded with signs rendering a celebrity deified.
Balakrishnan 16
Works Cited
Boorstin, Daniel. The Image: A guide to Pseudo-Events in America. New York: Vintage,
1961. Print
Bhaskaran, Theodore.S. "The Rooster Needs A Calling". Outlook India. 30 May 2005. Web.
12 August 2015
Carr, Coeli. "A New Age of Celebrity Worship". Web MD.com. 1-4. Web. 20 October 2015
Evans, Jessica. Celebrity, Media and History. England: The Open University Press, 2005.
Print.
Kakar, Shalini. “‘Starring’ Madhuri as Durga: The Madhuri Dixit Temple and Performative
Fan-Bhakti of Pappu Sardar”. International Journal of Hindu Studies Vol.
13.No.2009:391-416. Web
Nayar, Pramod.K. Seeing Stars: Spectacle, Society and Celebrity Culture. India: Sage
Publications, 2007. Print
Neikmark, Jill. "The Culture of Celebrity". Psychology Today. 1 May 1995. Web. 18 August 2015 Rojek, Chris. Celebrity. London: Reaktion Books, 2001. Print.
Srinivas, S.V. Megastar: Chiranjeevi and Telugu Cinema after N.T. Rama Rao. India:
Oxford University Press, 2009. Print
--- “Hero Worship”. Frontline. 18 October 2013. 1-8. Web. 12 August 2015
--- “Devotion and Defiance in Fan Activity”, Journal of Arts and Ideas. 29 January. 67-83.
Web. 15 August 2015
Weinstein, Deen and Weinstein, Michael. “Celebrity Worship as Weak Religion”. Icons of
Culture Vol. 23. No 3. 7 January 2003:294-302. Web Balakrishnan 17
Chapter 2
Understanding Celebrity Worship
Celebrity-worship and hero-worship should not be confused. Yet we confuse them
every day, and by doing so we come dangerously close to depriving ourselves of all
real models. We lose sight of the men and women who do not simply seem great
because they are famous but are famous because they are great. We come closer and
closer to degrading all fame into notoriety (Boorstin 189).
In this chapter the researcher intends to introduce celebrity worship as it has been understood across cultures and provided instances of the occurrence of this cultural phenomenon. Celebrity worship is the act of the fan deifying the celebrity and treating him/ her god-like thus elevating their status within an already elevated system of celebrity culture.
This would enable an understanding of the practices that get encoded with special ritualistic significance rendering the celebrity defied. Furthermore, this comparison will help discern the correlation of said practices and their impact on defying the celebrity across various cultures. The intention is then to narrow down ‘rites’ and ‘rituals’ deemed unique to India to help further the cause of the research in its ability to understand representations of celebrity worship in India.
British pop band The Beatles enjoyed a celebrity status that was peerless at the heights of its popularity. Beatlemania had swooped through the British Isles and made its way across the ocean to the Americas. Young girls clutching their faces as they screamed and wept in utter ecstasy to the best of the decade’s Pop music soon became a regular and almost obligatory accompanying performance. It was during this era of fame and glory that one of its more outspoken members claimed in an interview that The Beatles were more popular than Balakrishnan 18
Jesus Christ. “Christianity will go,” John Lennon said to the London Evening Standard in
1966. “It will vanish and shrink….We’re more popular than Jesus now” (“More Popular than
Jesus”).The reactions to his comment in America included complete boycott of the band by conservative groups. Radio stations refused to play their music and groups organised public burning of their records to acknowledge the blasphemy of the comparison Lennon dared to make (“John Lennon sparks his first major controversy”). Devout white supremacist the Ku
Klux Klan too made its presence felt with death threats being issued at the man who would soon urge the people to imagine a world without heaven. The uproar was serious enough to eventually reduce the touring band to just a studio band as organizers started pulling out.
Lennon was forced to apologise due to mounting pressure and losing a chunk of its fan base.
In 2008, the Pope issued a formal note of forgiveness for having hurt the sentiments of
Christians around the world. The article that appeared in The L'Osservatore Romano, the
Vatican's official newspaper, dismissed Lennon as an English bloke who had seen too much of success too soon while acknowledging the band’s iconic prowess in the sixties.
Across the border and timeline--nearly five decades later-- Venezuela witnessed the demise of one of its most illustrious leaders. Hugo Chavez, who served as its President for nearly 15 years was hailed by his supporters as “an almost omnipresent figure in Venezuelan life, the charismatic driving force of the Bolivarian Revolution, captivating supporters with grandiose orations on the evils of imperialism and folky tales of his exploits.” The leader of the Bolivarian Revolution succumbed to cancer at an untimely age of 58 in 2013. While his death saw the obvious outpouring of public grief, it is the aftermath that requires our attention. The president who had amassed quite a reputation as a political celebrity was elevated into a larger than life entity and slowly but surely deified. A year into his death Balakrishnan 19 anniversary, the people of Venezuela began referring to Chavez as ‘Saintly’. The Lord’s
Prayer ‘Our Father’ was changed to accommodate the ‘Father’ of Venezuelan hope: Chavez.
Our Chavez who art in heaven, in the earth, in the sea and in us, the delegate
Hallowed be your name, may your legacy come to us so we can spread it to
people here and elsewhere. Give us your light to guide us every day
"Lead us not into the temptation of capitalism, deliver us from the evil of the
oligarchy, like the crime of contraband, because ours is the homeland, the peace
and life forever and ever. Amen. Viva Chavez (Strange).
“Venezuelan Socialist Party swaps God for Chavez in new prayer”, claimed a media house
(“Saintly Hugo Chavez Replaces God in Socialist Lord's Prayer”), while another could barely contain its mockery as they ran reports on a ‘mentally unstable’ successor and ardent follower
(read: devotee) President Nicolas Maduro who claimed to have seen Chavez in the form of a bird who then expressed his satisfaction and how “it was happy with the way Maduro was running the country.” The report went on to list out various other ‘proof’ that Chavez was indeed God, while including a disclaimer in parentheses, “(According to Maduro)”. These claims include the election of a Latin Pope courtesy Chavez’s talk with Jesus Christ, apparitions of the dead political leader on an underground construction site and a final comparison between Chavez and Jesus Christ, who Maduro claimed “came to protect those who had nothing” (Strange).
Indian actor Amitabh Bachchan enjoys the title of Shehenshah of Bollywood and the support of a large fan following after having cemented his super-star status over time. From the angry young man, to the romantic hero, to the embodiment of the paternal soul of the
Hindi film industry, Bachchan has pulled people to his movies courtesy his charismatic screen presence and legendary baritone voice. However this is not all, in the narrow lanes of
Ballugung, Kolkata, the actor has also been enjoying his demi-god identity since 2003. Balakrishnan 20
Calling himself a devotee and not a fan, the owner/ devotee/ priest of the temple Sanjay
Patodia follows all the Hindu rituals in ensuring Kalyug Ka Ram, his celebrity god Bachchan is deified in a traditional manner. The sanctum sanctorum is replete with images and posters from the film star’s movies including a pair of white leather shoes worn by the actor in a movie and procured by Patodia to grace the altar. Accompanying this is the Amitabh Chalisa modeled after the Hanuman Chalisa, a chant that would bring one spiritually closer to one’s god. Blood donation camps in the actor’s name and a pilgrimage every year on the star’s birthday to see him in the flesh seals the deal of the fanatic. “There are many forms of God and to us he is one of his many forms,” he asserts (Austa).
Lennon, Chavez and Bachchan are celebrities in their own right whose celebrity images have merged with that of God. The obvious difference is that while Lennon took it upon himself to label The Beatles more popular than Jesus Christ, Chavez’s deification was posthumously handed over to him by his adoring followers (read: devotees) and Bachchan’s temple was created without any ‘permission’ from the star. The outcome towards Lennon’s comments and eventual forgiveness, Chavez’s prayer through the word of the Lord or
Bachchan’s comparison to (this generation’s) Lord Ram directs our attention to an interesting phenomenon of who decides who becomes god-like. Lennon’s declaration could be termed arrogance however, he never blatantly identified himself as a new God, just more famous than Him; but it was enough to irk the public and despite a huge fan following the band was rendered helpless and Lennon forced to apologise. The examples kept side by side would indicate not only the changing times but also the power of the audience to control meaning making and retention. Three of these instances allow us to understand that deification does not have a single means of representation.
Balakrishnan 21
Understanding Celebrity Culture
German scholar Max Weber chose to define the celebrity as one set apart in society due to a certain charisma. He described this charismatic individual as someone who had ‘a certain quality by virtue of which s/he is set apart from ordinary men and treated as endowed with supernatural, superhuman or at least superficially exceptional qualities’. However, the making of this charismatic individual is not innocent. While the ‘admirable doings’ or actions of a hero render him/her famous; the actions of a celebrity, popular culture argues, unlike that of a hero, does not require to amount to anything productive or positive. Furthermore, it draws one’s attention to the fact that the ‘doing’ or a performative aspect is crucial and essential to a celebrity’s existence. The charisma as argued by Weber to be pertinent in a celebrity, while still necessary, could be manufactured. Thus a celebrity is a performed (read: constructed) image that has been disseminated through various representations to be eventually consumed by an audience.
While the hero was recognized for his/her actions, the celebrity was recognized not necessarily due to any form of action but more so for his/her permeating (and sometimes forced) presence. The creation of the culture of the celebrity, its sustenance through the vicarious interest of an audience has since then inundated our lives through the expansion and growth of media.
Earlier showered with adulation for their achievements, today anybody with access to the public can be termed celebrity. Nobody is ‘celebrated’ as the etymology of the word would suggest but is definitely recognised by those who receive these constant and many times forced images. The celebrity then, as defined by Daniel Boorstin is: “A person who is known for his well-knowness”. One need not know or follow the rules of cricket to understand the impact Sachin Tendulkar has in the field of sports or follow the market value of the Hilton Empire to be familiar of its ‘most’ celebrated heir, Paris. The celebrity is known Balakrishnan 22 for his/her pervasive images in society. The audience consumes these images and over time the eagerness to catch a glimpse of their reel identity is replaced by an insatiable need to know their real lives. Thus the current celebrity is a constant schizophrenic, shifting between roles of reel and real, the performance being crucial in the narrative that is the celebrity.
The nature of celebrity culture has seen a marked change over time. From the heroic warrior and conqueror Alexander the Great who has been recognised as the first famous person in a modern sense as contended by Leo Braudy (Evans 20), to Paris Hilton who has nothing attached to her name sans the family ‘heirloom’, the question of who constitutes a celebrity has been debated. Boorstin’s definition seems all encompassing allowing variations to exist within its folds. However, in his work The Image (1961), he provides clarity about the essence of a celebrity as a constructed image, always performing, rarely and a true reflection of the self. This image undergoes constructions at various levels before it is disseminated. The celebrity then is a mediated text, a work of signs and signifiers that is open for interpretation upon consumption by the audience. This idea that the celebrity is manufactured fits the school of thought that culture is manufactured by society.
Staking claim in the culture industry as proposed by Max Horkheimer and Theodor
Adorno in The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception (1994), celebrity culture then covers the expanse of the production, dissemination and consumption of celebrity images in society. The ‘image’ serving as a key word in all discussions. Celebrity culture invariably then belongs to the culture industry that proposes the idea that these are products manufactured and consumed en mass. These images are created with certain values and attributes associated to them that would enable them to stand out from the ordinary. In a manner similar to the production of varieties of the same brand of a product that allows the consumer to believe that s/he is in control of his/her choices, the celebrity image too is manufactured with different celebrities associated with different values and thus Balakrishnan 23
‘empowering’ the consumer (read: audience) to choose the one s/he feels more suited to his/her needs.
The idea of the celebrity as a commodity has been one supported by Graeme Turner who defined the celebrity as “...a commodity traded by the promotions, publicity and media industries that produce these representations and their effects…” (Turner 2). Terming it as a worrying cultural shift that privileged the momentary, the visual and the sensational over the enduring, the written and the rational, he further comments on the inexplicable nature of who constitutes a celebrity and calls the celebrity industry as a product of a number of cultural and economic processes including the commodification of the individual through promotion, publicity and advertising. It was Turner who also noted that the present overwhelming exposure to celebrity news has led to the wild held belief that celebrity culture is a 20th century phenomenon rather than thinking of it as an extension of a long standing condition.
Chris Rojek notes that the aim of the culture industry is to view organized entertainment as a type of social control. “Celebrities are conceptualised as one of the means through which capitalism achieves its ends of subduing and exploiting the masses. The celebrity is only an image mass produced and dispensed to a submissive audience.”
Embodying false values, the celebrity is but a commodity distributed to control the consciousness of the people. (Rojek 2)
The Divinity of Man
The elevation of mortal to divine has been in existence since the Egyptian civilization.
They were the first to deify their rulers and lawmakers through the construction of statues and temples in their honour. ‘They were the first who built altars and erected statues and temples to the gods; for the erecting of statues was esteemed a certain mark that the worshippers believed that gods had human natures.’ (Warburton 178). The reason why the law makers and rulers were defied seem to fit the administrative policy as it believed that it would lead the Balakrishnan 24 commoners to better abide the laws. He further discusses the rationale behind the qualities they chose to attribute to these deified men and women. According to him, it corresponded with the nature of the government. A compassionate governance was reflected in sympathetic and forgiving gods whereas a tyrant one saw the qualities of wrath, revenge and bloody sacrifice being attributed to them. This manner of attributing qualities to deified mortals is significant in our understanding of current occurrences of deification. The transfer of knowledge and culture of the Egyptian civilisation entailed the transfer of their idea of deifying their dead. This was picked up by the Greek civilisation. Instances of Greek literature provide evidence of the process of apotheosis wherein a mortal is raised from the status of an ordinary man to a demi-god. The pantheon of already existing gods witnessed a steady intake of deified mortals. The Hellenistic empire influenced the Romans to bring in the imperial cult, a practice wherein the governors of the State were deified and worshiped as part of state religion. Crawford quotes Ittia Gradel’s findings on the success of the imperial cult in the Roman Empire as it created a distance between the worshiper and the worshiped thus enabling a new power structure (Crawford 2). In an effort to trace the transfer of the idea of deification from the Greeks to the Romans, she traces this idea of the imperial cult to the practices adopted by Alexander the Great. The Cult of Alexander, she claims, inspired the
Cult of Augustus. Alexander employed the process of “proskynesis (ritual prostration given to a god and later, a salutation made before an altar with Alexander's image) as a way to establish a formal ruler cult” (Crawford 3). The transfer of the ‘aura’ of the divine onto him was cemented through this everyday ritual till eventually his subjects began to refer to him as an almost divine ruler (Crawford 3).
The Cult of Alexander serves as a case point in understanding the transfer of the aura of the divine onto a mere mortal in a modern day scenario. Politicians in India have often been attributed with god-like status and this transfer seems to occur through representations Balakrishnan 25 of them as God, as will be discussed in the next chapter. Though the Egyptians began with the process of deification of their Pharos, Alexander holds claims to having begun the process of deifying the living. Leo Braudy notes the intentional media management employed by
Alexander to ‘sell’ his deified image (Evans 22). He had sacrifices, festivals dedicated to him and his stories were received with much aplomb that eventually raised him to the status of a hero and a real life demi-god-like where man became or was made to become more than man, he ensured it would. Braudy attributes Alexander’s ubiquitous nature to the fact that his image was engraved on the common coin that was used as currency across the
Mediterranean. It is interesting to note that on the very coins rests his face adorned with the ram’s horn of Jupiter Ammon, denoting his descent from the Gods. Another attempt at transfer of the divine aura. Due to the abundance in number of religions and their equivalent practices of deification, the researcher will limit this dissertation to analysing the practices of deification in the three major religions of the world: Islam, Christianity and Hinduism.
Deification within Established Religions
A monotheistic religion, Islam believes in the idea of one God. This God has been accessible to its people through messengers or prophets. The distinction between God and
Prophet is clear and forceful in its establishment. However, Sam Shamoun in his essay
“Islam’s Other god. The Muslim Deification of Muhammad” speaks of how the difference in status between the Prophet and Allah has witnessed a form of thinning due to incorrect interpretations of the Quran (Shamoun 1). Quoting passages from the Quran, Shamoun refers to the Prophet as a mere fallible human who been attested with unnecessary divinity. He refers to such followers of the Prophet as fanatic and uniformed (1). An instance of misinterpretation that aids in the deification of the Prophet include the practice that states that
Muhammad must be prayed on if one's supplications are to be accepted by Allah:
"Supplication and prayer are suspended between the heaven and the earth and none of it rises Balakrishnan 26 to Allah until you pray on the Prophet" (3). Thus Prophet Muhammad receives as many prayers as Allah does. Terming this act as blasphemous, Shamoun finally concludes by quoting Iranian Muslim scholar, Ali Dashti, “Moslems, as well as others, have disregarded the historical facts. They have continually striven to turn this man into an imaginary superhuman being, a sort of God in human clothes, and have generally ignored the ample evidence of his humanity” (3) One must note that the closest this religion has come to defying man is the Prophet or the messenger of God enabling the mere mortals to attain nothing other than saint-like status.
In the modern era, the process of religious canonization is the closest means a mortal could get to attain a god-like status in Christianity. Canonization and beatification finds its roots from the borrowed tradition of apotheosis. However, canonization would only render an individual saintly and close to the status of God, but not God. S/he will be called a saint and serve as nothing more than as servant or friend to god, but not god itself. The procedure of canonization requires a minimum of five years after the demise of the individual and will be based on the heroic and virtuous life led by them. In his essay Beatification and Canonization
(1907), Camillo Beccari sets this process of apotheosis as it functioned in the Roman Empire.
The Roman Empire, he claims, deified any member of the royal family with less regard to their virtues or achievements. This was done with a similar purpose as the Egyptians did to control the masses and distract them from their apparent cruelty (Beccari n.p). He throws light on the three types of worship as prescribed by the Catholic doctrine:
Latria (latreia) is indicative of strict adoration and is the worship bestowed upon God
alone, dulia (douleia) is the reverence that is doled out to the saints and hyperdulia
(hyperdouleia) is a higher form of dulia but lower than that of lateria and is the
worship that belongs to the Blessed Virgin Mary (Beccari n.p). Balakrishnan 27
This categorisation helps cement an understanding towards the idea that while the deification of a mortal was not uncommon through the process of canonization, the degree of reverence received by the mortal was prescribed by the Church. In sharp contrast to the idea of God being omnipotent is the work of German philosopher Ludwig Andreas Feuerbach who in his essay The Essence of Christianity (1841) posited the idea that man manufactures God.
According to him, God is nothing but a mere object onto which goodness is personified and man termed this goodness as God. God does not possess divinity, divinity renders something as God through association (Feuerbach 19). Here the qualities associated with divinity are more important than who is God. While the Romans and the Greeks deified accidents and substances as independent beings, the religious man worshipped “whatever strongly impresses a man, whatever produces an unusual effect on his mind, if it be only a peculiar, inexplicable sound or note, he personifies as a divine being…” (19).
This is highly pertinent to understanding celebrity worship as it allows us to view this
‘divinity’ as a quality that is transferable from one celebrity to the next and also onto objects used by the celebrities that serve as talismans. This idea that the subject can discover divinity in anything that fascinates him can be further used to explain why certain celebrities are deified and certain aren’t. Feuerbach goes on to argue that the identity of all the possible qualities indicating divinity was appropriated on this being called God as the absolute making
His nature different from that of human beings who possessed only a few thus making them un-God-like. This appropriation of all divinity onto a single being he terms chimera as it is really the outward projection of man’s inner self. It is here he stakes claim to his major argument that God is man since He is a creation of the latter. While Feuerbach enables a philosophical understanding of the inherent divinity of man, he also offers a premise to humanise God. Balakrishnan 28
The idea of humanising God is an important aspect in Hinduism. The concept of the avatars of Lord Vishnu as various incarnates (sometimes as animals) is understood as the act of God to transcend through the man-god barrier and be more humanised in order to retain the man-god continuum ( Aiyappan 140). The final destination of the Hindu is moksha, a spiritual realm that will free him of all earthly bondage; however, for the devotee to understand and access this spirituality a more concrete form was required. The murti- that which has taken or been given a shape for the spirituals beings and also their icons served as the tangible form of an intangible belief (140). Thus the avatars serve as icons of the ultimate
Spiritual Being and the consecration of the murti or the idol allows the devotee to access this spirituality through a form that can be dealt with and understood properly by man. This act loosely follows the argument posited by Feuerbach of tangible objects being appropriated with divinity. Celebrity worship centres around this idea of deifying objects fans believe to be the concrete expression of the qualities they worship in a celebrity, each quality attached to a different celebrity thus creating a pantheon of celebrity gods.
The idea of 330 million gods and goddess existing in Hinduism and thus making it the largest religious pantheon has often been debated in academic circles. These deities encompass all expressions of Brahman who represents the Ultimate Reality. Brahman here is not the absolute God but is understood as "creator of the world, above and independent of human existence", where in Hinduism "God, the universe, human beings and all else is essentially one thing" (Brodd 43).
Celebrity Industry and Religion
Organised religion enables the celebrity industry to appropriate means of worshiping and selling these representations of the deified celebrity. The weakening of religion as discussed earlier in Chapter 1 left a vacuum for those seeking to create more gods. Gods that would suit their specifications in terms of qualities and those who could be disposed at will. Balakrishnan 29
“...Organized religion has declined in the West. Celebrity culture has emerged as one the replacement strategies that promotes new orders of meaning and solidarity” (Rojek 99).
However, how did the celebrity come to replace God? Rojek believes that tension created between the distance of the celebrity and the manner in which his representations are mediated through media draws parallels with certain religious experiences. Celebrities are thought to possess God-like qualities by some fans while others- experience the power of the celebrity to arouse deep emotions. (Rojek 172). Contemporary religions make their way into an established system by three ways: (i) A move away from religion of the transcendent and other toward a religion of the self, (ii) the effect the media has on this religious shift and (iii) the manner in which this emergent system of beliefs might be described from the perspective of the religious subject (Ward 69).
The need for a morally decaying society to find more role models who would help them venerate humane values could be one of the reasons of creating a ‘new religion’ with celebrities at the centre as gods. Society began to look ‘inward’ and began preferring the personality rather than the selfless public virtue. Here man worships a slightly elevated self of the ordinary mortal. This change in preference of ‘personality’ over ‘character’ indicates a shift in cultural perspective with the shift from a producing society to a consuming one.
Personality, “became a means to distinguish our individual selves from the mass and a measure of success” (Henderson 51). This realization of the inner self over the ‘actions’ enabled a society that allowed to feel in control. Warner Susman notes how in a world left to the mercy of the culture industry, the vision of ‘God’ was receiving a makeover. God was no longer the mere designer as man stepped into His shoes. The definition of the hero was no longer limited the ‘heroic’ and the American People were melting down old heroes and recasting their mould in which heroes were made. The audience was thus given charge to fill Balakrishnan 30 these moulds and create a God befitting (50). Thus emerging the new age God and new means to venerate this God.
This new religion is recognised by certain practices which serve as markers to deify the celebrity. Celebrated American singers Elvis Presley and Michael Jackson’s homes
(Graceland and Neverland) serves as museums turned shrines to fans who throng the place in an attempt to ‘feel’ with aura of whom they considered the King of Rock and Roll and King of Pop respectively. The Elvis Cult is one such phenomenon whereby fans embark upon a
‘pilgrimage’ to Graceland sharing virtuous stories about the deceased star and his selflessness demonstrated through the distribution of Cadillacs. Elvis impersonators lead the group as self-attested priests of this ‘religion’ as charitable acts are performed in the star’s name. The ritual concludes with fans collecting personal items of the star such as toenails and used water cups and revering them as sacred objects (Reece). The act enables the group of fans to come together in what Durkheim refers to as collective effervescence thereby experiencing a surge of emotions that would classify as out of the ordinary and is interpreted as divine. These acts are borrowed from Christianity with the idea of the Elvis shrine drawing parallel with the church, the holy pilgrimage, the charity extended in the name of the Lord, the sharing of tales of Jesus’ acts of kindness, establishing a set of ‘leaders’ or priests who will then enable the devotees to partake in the religiosity that is offered by Christianity and finally placing religious significance on seemingly mundane objects like the wooden cross with relevance. Balakrishnan 31
Fig. 1
Another means or marker of deification within Christianity is the appropriation of images of the sacred with the newly deified. Hollywood actress and humanitarian Angelina
Jolie was deified as Mother Mary holding on to all her adopted children as seen in Fig 1. Cast in virginal white, she is painted as standing on clouds, thus marking her above the ordinary, with two toddlers standing by her side as she holds on to the infant to her bosom. The halo radiating from behind her categorizes her as the divine and seeks to represent her in an ethereal manner. U.K based publication The Sun responds to the image with shock and condescension publishing the image along with an accompanying article under the category of bizarre.
This idea of celebrities replacing gods or traditional rituals being appropriated to deify celebrities has been denied as replacing traditional religion. Elvis fans who themselves partake in the veneration of their star dismiss any such parallels. They are very clear about the sacrifice of Jesus Christ ‘who died for the sins of man’ and Elvis Presley, the singer and they do not want any comparison to be made between the two (Ward 31). This creates an Balakrishnan 32 interesting tension between an already established religion and what is understood as a new form of religion created through representations of such fan-based acts. Thus the celebrity god will be deified but will not replace traditionally acceptable religion. Instead it has created something of a para-religion: a belief system that incorporates certain aspects of religion
(Ward 57). The means in which this para-religion of celebrity culture is decoded and understood based on fan activities and then represented through the media will be dealt with in the following chapter.
Balakrishnan 33
Works Cited
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Aiyappan, A. Agents and Audiences. World Anthropology. Ed Agrhananda Bharati. Walter de
Gruyter, 1976. 15 November 2015. Web
Beccari, Camillo. Beatification and Canonization. The Catholic Encyclopedia. Vol. 2. New
York: Robert Appleton Company, 1907. 11 Dec. 2015. Web
Boorstin, Daniel. The Image: A guide to Pseudo-Events in America. New York: Vintage,
1961. Print
Brodd, Jeffrey. World Religions: A Voyage of Discovery. Saint Mary's Press. Winona, 2003.
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Symposium Abstracts. Washington D.C: Harvard University, 2011.December 11,
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(1992): 49–54. Web. 17 August 2015
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Shamoun, Sam. Islam’s other god: The Muslim Deification of Muhammad. Answering Islam:
A Christian and Muslim dialog. 09 November 2015. Web
Strange, Hanna. "Saintly Hugo Chavez Replaces God in Socialist Lord's Prayer". VICE
News. 4 September 2014. Web.4 November 2015 Balakrishnan 34
Warburton, William. The Divine Legation of Moses Demonstrated, Volume 1. Harvard
University.1837. Digitized 2006. 09 November 2015. Web
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Fig 1: “Angelina as the Virgin Mary’. The Sun. 3 January 2007. Web. October 12 2015
Balakrishnan 35
Chapter 3
Narrativizing the Celebrity: Reading Representations
Of Celebrity Deification
Rather than dismissing celebrity worship as not religiously significant by adapting
different elements from a range of theories, it might be possible to cast new light on
how, through the action of the media, and through the agency of the audiences and
fans something like (and not like) religion is starting to emerge (Ward 58).
In this chapter the researcher seeks to read representations of deified Indian celebrities as they appear in mainstream media. It aims to understand the connection between media and celebrity worship. The fan requires a means to worship or deify the celebrity, the researcher argues that these means will function as ‘markers’ that have been largely appropriated from an already established religious system. It then seeks to determine if the media can provide validation of what markers serve as identifiers of these acts of deification. It will do so by (i) reading representations of acts of deification by fans that borrow from traditional religious practices and (ii) analyse how these acts have been described and discussed by the media.
The researcher will further investigate the possibility of a common pattern emerging from these representations that will isolate the most identifiable marker of deification. The researcher will then argue that by favouring a particular marker as most identifiable, the media is then encoding and constructing a hierarchy within the class of deified celebrities that is then decoded by the reader. Finally the researcher will argue that celebrity religion in India is primarily mediated conveyed through media and the mediations of these practices receive validation time. Stuart Hall’s findings on the implications of encoding and decoding as it Balakrishnan 36 appears in his work Encoding and Decoding in the Television Discourse (1973) will form the framework of this chapter.
For a long time, Indian television actor Nitish Bhardwaj was unable to separate his reel (constructed on-screen image) identity as Lord Krishna essayed on B. R Chopra’s magnum opus Mahabharat (1988-1990) from his real one as an actor-cum-veterinarian. In an interview, Bhardwaj recalls how at the age of 23, in the heydays of his popularity, people fell at his feet and sought for his blessings. “…Rickshawallas would point to my building and say, ‘This is where Krishna lives’. Like people touched the feet of Sudhir Dalvi after the film
Shirdi Ke Sai Baba, and Arun Govil after the serial Ramyana, they touched my feet too” ("I
Did Not want to play Krishna in Mahabharat"). So synonymous was his image with that of the divine charioteer that he claimed he was often offered money to don the costume and attend corporate events to bless people.
Tamil actor and later Chief Minister M.G Ramacharan faced a similar conundrum when he chose to essay the role of Jesus Christ in the movie Yesunathar (I am Christ) in
1970. The movie produced by Thomas Pictures was shelved at the production stage, however, stills of MGR in his avatar as Christ captured during the pre-production stage were circulated in print media to generate the buzz and anticipation towards the movie.
Fig. 1 Balakrishnan 37
Though the movie never made it to the sets, these images were well received by fans. The extent of his depiction as Christ and fandom of the fan is captured in the image below.
Fig. 1.1
The image captured showcases the insides of a cycle workshop in rural Tamil Nadu.
Here the owner has created a pantheon of portraits of whom he chooses to worship. The nine portraits make up of five Hindu deities and three individuals (Dr B R Ambedkar, Anna Durai- founder of Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (DMK) party and the owner’s father). In the middle appears to be the portrait of Jesus Christ, which amounts to no real significance until one realises that it is of the actor MGR posing as Christ. All but the portrait of Dr B R Ambedkar is decorated with offerings of flowers. The offerings of flowers hanging onto the portraits need not necessarily imply deification of the common man as this is a common practice extended to family members and inspirational leaders as a sign of reverence. However, it is the conscious decision of the owner of shop to choose an image of MGR portraying an already established god as worthy of worship that draws our attention. Is he worshipping
Christ or deifying MGR or both? Does his preference of MGR’s image as Christ over the popularly circulated one of Jesus speak of his choice to worship the mortal over the man?
This example is reflective of a constant tension in the world of celebrity worship Balakrishnan 38 created by actors who portray gods onscreen. The encoding of the image of the actor as God is decoded by certain members of the audience. The audience, such as in the case of
Bhardwaj’s and MGR’s fans, is aware of the performative aspect of their reel image, however, their choice to believe the continuance of this godly persona off-screen necessitates a harder look into the mechanism of representation.
Analysing the role of media in creating celebrities, Boorstin notes man’s extravagant expectations of “(i) ...how much news there is, how many heroes there are, how often masterpieces are made… and (ii) ...of our ability to create events when there are none, to make heroes when they don't exist…” (Boorstin, 1). An innate need in man to make life larger than ordinary due to extravagant expectations finds respite in the celebrity’s ‘reel’ image. To sustain what has been created for him as a celebrity god. Boorstin’s arguments on the creation of a pseudo-event are extended to cover the pseudo-individual created in the process: The superficial individual; a.k.a: The celebrity. The voyeur in man wakes up and begins a series of parasocial relations (Rojek 171) with the celebrity that addresses and satisfies his need of grandeur and sensation. The exaggerated expectations are high enough to create falsified celebrities or people who need not be talented or heroic. This process of celebritification— creating a celebrity— depends on various environmental factors. This celebrity ecology determines the meanings drawn by the actions of the celebrity (Nayar 26).
The image of the celebrity is created and sustained in an ecology of its own comprising of constant media exposure and a loyal fan base.
The celebrity exists only when the public begins to express a heightened interest in their personal lives (Rojek 12). The role of media in the dissemination of these images is crucial. Celebrity culture is only possible in the age of mass media (Nayar 7). However, the celebrity is a constructed image that is then disseminated for consumption by an active audience, a mediated persona (Evans 19). Bhardwaj’s and MGR’s instances is only one Balakrishnan 39 manner of deification employed by the fan, it is reflective of the impact of technology and media in the creation and sustenance of deified celebrities. It further compels the reader of such acts of worship to deliberate on understanding the encoding of the makers of deification and its decoding by the consumer of such representations of the celebrity.
The Makings of a Deified Celebrity
In a country that houses over 33 million Gods— and that is just Hinduism— and hosts the largest movie industry in the world – 1,200 films per year ("Top Ten Feature Film
Producing Countries")— it shouldn’t come as a surprise that creating more gods in the name of celebrity worship has become an almost mundane practice. India also happens to be the largest newspaper market in the world. As per the data available with the Government, a total of 1, 05,443 newspapers/periodicals are registered with the Registrar of Newspapers for India
(RNI) as on 31st March, 2015. To determine the possibilities of representations of deified celebrities in all the papers is a voluminous task as coverage of these representations seem erratic in nature. This chapter examines coverage of celebrity deification in mainstream
English dailies and periodicals and fan pages.
Though the Yajur Veda prescribes only 33 deities, the basic idea of Bhraman’s
(Ultimate Reality) ability to manifest as anything and everything in this universe allows the practitioners of this faith to have a broad understanding of who can be accommodated within the pantheon of gods. The makings of a deified celebrity begins with identifying the means employed by the fan through which this sense worship is conveyed across to the image of the star. Fans borrow from already established religious practices to convey this. A message can be received at a particular stage only if it is recognisable (Hall, 507). These would serve as markers. The researcher has identified a limited set of recognisable markers as popularly represented through media coverage.
(i) Temples, idols built for celebrities Balakrishnan 40
(ii) The act of performing aarti and chanting bhajans
(iii) Appropriation and circulation of celebrity images on established images of deities
(iv) The act of performing abhishekam on images
(v) Cut-outs, photos, busts being garlanded
Temples and Idols
The temple or mandir serves as a prominent site for the worship of a deities. Considered home for the god (Lochtefeld, 418), it serves a gathering place for the devotees to congregate and partake in puja (a series of established rites and rituals that will exalt the divinity of those being worshipped). The murti on the other hand does not acquire religious significance unless it has been placed in an area of worship and receives acts of worship done upon it to be reflections of deification, it remains a statue and not an idol. This is one of the main reasons why leaders and heroes’ statues are not considered idols. Temples on the other hand are one of the most concrete forms of establishing the divinity as there is no other purpose more important in a temple than to house a god. India has been generous in building temples for humans, animals and even object such as aeroplanes and motor vehicles ("Top 10 Strange
Temples in India Part I & II"). Celebrity worship in India too stands out for churning out temples for their celebrities. Consider the following list:
1. Mamta Kulkarni- Nellor, Tamil Nadu (1993)
2. Kushboo (Kushambigal Devalayam)- Tiruchirappalli, Tamil Nadu (1999)
3. Madhuri Dixit- Jamshedpur, Uttarakhand (2001)
4. Amitabh Bachchan- Ballugung,Kolkata (2001)
5. Namitha- Tirunelveli, Tamil Nadu (2008)
6. Sachin Tendulkar- Atarwalia, Bihar (2013)
7. Mahatma Gandhi- Sambalpur, Orissa (2009)
8. Pooja Umashankar- Colombo, Sri Lanka (2009) Balakrishnan 41
9. Mayawati- Natpura village, Bundelkhand, Uttar Pradesh (2010)
10. M.G.Ramachandran- Nandammeedu, Tirunindravur ,Tamil Nadu (2011)
11. Rajinikanth- Kolar district, Karnataka (2011)
12. Hansika Motwani- Madurai, Tamil Nadu (2013)
13. Sonia Gandhi- Mahbubnagar, Andhra Pradesh (2014)
14. Narendra Modi- Gujarat (2015)
15. Huccha Venkat- Not Applicable (2015)
This list comprises of temples for Indian celebrities whose existence is available through the media. Kannada actor and reality star Venkataram Laxman who goes by his popular name
Huccha Venkat made claims of having a temple to his name in America while on a popular reality show. There is no veracity to this fact other than his self-proclaimed assertion. This was picked up by a leading English daily The Times of India. The article "OMG! A temple in
US for Huccha Venkat" (October, 2015) featured in the entertainment section of the paper leads with the headline “OMG!...” immediately putting it in a less than serious category for the reader to consider. Its use of colloquial abbreviations also suggests that the particular article is targeted towards a generation comfortable with the usage and not known to be very active towards celebrity deification. The use of “OMG” (Oh my God!) in the title expresses a sense of disbelief that may be interpreted as applicable to the idea of celebrities having temples to their names. However, the article begins with examples of already established temples for celebrities to ascertain the common nature of this phenomenon. This contradiction in representations seem to indicate that the disbelief is intended only towards that particular actor (Huccha Venkat) having a temple and not wholly towards the phenomenon of temples for celebrities. The paper thereby indicates its approval of few select celebrities having temples in their names thereby creating a hierarchy within celebrity culture. The lack of a question mark in the headline leads the reader to believe of the Balakrishnan 42 existence of such a temple, however on reading the 200-word report, the paper has no other evidence sans the actor’s claim.
Similar reports exist about Tamil actress Kushboo’s temple christened Kushambigal
Devalayam. Built in 1999 by her fans in Trichy, Tamil Nadu, mainstream media has only a mention of the supposed temple in reports that feature her. The New Indian Express takes this one step forward. They introduce the temple built for her by her fans and then go on to question its authenticity and informing the readers that the actress had herself has never seen the temple ("Kushboo unplugged"). However, every paper when featuring Kushboo does mention the existence of such a temple and also the demolishment of the same after her comments on pro- pre-marital sex in 2005. The usual tone of the article in such mainstream media showcasing any information of temples meant for celebrities is one of derision. The fans are represented employ a tone of justification. Kushboo’s fans claims the actress had begun to look like her old-self (pre pre-marital sex comments) and hence deserves a new temple ("Fans Build up a Temple to Kushboo "). However, the report is blatant in calling the actress irresponsible for encouraging the fans. Reports on temples for celebrities run into only about a paragraph, most of the time with no accompanying pictures of the temple, and if there are any it seeks to highlight absurdity of the practice rather than provide an objective representation. However, a few celebrities’ representations of temple move against the grain of regular representation.
Narratives about Mahatma Gandhi’s and MGR’s temples carry the impression of having ‘earned’ the respect of mainstream media as the representations of these temples employ a tone of why this act of deification is justified. MGR’s temple in Nandammeedu,
Tirunindravur, Tamil Nadu was consecrated in 2011 and reports of this consecration were dutifully published in mainstream papers including The Hindu, The New Indian Express and others. IBN live’s description of the consecration of the temple dedicated to the actor-cum- Balakrishnan 43 politician employed a heroic narrative. The paper called it the “first ever temple” dedicated to
MGR, hinting at the possibility of many more to follow ("Hundreds Turn Up For MGR
Temple Consecration"), though not descending into fanaticism, does not belittle the deification and is accompanied by an image of the actor’s idol. A follow up article was published in 2013 by The Times of India ("Childless couples seek miracles from MGR") wherein the faith of a childless couple seeking for a miracle by praying to MGR’s idol at his temple was documented. It went on to inform the public about Arulmigu MGR Aalayam’s
(MRG’s fan club) festival held celebrating the star which witnesses participation from fans across Tamil Nadu.
...A ritual similar to that practised at Sabarimala is performed here. At least 40
devotees observe a 41-day vritha (fast) after wearing beaded garlands and come to the
temple on January 15(Saju).
It chronicles the 41-day vrita or fast observed in the month of December, the month MGR died using the word devotee in the place of fan thus mediating to the reader in a positive light this form of deification of MGR.
Gandhi’s temple, though it did not receive as much aplomb as MGR’s, too follows a similar pattern of description. These variations in description of Kushboo’s temple versus
MGR’s temple highlights the media’s power to express validation on who deserves a temple.
An obvious political leaning apart, another possible conclusion is that since Gandhi and MGR were involved in nation and society building, their divinity precedes that of film actors whose lives and actions pale in comparison and are largely considered frivolous. Furthermore, it feeds into the idea of apoetheosis as practiced by the Egyptians and Romans wherein the lawmakers and statesmen were deified because of their position in administration.
However, a recorded exception to the case is the representation of the temple intended for Mayawati. NDTV’s report “And now, a Mayawati temple” does not mince its words Balakrishnan 44 when describing the installation of a temple for the ex-Chief Minister of Uttar Pradesh. The headline that begins with the conjunction ‘and’ signifies a continuum of sorts, that temples were being constructed for celebrities and now has an addition to that list. The report begins by reminding the reader that Mayawati’s temple is an addition to the existing statues of herself ‘that already dot the sprawling state’. It then moves on to describe the location of the proposed temple as ‘in the poverty-stricken Mahoba district in Bundelkhand, economically the most backward region in Uttar Pradesh’ (“And now, a Mayawati temple”). It immediately then reminds the reader of the controversy surrounding Mayawati’s acceptance of a garland made of currency notes amounting to Rs. 22.5 crore by her party worker. The accompanying image is that of Mayawati’s controversial garland and external links provided on the e-paper in the middle of the report too lead to articles and opinion pieces on the garland controversy.
The implications of the dominant manner of representation here can be interpreted as one of the politician’s extravagant nature, a temple built on poverty stricken neighbourhood and the duty of a nation’s leader in being selfless. The narrative further presents the building of temples a frivolous activity.
Fig 2
Among the most recognisable actor in the Kannada film industry, Rajkumar has no temple built to his name. However, instances of him being referred to as god are not Balakrishnan 45 uncommon despite the lack of a temple. Fig 2 shows the inauguration of Kannada actor
Rajkumar’s memorial built for him in Karnataka The memorial was inaugurated by the Chief
Minister of Karnataka Siddaramaiah and saw in attendance actors from across the country including Rajnikanth, Chiranjeevi, Ambareesh and family members of Rjakumar. Built on a budget of Rs 7 crore ("Rajkumar memorial inauguration on Nov. 29"), it houses photographs of the late actor and will be expanded into an auditorium and museum. The media’s sober toned representation of this event indicates that a museum dedicated to an actor doesn’t seem objectionable. The image chosen by the media to cover this inauguration of the museum can be further read to understand how deification functions through representations. The bronze garlanded bust of Rajkumar set high on a pedestal looking down upon the celebrated actors who gathered to celebrate him. Rajnikanth’s speech on this occasion reported by the media adds to the ‘divinity’ of Rajkumar’s memorial. International Business Times dedicated an entire article just to highlight Rajnikath’s speech. The manner of reporting broke down the ten minute speech into nine points thus enabling the reporter to exercise his choice to highlight only what the publishing house thought important. Among these points included are three referred to Rajkumar as godly:
...the respect given by the people was not for him but it was for the Goddess
Saraswathi in him... Perform prayers and he will bless you... In the coming days, this
memorial will be a temple and a place where miracles will happen (Upadhya).
The narrative employed here by the media house does not ridicule the emphasis Rajnikanth placed on the possibility of this museum turning into a temple or of miracles occurring in the place meant to honour a celebrated mortal. This an instance where the representation of a future Rajkumar temple has been mediated in a positive manner. A fact to consider would be that these statements came from a famous celebrity Rajnikanth who has a temple to his name. Balakrishnan 46
Thus the implication here is not of positive mediation of celebrity deification of just what has been said, but more so by who made those statements and their power over the masses.
An alternative narrative available to the reader in representations of temples built for celebrities is through the medium of travel writing as in the case of the temple built for
Amitabh Bachchan by his fan in Kolkata. From describing in detail the dingy lanes leading to the temple which is enshrined in the corner of an old ordinary house, the writer expresses a sense of disbelief, not at the temple but the fact that this could serve as a location for a temple. “This is clearly not a fans shrine to their superstar,” he writes. He moves on to document the workings of the temple, the rituals observed and provides information on
Hinduism. His narrative employs a sense of wonderment and amazement at this practice as an outsider observing this for the first time. This article is targeted towards a foreign audience
(first posted in Bangkok Post in 2013) and thus focuses on providing information rather than convey an opinion. His article further involves an interview with the fan (who wants to be referred to as devotee).
Fan pages on the other hand employ a tone of justification on the act of building a temple for their celebrity. MGR’s fan page refers to MGR fans as devotees and not fans. The word devotee is used when publishing announcements requesting their presence or even when reviewing an old film. The lack of ‘build-up’ towards the term devotee and its constant usage reflects the nonchalance of the fan towards this nomenclature. It is indicative of assertion of a hierarchical segregation in identity (the devotee is above the fan). Fan pages also are the main source for images of these temples and offer visual representations of these acts.
Balakrishnan 47
The Act of Performing Aarti and Chanting Bhajans
Visual media are the privileged sign of late modern culture and visual representation is a more effective manner of representation of the deified celebrity in media.
Fig. 3
Fig. 3 captures the sanctum sanctorum of the Bachchan temple. Photographed by the author, it captures the main aarti being performed to a pair of white shoes resting on a intricate green chair. Bachchan’s portrait is placed on the shoes and garlanded. The author goes on to explain the significance of the shoes used by Bachchan himself and the chair as part of the sets of one his movies. The image chosen by the devotee of bachchan has the word
‘GOD’ and a closer look at the ‘priest’s’ garment would reveal the inscription ‘Jai shree
Amitabh’ (Hail Amitabh) and ‘Amitabh namaha’(salutations to Amitabh). The choice of the photograph published by the author indicates he wanted to capture the essence of the deification of the celebrity.
Similar to the Elvis Cult (mentioned in the previous chapter) fans of Bachchan observe certain rituals as part of their celebrity worship. These rituals are taken again from within the Hindu context including observing special days and making a pilgrimage to see one’s god. Every year, on the actor’s birthday on October 11, a group of fans travel from
Kolkata to Mumbai. Balakrishnan 48
Fig 3.1
The fanfare begins with a procession of the fans moving in a boisterous group dancing to the songs of the actor and bearing posters and placards announcing his birthday and culminates outside the star’s residence. They bear posters with proclamations of themselves as devotees on their way to meet their god. The representation of this procession and celebration bear striking resemblance to Ganesh Chaturthi, a pan India festival that sees the devotees run amok on the streets in a frenzied and celebratory mood of worship towards Lord
Ganesh. As evident in Fig 3.1, the fans prefer to be referred to as devotees and not as fans.
They don’t shun their worship towards a mere mortal who they believe to be divine. Another day observed by the fan is on August 11, the day Bachchan’s fatal accident on the sets of
Coolie that almost cost him his life. Bachchan was declared comatose and circling the drain when his vitals improved and he ‘came back to life’. A resurrection similar to the story of
Jesus Christ, the worshippers of Bachchan chose to call this ‘second birth’, a largely Hindu idea that believes in reincarnation. Almost all Hindus have generally accepted that although our bodies are transient, our souls are immortal. After the death of a particular body, the soul will inhabit a different body (Lochtefeld 9). Thus, the fans chose to appropriate a culture closer to them and find meaning within an established context of religious practices and beliefs, here: Hinduism. Balakrishnan 49
Fig 3.2
Fig 3.2 captures copies of papers with Bachchan portrayed as a deified man on the side facing the camera. It contains within it the Amitabh Chalisa. A chalisa is a religiously composition that is usually meant for recitation. Short texts like the Hanuman Chalisa are often sung as a devotional act, or as an established part of worship, and in many cases people can recite the text by heart...promise benefits as a result of the recitation of the verses
(Lochtefeld 302). This Amitabh Chalisa worships composed by fans turned devotees worships the actor and is once again a practice lifted straight out of Hinduism.
Fig 3.3
Fig. 3.3 captures the deification of Hindi actress Madhuri Dixit at her temple built by her fan in Jamshedpur. What we see is an array of photographs of the actress arranged on a table decorated with flowers. Placards next to each image inscribes in Hindi phrases to Balakrishnan 50 describe the actress as Maa Durga incarnate. The ‘priest’ performing the aarti or purifying the image by fire is the fan who built the temple. Similar to Bachchan’s fan who was dressed in an attire that had the actor’s name inscribed on it, the fan here dons a kurta that has names of movies of the actress printed on it. The fan celebrates Dixit’s birthday with his own version of Madhuri Bhajans or religious hymns composed of her movie songs. Bhajans, as explained by Lochtefeld could deal with the deeds of a particular deity, praising the deity, reminding the deity of the speaker’s difficulties from internal or external sources. He goes to add that singing and listening to such hymns was, and remains, a major form of religious activity in the bhakti (devotional) movement (Lochtefeld 127). Furthermore, the temple here is primarily a chat shop that also functions as a devotional space. The ability of a fan to determine what serves as temple space proves that the temple is where the devotion taken place. This performative aspect of the deification is crucial to determining the identity. The identity of a space to become a temple and the identity of a fan to become a devotee.
Fig 3.4
Fig 3.4 captures the act of deification occurring at a temple constructed for Narendra
Modi. Instead of using an image as seen in the previous two examples, here the fan turned devotee worships an idol constructed in the likeness of the politician. The idol has been garlanded with flowers as one would a revered individual or deity. At the base of bust is Balakrishnan 51 placed chanting beads, a conch shell and what can be understood as religious books. The chanting beads akin to a rosary is used to keep track of the count of certain religious utterances. The conch shell or shanka is an object carried by many gods in Hindu religious imagery including Vishnu. The blowing of the conch shell is associated with the start of any religious worship. The fan turned devotee is dressed as his god with a very identifiable vest that similar to the one that appears on the idol. He is captured in the middle of offering aarti to his god thus performing his devotion and turning into a devotee. The surroundings behind the idol look very simple and meagre sans any ostentatious embellishments as seen in Dixit’s temple and the plastic bag placed behind the idol looks as if it has been carelessly tossed away. Once again, the space of performance dictates the identity of the space thus making this the fan’s temple for his celebrity.
All three images have common elements while worshipping the celebrity: the aarti, the attire and the image surrounded by flowers.
Members of the same culture must share sets of concepts, images and ideas which
enable them to think and feel about the world, and thus to interpret the world in
roughly similar ways. They must share the same ‘cultural codes’ (Hall 5).
Through such repetitions of images of such practices, the media constructs a framework that enables an understanding of common practices and thus a common ground in celebrity religion, all stemming from the larger framework of Hinduism. The circulation of these images are crucial as these representation helps a reader deduce the intensity of worship that would not have reflected had it been an image of the just sanctum sanctorum or of the fan turned devotee. These images help us understand the rituals borrowed from the Hindu system and allows the fan to establish its identity as devotee. The devotee becomes one only by practicing such acts of ritualistic deification. It allows the consumer of the image to visualise the performative aspect of deification. Furthermore, the circulation of these representations Balakrishnan 52 in media cements the status as a deified celebrity is more powerful when compared to that of the celebrities with no available representations in mainstream media.
Appropriation and Circulation of Celebrity Images on Established Images of Deities
Celebrity worship includes plenty of instances of iconography appropriated from
Hinduism. These appropriations in media have been used to deify the celebrity by making a very obvious connection between God and the deified mortal. The choice of which God becomes a matter of interest as an abundance of gods in Hinduism allows the creator of these images to choose the closest in terms of attributes. Hinduism comes with an already established hierarchy of gods and this choice of God reflects the fan’s perception of the celebrity’s divinity.
Fig 4 & 4.1
Fig. 4 is an image of Lord Vishnu and his ten avatars and Fig, 4.1 is an artist’s rendition of Indian cricketer Sachin Tendulkar as God. Created after the victory at ICC World
Cup 2011, the second image is an appropriation of the Hindu concept of Dasavataram.
According to this, Lord Vishnu (also referred to as the creator) takes on various forms to visit
Earth and interact with the humans. Balakrishnan 53
To deliver the pious and to annihilate the miscreants, as well as to re-establish
the principles of righteousness, I manifest myself, millennium after
millennium (The Bhagavad Gita, Chapter 4 Shloka 8).
The avatars are varied and serve different purposes. No two avatars are the same, though the similarity of being very influential during their visits on Earth ties them altogether. His coming down to Earth to mingle with the humans is accepted as an instance of humanising god. Here Tendulkar’s face is appropriated to that of Vishnu and his ten avatars. The artist has used the original image (Fig. 4) and reworked on particular aspects to make it relevant to the sportsman. The sudarshan chakra used to annihilate Vishnu’s enemies and protect his followers is replaced by a helmet, the panchajanya or sanka used as a means to warn of an impending death is replaced with the ICC World Cup Trophy, the padma or the lotus suggesting expansion of the soul is replaced with the ball and the kaumodaki or the mace is the strongest weapon known to man and is replaced with the cricketer’s bat, his strongest asset. A closer look shows the tenth avatar of Kalki wherein Lord Vishnu is to ride in on his horse, destroy evil and bring about redemption to the followers. The current age we live in according to Hinduism is the Kaliyuga. This has been replaced with Tendulkar, horseback, clutching the trophy, thereby bringing redemption to all the followers of cricket who have eyeing the trophy since the last victory in 1983.
The background too has been doctored to locate these ten avatars of Tendulkar in a cricket stadium. The message is clear, the divine Tendulkar still belongs to the cricket field.
Interestingly enough, Tendulkar plays for the country with the number ten on his jersey.
Illustrated by Prakash Dhole, the image accompanies an article that describes the ten avatars of Tendulkar as Sachavatars ("Lord Sachin Tendulkar's 10 avatars"). The writer goes into great detail about all the avatars and how they apply to Tendulkar’s life and places them in Balakrishnan 54 what he terms as After the Birth of Sachin -ABS. An example of the first avatar Matsya or fish is provided below:
Matsya (14 ABS – 17 ABS) – The fish, appeared in the Eighties Yuga. This
avatar saved Indian cricket from the great deluge and bought fans back to the
game. Like a fish, the Matsya swam through different streams like School,
Ranji, Duleep and Irani seamlessly and triumphed by scoring heavily in all
(Dileep).
The narrative employed through this representation of Tendulkar’s divinity is evident in the choice of a very popular God, Lord Vishnu who is also known as the creator and the replacement of Vishnu’s four attributes to reflect Tendulkar’s. Here not only does the fan appropriate Hindu mythology to enable celebrity deification, but he has put in a lot of thought into the selection of the ‘right god’ to best emulate his deified celebrity and makes it relevant to his mediated persona. Thus he deifies according to the framework, but choses which god and which mythology offered by Hinduism is appropriate.
Fig. 5.0 and 5.1
A hierarchy of gods from the within the existing pantheon emerges based on the gods chosen by fans to deify their select celebrities. Mahesh Tripathi, a fine arts student from Balakrishnan 55
Uttar Pradesh, too chose to venerate his devotion towards Mayawati through this act of appropriating images of the politician as various goddesses. At the exhibition held in Lalit
Kala Akademi, Lucknow, he displayed his original paintings of the politician as various goddesses. The media reports about this particular event saw only two images being published of the paintings, one as Goddess Lakshmi and the other as a benevolent saint posing in front of a miniature elephant. Fig. 5.0 is the painting of her as Goddess Lakshmi, the Hindu goddess of wealth, as the artist believes she has truly helped the cause of the downtrodden dalits (Mishra). Her features have been softened in the painting and her tresses extended beyond her shoulder and bedecked neck unlike the politician’s true appearance. A pink halo provides the divinity to the painting. Fig 5.1 shows another painting of the politician as a saint. Here, she is portrayed with her regular hair and attire with a miniature elephant in the background to signify the strength of her impact that reduces an elephant to dwarf-like. The pink halo is repeated here as Mayawati is depicted with her palm raised to
‘bless’ the devotee. A report describes this as a ‘beatific pose’, using the framework of
Christianity and canonisation (Mishra). Here we have the fan using the traditionally recognisable image of goddess Lakshmi that is instantly recognised by the media whereas the other painting is termed saintly by the reporter with references to Christianity as it does not fall into the category of popularly recognisable gods. What gives the second image its divinity is the halo. Thus, a shared code becomes imperative for one to recognise the deification of a celebrity, either through accepted images of gods and goddess or accepted signs (a halo, the palm raised to bless etc.).
However, these paintings were met with heavy criticism in the media. Mainstream newspapers described these painting as an excuse in the name of art with little to no resemblance to the politician (Mishra). The article that highlights the deification of Mayawati makes references to her being reprimanded by the then Union Minister for having spent Rs Balakrishnan 56
1,000 crores on installing temples for herself. As in the case of her being deified with a temple, this act of deification too is met with much derision.
Fig 5.2
Fig 5.3 Balakrishnan 57
Fig 5.4
Fig. 5.5
Politicians Jayalalitha, Vasundra Raje, Sonia Gandhi and Karunanidhi and Stalin have been depicted as Mother Mary, Goddess Lakshmi, Krishna and Arjuna respectively.
Appropriated in the name of political propaganda, it is interesting to note the choice of god to depict each of these politicians in comparison to their mediated persona. The celebrity is always a mediated persona (Evans 19) and the persona is interpreted by the fan/ party workers who then choses a god or goddess to best express the divinity of their celebrity. Thus
Jayalalitha is depicted as Mother Mary— an incident that raised a lot of concerns from the
Christian community (“Christians Upset at Tamil Nadu Chief Minister´s Portrait as Mother
Mary”)— to portray Amma (Mother) as she is referred to by her supporters. Raje and Gandhi Balakrishnan 58 have been depicted as Goddess Lakshmi. Raje’s image is doctored to resemble a queen’s sabha or gathering of her subjects. She is seated on the throne with her subjects fawning at her divinity. She is being looked down by three other celestial beings as her party workers faces’ have been morphed into every available corner of the image. The message that comes across is that of a mother who ensures the prosperity of her kingdom. Gandhi too is referred to as Telangana Talli or Telangana mother after her involvement in the creation of the new state and is worshipped as bringer of wealth and prosperity that eventually culminated in this statue (Sudir).
Fig 5.5 depicts Tamil politicians and father-son duo Karunanidhi as Krishna leading his Stalin depicted as Arjuna in the image representing the battle of Kurukshetra. This is not merely depicting the politicians as gods and demi-gods. Those who are familiar with the epic
Mahabharata will instantly recognise the significance of Krishna as the charioteer who guided
Arjuna towards victory in this epic battle through what can be termed an unethical means. It also records the birth of the Bhagvad Gita the most holy text in Hinduism transferred orally to Arjuna through Krishna. The implications in running a kingdom (here Tamil Nadu) are obvious to those who understand the references and parallels drawn thus emphasising on the need of a shared cultural code and also justifying the fans’ need to use an already established god or goddess to deify their celebrity to make it obvious to others. Goddess Lakshmi is the most popular goddess in Hinduism as is Vishnu the most esteemed god (Pattanaik) and by appropriating their celebrities’ faces onto these popular gods they are creating a hierarchy a popularity within deified celebrities. The representations of these acts of deification faces more wrath in comparison to that of building temples. Film personalities’ images witness less of such acts of deification in comparison to politicians and sports personalities.
Balakrishnan 59
The Act of Garlanding and Performing Abhishekam on Images
Film stars enjoy a form of deification that has been rarely represented in the media for politicians- the abhishekam. Abhishekam or ritual bathing (snana) or anointing with water, particularly of the image of a deity during worship signifies the start of ritualistic worship
(Lochtefeld 3). Abhishekam is performance and hence more impactful through visual representation than in writing. abhishekam are a common occurrence, especially during movie releases of south Indian film stars. It has become a ritual and tradition of a fan club to offer these abhishekam, of milk usually called paalabhishekam, on larger than life cut-outs of these movie stars. The representations available of abhishekam of movies stars in media has become such a common occurrence that one would find it strange if there were none taking place during the release of a movie. The narrative depicting the representations of this form of deification has met with least amount of criticism from the media.
Fig 6
Balakrishnan 60
Fig. 6.1
Fig 6 and 6.1 help us understand this act of abhishekam and garlanding performed on cut-outs of Tamil actor Rajnikanth and Kannada star Upendra respectively. Both cut-outs are located in the vicinity of a theatre that screens their movies. Fig. 6 depicts the cut-out of the actor dressed as a Robot for his Tamil movie Endiran flourishing two guns and wearing dark glasses. His larger than life cut-out is receiving ablutions from fans who have managed to climb atop the bamboo framework. They ‘douse’ milk from green plastic pots onto his image that has two types of garlands around him. A short garland of flowers crowing his temple and a long garland of lemons around his neck. The image of Rajnikanth holding guns depicts violence, an unusual (not uncommon) image to be deified. However, the image becomes significant because the fans chose to garland this particular cut-out with lemons. Hindu mythology has recognised the lemon garland to be one that removes all bad luck. It is also the garland that is offered more often to Goddess Kali on the occasion of Kali Chaudas (“Lemon garlands for goddess Kali!”). A violent form of Shakti, Kali is understood by the followers of
Hinduism as the awful, uncontrolled power of the divine in its most terrifying aspects. She is Balakrishnan 61 consistently associated with images of blood, death, and destruction (Lochtefeld 333). Thus the fans associate this image of impending violence by Rajnikanth’s character as equivalent of Goddess Kali and chose to worship him according to the set of traditions accorded to the goddess of violence in the Hindu system of practices and beliefs.
Fig 6.1 is an image of a cut-out of Upendra for his movie Uppi 2. The cut-out has the actor standing on his head. As seen, the fans marked their reverence by garlanding the head which appears at the bottom. Both images appear uncommon (not unusual) to a traditionally accepted image of god, however, the fan exercises agency and chooses to worship the celebrity nevertheless.
Fig 6.2 and 6.3
Fig. 6.2 captures fans performing the abhishekam only onto Tamil actor Kamal
Hassan’s image which has been pre-decorated with garlands. The movie Vishwaroopam had an ensemble cast including renowned Indian director Shekhar Kapur who is a celebrity in his own right. The image depicts the fans in the act of devotion, however there is selective devotion occurring here as only Hassan receives the abhishekam and Kapur receives none of this deification despite being in the same frame. Balakrishnan 62
Fig. 6.3 too captures the fans who have assembled at the theatre indulging in the act of showering flowers onto Hassan’s image and consciously avoiding Kapur’s image next to his.
This act of the fan to recognise his god and worship only the intended is reflective of a class of celebrities created within celebrity culture. This act further shows that while the media through representations mediate a favoured mode of deification thus creating a hierarchy, the fan too through his choice of whom to worship exercises creates a similar hierarchy of the celebrity and the deified celebrity as two different constructs. The researcher’s attempts to procure images of these abhishekam never resulted in female actors receiving this form of deifying. It is a predominantly masculine space. Again, the participants at movie theatres who participated in this particular act of deification are largely male.
Fig.6.2 and 6.3 further allow us to look at the space in which the fan performs these acts of abhishekam. The fan here balances on a rusted ladder to ensure he reaches the actor’s face and sprays milk from a packet. Another fan on the ground does the same. As in the case of Dixit’s temple emerging from a chat shop, so in the case of these acts of abhishekams creating an identity for the space intended for devotion based purely out of the performative aspect of the fan’s devotion. Thus the filth marking the surroundings of the cut-out in a theatre, the crass milk packets or plastic pots from which the abhishekam is offered or the attire of the fans turned ‘priests’ do not matter as the sole act of abhishekam is powerful enough to creating a sense of deification of the celebrity. This is crucial in our understanding of how much of the Hindu tradition is appropriated and how much is re-appropriated. While the skeletal structure of the abhishekam remains as borrowed from Hindu traditions, the manner of performance is then re-appropriated by the fan. Similarly, in the case of the temple and bhajans, familiar rites and rituals are appropriated by the fan to enable the common man recognise the process as deification, however, it has been re-appropriated to suit each Balakrishnan 63 celebrity in a distinct manner thus allowing the fan to exercise his ability to construct his version of the deified celebrity.
Primarily culture is concerned with the production and exchange of meanings– the
giving and taking of meaning-- between members of a society or group. Language is
one of the media through which thought, ideas and feelings are represented in a
culture. The main tool for meaning making is language and language is nothing but
representation (Hall 2).
Media here is the tool that enables creating a code of ‘acceptable’ form of celebrity deification. The media’s act to mediate and frame meaning for an already present meaning can be understood as the act of re-presenting already coded information. The media offers a sense of validation of this phenomenon of celebrity religion by printing and publishing the mentioned practices engaged by the fan. Furthermore, the media, through its representations of the acts of celebrity deification thus function as important tool to construction shared practices within celebrity culture and providing a framework for understanding celebrity religion.
Balakrishnan 64
Works Cited
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2013. Web. 15 November 2015
Boorstin, Daniel. The Image: A guide to Pseudo-Events in America. New York: Vintage,
1961. Print
Dubbudu, Rakesh. "More than a Lakh Newspapers & Periodicals are registered in the
country" FACTLY.in. May 28, 2015. Web. 7 November 2015.
Evans, Jessica. Celebrity, Media and History. England: The Open University Press, 2005.
Print.
Lochtefeld, James G. The Illustrated Encyclopedia of Hinduism: A-M. Voorkant: The Rosen
Publishing Group, 2002. Print
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2002. Print
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1972-79. Print
--- “Representation: Cultural Representations and Signifying Practices”. Washington:
Washington.edu, 1997. Web. Balakrishnan 65
Khajane, Murlidhara."Rajkumar memorial inauguration on Nov. 29" The Hindu. 28 October
2014. Web. 20 October 2015
Mishra, Manjari."Artist's muse? Paintings depict Maya as goddess". The Times of India. 5
September 2009. Web. 15 November 2015
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growth". The Economic Times. 20 December 2013. Web. 4 December 2015
Saju, M T. "Childless couples seek miracles from MGR". The Times of India. 5 September
2013. Web. 20 October 2015
Sudir, Uma. "A 'Goddess Sonia' temple: Congress legislator's thank-you for Telangana
decision". NDTV.com. 9 January 2014. Web. 18 November 2015
Upadhya, Prakash. "Dr Rajkumar's Memorial Inauguration: Highlights of Rajnikanth's
speech". International Business News. 29 November 2014. Web. 20 October 2015
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"OMG! A temple in US for Huccha Venkat", The Times of India. October 27, 2015. Web. 12
November 2015
"Top 10 Strange Temples in India Part I & II". Astrospeak.com. Web. 12 November 2015 Balakrishnan 66
"Fans Build up A Temple to Kushboo ". MoonramKonam Now. 8 April 2014. Web. 14
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“Lemon garlands for goddess Kali!” DNA India. 17 October 2009. Web. 4 December 2015 “Christians Upset at Tamil Nadu Chief Minister´s Portrait as Mother Mary”. UCA News.com. 8 March 1995. Web. 18 November 2015
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2011. Web. 12 October 2015 Balakrishnan 67
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Balakrishnan 68
Chapter 4
Conclusion
Celebrity culture is an integral part our society that is constantly being mediated to us through representations in the media. The meaning of the word celebrity and its representations have undergone a gradual yet steady change from being understood as someone celebrated for their achievements to being termed as famous for no reason other than being well-known. Boorstin’s analysis of the media leads us to understand that media creates pseudo- events to satisfy the exaggerated expectations of the reader. These pseudo- events are events that contain no real significance in them other than the intense media and thus public attention. The celebrity is constructed in a similar mould akin to a pseudo-event.
The celebrity is a pseudo-individual who has nothing more to his/her name than fame. Those who are skilful, talented are deemed heroes and those who are not and yet gather attention from the public are termed the celebrity. The celebrity can only exist in the age of the media
(Nayar, 7). Constant media attention is what enables the construction of the celebrity and an audience enables the consumption. The celebrity is a construction whose mould has been encoded with meaning from the celebrity’s public and well as personal life. This construction or encoding is done not just by the celebrity, but also the media in the process of dissemination and the audience in the process of consumption.
Thus the encoding and decoding of a celebrity's identity is in a constant flux being operated on by many sections of the society. This indicates that the reigns of dominant meaning making need not always be held by the celebrity, the media and the fans are active participants in the process. Balakrishnan 69
Celebrity worship is an extension of this culture wherein the fans and media encode certain celebrities with significant meaning related to being considered divine. The media and the fan have the choice to elevate the status of individuals within this already elevated status through acts of deification and mediating these acts in society. Celebrity worship follows the idea of the deification of man, a practice that has been in existence since the Egyptians. Man has created the idea of God and thus man too must be worshipped as a creator the practice that began with the deification of statesmen and law makers soon trickled down to celebrities.
The celebrity is treated god-like by the fan through various acts of deification borrowed from an already existing set of established and validated rituals and rites. This reflects our society’s need to constantly appropriate the familiar and to then re-appropriate them to construct new meaning within an acceptable framework.
Meaning is also produced when we appropriate cultural ‘things’; that is we
incorporate them in different ways into everyday rituals and practices of daily life and
in this way we give value them value or significance. (Hall 3)
The act of deification encodes within it a construct of hierarchy that allows the audience to decode a class system among celebrities. The fan requires a means to worship the celebrity and this he finds by adopting certain practices from an already established religious system. The appropriation of certain religious acts from already established system then serve as markers to understand if a particular celebrity has been deified. However, through the act of appropriation, there is also re-appropriation wherein the fan chooses to ‘tweak’ a few rituals and rites while maintaining the integrity of the original practice. This is how a fan becomes an active participant in the construction of the deified celebrity’s identity.
This dissertation has attempted to make meaning of various representations as performed by the fan which are then represented once more through media coverage. In order Balakrishnan 70 to analyse the objectives and arrive at the arguments the dissertation is divided into four main chapters. Chapter I has introduced the research objectives, research problem, research argument. It introduces the celebrity’s dependence on the media to exist. It locates celebrity culture within the realms of Culture Industry that involves in the dissemination and consumption of the celebrity image. The image is a construction that will be reconstructed by media representations. It is this image that is then worshiped by the fan. Celebrity worship is introduced as a weak form of religion. The idea of polytheism has regained its lost ground through the worship of many celebrities who now form a new pantheon of gods. The literature review gives instances of the fan culture surrounding celebrity worship. The fan is an integral part of a celebrity’s identity and it is the fan’s actions that contribute to the meaning making of the constructed image of the celebrity.
Celebrity culture and celebrity worship have been further elaborated in Chapter 2. It follows the act of deifying man from ancient times and tries to understand the relevance of such a practice in the current scenario. The ancients deified man to establish an unequal power system and more effective administrative purposes such as the case with the Egyptians and the Greeks. This process of deification is then narrowed down to three major religions:
Islam, Christianity and Hinduism. All three religions reflect a different view when it comes to the act of deifying a mortal. Islamic traditions allow the deification of man till the level of the
Saint, as does Christianity. Christianity furthermore has assigned categories to forms of deification to be offered to God, Mother Mary and canonized saints. However, celebrity worshippers within Christianity use the example of Jesus Christ, God’s son who lived as a man on earth, and thus are more comfortable making comparisons between the celebrity and
Jesus Christ as well as Mother Mary. Christian rites such as the pilgrimage and the mass have been appropriated by fans such as the Elvis Cult to worship their celebrity in a recognized manner. Hinduism on the other hand offers its fans a range of gods to whom the celebrity is Balakrishnan 71 compared. It stems from the basic understanding that Hinduism recognises the Ultimate
Reality as the supreme power and this Ultimate Reality can be manifested in any form.
This appropriation of Hinduism in expressing acts of deification has been dealt with in Chapter 3. It deals with the main argument of the dissertation wherein a fan finds means of expressing his devotion through identifiable practices. These practices are referred to as markers. Five broad markers have been identified within the nature of celebrity worship in
India. The fan borrows heavily from Hindu rites and practices to worship the celebrity of his choice. The borrowing of practice is necessary as the act of worship needs to be identified by a society sharing similar cultural codes (Hall 5).
This form of deification is performative in nature and allows the fan to turn devotee on the basis of this performance. It is participants in a culture who give meaning to people, objects and events (Hall 4). The representations of these acts of deification as mediated by the media demonstrate that few practices, such as the construction of temples, appropriation of images of celebrities onto that of established gods and palabhishekam, are more definitive than garlanding a cut-out or creating busts and statues. By recognizing these acts of deification through coverage of representations, the media encodes a hierarchy within the markers used to deify a celebrity and thus partakes in encoding a larger construction:
Celebrity religion.
The fan on the other hand borrows dominant, recognizable practices from an already established set of rites and rituals and re-appropriates this to deify the celebrity. Thus the fluidity of a temple space or the framework of the religious hymns are reconstructed by the fan to better showcase his/her devotion. It is through culture and language that production and circulation of meaning takes place (Hall 6). Thus the fans acts of deification coupled with Balakrishnan 72 the media’s representations of these acts society has the potential to provide a dominant framework on “how the world is and why it works as it is said and shown to work” ( Hall 11).
The present study aims at understanding the dynamics of culture and meaning making within celebrity religion. It questions the authorities of meaning making by analysing the fan’s act of devotion and the media’s representation of this act that is finally mediated to the common man. The social relevance of this research allows one to observe the fluid nature of religion over time as man’s act of deification of another human being indicates the construction of a new religious system.
The scope for further research offers an aspirant the possibility to survey and consolidate the findings of the vast culture and its impact on celebrity worship in India in comparison to that performed abroad. The practice of celebrity worship in India is fascinating for all the possibilities it offers in meaning making and construction of a culture. The diversity in practices, gods, rites and rituals particular to geographical and ethnographic segregations allows a rich and multi-layered construction of encoding and decoding of meanings.
Balakrishnan 73
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Balakrishnan 74
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