(Imagine Rocky Horror as Church and you're basically there)

May 5, 2018 1:26 AM

it's way underappreciated just how absurdly huge the impact of bollywood on hindu culture has been. an actual goddess exists and is worshipped who only exists because of low budget movie in the 70s. SLTwitter. Part 2.
posted by MartinWisse (19 comments total)

This was pretty amazing. It shows the fluidity of religious traditions and society.

(For some reason I'm vaguely reminded of the rise of the goddess Anoia* in Terry Pratchett's later work.)
_{*Goddess of things that stick in drawers.}
posted by Quackles at 2:19 AM on May 5, 2018 [5 favorites]

This is neat! I never realised she was a minor folk goddess
posted by cendawanita at 3:40 AM on May 5, 2018

Ars gratia aartis!
posted by Joe in Australia at 4:12 AM on May 5, 2018 [2 favorites]

Heh! I guessed Santoshi Maa before clicking through.
posted by infini at 5:08 AM on May 5, 2018 [6 favorites]

A film credit for theogony would be pretty good.
posted by Segundus at 5:18 AM on May 5, 2018 [1 favorite]

Any non-twitter alternate source for this?
posted by Meatbomb at 6:26 AM on May 5, 2018 [2 favorites]

I'm reminded of the minor obeisances given to El Santo.
posted by aramaic at 8:06 AM on May 5, 2018 [2 favorites]

I love that Bhatt is talking on twitter in the context of a goddess being invented by a movie. Then when he starts discussing Hindu folk traditions he goes for the analogy of "like Prometheus hiding the meat and fat from Zeus." Sometimes this globalized world suits my tastes just fine.
posted by mark k at 8:27 AM on May 5, 2018 [12 favorites]

He also uses “god” and “christ” as epithets, which amused me.
posted by Etrigan at 8:40 AM on May 5, 2018 [3 favorites]

There's probably some family shame issues, seems like she did not inherit Ganesh's nose.
posted by sammyo at 8:52 AM on May 5, 2018

Wait- Rocky Horror isn't church?


*prays to Saints Magenta and Columbia for the salvation of the author*
posted by TheWhiteSkull at 9:30 AM on May 5, 2018 [9 favorites]

Meatbomb: Any non-twitter alternate source for this?

Thread Reader App (covers the entire thing, I think ...)
posted by filthy light thief at 10:56 AM on May 5, 2018 [3 favorites]

Wow, that is incredibly cool.
posted by djeo at 11:04 AM on May 5, 2018

filthy light thief, thank you!
posted by theora55 at 12:55 PM on May 5, 2018

This is great, thank you for posting it.
posted by LobsterMitten at 2:41 PM on May 5, 2018

I've often wished that I understood Hinduism, but Shivam Bhatt makes me wonder if I'm making a category error, that "Hinduism" is too diverse and amorphous to mean anything except in vague terms like "the indigenous religions of India and their descendants, sharing common elements and terminology and with at least some degree of intercommunality." That would be like defining "Western Food" as "food reflecting traditional cuisines and staple diets of Western Europe"; it doesn't actually tell you very much vh.
posted by Joe in Australia at 7:11 PM on May 5, 2018 [4 favorites]

The description my dad's old boss Kumar gave was that Hinduism was broad enough to envelop polytheists, monotheists, and even atheists like himself, which is theologically independent of the many, many regional and ethnic subtypes.
posted by ivan ivanych samovar at 7:25 PM on May 5, 2018 [2 favorites]

I think that the post was not about the film creating Santoshi Maa but was rather about how her cult, one in a long line of female-centric and unjustly ephemeral cults, achieved national and long-term public recognition because of a film. I am unable to get a targeted link to the post but Mr. Bhatt does say that she was a, "... tiny localized goddess of a lake near Jodhpur...".
posted by Ignorantsavage at 11:33 PM on May 5, 2018 [2 favorites]

Ignorantsavage: Right click on the datestamp in the relevant tweet and copy the permalink. If you're on a touchscreen device, hold your finger on the link until a menu appears that allows you to copy it. This is the tweet you're referring to.

This reminds me in a way about how folk-level Shintoism accommodates the, I guess, improvisatory nature of god creation. Inasmuch as animism allows that everything is a god or partakes of distinct godhood, this goes a little further in that people and things can be identified as gods, usually because of their significance or remarkable actions or self-sacrifice for the sake of their community or nation. For example the late Osamu Tezuka is the (or at least one among few peers) god of comics due to his accomplishments. And he's a literal god, not a god in the sense Americans might refer to Michael Jordan as a god of basketball offense (although for all I know there are people in Japan who think of Jordan this way). There is also the folktale of a wealthy farmer who burned his fields (and therefore his wealth) to save his community from a tsunami, and in some tellings was honored as a god for his sacrifice. The other side of this deistic coin is that gods can die or disappear when there's no-one left to pay respects: A village god dies with her village. Easy come, easy go.

I don't want to make too much of the parallel. Among other things, Santoshi Ma had been actively worshiped for some undocumented long period of time before her relatively recent popularization, and flying under the radar of the official record is not the same thing as being created out of thin air. But there's a similar sense of religious nature abhorring a vacuum, different from how Christianity files any new phenomenon or thing as the added responsibility of their singular all-knowing God; in this case, daughters-in-law needed their own deity and rites, and there happened to be one available with a ripping yarn and relatable identity.
posted by ardgedee at 6:57 AM on May 6, 2018 [3 favorites]