[PDF] Understanding Representations of Celebrity Worship in India

43069_1The_Deified_Celebrity.pdf

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

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

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

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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, µ15 and µ16, 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 µhow not to go about an MPhil¶DQGIURPZKRP,OHDUQW 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! 7KHUHDUHQRZRUGVWRWKDQNWKHODVWVHWRISHRSOHZKRP,GRQ¶WQHHGWRWKDQNDQ\ZD\DQG 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. $µWhank 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 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 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 f 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 year² LWVKRXOGQ¶WFRPHDVD

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

EH*RGDQGDUHLQVWHDGFUHDWLQJDQHZµFODVV¶RIPRUWDOVWKDWRVFLOODWHEHWZHen 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 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 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

-her 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 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 Persona is the distinctive image of a person built up from the sum of their mediated 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

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 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 the other hand argues that no accomplishment would ever reach the desired audience without intentional and the means of disseminating these images was through monuments, coins or buildings. According to him Alexander had a strong celebrity-manufacturing- mechanism. Behind

Alexan

everybody about it, and he had an apparatus for telling everybody about it. He had techniques for doing famous things. He had historians, painters, sculpt (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 ross border to the deified. Rojek notes how

(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

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

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. consciousness, since celebrities are not regarded as reflections of reality, but fabrications designed to enhance the rule of However, these falsified images created within the ambit of the celebrity industry 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 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 (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

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