The Missionary Position
How Indian Cinema Swapped the Cross for the Camera to War Against Its Own History.
Phase 1: The Greco-Roman Precedent — The Keyhole View of the Pagan Past
There is nothing quite as profitable as selling pornography disguised as moral outrage. For centuries, the Western imagination has salivated over a specific, forbidden fantasy: the woman who barters her flesh at the altar. We are taught to look at her with a mix of sanctimonious pity and repressed desire—a tragic creature trapped in a twilight zone where the divine meets the carnal.
But let us be clear: this archetype was not born out of historical truth. It was manufactured as a psychological weapon.
Fourteen hundred years before a single camera rolled in Hyderabad, early Christian apologists found themselves facing a massive marketing problem. They could not defeat the sophisticated, deeply rooted civic and philosophical traditions of the Greco-Roman temples through theology alone. So, they changed tactics. They stopped arguing philosophy and started painting the temples as brothels.
Enter Eusebius of Caesarea (c. 260–339 CE). In his Life of Constantine, he didn’t just critique paganism; he invited his readers to become voyeurs, peering through the keyhole of a fictionalized sanctuary:
"They honored their gods with lascivious practices... throwing off all restraint, they surrendered themselves to mutual corruption... turning the very temples of their gods into houses of ill-fame and places of the vilest debauchery."
It is a brilliantly manipulative piece of rhetoric. By reducing a complex web of community, governance, and female ritual authority into a sweating mass of “mutual corruption,” the early Church successfully stripped pagan institutions of their dignity. To be a civilized, moral human being, you were forced to look at your own ancestors’ heritage with utter disgust. You had to burn the temple down just to prove you were clean.
Phase 2 : The Transposition: Packing the Eusebian Luggage
The tragedy of the European traveler-missionary was not that he lacked eyes, but that he lacked the imagination to see anything other than his own repressed anxieties. When the Portuguese, the French Jesuits, and British Evangelicals landed on the subcontinent between the 17th and 19th centuries, they did not find a unified “India.” They found a dazzling, chaotic patchwork of sovereign regional traditions.
In the South, they encountered the Devadasis and Isai Velalars—matrilineal custodians of classical Sadir and Carnatic music who held royal land grants and answered to no husbands. In the West, they found the Bhavins and Kalavantins. In the East, the Maharis of Odisha. These women were litigious, wealthy, educated, and socially independent—three centuries before European women were even allowed to open a bank account.
But the missionary’s mind was an ideological straitjacket. He could not comprehend a woman who was sexually autonomous, artistically dominant, and spiritually revered all at once. For a mind raised on the strict binary of the virginal housewife or the street walker, the independent temple artist was an ontological impossibility.
So, instead of trying to understand what they were looking at, the missionaries reached into their intellectual luggage, pulled out the dust-covered Greco-Roman model of Eusebius, and aggressively jammed it onto the Indian subcontinent.
The Regional Re-Branding: One Script, Many Stages
To watch this narrative-building in real-time is to witness a masterclass in colonial gaslighting. No matter how much the regional realities differed, the missionary translation remained utterly monolithic. Every distinct regional art form was systematically re-branded as a localized franchise of a single, ancient temple brothel.
Consider the French Jesuit missionary Abbé Jean-Antoine Dubois (1765–1848), who roamed Southern India looking at the highly sophisticated Isai Velalar communities. Unable to separate artistic mastery from carnal temptation, he wrote in his Hindu Manners, Customs, and Ceremonies:
"They are the only women in India who enjoy the privilege of learning to read, to dance, and to sing. It is true that their education is directed solely to the purpose of rendering them more seductive... but they are also bound by their profession to grant their favors to anyone who wishes."
The taunting irony here is dazzling. To Dubois, the fact that these women were the only literate females in the region wasn’t a sign of social empowerment or systemic privilege; it was merely an elaborate grooming mechanism. The missionary gaze looked at a woman holding a palm-leaf manuscript and singing intricate theological poetry, and could only wonder how much she charged.
Further north, the narrative became even more explicitly transactional. Jean-Baptiste Tavernier (1605–1689), mapping his European commercial sensibilities onto the temples of Golconda and Varanasi, flatly accused the indigenous priesthood of running a corporate flesh trade under the guise of piety:
"The Brahmins [priests] are the most cunning of men... they maintain a great number of courtesans for the service of the pagods [temples]... all these women are of loose life, and the priests themselves are the first to abuse them."
By transforming the complex, symbiotic relationship of royal patronage, ritual duty, and artistic preservation into a simple, predatory math equation—Cunning Priest + Loose Woman = Temple Revenue—the missionaries achieved their primary geopolitical goal. They successfully severed the artistic and socio-economic umbilical cord of Indian society.
The Psychological Schism
This was not a benign case of cultural misunderstanding; it was a deliberate strategy of fragmentation. By using the Greco-Roman model to frame the entire spectrum of Indian classical arts and temple traditions as a moral biohazard, the missionaries successfully induced a massive inferiority complex in the newly Western-educated Indian elite.
The strategy was flawless: make the natives so utterly ashamed of their own mothers’ and sisters’ artistic lineages that they would demand the destruction of their own cultural infrastructure. Through the Anti-Nautch movement and legal bludgeons like the Bombay Devadasi Protection Act, the colonial apparatus achieved what no invading army could: they convinced Indians to willingly starve their own artists, lock up their own temples, and strip women of their matrilineal land rights—all in the name of becoming “civilized” according to Victorian standards.
And it is precisely here, with the native elite thoroughly brainwashed into viewing their own history through this imported European lens, that the stage was set. The cross had done its work. The psychological schism was complete. All that was left was for someone to pick up the camera.
Phase 3: The Secularized Missionary — How Shyam Singha Roy Picks Up the Script
This brings us to the ultimate, tragic punchline of this two-thousand-year-old story. The modern Indian filmmaker arrives on the scene, beats his chest as a progressive revolutionary, and proceeds to shoot a film that could have been storyboarded by Abbé Dubois himself.
When directors tackle the Devadasi system today, they do not decolonize the narrative. They simply swap the cross for the camera. They take the exact psychological schism manufactured by 17th-century European travelers and package it into high-definition, emotionally manipulative melodrama.
Consider how Shyam Singha Roy (2021) and its contemporary peers construct their cinematic universes by meticulously checking every single box of the historical missionary propaganda machine.
1. Visual Demonization: The Temple as an Ominous Biohazard
The very first thing a filmmaker does is recreate Eusebius’s cinematic universe. In Shyam Singha Roy, the temple festival is never presented as a sunlit, bustling hub of community life, philosophical discourse, or high classical art. Instead, the director relies on heavy, suffocating shadows, casting an ominous, predatory crimson glow across the courtyard.
The visual grammar is deliberate: the temple is framed not as a sanctuary, but as a dimly lit cage. The camera lingers on rows of silent, terrified women lined up like livestock. Before a single line of dialogue is spoken, the lens has already passed its verdict. The director doesn’t want you to understand the historical institution; he wants you to recoil from it in disgust. It is the exact visual equivalent of a Jesuit letter describing a “pagan den of sin.”
17th Century Jesuit Travelogues ===> "The temple is a place of darkness and demonic trap."
21st Century Indian Cinema ===> Low-key crimson lighting, ominous shadows, claustrophobic framing
2. The Tavernier Caricature: The Hyper-Sexualized "Cunning Brahmin"
Next comes the antagonist. The film’s high priest, the Mahant, is a literal carbon copy of Jean-Baptiste Tavernier’s “cunning Brahmin.” He is written with absolute, cartoonish simplicity: he possesses zero genuine spiritual belief, zero human nuance, and zero actual administrative or ritual duties.
He is a hyper-sexualized, drooling predator who uses his religious authority exclusively to abuse Maitreyi (Rosie) and pocket temple funds. By reducing a highly complex, thousands-of-years-old social hierarchy into a primitive math equation—Corrupt Priest + Helpless Victim = Holy Brothel—the film validates centuries of colonial polemics that claimed Indian religious structures were invented entirely as a front for sexual exploitation.
3. The Dubois Fallacy: Art as a Grooming Ritual
The most insidious betrayal in these movies is how they handle the classical arts. When Maitreyi (Sai Pallavi) dances, the film exploits her immense skill for cinematic spectacle, but the narrative instantly undermines her agency.
Her literacy, her artistic mastery, and her spiritual command over Bharatanatyam (Sadir) are never shown as the historical sources of her socio-economic sovereignty or matrilineal power. Instead, the plot frames her education as an elaborate grooming mechanism orchestrated by the priest to make her “more seductive” to wealthy patrons. The filmmaker looks at a master artist holding a palm-leaf manuscript and, just like Abbé Dubois, can only view her intellectual elite status through the lens of sexual availability.
4. The External Savior and the Denial of Organic Reform
Finally, we arrive at the absolute core of the missionary project: the erasure of native agency. In the worldview of British evangelicals like Charles Grant, the “Hindu character” was too degraded to ever reform itself; salvation had to come from an enlightened force “from without.”
Shyam Singha Roy follows this imperial mandate to the letter. The local society, the devotees, and the Devadasis themselves are portrayed as entirely helpless, brainwashed, and complicit in their own victimhood. Not a single local person raises a voice.
Liberation occurs only when the external, Westernized, Marxist-adjacent hero, Shyam Singha Roy (Nani), charges into the village to physically smash the system. The film completely erases the historical reality—that the hereditary dancing communities possessed immense internal dignity, fierce artistic pride, and their own complex internal debates about modernization. By turning the Devadasi into a mute prop awaiting a radical, non-traditional savior, the director fulfills the ultimate colonial fantasy: the brown woman is entirely voiceless until an enlightened, external iconoclast arrives to rescue her from her own culture.
The Triumph of Cultural Autophagy
This is how the trap snaps shut. Modern Indian cinema takes a late-stage, localized degradation—a collapse of the system caused primarily by British economic starvation and the theft of temple lands—and presents it as the eternal, original truth of indigenous civilization.
The filmmaker thinks he is being fiercely progressive, but he has actually been completely house-trained by the ghost of Lord Macaulay. He has accepted the premise that his own heritage is an unmitigated horror story, and he is now using the immense power of 21st-century mass media to teach his audience to look at their own ancestors with a burning, internalized hatred. The missionaries of the 1700s failed to completely fragment Indian society with the cross; their modern secular descendants are finishing the job with a camera.
Conclusion: The Grand Illusion — Regression Masquerading as Vision
To call these filmmakers “progressive” or “visionary” is to fall victim to a massive, spectacular confidence trick. They stride onto the stage wrapped in the mantle of social justice, beating their chests as radical iconoclasts who are brave enough to expose the dark underbelly of their own culture. They paint themselves as the vanguard of a modern, enlightened age.
But when you strip away the high-definition cinematography, the swelling background scores, and the cheap emotional melodrama, their true intellectual identity is laid bare. They are not visionaries looking forward into the future; they are historical reactionaries looking backward through a borrowed, colonial lens. They are the ultimate regressive forces in modern Indian discourse, entirely house-trained by the very imperial machinery that once crushed the subcontinent.
There is a profound, staggering cowardice in this style of filmmaking. It is remarkably easy to kick an institution that has already been broken, disenfranchised, and starved by centuries of colonial legislation. It requires zero creative courage to take a complex historical matriarchy—one that stood as a vibrant alternative to both Western and Eastern patriarchal structures—and reduce it to a flat, cartoonish caricature of a holy brothel. By doing so, these directors achieve something truly tragic: they validate the old, racist claim of Lord Macaulay and Charles Grant that Indian society is inherently bankrupt, fragmented, and incapable of organic, internal evolution.
The ultimate judgment of these filmmakers must be harsh, precise, and unsparing. They are not artists engaged in the noble, difficult work of decolonizing the mind. They are agents of cultural autophagy—a society literally eating its own history from the inside out because it has been taught to view its own past with a burning, internalized disgust.
By swapping the missionary’s cross for the cinema camera, they have not liberated their audience; they have merely updated the software of their subjugation. They stand exposed not as the revolutionary prophets they imagine themselves to be, but as the unwitting, brown-skinned heirs of Eusebius and Abbé Dubois, finishing the imperial project of societal fragmentation—one ticket sale at a time.
Appendix: The Multi-Industry Blueprint of Cultural Autophagy
The structural mechanics of the “Secularized Missionary Gaze” are highly adaptable. When analyzing other prominent South Indian films, the narrative formula remains rigidly consistent: demonize the traditional architecture, strip the native characters of organic agency, and introduce an ideological substitute to achieve salvation.
1. Annapoorani: The Goddess of Food (2023, Tamil)
The Smokescreen: Packaged as a modern, feminist tale of female empowerment, showcasing a young woman breaking barriers to achieve her dream of becoming a top chef.
The Missionary Parallel (The Eradication of Ritual Purity): Just as 17th-century travelogues targeted the sanctity of the temple space, Annapoorani directly targets the traditional concept of Vedic ritual purity maintained by the temple-cooking lineages of Srirangam. The film presents the protagonist’s heritage—centuries of specialized, vegetarian culinary art—not as a distinct cultural legacy, but as a backward, oppressive shackle that must be broken by consuming and preparing meat.
The External Savior Complex: Mirroring how Shyam acts as the enlightened liberator of the Devadasi, Annapoorani’s path to professional “salvation” is entirely mediated by an external Islamic framework. Her ultimate artistic triumph (cooking the perfect biryani) requires her to don a hijab and perform Namaz (Islamic prayer). The underlying subtext is identical to colonial-era polemics: indigenous spiritual traditions lack the capacity to foster modern, secular excellence; true liberation requires the total submission to or adoption of an outside faith structure.
2. Devadasi (1999, Malayalam)
The Smokescreen: Framed as a gritty, tragic exploration of the late-stage feudal exploitation of temple dancers in Kerala.
The Missionary Parallel (The Voyeuristic Trapped Sanctuary): The film relies entirely on the Eusebian template. It systematically strips the protagonist of her status as a sovereign custodian of classical arts, property owner, and spiritual elite. Instead, the temple is shot exclusively as a dark, claustrophobic prison where corrupt, upper-caste trustees manipulate rituals purely to facilitate sexual servitude.
The Regressive Reality: Under the guise of exposing social evils, the camera engages in a deeply voyeuristic, highly sensationalized exploitation of the female form. It uses the aesthetic of “sacred ritual” to bypass censorship, translating the Victorian prude’s obsession with “temple prostitution” into modern, titillating cinematic commerce.
3. Kansa / Parallel Kannada Social Dramas
The Smokescreen: Period pieces or contemporary social dramas depicting the abolition of regional systems like the Basavi or Bhavin traditions in Karnataka and Goa.
The Missionary Parallel (The Denial of Internal Reform): These films rigorously implement Charles Grant’s evangelical thesis: that the local community is too inherently corrupt and ignorant to ever reform itself. The hereditary artists are uniformly drawn as brainwashed, voiceless victims who actively participate in their own degradation until a rational, non-traditional iconoclast (often a modern urban activist or a state official) arrives to dismantle the local temple hierarchy.
The Regressive Reality: By airbrushing out the historical reality—that the abolition movements were frequently led by fiercely articulate, internally organized members of the dancing communities themselves—the filmmakers rob these women of their historic agency. They reduce a complex battle for socio-economic survival into a simplistic, melodramatic cartoon designed to make the modern, urban viewer feel morally superior to their own ancestors.