![]() Kapoor’s formula seems anodyne, but it launches the film’s investigation-a searching and layered one-of visual relations and the cultural modes that structure them, including darshan, or visual worship, and cinema itself. So what is it that turned it into a god? Your faith did. But in actuality, what your eye is seeing-what would that be? It’s a rock. Now, if someone were to ask you what that is, what would you say? It’s a god. The credits begin.ģ The off-screen voice that comments on the scene is that of Kapoor himself. Once the visual conversion of the rock is complete, a gleam of light off its surface transforms into animated letters spelling out the film’s title. Some villagers add to the adornment, while others stand by reverently. The camera pulls back to show some rustic-looking men and women assembling around the newly sacred object a devotional chant in Sanskrit fills the soundtrack. As the rock is anointed, another hand emerges to paint it with the three stripes symbolic of Shiva. Two hands appear from the edge of the frame with a water vessel. ![]() The camera zooms in on a rock projecting from a field at the side of a road. What is attractive? What is modest, and what indecent? What is natural, and what is modern? And most germane for this essay: What does God look like, and what does He see?Ģ The film opens with the consecration of a wayside shrine. But Satyam Shivam Sundaram is also notable as a highly self-conscious statement on the part of the director, whose lens (voyeuristically at points, to be sure) exposes and questions multiple codes of Indian visual culture. Nowadays, the film is chiefly remembered for its emphasis on female sexuality, which titillated some viewers and scandalized others. It is also the title of a 1977 film by one of the great creative spirits of Indian cinema, Raj Kapoor. 1 Truth, Divinity, Beauty: Satyam Shivam Sundaram is the official motto of Indian government television, Doordarshan.
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