How have cinema and popular religion shaped each other? Is the display of devotion in the cinema hall the same as devotion in a temple? If cinema has a power to persuade people to believe in the image, to mesmerize or even possess them, how do we understand that compelling power?

Through engaging with these questions, this book presents a genealogical study of the intersections between cinema, religion and politics in South India. Through a study of Telugu mythological and devotional films, this book combines a history of these genres with an anthropology of film making and viewership practices. In the decades from the 1940s to the 2000s, it examines film texts, as well as methods of film making and publicity, modes of film criticism as well as practices of viewership. The book draws on film and media theory to foreground the specificity of new technologies and the new kind of publics they create. Anthropological theories of religion, secularism, embodiment and affect are combined with political theories of citizenship to complicate our understanding of the overlapping formations of film spectators, citizens and devotees. It argues that the cinema offers a unique opportunity to explore the affective dimensions of citizenship and the formation of citizen-devotees.