Padma Chirumamilla is an assistant professor in cultural studies at the Department of Communications and New Media, National University of Singapore. Currently, she is working on a book manuscript about the emergence and contemporary presence of television in the South Indian state of Andhra Pradesh.
In this paper, I explore the linkages made between a city-to-be, the still-unbuilt capital city of Amaravati in the South Indian state of Andhra Pradesh, and the fictional computer-generated urban spectacles of the popular Telugu fantasy film duology Baahubali, released over 2015 and 2016. In doing so, I hope to uncover the multiple ways in which discourses of technological and “Asian” futurity can be imaginatively welded to popular visions of Hindu nationalist pasts and futures. The planned capital city of Amaravati was linked to several international funders, especially the city-state of Singapore, whose vaunted urban planning firms were selected to produce the city’s masterplan. The city, it was hoped, would be a “world-class” replacement for the city of Hyderabad, which had been allotted to the neighboring state of Telangana after the state’s creation in 2013. However, upon seeing the proposed plans and designs by Singaporean firm Surbana Jurong and “starchitect” firms like Foster + Partners, then-chief minister N. Chandrababu Naidu felt that Amaravati ought to be more reflective of “Indian” heritage. Naidu cited the fantastical (and completely computer-generated) urban landscape of Mahishmati—from the Baahubali films—as inspiration, and the planning committee reached out to director S.S. Rajamouli for consultation. This was met with round condemnation in the English-language press, with several architects writing into newspapers with withering critiques of both the megaproject and the committee’s decision to reach out to someone with no actual urban-planning expertise. Baahubali’s technical spectacle—which was central to the film’s marketing and success—was driven at a technical level by Silicon Valley giant AMD Technologies. Raja Koduri—then a senior VP at AMD’s Radeon Technologies Group—was also Rajamouli’s cousin, and integral to providing AMD hardware to Arka Technologies, the firm responsible for the Baahubali films’ visual effects production. Their technologies were put into service to render viable a fantastic (and fictional) story of Hindu kings and queens fighting amongst themselves to (re)establish seemingly just rule over their fictional territory and subjects. Reviews from Swarajya, a right-wing Hindu nationalist magazine, described the film’s technical prowess as essential to conveying the power and magnitude of the characters from Hindu epics, linking together the necessity of technical prowess to generating a worthy vision of the Hindu past and present. In this paper, I draw together these disparate elements—the familial linkages undergirding Telugu cinema and the presence of South Asians in Silicon Valley, the commoditization and marketing of Singaporean urban planning across the Global South, and the rise of high-production value Hindu fantasy films—to think through how a seemingly acceptable vision of contemporary Hindu nationalism is generated through complicated transnational, material, and imaginative linkages, across popular and mundane media forms.