Hindi Films: Theoretical Debates and Textual Studies

Abstract

Although this book is concerned primarily with the significance for and reception by young audiences of contemporary sexual and gender iconography in commercial Hindi films, both during the analyses of film texts and during the interpretation of audience self-representations and emotions, I will of necessity be drawing upon some of the theories and ideas implicit in existing accounts of Hindi film texts. Thus, in this chapter, I delineate some strands of thought that have dominated historical and theoretical scholarship on Indian ‘popular’ or ‘commercial’ cinema in the last three decades. Notably, these include debates surrounding the effects of Hindi cinema, the connections between texts and contexts, the mechanisms and ideologies of the medium, the significance of realism for spectatorship and the role of what is characterised by Fareed Kazmi (1999) as the ‘tradition-modernity paradigm’.