Audiences and Hindi films: Contemporary Studies

Abstract

A presupposition of total unity between subsections of any audience (whether delineated by location, ethnicity or class) appears unwarranted; the precise extent to which children, youth and their parents, or members of different religious or national groups, share the same understandings of media texts can only be gauged via research into audience perceptions of specific texts within a given, and bounded, social context. Although notions of diaspora and hybridity are not discussed extensively in this book,¹ inherent in the study of the meanings Hindi films hold for young British-Asian audiences is a sense of their experience as diasporic individuals.

Jatin: Pardes, Subhash Ghai again — it’s this concept of Indians who live abroad being so rich, all multimillionaires — like that film with Amitabh Bachchan being filmed round here where he’s the richest guy in the world. And we’re not all rich, some of us are very poor. Some live in council flats in inner city areas and a lot of people just work really hard. I think that’s why some British-Indian people like those movies as well because it’s a bit of dream world as well.

(24 year-old, my sample, London)