Films are social texts, produced within political, socioeconomic, cultural, and techno-logical milieus. Yet, popular films also play a significant role in the production, circulation, and validation of cultural forms and norms and, as a result, are constitutive of the social, economic, and political.
In India, cinema: "Is the dominant cultural institution and product... the pleasures the commercial film offers [glamour, drama, and fantasy], and desires it generates causes it to be an essential part of popular culture and a crucial site of cultural interpretation''
Cinematic space acts as an essential node in the flow, intersection, reconfiguration, and re-articulation of a selection of competing discourses. Discourses work in the production of subjectivity and of the social imagination-öthe organising field of social practices.Ajooni Today Episode
Thus, cinematic representations are sites where:
"Economic and political contradictions are contested and resolved... meanings are negotiated and relations of dominance and subordination are defined and contested''
Given the range and speed of technological developments in India within the past decade it is difficult to imagine that when film arrived in India it had been regarded as a foreign technology a "tool of Europe and part of its dominating project'' ;.
Yet, technology does not arrive with a pre-given group of cultural possibilities but necessarily articulates with local conditions and cultures which determine the ways where it functions in a specific society. It is notable that Dadasaheb Phalke, known as the father of Indian cinema, "made explicit the links between film-making, politics and Indian statehood'' ;.
As Indians, supported by way of a movement to advertise indigenous enterprise, looked to filmmaking, cinematic representations couldn't remain the exclusive domain of the colonisers but although a favorite definition of NRI is an overseas national of Indian origin (excluding those from Pakistan and Bangladesh) NRI might also include Indian nationals employed overseas. The precise definition of who counts being an NRI for particular investments or tax breaks in India is variable.
Bollywood, the 'homeland' nation-state, and the diaspora became area of the terrain for the ideological confrontations between anti-colonialists and colonialists. With independence, Hindi cinema emerged because the de facto, if not de jure, national cinema of India, successfully transcending linguistic and regional divisions within the domestic market.
As the Nehruvian state refused to confer industry status on Hindi cinema in recognition of its role in nation-building, either in economic or cultural ideological terms, the became a willing partner in these processes included in furthering its own commercial interests.
Sankaran Krishna argues that "something called 'India' becomes inscribed, in several ways, through representational practices... which endow that entity with content, a history, a meaning and a trajectory.'' Hindi cinema performs the national and as an integral player in the scripting of the nation shapes its meaning, signifying its internal and external borders. Ashish Rajadhyaksha notes how, after independence, Hindi cinema start assembling a national market through the construction of unified, national, gendered, racialised, (hetero) sexed subject. In lots of parts of India the cinema hall was the only space which was not divided along caste lines.
