Films are social texts, produced within political, socioeconomic, cultural, and techno-logical milieus. Yet, popular films also play an important role in the production, circulation, and validation of cultural forms and norms and, as such, are constitutive of the social, economic, and political.
In India, cinema: "May be the dominant cultural institution and product... the pleasures the commercial film offers [glamour, drama, and fantasy], and desires it creates helps it be a vital part of popular culture and a crucial site of cultural interpretation''
Cinematic space acts as a vital node in the flow, intersection, reconfiguration, and re-articulation of a range 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 product range and speed of technological developments in India in the last decade it's difficult to imagine that when film found its way to India it absolutely was regarded as a foreign technology a "tool of Europe and part of its dominating project'' ;.
Yet, technology doesn't arrive with a pre-given set of cultural possibilities but necessarily articulates with local conditions and cultures which determine the ways by which it functions in a certain society. It's notable that Dadasaheb Phalke, called the father of Indian cinema, "made explicit the links between film-making, politics and Indian statehood'' ;.
As Indians, supported with a movement to promote indigenous enterprise, considered filmmaking, cinematic representations couldn't remain the exclusive domain of the colonisers but although a well known definition of NRI is an offshore national of Indian origin (excluding those from Pakistan and Bangladesh) NRI may also include Indian nationals employed overseas. The complete 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 as the de facto, if not de jure, national cinema of India, successfully transcending linguistic and regional divisions within the domestic market.
Whilst 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 various ways, through representational practices... which endow that entity with content, a history, a meaning and a trajectory.'' Hindi cinema performs the national and as a vital player in the scripting of the nation shapes its meaning, signifying its internal and external borders. Ashish Rajadhyaksha notes how, after independence, Hindi cinema go about assembling a national market through the construction of unified, national, gendered, racialised, (hetero) sexed subject. In several parts of India the cinema hall was the only real space that was not divided along caste lines.
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