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: "May be the dominant cultural institution and product... the pleasures the commercial film offers [glamour, drama, and fantasy], and desires it generates makes it an important section of popular culture and a vital site of cultural interpretation''
Cinematic space acts as an important 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 number and speed of technological developments in India in the last decade it is difficult to assume that when film found its way to India it was regarded as a foreign technology a "tool of Europe and section 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 by which it functions in a specific society. It is notable that Dadasaheb Phalke, called 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, considered filmmaking, cinematic representations could not 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 might also include Indian nationals employed overseas. The particular definition of who counts as an NRI for particular investments or tax breaks in India is variable.
Bollywood, the 'homeland' nation-state, and the diaspora became part of the terrain for the ideological confrontations between anti-colonialists and colonialists. With independence, Hindi cinema emerged whilst the de facto, or even 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 industry became a willing partner in these processes within furthering its commercial interests.
Sankaran Krishna argues that "something called 'India' becomes inscribed, in a variety of 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 set about assembling a national market through the construction of unified, national, gendered, racialised, (hetero) sexed subject. In many parts of India the cinema hall was the only real space that has been not divided along caste lines.
