Cinema of India
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India has the largest film industry in the world and, since 1992, one of the fastest growing television audiences in history. Popular media in India, as anywhere else, tend to reflect and shape -- or attempt to shape -- people's attitudes on many issues. In the mixture of cultures, languages and religions that make up the Indian nation the status of women is a question that is capable of generating immense, furious controversy. But the question of full female emancipation, or even relatively moderate change in women's status, is nearly taboo in the popular commercial media of film and television. Greater strides have been made since the 1980s in so-called "New" or "parallel" cinema, yet even in that arena filmmakers have strained to emphasize the nonradical, nonfeminist, tradition-oriented nature of their calls for change in women's status. Still more important than the absence of popular feminist appeals and the timidity of the parallel cinema, however, is the strong tendency of commercial producers of film and television to appropriate basic points of feminist rhetoric and adapt them in the service of conservative social and political agendas. Thus, for example, 1980s film and 1990s television prided themselves on delivering positive images of women. Yet very often they were women acting as vigilantes who avenged crimes, usually rape, against themselves. The implication of such individual action is that structural change is not called for since it is always the ind
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s were, however, largely dependent on government-sponsored bodies for their funding and proposed films that went too far beyond tradition could easily be forestalled.
The status of women was, of course, one of the issues tackled by the parallel cinema, especially from the 1980s on. Yet Indian New Cinema was, by far, more cautious in approaching this subject than any other. Filmmakers and critics tended to adopt a placating tone toward conservative opinion on the topic of women and their rights which indicated a fairly broad acceptance (at least in public) of the notion that Western feminism was not for India. In India, as writers in an English magazine aimed at the educated upper middle class recently put it, a specifically "Indian model" of feminism was needed, one that could deal with those "peculiar concerns about women's status in society that are far removed from those in the West" (Chatterjee & Pande 22). This notion of Western feminism as an alien force that has no bearing on India pervades political discourse in India and is the key to the expressed and implied conceptions of women's roles in both the parallel and the commercial cinemas. And the description of the enlightened treatment of women in the parallel cinem
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Some common words found in the essay are:
Misra Roychowdhury, Bollywood Indian, , Patel's Umbartha, Priti Priti's, Phoolan Devi, Mother India, Party BJP, Samiti RSS, Karan Johar, parallel cinema, indian cinema, indian film, development corporation, misra roychowdhury, national film, film development corporation, national film development, film development, ed rani burra, directorate film, film festivals, festivals national, rani burra delhi, cinema 1980-1985 ed,
Approximate Word count = 4639
Approximate Pages = 19 (250 words per page)
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