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 individual aberrations of these films' villains, rather than the nature of the patriarchy itself, that is responsible for the heroines' dilemmas. Other similar ploys include the stigmatizing of a radical version of Western feminism as the propaganda of cultural imperialism. Such 'feminism' is shown to be inappropriate for India and the media appeal instead to the national feeling of women who, as the media assure them, have chosen lives centered around the family. ...