The growing body of scholarship on women and Indian film and television focuses intensively on these strategies for coopting a very mild form of feminism in the service of traditional social modes, on the very gradual emergence of countervailing voices in the parallel cinema, and on the horrifying trend in which rape has become a staple event in commercial films since the late 1980s.
India produces between 600 and 700 films annually in the nation's fifteen official languages and, occasionally, in English, its sixteenth. Commercial Hindi cinema, however, is the only portion of this output that is regularly shown in every region of the country. While they do not make up even the largest segment of Indian cinema (both the Tamil- and Telegul-language industries produce more films) Hindi movies exert immense influence via the masala (melange) films of Bombay, sometimes characterized as "Bollywood." Although Indian film production previously included many "topical dramas that often dramatized (even as they romanticized) the downtrodden" and old-fashioned mythological stories, in the decade following Independence the masala films gradually came to establish a stranglehold on the industry (Chute 51). A masala film is "a machine of tremendous complexity [featuring] an assemblage of action clichTs, 'wet sari' numbers, kitschy dialogue, and witless plot contrivances" (Levich 32). Audiences are usually, however, fully aware of the excessive nature of these musical-dramatic-romantic extravaganzas and all the singing and dancing and highly stylized acting does not, in their view, work against the moral import of the films (Levich 32). Indeed the romantic love at the center of their wild plots was, from the fifties on, "repeatedly use[d] to transcend all kinds of social schisms in India: between rich/poor, rural/urban, upper/lower caste and recently, Hindu/Muslim religio-ethnic communities" (Virdi 76). In this sense the commercial output of...