Bharat Suri

Tutorial Group L
Tutor Professor Vikramendra Kumar
Semester II, MA (First Year) Sociology
Sociology of India II
How is India imagined in popular culture? Discuss with respect
to any one form of popular culture.

The Indian nation-state, as we know it today, was fashioned through a longdrawn-out anti-colonial struggle against the British Raj in the middle of the
twentieth century. Scholars such as Partha Chatterjee have convincingly
argued that even though the political project under the auspices of the
Indian National Congress popularly known as Indias independence struggle
culminated in the formation of a nation-state in the year 1947, it was in
fact the cultural (or more specifically for Chatterjee the spiritual) domain
where India managed to first retain and preserve its sovereignty by refusing
intervention to colonial power (Chattarjee, 1993). For the first time in the
history of the subcontinent then, the idea of a national culture emerged
formally; it can also, therefore, be argued that the formation of nation
predates the formation of the nation-state in the context of India. Like most
other nation-states western or post-colonial this newly formed political
entity (India) engaged in a series of nation-building activities that have left
an indelible mark on the nature, form and content of its culture, and continue
to shape it even today. How India is imagined in popular culture, in other
words, is profoundly implicated in the nature of its nationhood, and the
States attempts at forging (or following Chatterjee, reinforcing) a national
culture post-independence.
Particularly in the West, through Marx and later Gramsci, state has been
understood to be the hegemonising apparatus at the disposal of the ruling

(bourgeois) classes that bolsters the creation of a monolithic, homogenising

national culture. Such a claim does not necessarily hold in the post-colonial
experience, however, where the formation of national culture is constantly
under contestation from both indigenous (or folk) and transnational (or
global) cultures. Popular culture in India, therefore, is a zone of cultural
debate (Appadurai & Breckenridge, 1995). Here, the forces of globalisation,
industrialisation and privatisation of industry also play significant roles in
production and dissemination of culture through the advent of mass media
and related mechanical modes of reproduction (Appadurai & Breckenridge,
1995). Mass media and mechanical modes of reproduction necessitate
consumption of culture. Culture (along with modernity) then, becomes a
commodity that is bought and sold in this paradigm and is subject to
generalised market conditions. This brings into the picture a multitude of key
interest groups; entrepreneurs and commercial institutions that constitute
the culture industries film, music, television, print, tourism, advertising
and the burgeoning middle classes who have real purchasing power are
culture producers and consumers respectively. An ever-increasing number of
people consume particular ways of living and learning through such media,
and the state here is envisaged both as competitor in the marketplace of
cultural production and as arbiter of such production mediates in the
contest of private cultural entrepreneurs (Appadurai & Breckenridge, 1995).

National Culture

Figure 1: The Political Economy of Popular Culture; The Zone of Cultural

Debate

Popular culture in India is situated within the complex of States nationbuilding

desire,

entrepreneurs

middle-class
motives

of

tastes

and

profit-making.

preferences,
This

culture-industry

triumvirate

of

forces

maneuvers and contests one another around and through transnational and
indigenous cultural flows (Appadurai & Breckenridge, 1995). Understanding
the imagination of India through any modality of popular culture cinema,
sport, television, travel, radio, museums therefore, requires an inquiry into
the various global and local forces discursively and materially influencing
India (that I have attempted above), and how the State, the middle-class,

and private industries, collectively influence or produce culture through the

vast resources at their disposal. Having elucidated the factors influencing
production of popular culture more generally, the rest of the essay will now
be focused on Indian (or more specifically Hindi) cinema to appreciate its
construction and imagination of India. Further, I will do this by locating Hindi
cinema within its historical, material, and discursive milieu.

[C]inema is an immense force which by the subtlety of it[s] nature

moulds the opinion of millions in the course of its apparently superficial
business of merely providing entertainment
Panna Shah (1950) [quoted in (Deshpande, 2007)]

Cinema is, by far, the most popular art form in India today. Indian cinema,
most popularly Bollywood or Hindi cinema, caters to the needs of south Asian
communities abroad, and is consumed in multiplexes across the world.
Communities from the subcontinent who possess shared memories and
conflicting histories find in such cinema a united cultural in terms of
language, styles, code, and centrality of the family discourse

(Parveen,

2003) and reaffirmation of their ethnic, regional identities. India has a rich
cinematic history predating partition and the independence struggle, which
is particularly entangled with the Indian bourgeoisie (middle-class) and the
West. Mainstream Hindi films have affirmed particularly majoritarian (male,
Hindu, upper-caste) identities by relegating minority identities to extremely
marginal and manicured depictions, and are characterised by urban middleclass values and notions the patriarchal, conservative, god-fearing family.
Hindi cinema has also managed to willy-nilly hegemonise the subaltern with
the ideas of a singular history of/nationalist struggle for independence. I will
expound each of these currents the symbolic and ideological role played by

cinema after explicating cinemas more popularly understood role as that

of entertainment for the masses below and its implications.
Bollywood, especially when thought of from the point of view of the
proletarian and rural/farming classes, can essentially be conceptualised as a
recreational domain that gives the common-man an avenue for escape from
the drudgery of his daily life. The idiom of escape is of dual (material and
ideal) significance here; not only does it provide immediate temporary
respite from routine work by the virtue of its form (as a leisurely activity), but
it simultaneously is of aspirational value the consumer is sold the
possibility of escaping his sordid condition of poverty and crossing over to a
more comfortable life Bollywood is replete with rags-to-riches narratives.
The businessman is valorised, consumerism and the West are glorified
(Deshpande, 2007), the audience learns an Indian form of capitalist realism
(Appadurai & Breckenridge, 1995) polyglot image of glamour, fashion, and
mobility centered on the lifestyles of heroes and heroines whilst the
conditions of poverty are ascribed to evil; narratives rarely foreground the
poor who are usually props given extremely perfunctory characterisations.
This helps to perpetuate and further entrench ideologically the capitalist
enterprise in the minds of the masses. It is important to note how cinema is
a commodity has to be purchased and then consumed because of which
those who are unable to afford tickets are automatically marginalised even
from the hegemonising culture.
After independence, under the Nehruvian mixed-economy, India saw a
discernible rise in its parvenu1 classes whose influence over the State and
society improved sharply and manifestly influenced cinema production
1 Rising corruption, increased black money and criminalisation of politics
underpinned the rise of the new middle brow, middle class during the 1960s and
1970s. The nexus of capitalists, operating within the licence-permit-quota raj
established by the pseudo socialist state of India, bureaucrats and the politicians
was largely responsible for empowering independent Indias vocal parvenu class.
(Deshpande, 2007, p. 99)

(Deshpande, 2007). The 1960s and 1970s saw an especially middle-class

sensibility pervading Bollywood in the form of patriarchy where women are
subordinated to the joint family. The womans body was, and still remains,
the site where the contest between tradition and modernity takes place in
terms of dress and sexuality. The weathered wife/vamp binary based on the
duplicitous middle class morality makes stark this contest, where the wife is
wholly clothed, loyal, and subservient to her husband and usually attributed
the status good by the family, as against the vamp who is in all likelihood
westernised and equated with being fast or loose, independent and
aggressive qualities equated with being bad (Butalia, 1984) (not when
they are ascribed to men however). Women are still depicted as sex objects,
and only very recently with films such as Fashion, Queen, etc have women
enjoyed autonomy and centrality in the cinematic arena. By and large the
industry remains dominated by men and repressive notions of patriarchy.
Apart from operating under bourgeois public morality that favours the
market, prides itself on family values, and is grounded in religious identity,
Hindi cinema is also fundamentally partial to majoritarian character
portrayals. The characters being portrayed by the heros and heroines
invariably belong to the dominant groups whilst the treatment of those at the
periphery ones with minority identities in films is abysmal. Either they do
not exist, or are silenced when they do have at the most a couple of
dialogues. The archetypal identity of a central character (hero) of Hindi
cinema is an upper-caste, male and devout, practicing Hindu, whereas say
religious minorities such as Muslims have little to no representation, visibility
in the film. Even if a film is, in fact, based on a minority character they
usually have to be shown to be endowed with some special super-power
(Iqbal, My Name is Khan); complexities in such characters are hardly teased
out. The most glaring example of this is the neglect of tribal characters in
mainstream cinema. Even the few movies that are centered on tribal
characters caricature tribal life to such an atrocious degree that they can

hardly be called authentic. Tribesmen are usually depicted as inhabitants of

hills and forests (and understanding that is grounded on the notions and
categories created by British Anthropology), and singing and dancing
primitives, who have a certain beauty and mystique that arises from their
spontaneity, goodness and innate simplicity (Chattopadhyay, 2016). Another
tribal motif in Hindi cinema is the tribal song that is punctuated by distinct
language, dress and eroticised performance. Historically, the tribal is
constructed and imagined as the exoticised and sexualised other in Hindi
cinema, but more recent works show how the tribal protagonist (mostly
male) sheds the visible markers of his identity (which were in themselves
stereotypes) to now project himself as a proud member of the Indian nation
(Chattopadhyay, 2016).

Salman Khans Veer, and Priyanka Chopras Mary

Kom both are perfect examples how the national identity impinges upon the
minority identity and, in fact, appropriates it in toto; the protagonist, in such
a case of cultural appropriation, appears to be entirely immersed in the new
national identity marking also the completion of the hegemonisation process
in a sense.
This, in fact, is the most perilous aspect of popular culture, that it is
increasingly being co-opted by the culture of the dominant 2 or national
culture through successful attempts of the state and middle class to impose
its (so-called national) sensibilities onto other groups and communities. Both
Lagaans narrative and the ensuing academic debates that showered praises
on it epitomise the strengthening of the hegemony of nationalist discourse
set forth by the Indian State and opinion making majority of India
(Mannathukkaren, 2001). Lagaan is based on the story of the villagers and
peasants of Champaran, a village in Awadh. The film depicts the struggle of
2 The dominant culture is nothing but the middle classes who through their power
and resources are able to influence the state; their culture becomes the hegemonic
national culture which then is disseminated through mass media and is mediated by
state apparatuses and seeks to appropriate all forms of indigenous/folk cultures; it
is consumed by the masses as popular culture.

villagers against colonial forces for the revocation of taxes; the villagers are
able secure such revocation on account of winning a cricket match against
the colonial states representatives. The film wins various accolades from
critics and scholars alike, but according to Nissim Mannathukkaren, Lagaan
fails to problematise what should have been extremely strained relations
between the local raja of Awadh and the villagers of Champaran because of
the formers exploitation of the latter. Such an (arguably deliberate)
oversight is akin to an effacement of the subaltern history of Champaran and
Awadh, and amounts to the expropriation of indigenous culture by way of the
hegemonic nationalist project and national culture.
Pre-independence histories of South Asia are littered with peasant struggles
and agitations against the exploitation and oppression by landlords,
zamindars, taluqdars, jajmans, etc. It is interesting to note that various other
regional, linguistic, caste-based assertions were also prevalent in addition to
these

agricultural-social

movements

during

this

time.

Later

these

movements were all brought under the ambit of a single monolithic freedom
movement (or the national, anti-colonial struggle) by nationalists such as
Gandhi, and other stalwarts of the Indian National Congress. In Nationalism
without a Nation in India, G. Aloysius classifies a lot of these assertions as
distinct national movements because they specifically mark out their
communities as distinct from that of others (thereby fulfilling Benedict
Andersons criteria for imagining a community). These movements, however,
did not achieve separate political nationhood at the time India came into
being as a nation-state, as they were collectively organised as a singular
struggle against the colonialists; some of these concerns were to be taken up
by the Indian nationalists at a later stage post-independence. Some of these
struggles for political nationhood remain unresolved and continue to exist
even today. Most Hindi cinema, as also other modalities of popular culture,
does not acknowledge these distinct subaltern histories and adds fuels to
proverbial fire; in its attempts to build a unified, coherent Indian nation by

producing a national culture, the Indian State and dominant classes, in fact,
manage to further alienate some of the masses. Their activities are found to
be counter-productive to the actual objective of the project.
Male/Hindu/Upper-Casteidentitiesdominant;minoritiessilentor

ImaginationofIndiainHindicinema

Sensibilitiesofthemiddleclass(bourgeoismorality)familyvaluesandreligiousritu
rituals

Hegemonisation

Dearthofsocialorpolit
litic
icalrealism;ideologicalentrenchmentofth
thecapitalistenterprise

Figure 2: How India is imagined in Hindi cinema

Conclusion
In sum, Hindi cinema posits an essentialist, nationalist, unified, Hindu, uppercaste and upper-class, male-dominated image of India, which is very far from
its empirical reality India has some to the most fragmented and diverse
sets of communities in the world. Cinema also reflects a society deeply
immersed in patriarchy that subjugates women through the justification of
parampara; this is slowly changing, however. Although cinema, on the one
hand, seems extremely fascinated with modernity, the West, and its
consumerist culture that it seems to have itself co-opted, on the other hand,
it portrays an extremely traditional front, especially with respect to family
values and religious rituals that are generally not associated with marketbased secular cultures. Hindi cinema not only projects an essentialist image
of

India,

but

also

an

essentialising,

totalising

India

engaged

in

homogenisation of its myriad cultures and erasure of its variegated histories.

This either projects the insecurity, the fragility of the middle-classes/Indian
State or signals the more or less complete hegemonisation of masses.

Commercialization has further entrenched Hindi cinema into the world of the
market driven exchange and capitalist realism. The industry is therefore
subjected to the logic of the market, whereby only what can be sold is
ultimately created. Either demand has to already exist, or it has to be
created. The Indian bourgeoisie are the most voracious consumers of Hindi
cinema and therefore are a constant source and determinant of this demand.
And because they are sizable consumers, their tastes and aspirations get
reflected in the cinema/popular culture that is produced. The entrepreneurs
of the culture industries also have stake in producing and selling their
products and therefore influence what and how much gets produced based
on these demands. Such market pressures and asymmetries of information
make it difficult for the subaltern to push forth his view.
I am not trying to suggest, however, that these are the only imaginations of
India in Hindi cinema, or that the structures of the market do not or will
never allow heterogeneous views to exist. A recent film Masaan depicted the
romantic, and tragic, twists and turns in the life of a young Dalit man Dalits
are, of course, another minority community that remains terribly underrepresented in mainstream cinema and popular culture in general, primarily
because of its low socio-economic status.

Mani Ratnams Raavan was a

refreshing take on the life of tribal communities and their complex

predicament due the neglect of the State. A lot of such films, and others that
cover different social issues, are usually labelled alternative cinema
primarily because of their relatively lower marketing budgets and production
costs. Lower budgets and costs obviously imply lower expenditure on
campaigns, which, in turn, implies that such films and oeuvres (those based
on social issues) seldom enjoy commercial success. Guru Dutts oeuvre
remains one of the few exceptions to this rule (Bhattacharya, 2011).
The co-existence of mainstream and alternative cinemas is testimony to the
tolerance and diversity of India. However, the State in its mediation between
cultural forces and class relations will keep attempting to mold the popular

into the dominant (or national) culture and hegemonise the subaltern. As
suggested by Nissim Mannathukkaren, analysing popular culture and, in fact,
the entire notion of nation in terms of social relations of inequality helps
maintain a fragmentary perspective against the homogenising tendencies of
nationalism and may also help us sustain the struggle for a richer definition
and understanding of India.

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