Screens of Power: Cinema as a Hegemonic Apparatus in the Construction of Political Culture in India
Main Article Content
Abstract
Cinema in India is unique in terms of its relationship with mass culture, politics, and social practices. This paper aims to explore how Hindi mainstream cinema, commonly referred to as Bollywood, acts as an apparatus of cultural hegemony where dominant political cultures are reproduced and challenged. With reference to theory of cultural hegemony (Antonio Gramsci), idea of Ideological State Apparatuses – ISAs (Louis Althusser), and encoding/decoding model (Stuart Hall), this research will employ qualitative textual analysis of twelve purposively sampled Hindi movies from 2000 to 2024 that explicitly focus on issues related to nationalism, caste, religion, gender, and state power. The findings suggest that the main function of Bollywood is to encode ideological values that promote elite-nationalism while also creating fragmented space for counter-hegemonic discourses within them. This research proposes that cinema plays an active role in shaping Indian political culture and, thus, should be considered in any analysis of Indian politics.
Article Details
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
References
Almond, G. A., & Verba, S. (1963). The Civic Culture: Political Attitudes and Democracy in Five Nations. Princeton University Press. http://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt183pnr2
Althusser, L. (1971). Ideology and ideological state apparatuses: Notes towards an investigation. In L. Althusser, Lenin and philosophy and other essays (B. Brewster, Trans. (Original work published 1970). Available at: https://mforbes.sites.gettysburg.edu/cims226/wp-content/uploads/2018/09/Week-3b-Louis-Althusser.pdf
Central Board of Film Certification. (2023). Annual report 2022–23. Ministry of Information and Broadcasting, Government of India. https://mib.gov.in/sites/default/files/2024-08/annual-report-english-file-29-8-2023-low.pdf
Chakravarty, S. S. (1993). National identity in Indian popular cinema, 1947–1987. University of Texas Press. https://doi.org/10.7560/755512-009
Dwyer, R. (2006). Filming the gods: Religion and Indian cinema. Routledge. Available at: https://www.routledge.com/Filming-the-Gods-Religion-and-Indian-Cinema/Dwyer/p/book/9780415314251
Dwyer, R. (2020). New myths for an old nation: Bollywood, soft power and Hindu nationalism. In S. Dennison & R. Dwyer (Eds.), Cinema and soft power (pp. 190–209). Edinburgh University Press. DOI:10.3366/edinburgh/9781474456272.003.0010
Fraser, N. (1995). From redistribution to recognition? Dilemmas of justice in a 'post-socialist' age. New Left Review, 212, 68–93. https://newleftreview.org/issues/i212/articles/nancy-fraser-from-redistribution-to-recognition-dilemmas-of-justice-in-a-post-socialist-age
Gopal, S. (2011). Conjugations: Marriage and form in new Bollywood cinema. University of Chicago Press. https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/C/bo12120811.html
Gramsci, A. (1971). Selections from the prison notebooks (Q. Hoare & G. Nowell Smith, Trans. & Eds.). Lawrence and Wishart. (Original work written 1929–1935). https://lwbooks.co.uk/product/selections-from-the-prison-notebooks
Grossberg, L., Nelson, C., & Treichler, P. A. (Eds.). (1992). Cultural studies. Routledge.
Hall, S. (1980). Encoding/decoding. In S. Hall, D. Hobson, A. Lowe, & P. Willis (Eds.), Culture, media, language: Working papers in cultural studies, 1972–79 (pp. 128–138). Hutchinson. Available at: https://spkb.blot.im/_readings/EncodingDecoding_HALL_1980.pdf
Mehta, R., & Pandharipande, R. V. (Eds.). (2010). Bollywood and globalization: Indian popular cinema, nation, and diaspora. Anthem Press. https://doi.org/10.7135/UPO9781843318897
Mulvey, L. (1975). Visual pleasure and narrative cinema. Screen, 16(3), 6–18. https://doi.org/10.1093/screen/16.3.6
Prasad, M. M. (1998). Ideology of the Hindi film: A historical construction. Oxford University Press. Available at: https://india.oup.com/product/ideology-of-the-hindi-film-9780195652956/
Rajadhyaksha, A. (2009). Indian cinema in the time of celluloid: From Bollywood to the emergency. Indiana University Press. https://iupress.org/9780253352682/indian-cinema-in-the-time-of-celluloid/
Tiwary, I. (2023). Streaming and India's film-centred video culture: Linguistic and formal diversity. International Journal of Cultural Studies, 27, 65 - 81. https://doi.org/10.1177/13678779231197696
Vasudevan, R. S. (Ed.). (2000). Making meaning in Indian cinema. Oxford University Press. https://doi.org/10.1093/screen/42.2.239
Virdi, J. (2003). The cinematic imagination: Indian popular films as social history. Rutgers University Press. Available at: https://www.rutgersuniversitypress.org/the-cinematic-imagination/9780813531915
Zizek, S. (1994). The spectre of ideology. In S. Zizek (Ed.), Mapping ideology (pp. 1–33). Verso. Available at: https://analepsis.org/wp-content/uploads/2011/08/415_mapping-ideology-slavoj-zizek.pdf