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Masala movies: Filmmaking in India
I first watched an Urdu mainstream movie at a cinema in the 60s in Pakistan. Covered in a long veil, I sat in a family booth where during intervals the curtains were closed so as to prevent any male gazing at the memsahib (madam). With my pidgin Urdu I understood very little about the musical but enjoyed it nevertheless and I cried heartily when I heard others sniffing in their handkerchiefs at the sad parts. Going to the pictures was an outing, the cinema hall had an exciting decaying ambience and I enjoyed being among people although separated from them by a double veil. Little did I know that going to the movies was to provide me with an insight into Pakistani society and the way women are placed within that society.
Indian cinema is a very popular form of entertainment. India produces more films than any other nation -in 16 languages. Production of the 180 or so films per year in the Hindi language is dominated by the Bombay Studios. There are few filmmakers known for art films. Independent filmmakers often add ingredients from mainstream movies to their `mid-way' films to cater for an audience half-way between the masses and the elite audience. In order to distinguish mainstream Hindi films cleary from so-called at alternative, new wave, or `mid-way' films, I call them Hindi Masala Movies (HMM). This expresses the lack of definite genre and its uniqueness as popular or mass culture. Masala basically means spices. As a result of different combinations and quantities of Indian spices, every curry has its own distinctive flavour. Masala is used to denote the ingredients which go into the making of mainstream movie. The masala ingredients are songs, dance, romance, violence, comedy, sex, rape scenes, fantasy/dreams etc.
The film research looks at the underlying ideology in gender relations in the discourse of film. To conduct the research movies were selected over a defined period, 1975-1995, with a few earlier box office successes and a few films after 1995, for comparative reasons. This period was chosen because of the increasing importance of the male star...