Importance Of Indian Cinema

The pleasure of watching a great cinema or conversely the disappointment and frustration of watching a poor film, is familiar to most of us. Cinema is one of the most popular and vibrant cultural practices reflecting a plethora of social, economic and cultural phenomena in modern societies. Cinema sometimes is the cultural reconstruction of our daily lives, sometimes an entree to a different time or place or idea that otherwise is difficult or even impossible to access. They remix the real, the unreal, the present, real life, memory, and dream on the same shared mental level. Cinema has the power to move people; it has been a very successful medium with a global reach and speaks the language of universality. It has entertained and influenced people across the spectrum in places as diverse as Jakarta, New York, Tokyo and Mumbai. This paper will try to look into the mass appeal and popularity of Indian cinema.

“Cinema in India is like brushing your teeth in the morning, you can’t escape it”, quipped the Indian superstar Shahrukh Khan and it holds true as Indian cinema today has grown to achieve global status. “India is the largest producer of films (over 1,000 films per year) with annual ticket sales of nearly 2.8 billion, a box office of $ 1.53 billion and growth across international markets every year. According to a recent report by Deloitte, the Indian Media and Entertainment industry is expected to grow at a CAGR of 17%, contributes $8.1 billion to the nation’s economy, supports 1.8 million jobs and constitutes 0.5% of the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) of India.”( MPPAA) MPAA’s recent annual theatrical market statistics report says that India ranks fifth after China, Japan, U.K and France in box office performance. These grow...

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...f Pi, A Mighty Heart) and Priyanka Chopra (Planes).

Commercial cinema has a multitude of audience coming from a diverse spectrum; it cuts across myriad ethnicities and lifestyles of the people. While the films talk a mixture of class tastes, some having lower or working class as its major social referent, others speak about middle class values and the bourgeoisie class. Rachel Dwyer in her work “Bollywood Bourgeoisie” speaks about how the middles are establishing their cultural hegemony. Their depictions of lifestyle becomes the benchmark to which the lower classes aspire and thus appealing to a broad social spectrum. Ashish Nandy opines that commercial cinema emphasizes on lower middle class sensibilities and how this cinema is a reading of haute bourgeoisie by the lower middle classes. This explains the medium's stylization, grandeur conventions and mannerisms.