ABSTRACT
Few cinemas have been as much maligned and subject to critical derision as the popular commercial cinema of India. The widely used and negatively-charged term “Bollywood” indexes one significant aspect of this complex discursive field. India continues to be the largest film-producing country in the world with an annual output of over 700 films. A few years ago the figure was as high as 900. And nearly 90 percent of these films belong to what critics term the popular cinema as opposed to the artistic cinema as exemplified in the works of such auteurs as Satyajit Ray, Mrinal Sen and Adoor Gopalkrishnan. Popular cinema is still a dominant force in India providing a useful site for the negotiation of cultural meaning and values and inviting the vast mass of movie-goers to participate in the ongoing conversation of cultural modernities. Consequently, the domain of popular cinema is one that merits close study and analysis.
