Cinema

Indian popular fi lms have a defi nite “fl avor.” This is generally recognized

(and one indigenous descriptor of them is indeed as masālā or “spicy”), even by Anglo-Americans who encounter them while surfi ng cable TV channels-

and not simply because the actors happen to be Indian. The fi lms look,

sound, and feel different in important ways, and a kind of cinematic culture

shock may accompany a fi rst prolonged exposure. An American fi lm scholar,

after viewing his fi rst “masālā blockbuster,” remarked to me that the various cinemas he had studied-American, French, Japanese, African-all seemed

to play by a similar set of aesthetic rules, “but this is a different universe.”