ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the issues and problems in doing popular culture studies in India, under four heads: those to do with terminology, ontology, methodology and ethics. When one considers the ontology of popular culture in India, there are several problems which crop up. India being a multicultural, multilingual, multi-ethnic entity, it is rather impossible to think of a common set of shared texts as paradigm cultural texts which can represent it all. Therefore, it is difficult to speak about popular culture ontologically in the Indian context, because India's multicultural fabric does not allow building a unified corpus of paradigm cultural texts. Is studying Indian culture using the method adopted by an anthropologist or ethnographer valid, or is it rendered problematic by the fact that the ethnographer here does not enjoy distance from the culture s/he seems to be analysing since she/he is embedded in it.
