Hehasmovedfrom playingthe roleofthe quiet,well-behavedbuteffetehero,infilms thatwerebutminorsuccesses,tohistriumphantportrayalsofangry, violent vigilantesfunctioningatthemarginsofthe society.Ontogeny,asthebiologistssay,replicatesphylogeny.'

Asonebox-officehitafteranothershows,thepolitician-as-villaintodayisnotmerelyacounterpointtothehero-as-the-anti-herowhorepelsmanyfilmanalysts,disgustedwiththesurfeitofviolence andsexincinema[...].Heisalsothecounterpointtothelessviolent,moreandrogynousheroeswhooncerepresentedfortheWesternizedIndianseverythingthatwaswrongwithMotherIndia.

That is why the popular film ideally hasto have everything — from the classical to the folk, from the sublime to theridiculous, and from the terribly modern to the incorrigibly traditional, from theplots within plots that never get resolved to the cameo roles and stereotypicalcharacters that never get developed. Such films cannot usually have a clear-cutstory line or a single sequence of events, as in, say, the dramatic, event-based,popular films of Hollywood or even Hong Kong. An average, ‘normal’, Bombayfilm has to be, to the extent possible, everything to everyone. It has to cut acrossthe myriad ethnicities and lifestyles of India and even of the world that impinges onIndia. The popular film is low-brow, modernizing India in all its complexity,sophistry, naiveté and vulgarity. Studying popular film is studying Indian moder-nity at its rawest, its crudities laid bare by the fate of traditions in contemporary lifeand arts. Above all, it is studying caricatures of ourselves — social and politicalanalysts negotiating the country’s past and present — located not at the centre,studying others, as we like to see ourselves, but at the peripheries, standing asspectators and looking at others studying themselves and us.

The Indian upper-middle class may have some of the economic features of anélite, but it has not tried to distance itself from the culture of the lower-middle class.Much of India’s upper-middle class is simply a lower-middle class with more money.

pan-Indian homogeneity

The discarded, obsolete population that inhabits the unintended city is aconstant embarrassment to the rest of their urbane brethren — in the way that theconcerns and style of popular cinema are often an embarrassment to the devoteesof art films and high culture.*

Phalke or Phalkemuni, as Christopher Byrski affectionately calls him to underscorethe continuity between classical Sanskrit plays and Bombay cinema.?

The answers presume that the Indian commercial cinema, to be commer-cially viable, must try to span the host of cultural diversities and epochs the societylives with, and that effort has a logic of its own.

more than two-and-a-half

Common assumptions put forward by masssociety theorists, and taken up by its researchers, included notionsthat mass culture was crude and that its consumers were little morethan undiscriminating dupes who were being injected with, and takingon board, media messages wholesale.