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The chapter explores how gender has been an integral part of the nation building project in post-liberalisation Hindi cinema, popularly, known as Bollywood.

This chapter is based on primary data gathered through interviews with prominent members of the Hindi film industry along with a detailed content analysis of commercially successful post-liberalisation mainstream Hindi films.

It highlights how the representation of gender has been a central axis around which the tension between tradition and modernity has been played out in Hindi Cinema. The construction of Indianness post-liberalisation has questioned gender politics but proposed easy resolutions which fit into the larger nationalist narrative. In doing so, it has used the diaspora as a category to produce a nationalist account which is simultaneously essentialised and transnational in the quest for projecting India’s aspirations on the global platform.

The chapter provides important insights into the role of popular Hindi cinema, often brushed off as frivolous, in contributing to the mainstream discourse on nationalism post-liberalisation.

According to Yubin et al. (2023), films serve as a medium for conveying visual representations of various elements such as landscapes, buildings, landmarks and monuments, which provide a contextual backdrop for the narrative. According to Vila et al. (2021), the number of global tourists visiting film locations exceeds 80 million. In addition, according to Yubin et al. (2023), the promotion of tourism is facilitated through the utilisation of films, which serve to create novel representations, counteract negative perceptions and enhance the portrayal of underdeveloped destinations. A significant number of individuals engage in the practise of visiting movie sets with the intention of re-experiencing the emotional impact of the film. The devaluation of film marketing has been observed. This method represents a highly indirect approach to enticing tourists. This chapter examines the comprehension of travellers' motivations and the perception of film-exposed locations in Bollywood films (Salnick, 2023). Film tourism provides a tailored and personalised experience for individuals. The difficulty in measuring this concept arises from factors such as the emotional responsiveness, personality traits, background and interpretive abilities of the viewers in relation to media images. According to Castro et al. (2023), the inclusion of a destination on a screen can serve as a means to enhance the diversity of a site's tourist offerings or mitigate the effects of seasonality by providing opportunities for experiential activities, showcasing notable landmarks or serving as a filming location. Film destinations have the potential to gain popularity and benefit from advertising and the perception of spectators.

Films, besides serving as an important instructive means to deliver sociological content, have also recently made their way into more structured courses on Media Sociology. It becomes particularly pertinent for cultivating global sociological imagination in the classroom. This chapter is a pedagogical reflection discussing the potentials of integrating Bollywood films into a first-year seminar, the content of which at many levels is comparable to basic sociology classes. The reflection is based out of the experience of teaching a freshmen class on Bollywood to a body of students with little past exposure, or knowledge of this movie industry. The chapter will initiate a dialogue on strategies of introducing the content, encouraging engagement and critical thinking, how to build on essential global sociological imagination along with a summary of what works and what does not. For this chapter, I will detail on the three contemporary Bollywood films (Ishaqzaade, Monsoon Wedding, and Dor), which I use to engage in a dialogue on family, class, and gender. Next, I will apply Sutherland and Fetley’s (2013) framework to explore the sociological relevance of these films (thus validating my choice of these works for pedagogical purposes) and also demonstrate possible hegemonic versus oppositional ways of reading these texts, which students are supposed to decipher and apply. Contemporary Bollywood films in many ways mirror aspects of the life course experienced in the United States and can be instrumental in encouraging a diverse undergraduate curriculum.

On 20 March 2020, the four adult convicts of the 2012 Delhi rape case were executed after a long debate regarding the punishment for their crime. The Delhi rape case, unlike others, was also given to the fast track court because of the worldwide outrage India received in its aftermath. Otherwise, most rape survivors rarely speak out and if they do, their lives are often endangered and threatened, depending on the severity of the case itself and the perpetrator's rank in the society. Through the analysis of Aniruddha Roy Chowdhury's, 2016 film Pink, and Ajay Bahl's film Section 375 (2019), this chapter explores the different ways in which mainstream Hindi cinema deals with such questions, especially in its depictions of courts. Both these films foreground India's contemporary cultural systems of fear that silence the rape survivors. They also imply that in the court cases, unless the specific court case faces intense global publicity, as was the case of the Delhi gang rape, rape survivors will never want to speak out. Moreover, the rape survivors will also hesitate to file a First Information Report (FIR) – a document that records crimes by the police against their perpetrators – limiting any possibility for justice for them. The laws surrounding rape cases are obscure and complex and finding justice for a rape victim (unless it is on a global level) is not an easy venture in India. At the time of the #metoo movement, the rape laws in India are not designed in such a way to arguably encourage victim-survivors to speak up. Instead, if rape survivors do decide to confront their perpetrators, they not only face ostracisation from society but also the danger of losing loved ones and endanger their lives as well.

The growing interest of the scientific community in film marketing research can be discovered by the large scale published writings on the subject. Although, in this field, comprehensive and systematic research is still lacking. The important aim of this article is to merge the latest research results of film marketing through bibliometric research on articles published from 1976 to 2020, and to examine and introduce the research outcome from the view of the growth trend of the field; the most productive and influential countries, authors, articles, institutions, and research journals; keywords, author patterns, and international linkages. Research outcomes show that film marketing research increased gradually from 1976 to 2020, especially in the last five to 10 years. During this period, all 500 scholarly articles were published in 331 journals and listed in Scopus. Comparison is drawn between institutions from developing countries (in terms of number of articles) and developed countries (in terms of citation rate). On the basis of key points and three-factor examination, a conclusion is drawn that in the last 10 years, ‘film marketing’ as a keyword has attracted widespread attention.

This study reports on a four-month ethnographic project conducted among young Catholic women in Mumbai, India. Here, the author examines how the media consumption of participants is implicated in reconstituting Indian national identity. Because Hinduism is closely tied to conceptualizations of Indianness and because women continue to be marginalized in Indian society, Catholic women in India are viewed as second-class citizens or “not Indian enough” or “appropriately Indian” by virtue of their gender and religious affiliation. However, through media consumption that emphasizes hybridity, participants destabilize narrow definitions of Indian identity. Specifically, participants cultivate hybridity as central to an Indian identity that is viable in an increasingly global society. Within this formulation of hybridity, markers of their marginalization are reframed as markers of distinction. By centering hybridity in their media consumption, young, middle-class Catholic women (re)imagine their national identity in translocal cosmopolitan terms that subverts marginalization experienced by virtue of their religion and leverages privileges they enjoy by virtue of their middle-class status. Importantly, this version of Indian identity remains elitist in that it remains inaccessible to poor women, including poor women of minority groups.

In this chapter, I explore two media texts, Imtiaz Ali's Highway and Alankrita Shrivastava's Netflix original series Bombay Begums (2021). I contend that recent filmmakers have begun to arguably reframe the narratives of rape victim-survivors and disrupting the cultural of silence described above. They offer progressive and multi-faceted representations of these experiences, such that there is an opportunity for a dialogue within both private and public spheres. What I mean when I say that they are ‘progressive representations’ is that the rape victim-survivors are not merely reduced to helpless women in distress, nor painted as vengeful, aggressive characters. Instead, their characterisation shows that they have agency and autonomy, but at the same time struggle with the repercussions of speaking out against their perpetrators in a society that does not support them wholly.

This chapter analyses the pilot episode of the ABC TV series Charlie's Angels (Spelling & Goldberg, 1976–1981) and the latest film of this media franchise, Charlie's Angels (Banks, 2019). The chapter undertakes an analysis of the three main characters in the series pilot and the three starring roles in the film, applying methodologies proposed by the cinematic poetic formalism (Bordwell & Thompson, 2006) and observing specifically the roles and motivations of these six women from a feminist perspective. On the one hand, the TV pilot engages with several of the main premises of the second-wave feminism that was in full swing at the time the series was released. On the other hand, the 2019 film was launched in the contemporary era of post-feminism, reflecting a number of the concerns that shape the post-feminist agenda. However, the main argument of this chapter is that both the series pilot released in 1976 and the 2019 film construct ambivalent feminist narratives. The analysis reveals that the Charlie's Angels franchise fluctuates between characteristics that can be labelled as feminist discourses, but also as replicators of a patriarchal model. Forty-six years later, while a few things have changed for the Angels, we argue that the characters and franchise have not lived up to its potential as a transformative feminist text.

According to a report by the Afghan embassy in Delhi, refugees from Afghanistan, estimated at around 30,000 families, have, over the past two and a half decades, fled from their home towns due to large-scale conflicts, seeking safety in India's capital city. Many outsiders call Delhi home, but the Afghan people can claim a special relationship with India and her capital. To understand why, we must recall the history, both the ancient and the modern, of the two nations. There are nearly 11,000 Afghan refugees registered with the UNHCR in India, mainly living in Delhi and bordering areas. The refugees in Delhi face considerable hardships and difficulties. The Indian government and UNHCR should make it a priority to protect these Afghan refugees. While recognition of UNHCR-recognized China and Afghan refugees is greatly appreciated, the Indian government must be sensitive and sensitize others about their situation in Delhi and ensure timely attainment of recognition, registration, residential permits and exit permits without unnecessary cost or delay or corruption. The resettlement program must also be expanded and prioritized for Afghan refugees living in Delhi, particularly within large resettlement countries such as the US without any discrimination based on culture, language or religion. Without adequate and timely protection mechanisms and proper community support structures in place, the protection and assistance to the vulnerable section of society would be hard to attain and resolve.