The cinematic imagiNation : Indian popular films as social history

India produces more films than any other country in the world and these works are consumed by non-Western cultures in Africa, Eastern Europe, the Middle East, and by the Indian communities across the world. This text focuses on how such a dominant media configures the ""nation"" in post-Independence Hindi cinema. The author scrutinizes approxiamtely 30 films that have appeared since 1950 and demonstrates how concepts of the nation centre this cinema's moral universe. As a form of storytelling, Indian cinema provides an account of social history and cultural politics, with the family deployed as a symbol of the nation. Virdi demonstrates how Hindi films' portrayal of the nation as a mythical community collapses under the weight of its own contradictions - irreconcilable differences that encompass gender, sexuality, family, class and religious communities.