Rights to Love and the Denied Self in Bollywood Films

Abstract

The article discusses a few seminal issues concerning Indian cinema, in terms both of aesthetics and contents. In particular it tries to focus how such seminal points as gender and the crucial contact with western cultures is dealt with in Indian cinema. As far as the first point is concerned, the leading love-story in filmic melodrama, one grounded essentially on stridharmic and dharmic values, instructs the representation of the two loving characters according to traditional iconographies and standard conformity to myth. This normative bias can be seen again at work in the continuous clash between deshi values and the disturbing influence of western culture.