Postmodern Experience in India: Imaginary Subaltern Space and Cinema

Abstract

The article discusses India’s transition to a postmodern condition and consumerist society taking the transformation in Indian cinema, and the production and consumption of certain images over the past decade as its referential point. It argues that the changes that have been occurring in India, and in its cinemas, produced new types of films, and a new type of imagination that is fixated on the consumption of subalternity. It also argues that the new films only have the appearance of dissent and critique, but instead produce a carnivalesque of subalternity as the ‘New India’s’ Other, acting as a peculiar civilising process of the society into consumption. Transformations in popular culture, its consumption and the type of imaginary reality it projects can act as a good barometer in order to reflect on more overwhelming and far-reaching transformations and their effects on the society.