Film and Visual Communication II: Film and Identity in Indian Film Studies; Leading Directors before and after Independence; the Evolution of Indian Cinema, its Commercial and "Non-Commercial" Genres and the Hindi Film Song; Indian Cinema in the Twenty-First Century; and Approaches to the Analysis of Indian Television

The 1950s are often called the golden age of Hindi cinema. Raj Kapoor's Awaara (1951) and Shree 420 (1955) mixed Chaplinesque romance with Nehruvian social concern and were hugely popular in the Soviet Union; Bimal Roy's Do Bigha Zamin (1953) brought neorealist influence to the story of a dispossessed peasant, and his Madhumati (1958) was a popular reincarnation romance; Guru Dutt's Pyaasa (1957) and Kaagaz Ke Phool (1959), the first Indian film in CinemaScope, turned melancholy into poetry; Mehboob Khan's Mother India (1957) was India's first nomination for the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film; and K. Asif's Mughal-e-Azam (1960) set the standard for historical spectacle.

Beyond Bombay, Satyajit Ray's Pather Panchali (1955), the first film of the Apu trilogy with Aparajito (1956) and Apur Sansar (1959), brought Indian cinema world recognition, and Ray received an honorary Academy Award in 1992. Ritwik Ghatak's Meghe Dhaka Tara (1960) turned the trauma of Partition into melodrama of great force. Mrinal Sen, Adoor Gopalakrishnan, Shyam Benegal and Govind Nihalani led the parallel cinema described in Chapter 19. In the popular cinema, Hrishikesh Mukherjee (Anand, 1971) and Basu Chatterjee made middle-class "middle cinema"; Ramesh Sippy's Sholay (1975), Yash Chopra's Deewaar (1975) and Manmohan Desai's Amar Akbar Anthony (1977) defined the 1970s; and Mani Ratnam's Roja (1992) and Bombay (1995), K. Balachander and Bharathiraja reshaped Tamil cinema. Women directors including Sai Paranjpye (Sparsh, 1980), Aparna Sen (36 Chowringhee Lane, 1981) and Mira Nair (Salaam Bombay!, 1988) widened who made Indian cinema.

Indian film studies asks how cinema imagines the nation and the groups within it. Madhava Prasad's Ideology of the Hindi Film (1998) read the popular Hindi film of the post-Independence decades as a "feudal family romance", in which the patriarchal family and traditional authority are affirmed even as modern individual desire is staged. Ashish Rajadhyaksha's essay on the "Bollywoodization" of Indian cinema (2003) distinguished the globalised culture industry called Bollywood from the older Indian cinema. Ravi Vasudevan's The Melodramatic Public (2010) examined melodrama and the frontal, iconic address of popular film. The nation appears in films such as Mother India (1957), with its mother-as-land; secular national unity in Amar Akbar Anthony (1977), with three brothers raised in three religions; and the diaspora in the 1990s romances, such as Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge (1995), that made the overseas Indian a guardian of tradition.

Region and language are central to identity in Indian cinema, which produces films in many languages. Tamil cinema and the Dravidian movement grew together: Parasakthi (1952), scripted by M. Karunanidhi, carried the movement's rhetoric, and M. G. Ramachandran's screen persona became the basis of a political career that M. S. S. Pandian analysed in The Image Trap (1992); in Telugu cinema, N. T. Rama Rao founded the Telugu Desam Party in 1982. Caste was addressed from Achhut Kanya (1936) and Ankur (1974) to a new wave of films by directors from marginalised communities, such as Nagraj Manjule's Fandry (2013) and Sairat (2016) in Marathi and Pa. Ranjith's Kaala (2018) in Tamil. Gender has been studied through the roles cinema offers women, the male gaze (Chapter 19) and the recent growth of films by and about women.

Indian popular cinema evolved through a sequence of dominant genres. The mythological (from Raja Harishchandra) and the devotional or saint film, such as Prabhat's Sant Tukaram (1936), came first; the stunt film, with Fearless Nadia in Hunterwali (1935), and the social film of the 1930s to 1950s followed, alongside historicals and the Muslim social. The 1970s brought the "masala" film, which blends action, romance, comedy, melodrama and songs in one programme, and the "angry young man" films written by Salim–Javed and starring Amitabh Bachchan, such as Zanjeer (1973) and Deewaar (1975). The 1990s turned to family romances and the diaspora, the 2000s to multiplex films for urban audiences. Against these stood the "non-commercial" streams: the parallel or art cinema of the New Wave, the "middle cinema" of Hrishikesh Mukherjee, Basu Chatterjee and Sai Paranjpye, the documentary of the Films Division (1948) and of independent film-makers such as Anand Patwardhan, and today's independent cinema.

The Hindi film song is the element that most distinguishes Indian popular cinema. Playback singing, with actors lip-syncing to a recorded voice, was introduced in Dhoop Chhaon (1935) at New Theatres, with music by R. C. Boral, and it created a separate stardom of singers, Lata Mangeshkar, Mohammed Rafi, Kishore Kumar, Asha Bhosle and Mukesh, beside that of composers such as Naushad, S. D. Burman, Shankar–Jaikishan, R. D. Burman and later A. R. Rahman, and lyricists such as Sahir Ludhianvi, Shailendra, Majrooh Sultanpuri and Gulzar. Songs carry narrative, express emotion that dialogue cannot, and circulate independently of the films. Their circulation has its own media history: when All India Radio under the Information and Broadcasting Minister B. V. Keskar restricted film songs in the early 1950s, listeners turned to Radio Ceylon, whose Binaca Geetmala (from 1952), presented by Ameen Sayani, became a national habit, and AIR responded with Vividh Bharati (1957). The cassette revolution of the 1980s, led by companies such as T-Series and studied by Peter Manuel in Cassette Culture (1993), decentralised music, and in 2023 "Naatu Naatu" from RRR won the Academy Award for Best Original Song.

Several changes around 2000 reorganised Indian cinema. The government granted film industry status in 1998, opening the way to bank and institutional finance and corporate production; the multiplex, beginning with PVR Anupam in Delhi in 1997, created audiences for urban, experimental and smaller films; digital projection and distribution replaced film prints; and Lagaan (2001) was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film. Regional cinemas grew in ambition and reach, Malayalam, Marathi and Tamil among them, and "pan-Indian" films made in one language and dubbed into many, such as Baahubali (2015, 2017) and RRR (2022), became national events. Streaming platforms, arriving in the mid-2010s, commissioned series and films and gave independent and women film-makers new outlets. International recognition followed: The Elephant Whisperers won the Academy Award for Best Documentary Short in 2023, and Payal Kapadia's All We Imagine as Light won the Grand Prix at Cannes in 2024.

Indian television can be analysed through several approaches, each asking a different question. Textual and semiotic analysis reads programmes' signs, codes and narratives; genre analysis studies forms such as the soap opera, the mythological serial, the reality show and the news debate; political-economy analysis studies ownership, advertising, ratings and the pressure of TRPs on content; cultural studies and reception analysis, often ethnographic, study how viewers make meaning at home; and feminist analysis studies the representation and address of women. Two landmark studies are Purnima Mankekar's Screening Culture, Viewing Politics (1999), an ethnography of how women viewers in Delhi watched Doordarshan serials, and Arvind Rajagopal's Politics after Television (2001), which examined the televised Ramayan and its relation to the politics of the period.