Abstract
In the contemporary global landscape, cinema transcends its status as a mere instrument of entertainment to function as a hegemonic cultural apparatus that configures collective imaginaries, mediates dominant ideologies, and authorizes specific epistemologies of vision, identity, and truth. Within the Indian socio-political milieu—marked by entanglements of statecraft, religious nationalism, neoliberal capitalism, and entrenched social stratification—cinematic discourse emerges as a potent site where gendered, caste-inflected, and communal subjectivities are not only represented but actively produced, regulated, and naturalized. Here, filmic representations do not simply reflect societal norms; they operate performatively, reifying ideological constructs and participating in the ongoing (re)production of hierarchical power relations.
Through a close reading of selected cinematic texts across both mainstream and regional cinemas, this paper interrogates how the celluloid medium orchestrates a politics of visibility and erasure that sustains patriarchal, casteist, heteronormative, and communal logics under the guise of entertainment, nationalism, or cultural authenticity. It interrogates the gendered gaze and representational strategies that cast female, Dalit, and queer bodies as sites of containment, symbolic excess, or political silencing—thereby contributing to their epistemic marginalization within the national imaginary. Drawing on Althusser’s concept of ideological state apparatuses, Spivak’s theorization of epistemic violence, and Foucault’s notion of power/knowledge, the study interrogates how mainstream and regional cinematic texts participate in the disciplining of female, Dalit, and queer bodies—rendering them hyper-visible, fetishized, or entirely erased within dominant cultural imaginaries.
At the same time, the study engages with counter-cinematic impulses that fracture the monologic authority of dominant discourse, revealing fissures through which subaltern narratives assert agency and contest ideological fixities. By foregrounding cinema not merely as a cultural product but as a discursive battlefield, this paper argues that Indian cinema must be re-read as a site where power is aestheticized, resisted, and reconfigured—where the politics of seeing becomes inseparable from the politics of knowing and being. Ultimately, the paper calls for a re-theorization of cinematic spectatorship and authorship within the contemporary Indian mediascape, recognizing the celluloid as both an archive of epistemic violence and a terrain of critical intervention.
Keywords: Ideology, Violence, Power, Knowledge, Interpellation, mediascape, State