Hindi Popular Cinema – Reading of the Representative Register of India’s Pre-liberalization Social History and Its Prevalent Discourse Since Post-independence Period

This paper seeks to critically review extant literature and argue to show how the discursivity of the nation is amenable to the mainstream cinematic expression and thus privileging it to emerge as a veritable register of India’s popularly reclaimed social history as the excess that eludes and exceeds state authenticated symbolic representation of the nation under the auspices of the pre-liberalization postcolonial modernist state regime . At a post-modernist turn the collapse of totalizing meta-narratives of the state has generated interest to explore the relevance of popular narratives as representative temporal templates of nation and its discourse.