Filmi vs the Everyday:Hindi films in the lives of women in an Indian village

This study examines the purpose and significance of contemporary Hindi films for women living in Narwal, a north Indian village near Kanpur city. Based on ethnographic fieldwork carried out over four months, interacting with more than 80 women aged 18-80 years, this thesis highlights the complexities of audiencehood for women living in rural India, where ‘rural’ is defined as ‘anything but urban’ and officially houses 69% of Indian population (Census, 2011). Observations, conversations and interviews were carried out in a variety of locations, in residents’ homes, local beauty parlours, schools and workplaces. Despite these women’s negligible viewership of films in cinema theatres, their limited viewership within their homes, and moral issues around women’s film consumption, films fulfil these women’s desires in real and/or imaginative spaces, with the term “filmi” connoting anything that is ‘other’ to village life in these women’s imaginations. The thesis argues that by engaging in creative cultural production, using multiple modes of filmic engagement, negotiating within their own households, and capitalising on ‘men looking away’, women are breaking the everyday rules that govern them. Their negotiations around their consumption of Hindi films indicate a slow but steady social transformation which is visible through, and enabled partly by, their dealings with Hindi cinema. Drawing on James Scott’s concept of ‘everyday resistance’ (1985) that, he argues, lies in the realm of the mundane, this study reveals that social change is evolving through a growing cluster of ‘hidden transcripts’ (Scott:1990) that women deploy in the context of their love for Hindi films. Through these, the powerful position of the village males gradually begins to be questioned, thereby challenging the status quo.