Indian Art Cinema and its Cultural Elites (South Asian Screen Studies)

Repositioning Indian art cinema as a genre that articulated an elite, middle-class social imaginary, Indian Art Cinema and its Cultural Elites examines the form’s contentious position within Indian society, at once exclusionary in its outlook and yet instrumental in bringing Indian film into global prominence in the latter half of the twentieth century.Drawing on Bourdieu’s theory of cultural production, Jyotika Virdi looks at how a closed producer-critic-consumer circuit reinforced class distinction through a presumption of superior taste.She traces the trajectory of art cinema in India from the 1950s, when new institutions under Nehru’s socialist ideals catalysed its emergence, through the New Wave movement of the 1970s and 1980s, and finally to its gradual decline in the 1990s as economic liberalization once again transformed the social landscape.By examining films like The Apu Trilogy (1955-1959) and Godam (Warehouse) (1973), she showcases the complex contradictions of the middle c