BOLLYWOOD AS A SITE FOR CREATING COLLECTIVE MEMORY: A CASE STUDY OF SELECT MOVIES

Memory like history have and will always remain sites for discursive struggle wherein institutional mechanisms will continuously try to control and shape it. Throughout history, mass media has been one of major tools that various actors have used to shape the discursive struggle of history and memory simultaneously. Both of them serve as crucial sites of resistance for the disenfranchised groups. Mass media in the form of cinema has always been a crucial site for this discursive struggle for both memory and history. In the present-day visual culture, Television and cinema have emerged as major sources from where we get to know about glorious histories, past struggles, and triumphs. Be it biographical series or movies, fictionalized accounts of war memorialized into blockbuster movies, or state commissioned actualities/documentaries; the cinematic representation caters to collective re-imagination of past events and renders them into sites for shaping collective memory and thus identity. During WWII, both Hitler and Stalin used films as tools for propaganda as this medium has potential to shape one's understanding of history. State and non- state actors throughout history have used cinema to establish, reinforce and even mold historical events into hyper-emotionalized audio-visual texts, which over a period naturalizes or blurs the lines between real and represented history. This paper will focus on how content and transmission of popular memory via cinema in India takes place. The focus will be on how mass media in the shape of cinema reinforce the existing mnemonic hegemony, which in turn shapes collective identities and pasts of the public. Engaging with political economy the paper will further examine how economic conditions shape popular memory simultaneously leading to erasure of certain histories. The concept is to investigate how social, economic, and political circumstances indirectly encourage and exclude specific narratives in order to sustain dominant power dynamics in collective recollection across different races, classes, and genders through the medium of cinema. The premise is to not only understand mass media content act as an agency to the production and sustaining of memory but also highlight the various factors behind this materialist approach of memory leading to erasure and disenfranchisement of other histories and memories. This involves interrogating the ownership, production, and consumption of memories propagated through television and cinema in India.