Mother India - Miss India

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Cinema as a medium of mass culture and a medium with an enormously wide range in India is shaped by the culture in which it is embedded and, in turn, casts its shadows on the realities by which it is influenced. It is a platform for social criticism and for the construction, definition and negotiation of meanings and identities. With its widely circulated visuals it generates collective ideas of modernisation, westernisation, nationalism, ways of life, ideas of fashion and so on. This study aims at investigating notions of womanhood and their framing in popular post-Independence Hindi cinema. How has the 'ideal Indian woman' been defined and how have these conceptions changed (or not) over the last six decades since Indian Independence in 1947?