Faces of Indian Women in the Media: The Flawed Façade of "India Shining"
Open AccessImages of Bollywood actresses and depictions of rural Indian infants in the media have been intersecting and interacting with the "global" increasingly over the past decade. In a period of ostensible economic growth in India, the media is a window into the cultural productions and reproductions of this era. Both Bollywood and the American media run on a script that creates an invented image of an Indian woman that actually stands for the woman; one showing the glitz and glamour of Bollywood, while the other exhibits a village of "third world" indigents struggling for a proper quality of life. Bollywood and the American media are essentially doing the same thing--adhering to a script that paints Indian women in a rigid way. By limiting the images of Indian women, we rigidly define the categories associated with Indian "identity", "culture", and "woman". These incomplete images leave much to be desired. The incompleteness of these images manifests itself in two ways. On the one hand, the cosmopolitan, glitzy faces of Indian women in Bollywood film is exported by India for the world to see, and on the other hand, the American media disseminates images of "Third World" indigent people in their motherland as a spectacle to be consumed and judged by the American public.
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