The uncontested acceptance of Bollywood as the only available term for conceptualizing the Hindi film Industry in our times and the re-conceptualization of female sexuality in the films produced since the 1990s points towards a symbiotic relationship between the two cultural phenomena. This chapter will draw from the symptoms of the shifting paradigm of (female) sexuality, trying to understand the changed/changing symptoms not only as a dimension of performance, but, also in a larger sense, as a set of relations between the elements internal to the script as well as those which constitute its field: its audiences, its socio-economic structure and its ideological milieu. Approached from this angle, the gender matrix of ‘Bollywood’ may well offer insights into the changing modalities of Indian national identity and a redefinition of what may be termed the Indo-feminine in a global cultural context.

Bollywood: A Derivative Discourse

The best starting point for such a discussion is the highly contested terrain of ‘Bollywood,’ which has been copiously analyzed by Madhava Prasad and Vijay Mishra among others. According to Prasad in his article ‘This thing called Bollywood,’ ‘Bollywood’ has a commodious control specifically as it has an indeterminate (‘ill-defined’) purview, demonstrating a somewhat unbiased incorporation of all the existing models of the Bombay film industry, from the regressive, the popular to the ideological model.