SOCIAL GENRE IN SOUTH ASIAN CINEMA: STUDY OF PAKISTANI AND INDIAN FILM NARRATIVES

Abstract

Cinema is a unique instrument of media to be used for gaining political and cultural objectives. South Asian Cinema is considered to be the source of presenting societal change, political challenges, and evolving cultural identities through cinematic expression on big screen. This study is a comparative analysis based on genre theory, feminist film theory, and Gramscian cultural hegemony to investigate the development of the social genre in Pakistani and Indian cinema. The study assesses eight exemplar films using thematic and textual analysis: Arth (1982), Bombay (1995), Lagaan (2001), and 3 Idiots (2009) from India, and Khuda Kay Liye (2007), Bol (2011), Manto (2015), and Cake (2018) from Pakistan. The findings show that cultural restrictions during the Zia-ul-Haq administration caused a discontinuity in Pakistan's engagement with the social genre, which was followed by resurgence in the post-2000 era. On the other hand, during the same decades, Indian cinema continued to consistently produce socially conscious films. The analysis shows how cinema responds to various ideological frameworks while negotiating topics of gender, nationalism, religion, modernity, and state power in both situations. The study highlights that comparative research on South Asian social film shares cultural negotiations and regional differences that are missed by single-nation analysis. The focus of the study was socio-political discourse in content of Pakistan-India selected films. This study provides a pathway to explore cultural and political controversieries between film industry of Pakistan and India for critical studies in cinematic studies. This study is about the impact of cinematography on nations in shaping public opinions about diverse cultures.