The 'Paradox' of Being Young in New Delhi : Urban Middle Class Youth Negotiations with Popular Indian Film

Abstract: This thesis attempts to understand the ways in which popular film is integrated into the everyday lives of urban middle class youth in India. Approaching the study of film through an audience reception approach, I engaged in participant observation and interviews during a fieldwork period in New Delhi in order to better understand how a young audience might negotiate the fantasy of filmic images into the reality of their own lives. The two movies, Salaam Namaste and Kabhi Alvida Naa Kehna (KANK), provided the platform for discussing sensitive or taboo topics in the interviews as well as in the larger public sphere. In portraying alternative lifestyles such as a pre-marital sexual live-in relationship in Salaam Namaste, and an extra-marital relationship in KANK, these movies presented a possibility for discussing as well as negotiating changing practices and attitudes concerning courtship and marriage in India. The concept of negotiation plays a key role in this interpretation and analysis of the challenges, or 'paradox', young people face while integrating a modern, global outlook with traditional, "Indian" morality. Imagination, I argue, thus provides the necessary tool for negotiating modern dilemmas incurred by processes of globalization.