While Indian cinema has often been celebrated as a cinema of love and of the family, it has its own ways of showing desire. Filmmakers seek to avoid their films being cut by the Board of Certification, informally called the Censors, and they also want to reach the greatest possible audience by getting a general certificate of release, thereby allowing them to make a film that families can view together. Thus popular Indian cinema has developed ways of appealing to audiences by showing desire in its own particular manner.
While desires may be instincts they are also about culture, the greatest single resource for imagining desire is cinema, which is, after all, an industry of desire. The films pick up on existing cultural trends, as well as borrowing from all available sources, to create their own style. They draw on other cultural elements, including from literature and song, to create a new language of desire, in terms of language itself, visuals, music, gesture, situations, locations as well as showing who or what is desirable.
Hindi movies are most famous for their song and dance sequences and their melodramatic style. These are major resources for the depiction of desire, with the melodrama foregrounding emotions and articulating them in great detail, providing their own logic of networks of desire. Desire as part of romance and love is a key part of popular cinema and in Hindi cinema the heterosexual couple desire one another but the plot sets up obstacles, such as the family’s wishes for marriage, creating a wide variety of situations which extend the moments and expressions of desire.
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