Consumer citizens and troubling desires: Reading Hindi cinema in Pakistan
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This discussion draws upon interviews with Pakistani viewers of Hindi cinema and locates them within a context of a declining film industry in Pakistan. I examine the reception of Hindi films among Pakistani audiences, and explore the ways in which their cinematic narratives help infuse western influences with local traditions. In so doing, they also help produce forms of dress, music and lifestyles that have much to say about the fluidity of cultural forms in local contexts in Pakistan, a country that continues to be a land of contrasts. On the one hand, there is the jihadi culture and support for Osama bin Laden, and on the other, a local production of modernity influenced by consumerism, redefined sexuality and Shah Rukh Khan. I argue that Hindi films target potential consumers and create desires that trouble as much as they entice. Through a montage of cinematic narrative, cosmopolitan lifestyles, dazzling wardrobes and distilled glamour, Pakistanis participate in consumption patterns emerging in the country. At the same time, sexuality is in a state of flux. While conservative forces are trying to regulate their mobility and sexuality, young people are challenging traditions and received norms. Such a process renders Hindi cinema an important yet, to some viewers, troubling component of public culture in Pakistan. The emerging public culture identifies complex and dynamic processes that allow for new types of possibilities and arrangements as the lives and agency of individuals interweave with shared cinematic texts and the social structures within which they are played out.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.013 | 0.008 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".