India is the largest producer and consumer of feature films in the world, far outstripping Hollywood in the number of movies released and tickets sold every year. Cinema quite simply dominates Indian popular culture, and has for many decades exerted an influence that extends from clothing trends to music tastes to everyday conversations, which are peppered with dialogue quotes. With "House Full", Lakshmi Srinivas takes readers deep into the moviegoing experience in India, showing us what it's actually like to line up for a hot ticket and see a movie in a jam-packed theater with more than a thousand seats. Building her account on countless trips to the cinema and hundreds of hours of conversation with film audiences, fans, and industry insiders, Srinivas brings the moviegoing experience to life, revealing a kind of audience that, far from passively consuming the images on the screen, is actively engaged with them. People talk, shout, whistle, cheer; others sing along, mimic, or dance; at times audiences even bring some of the ritual practices of Hindu worship into the cinema, propitiating the stars onscreen with incense and camphor. The picture Srinivas paints of Indian filmgoing is immersive, fascinating, and deeply empathetic, giving us an unprecedented understanding of the audience's lived experience – an aspect of Indian film studies that has been largely overlooked.
About the Author
Lakshmi Srinivas is associate professor of sociology at the University of Massachusetts, Boston.
Reviews
"Srinivas's originality starts with her fundamental insight that understanding film requires understanding every aspect of film: its distribution as well as its production, and, especially, the role of the audience in choosing, buying tickets for, sitting through, and reacting to movies. Srinivas makes clear that differences in film viewing make us aware that something we have taken for granted as a fixed, unchanging aspect of filmgoing is actually a variable quantity, whose variations shape specific film experiences for real people in various places and times. In so doing, she outlines a vast field of study of comparative film experience in different social and cultural circumstances. This is an excellent book" – Howard S. Becker, author of "What About Mozart? What About Murder?"
"This is urban ethnography at its best! Srinivas has immersed herself in the filmgoing activities of a large city, engaging at the same time with the film industry, the contemporary Indian urban class structure, the heterogeneity of a city's population, and the negotiations that occur between different social elements on a daily basis. Few books on the Indian cinema range so widely to pull together the observations and obligations of film stars, producers, distributors, theater managers, ushers, guards, moviegoers, film critics, fans, and the 'low-life' scalpers and hangers-on who congregate around Bangalore's dozens of cinemas. The detail of personal interaction that Srinivas offers is unparalleled and her breadth of reading on the film industry and grasp of pertinent theory is impressive" – Paul Hockings, editor, Visual Anthropology
"This book is a wonderful, nuanced portrait of one of the chief creators of popular Indian cinema: its audience of hundreds of millions. Srinivas's writing is as lively as the phenomena she so richly details" – Sudhir Kakar
"Drawing on over fifteen years of observation, employing innovative research methods, and collecting an exceptional breadth of data, Srinivas reveals provocative sociological lessons in mundane activities that most of us would miss, such as the ticket queue, or the mahurat ritual that marks the official start to filming. Her methodological and conceptual insights can be applied to any large city in India, not only those sites as linguistically and culturally diverse or as cosmopolitan as Bangalore, and they offer fruitful models for other scholars of urban India" – Sara Dickey, author of "Cinema and the Urban Poor in South India"
"In 'House Full', Srinivas provides us with a rich, insightful, and evocative ethnography of cinema audiences in India, in a time when the place and role of cinema in this hugely diverse and dynamic country is rapidly changing as a consequence of the globalization of the multiplex. Far from being an individualized, anonymous experience, as is the case predominantly in the West, the cinema experience in India is pictured by Srinivas as a deeply social, collective, and performative act" – Ien Ang, author of "Desperately Seeking the Audience"
