DOI: 10.1177/09760911261501221 ISSN: 0976-0911

Violence as Spectacle: A Critical Interpretive Synthesis of Indian Cinema and the Social Construction of Aggression

Subhra Rajat Balabantaray
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This review offers a critical interpretive synthesis of scholarship on violence in Indian cinema, moving beyond content-cataloguing to explain how cinematic aggression is produced, aestheticised, commodified and legitimised within shifting political-economic conditions. Drawing on social learning theory ( Bandura, 1977

, Social learning theory ), cultivation theory ( Gerbner & Gross, 1976
, Journal of Communication, 26 , 2, 172–199), symbolic violence ( Bourdieu, 1991
, Language and symbolic power ), cultural hegemony ( Gramsci, 1971
, Selections from the prison notebooks ), representation theory ( Hall, 1997 , Representation: Cultural representations and signifying practices ) and moral panic theory ( Cohen, 1972 , Folk devils and moral panics: The creation of the mods and rockers ), the review integrates six decades of scholarship spanning the ‘angry young man’ period, post-liberalisation gangster cinema, the contemporary hyper-masculine blockbuster and the algorithmically curated over-the-top ecosystem. It argues that Indian cinematic violence functions not merely as reflective representation but as a socially constructed cultural institution that manufactures consent for particular arrangements of gender, caste, community and class power. At the same time, commercial incentives continuously reproduce it by rewarding affective intensity over narrative ambiguity. The review identifies significant methodological gaps in existing scholarship. These include an overreliance on textual and content analysis divorced from reception data, sparse longitudinal and cross-regional comparison, thin engagement with caste as an analytic category rather than a plot device and almost no empirical work on the algorithmic curation of violent content on Indian streaming platforms. The review closes by proposing an integrated conceptual model, the Cinematic Violence Institution model, which frames screen aggression as jointly produced by textual convention, industrial economics, regulatory architecture and audience interpretive labour, with implications for sociological theory and media policy.

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