D Ashish Rajadhyaksha 3. That this melodrama not only provided the most propitious space for handling the realist initiative, but in doing so it also crucially revitalized the star system. 4. That this mutation has its ancestry in the way cinema assimilated the cultural debates surrounding Swadeshi indigenism—so that earlier, if certain images 57 or symbols were more Indian than others, then after the mid-1940s the cultural valuation gravitated towards certain images and symbols being designated more realistic than others. The chronicle of this shift is a chronicle of the rise of an influential sector of mercantile capital—S.K. Patil's exacting financiers and calculating distributors—but it is more than that. It actually enacts a major struggle for cultural legitimation between different contending forces, within the overall nationalist umbrella. And, as I hope to show, the story is less about who won and who lost, though some forces clearly did win; it is about the extraordinarily influential narrative that emerged, just before and then after independence—with the commercial Indian cinema. The 'combination of art, industry and showmanship' (in the words of the S.K. Patil Committee) has, ever since it was established as an industry, provided one of the most influential technological paradigms for replaying the narratives of social processes in general. In the collective viewing experience, a pre-programmed and rigidly diachronic structure presents the experience of seeing through a set of synchronic 'present-continuous' sequences, which in turn set up a series of further paradigms. There is, to start with, the technology, figureheaded from the cinema's early years by the camera, i.e. by a virtually autonomous ability to define a realism of perception. Bringing to a culmination, on the one side, the verisimilitude of the camera obscura, the camera's famed objectivity, and its privileged visual image, incorporates what Eisenstein labels its two aspects of the 'depictive', i.e. the familiar and the recognizable aspects/symbols of reality, and the 'denotative', i.e. the less cognitive and more culturally determined idea of a rational historicity or its inverse, the iconography of 'the traditional'. Grounded thus, the 'objective' filmic visual allows for a more freewheeling but extraordinarily effective political/cultural redeployment of its narrative subject. If mainstream Hollywood or the 'first cinema' of Femando Solanas/Octavio Gettino's famous manifesto designates the best known teleology for the narrative subject of cinema, then its corresponding subjectivity is inevitably one of the voyeur—the cinema becomes a 'spectacle aimed at a digesting object in which man is accepted 'only as a passive and consuming object'. In Solanas' own work, it is the camera as 'inexhaustible expropriator of image-weapons' and projector as 'gun that can shoot 24 frames a second' that, in classic technological-realist style, guarantees/underwrites/endorses its internal as well as viewing subject, who says 'I make the revolution, therefore I exist' (Solanas/Gettino 1969). There are numerous other examples of the various uses that have been found for cinema's classic grid of technology-realism-tradition. Numbers 25-26