82 SOCIAL SCIENTIST border when protecting themselves in the global arena but at the expense of collapsing culturally different groups within a specific nation. In the course of this paper I have tried to examine the two pronged process of homogenisation in mainstream Indian cinema. Fundamentalist forces at home erase spaces of difference and possible interventions and construct a monolithic representation of gender and nation. The process of globalisation simplifies image making, isolating it from a historical or social context. The big boom of 'Hollywood' cinema threatens to obliviate alternate images and representations. But the effort to continually find spaces and intervene with a difference is a survival strategy which works - and the effort is ongoing. REFERENCES 1. Bhabha Homi K, "Dissemination: time, narrative and the margins of the nation", Nation and Narration, Bhabha ed., London, Routledge, 1990. 2. Ghosh Bishnupriya and Brinda Bose ed., Interventions: Feminist Dialogues on Third World Women's Literature and Film, New York, Garland, 1997. 3. Gopalan, Lalitha, "Avenging Women in Indian Cinema" Screen, 38:1 Spring 1997. 4. Grewal Inderpal and Caren Kaplan eds., Scattered hegemonies: Postmodernity and Translational Feminist Practices, Minneapolis, 1994. 5. Mohanty Chandra Talpade, "Under Western Eyes, Feminist Scholarship and Colonial Discourses", Colonial Discourse and Postcolonial Theory: A Reader, ed., Patrick Williams and Laura Chrisman, New York, Columbia, 1994. 6. Parmar Pratibha, "New Queer Cinema" Sight and Sound, 2.5, Spring, 1992.