This book offers a historical understanding of the Indian Audio-Visual media. It asserts that media is essential to the bourgeois domination of a system in which democracy normally does not work for the poor. Hence, in narrating the history of Indian cinema it simultaneously examines the histories of the Indian nation portrayed in this cinema. It is a well-known fact that cinema and its cousin television, comprise a media which is central to the self-perception of contemporary Indians. Indeed, it would not be wrong to say that the visual representations of social realities in this media shape popular mentality in a country with an old, influential and thriving film industry. In sum, being Indian today is often expressed in the idiom popularized by Hindi cinema and television and these idioms are what this book comments on.