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multi-class) nature of the Hindi film industry. Yet this abundance still fails to make it onto the silver screen.50 Perhaps given that the film industry – be it in Mumbai, Los Angeles, or Hong Kong – is an industry privileging profits over prophets, we should be neither sur- prised nor sanguine about the ability of film to break free from present ideological shackles because of either commercial interests or Hindu nationalist commitments (which are now commingling as never before). While one need not close an essay with a happy ending, it is encouraging to report that one looks for signs of hope – and not in vain. Artistically rich, socially conscious, and humanistic films produced by the aforementioned Amir Khan continue to be box-office sensations. Rang De Basanti (Colour it Saffron, Rakeysh Omprakash Mehra, IN 2006), Taare Zamin Par (Stars on Earth, Amir Khan, IN 2007), Three Idiots (Rajkumar Hirani, IN 2009), and Dangal (Wrestling, Nitesh Tiwari, IN 2016) readily come to mind. Perhaps in re- sponse to the fantastic, hyper-modern, shiny (where-do-people-really-live-like-this?) Yash Raj films created at the turn of the century, subsequent films relish the au- thentic. One thinks of Gangs of Wasseypur (Anurag Kashyap, IN 2012) and its more realistic regional dialogue, disorienting postmodern narrative style, and evident breaking of sacrosanct Bollywood film convention. One also thinks of Queen (Vikas Bahl, IN 2014) and its cinéma vérité style. We pause here only to note a message on women’s agency strikingly different from that offered by Dilwale Dulhania Le Jay- enge a generation earlier.51 Then there is the ability to tackle edgier themes without resorting to juvenile stereotypes (like homosexuality in My Brother Nikhil (Onir, IN 2005). Such films entertain while managing to refrain from shallow moralizing; they challenge social norms while calling Indians to something better, drawing upon var- ious aspects of South Asian religio-cultural traditions to hold a mirror before Indian and global audiences. Critically, and none too late, they reflect the lives, artistry, and sheer impatience of India’s younger generations. Whether or not the industry heeds this videśi’s (foreigner’s) unbidden critique, at least this member of the audience – an unashamed, unreconstructed Hindi cine- phile – awaits the time when Hindi popular cinema comes closer to fulfilling its po- tential in an India (and a world) marked by ideological chauvinism, distrust, and cyn- icism. Bollywood films are, after all, notoriously long, and who can say where we are in this particular industry’s history? We might simply be at the “Interval”. The lights 50 The multi-religious nature of Hindi popular cinema is demonstrated by a collection of essays in Pinto 2011. 51 Note the transition from the ultimately conservative if adaptive social vision of Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge, where Simran places her fate in the hands of her beloved, ultimately to be freed to love him by her father, to Queen, where the jilted fiancée finds her own way to Paris for a honeymoon without a husband. Twenty years separate Simran’s and Rani’s excursions to Europe, but it is Rani who demonstrates agency. Dharma and the Religious Other in Hindi Popular Cinema | 99www.jrfm.eu 2020, 6/1, 73–102