Chapter 6: Sociocultural Impact of Media Representations of Gender and Power Dynamics: Insights from India

In the “Be a Man, Yaar!” All Stars Roundtable episode hosted by Nikhil Taneja, Indian writer and filmmaker Varun Grover observes:

Media is often cited as an influential cultural force across fields like sociology, communication studies, and gender studies. Media serves as a mirror to the gender relations in society while simultaneously modeling and negotiating the public narrative of identities, power dynamics, and social norms. Films and television series not only function as entertainment but also operate as vehicles of cultural dialogues through which individuals begin to construct how they perceive themselves in society. This chapter analyzes the depiction of gender and power dynamics in Indian media narratives, focusing on a comparison of mainstream Bollywood movies and Hindi web series on the popular OTT platform, Netflix.