There has been a renewed interest among academics across disciplines in the nature of “colonial knowledge” – various forms and bodies of knowledge such as histories, ethnographic accounts, maps, geographical studies, travel journals, etc. – that was produced by European colonisers about their colonised subjects and their land, language, culture, and other resources. This “knowledge production” was obviously an important part of the colonisers' attempt to achieve complete domination over their colonised subjects. The process of this knowledge-formation has come under critical scrutiny, beginning with Orientalism (1987), the influential work of Edward Said which opened up alternative points of entry into the complex phenomenon of colonial encounter. Among the various issues concerning the whole process of colonial knowledge production, the study of the role of native intellectuals in this activity assumes a special significance for two reasons: first, it is important to understand what kind of native and local knowledge and disciplinary protocols these intellectuals brought to the project. Second, this, in turn, will throw light on the subtle but significant power native intellectuals wielded in the European project of “knowledge production.”

There are two very different evaluations of the role played by the colonised subjects in the production of colonial knowledge:

Telugu Film industry, the second largest of its kind in India, celebrated its platinum jubilee recently. Conservative estimates indicate that the industry produces around 150 films a year. The corpus of Telugu films is therefore so large that it is hazardous to offer any generalizations about its trends and themes. The one aspect I wish to examine here is the forging of issues related to women in films, and the patterns that appear in the presentation/representation of these issues. I will quickly track here the trajectory of woman-centric films in Telugu and examine the ideological underpinnings of these film texts. This will enable us to determine the discursive shifts in the genre and note if these have made a qualitative difference to the perception and handling of women's issues. To plot this, I shall point to the dominant trends in each decade. Let me add that the analysis is by no means exhaustive; it only focuses on certain nodal issues at different points of time, in the evolution of women's film as a sub-genre in Telugu cinema.

Cinema has always been sensitive to the problems of women and given considerable space to women's issues. It is significant to note that the 30s witnessed the making of some reformist movies such as Mala Pilla (The Harijan Girl, 1938) and Malli Pelli (Remarriage,1939). Issues such as dowry, child marriage and widow marriage engaged the attention of the film makers through the 50s.

If there is one single revolution which has decisively impacted the lives of the largest number of people in the twentieth century, it is the explosion in the field of media, and its reach. There is not a single social group which is outside the influence of media; not a single issue that is not mediated by media. In fact media has erased several borders and facilitated trafficking of images across barriers. Media constructs and deconstructs identities, prescribes and proscribes values, makes and unmakes lifestyles, creates and destroys icons, and simply mediates every aspect of our life. Even remote geographic areas are influenced by advertising, newspapers, magazines, radio, television, music, films and other print and electronic media. The mediated images and messages construct the very fabric of everyday life, knowledge and frameworks of reality. Given this omnipotence and omnipresence of media, it is imperative that we examine the ramifications of this huge apparatus for all sections of people.

In the last two decades Media Studies has quite rightly and understandably become a popular discipline operating under the broad rubric of Cultural Studies and has provided the necessary critical analyses of the developments in media from a variety of perspectives. One of the major concerns of media critics has been “the gendered structures and relationships between human beings on the inside of media industries who control the resources, determine the images, words, and sounds that we consume” (Ross and Byerly: 1).