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The street environment in an Indian city is a dense saturation of images that emerge from a haze of dust and heat. The most dominant imagery is that derived from the vastly powerful entertainment cinema industry; India being the largest producer of feature films in the world. However, this aspect of contemporary visual culture is dismissed for the most part by scholarly and artistic communities, in both India and the West, as more of the urban trash that obliterates India's artistic heritage. In this paper I propose reading this profusion of culturally hybrid, visually spectacular images as constructing an alternative or magical reality outside the cinema theater and on the street. This interpretation is supported and extended by considering context-specific theories of gazing, or, the particular relations between viewers and viewed in this culture.
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