Over the last few years, the Indian film industry has been at a peculiar crossroads. While the box office continues to be dominated by the hyper-masculine, action-spectacle cinema of the ₹1,000-crore club such as Jawan, Animal and Dhurandhar, a quieter but more structurally profound transformation is unfolding at the periphery. For decades, the Hindi film industry and its regional counterparts functioned as an institution propagating the cultural and political interests of the dominant social elites,…