Human Rights Perspective and Public Awareness: The Medium of Hindi Films

Abstract

Everybody has the right to live equally and peacefully and human rights protect people and their basic
needs for this. But people can use their rights only if they possess certain degree of knowledge about it. Film
is the effective and powerful medium of communication. It can equally reach to all sections of the society
such as rich, poor, literate, illiterate. It can play an important role for public awareness about human rights.
The present paper aims at the study of Indian Hindi film till 1990, how it portrays human rights perspective
to its audience and provides effective education as well as how film is acting as a change agent for the
audience on the basis of human rights. This paper studies how effectively the medium of film is portraying
the issue of human rights and how it is disseminating the information and promoting awareness among the
public. The basic aim of this study is to find out how different genres of film deals with same content and
how their attempt for awareness or effectiveness is different from one another. It tries to analyze which
genre of film effectively disseminated information or awareness to the audience about human rights
perspective and how the film medium deals with every evil practices of society and portrays it. The content
analysis in qualitative methodology has been used in this study. This study is based on Hindi films which
were shown before 1990. It deals with how film acts as an effective medium for providing useful information
and education to its audience on human rights perspective