Abstract This article focuses on responses to issues of sexual intimacy, community discourse and the viewing of Hindi films by young British‐Asians in London. Emerging from a twenty‐eight month study of youth audiences during which I conducted numerous in‐depth personal interviews with young viewers in London and Bombay, this article explores the ways in which some young British‐Asian viewers' sexual attitudes, values and behaviours are played out in public and private contexts. Whilst considering the ways in which these young viewers experience sex and sexuality in the contemporary arena, I specifically address questions about the personal significance of Hindi film sequences in the development of their understandings of ethnicity, sex and sexuality. Saliently, I will argue that the ways in which British‐Asian community discourses on sex and sexuality operate, while exaggerated or reinforced by certain Hindi films, are sometimes also undermined and challenged by the meanings that young people take away from their viewings of these films. Notes 1. A version of this article was presented under the title ‘Sex, Lies and Hindi Films: Young British‐Asian viewers discuss sex/uality on and off screen’ at a conference on ‘Sex, Sexuality and Relationships Education’ at the Institute of Education, University of London, on 29 May 2003. 2. Rachel CitationDwyer, for instance, writes about Indian popular culture, ‘I look at the audience's presence within the texts themselves, at how they are interpellated by these texts’ (Citation2000, p. 5) and Ashis Nandy (Citation1995, p. 205) implicitly assumes interpellation when arguing that ‘the basic principles of commercial cinema derive from the needs of Indians caught in the hinges of social change’. 3. In ‘Why the World Loves Hindi Movies’ IMDiversity.Com, 2003, reprinted from Himal, The South Asian Magazine, 1999. (http://www.imdiversity.com/villages/asian/Article_Detail.asp?Article_ID = 809) 4. Between September 2000 and April 2003. 5. Believing that the experiences and attitudes one may explore with regard to sexuality, religion and gender, when discussing these issues in a cinema queue or other public venue might be significantly different from those emerging during ‘private’ interviews, I carried out public interviews when doing observations at cinemas. I analysed these as ‘evidence’ of a different psychosocial kind to that emerging from the one‐to‐one interviews that make up the primary data in my study. 6. I employed a number of strategies for contacting respondents, including communicating with them initially through student unions, lecturers or teachers if they were at college or school, through friendship‐groups intermittently, via work colleagues or neighbours, by posting notices in local libraries, chemists, doctors' clinics and corner shops as well as on the internet‐movie‐database and other Hindi movie bulletin‐boards and via several local youth outreach organizations. I was inundated with requests from young people for me to interview them. 7. To ensure confidentiality, all interviewees' names have been altered throughout, although their pseudonyms are consistent with the region and religion of the originals. 8. Given the horrific sexual violence being perpetrated against Muslim men, women and children in Gujarat by organised groups of rightwing Hindus, just weeks prior to this interview, Manish's comments were disturbing and had more than a throwaway significance. 9. In the last three years, a number of articles discussing homosexuality, homosociality and representation in Indian films have been published. Some of the most interesting are those by R. Raj Rao (Citation2000); Gayatri Gopinath (Citation2000); Muraleedharan T. (Citation2002); and Shohini Ghosh (Citation2002). 10. When discussing Kuch Kuch Hota Hain, Nisha remarked, ‘I'm not a pretty little dream girl, not girlie. I like to think about things. So I understood [Kajol] in that film. Oh but she had to lose the basketball game before she married him. [Sadly] The girls lost in the end.’

INTIMATE DECEPTIONS

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Category	Quartile
CULTURAL STUDIES	4