Global Bollywood

Bollywood movies and their signature song-and-dance spectacles are an aesthetic familiar to people around the world, and Bollywood music now provides the rhythm for ads marketing goods such as computers and a beat for remixes and underground bands. These musical numbers have inspired scenes in Western films such as Vanity Fair and Moulin Rouge. Global Bollywood shows how this currency in popular culture and among diasporic communities marks only the latest phase of the genre’s world travels. This interdisciplinary collection describes the many roots and routes of the Bollywood song-and-dance spectacle. Examining the reception of Bollywood music in places as diverse as Indonesia and Israel, the essays offer a stimulating redefinition of globalization, highlighting the cultural influence of Hindi film music from its origins early in the twentieth century to today. Contributors: Walter Armbrust, Oxford U; Anustup Basu, U of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign; Nilanjana Bhattacharjya, Colorado College; Edward K. Chan, Kennesaw State U; Bettina David, Hamburg U; Rajinder Dudrah, U of Manchester; Shanti Kumar, U of Texas, Austin; Monika Mehta, Binghamton U; Anna Morcom, Royal Holloway College; Ronie Parciack, Tel Aviv U; Biswarup Sen, U of Oregon; Sangita Shrestova; Richard Zumkhawala-Cook, Shippensburg U. Sangita Gopal is assistant professor of English at the University of Oregon. Sujata Moorti is professor of women’s and gender studies at Middlebury College.

From Bombay to Bollywood analyzes the transformation of the national film industry in Bombay into a transnational and multi-media cultural enterprise, which has come to be known as Bollywood. Combining ethnographic, institutional, and textual analyses, Aswin Punathambekar explores how relations between state institutions, the Indian diaspora, circuits of capital, and new media technologies and industries have reconfigured the Bombay-based industry’s geographic reach. Providing in-depth accounts of the workings of media companies and media professionals, Punathambekar has produced a timely analysis of how a media industry in the postcolonial world has come to claim the global as its scale of operations. Based on extensive field research in India and the U.S., this book offers empirically-rich and theoretically-informed analyses of how the imaginations and practices of industry professionals give shape to the media worlds we inhabit and engage with. Moving beyond a focus on a single medium, Punathambekar develops a comparative and integrated approach that examines four different but interrelated media industries--film, television, marketing, and digital media. Offering a path-breaking account of media convergence in a non-Western context, Punathambekar’s transnational approach to understanding the formation of Bollywood is an innovative intervention into current debates on media industries, production cultures, and cultural globalization.

The field of Bollywood studies has remained predominantly critical, theoretical and historical in focus. This book brings together qualitative and quantitative approaches to tackle empirical questions focusing on the relationship between soft power, hybridity, cinematic texts, and audiences. Adopting a critical-transcultural framework that examines the complex power relations that are manifested through globalized production and consumption practices, the book approaches the study of popular Hindi cinema from three broad perspectives: transcultural production contexts, content trends, and audiences. It firstly outlines the theoretical issues relevant to the spread of popular Indian cinema and emergence of India’s growing soft power. The book goes on to report on a series of quantitative studies that examine the patterns of geographical, cultural, political, infrastructural, and artistic power dynamics at work within the highest-grossing popular Hindi films over a 61-year period since independence. Finally, an additional set of studies are presented that quantitatively examine Indian and North American audience consumption practices. The book illuminates issues related to the actualization and maintenance of cinematic soft power dynamics, highlighting Bollywood’s increasing integration into and subsumption by globalized practices that are fundamentally altering India’s cinematic landscape and, thus, its unique soft power potential. It is of interest to academics working in Film Studies, Globalisation Studies, and International Relations.

This book is a collection of incisive articles on the interactions between Indian Popular Cinema and the political and cultural ideologies of a new post-Global India.

Applying postmodern concepts and locating postmodern motifs in key commercial Hindi films, this innovative study reveals how Indian cinema has changed in the 21st century.

This volume examines the transmission, reception, and reproduction of new cinematic styles, meanings, practices, and norms in early twenty-first-century Asia. Hong Kong and Bollywood offers new answers to the field of inter-Asian cultural studies, which has been energized by the trends towards transnationalism and translatability. It brings together a team of international scholars to capture the latest development in the film industries of Hong Kong and Mumbai, and to explore similar cross-cultural, political, and socioeconomic issues. It also explains how Hong Kong and Bollywood filmmakers have gone beyond the traditional focus on nationalism, urbanity and biculturalism to reposition themselves as new cultural forces in the pantheon of global cinema.

Using an interdisciplinary framework, this book offers a fresh perspective on the issues of diaspora culture and border crossings in the films, popular cultures, and media and entertainment industries from the popular Hindi cinema of India. It analyses and discusses a range of key contemporary films in detail, such as Veer Zaara, Jhoom Barabar Jhoom, and Dostana. The book uses the notion of travel analytically in and through the cinema to comment on films that have dealt with Indo-Pak border crossings, representations of diaspora, and gender and sexuality in new ways. It engages with common sense assumptions about everyday South Asian and diasporic South Asian cultures and representations as expressed in Bollywood cinema in order to look at these issues further. Moving towards an innovative exploration beyond the films, this book charts the circuits and routes of Bollywood as South Asian club cultures in the diaspora, and Hindi cinema entertainment shows around the world, as well as its impact on social media websites. Bollywood Travels is an original and thought provoking contribution to studies on Asian Culture and Society, Sociology, World Cinema, and Film, Media and Cultural Studies.