The Globalization of Bollywood: An Ethnography of Non-Elite Audiences in India

There has been a growing Western interest in Bollywood, India's large film industry based in Mumbai. This article attempts to find the ways in which Indian identity is being shaped by the new globalizing Bollywood and how non-elite audiences from lower middle class and rural India are understanding these images. This ethnography reveal that the non-elite audiences find themselves increasingly distanced from the images that Indian cinema is constructing. The films are creating an elitism constituted by the brand logic of transnational capital which is redefining the meaning of the masses.

[1]  Jyotika Virdi.  The Cinematic ImagiNation: Indian Popular Films as Social History , 2003 .

[2]  T. Scrase.  Television, The Middle Classes and the Transformation of Cultural Identities in West Bengal, India , 2002 .

[3]  Ashish Rajadhyaksha,et al.  The 'Bollywoodization' of the Indian cinema: cultural nationalism in a global arena , 2003 .

[4]  A. Rajagopal.  Mediating modernity: Theorizing reception in a non-western society , 1996 .

[5]  Radhika Parameswaran.  Resuscitating Feminist Audience Studies: Revisiting the Politics of Representation and Resistance , 2007 .

[6]  Jigna Desai.  Beyond Bollywood: The Cultural Politics of South Asian Diasporic Film , 2003 .

[7]  S. Malhotra,et al.  Dreaming the Nation: Domestic dramas in Hindi films post-1990 , 2004 .

[8]  L. Srinivas.  The active audience: spectatorship, social relations and the experience of cinema in India , 2002 .

[9]  L. Gopalan.  Cinema of Interruptions: Action Genres in Contemporary Indian Cinema , 2002 .

[10]  V. Mishra.  Bollywood Cinema: Temples of Desire , 2001 .

[11]  Vamsee Juluri.  Global weds local , 1999 .

[12]  Sumita S. Chakravarty.  National Identity in Indian Popular Cinema, 1947-1987 , 1993 .

[13]  Ien Ang,et al.  Culture and Communication: Towards an Ethnographic Critique of Media Consumption in the Transnational Media System , 1990 .

[14]  Anjali Ram.  Framing the Feminine: Diasporic Readings of Gender in Popular Indian Cinema , 2002 .

[15]  S. Shukla.  India Abroad: Diasporic Cultures of Postwar America and England , 2003 .

[16]  Kishore Valicha.  The Moving Image: A Study of Indian Cinema , 1988 .

[17]  Panna Shah,et al.  The Indian Film. , 1981 .

[18]  T. Ramachandran,et al.  70 years of Indian cinema, 1913-1983 , 1985 .

[19]  Ashok Raj.  The curse of globalised culture: the fall of Indian cinema foretold , 2004 .

[20]  Wimal Dissanayake,et al.  Indian Popular Cinema: A Narrative of Cultural Change , 1998 .

[21]  Rachel E. Dwyer,et al.  Cinema India. The Visual Culture of the Hindi Film , 2002 .

[22]  Ellen Seiter.  Making distinctions in TV audience research: Case study of a troubling interview , 1990 .

[23]  Ira Bhaskar.  ALLEGORY, NATIONALISM AND CULTURAL CHANGE IN INDIAN CINEMA: SANT TUKARAM1 , 1998 .

[24]  M. Kraidy,et al.  Media ethnography: Local, global, or translocal? , 2003 .

[25]  R. Shome,et al.  Culture, communication, and the challenge of globalization , 2002 .

[26]  Steve Derné,et al.  The (limited) effect of cultural globalization in India: implications for culture theory , 2005 .

[27]  Fareed Kazmi,et al.  The politics of India's conventional cinema : imaging a universe, subverting a multiverse , 1999 .