Bollywood as a transnational Industry It is now a well-known fact that India has the world’s largest film industry with around 900 films a year produced in a number of languages. Further, the population of India now exceeds 1 billion and is second only to China. The audience for film in India is enormous with cinemas, free-to-air, cable and satellite TV providing programs. In this complex situation, it is therefore difficult to generalize. Nevertheless a few things can be observed. Bombay/Mumbai is the financial heart of film production in India. Its product, the Hindi Marsala film is the dominant film style. These films are very formulaic, depending on music, song and dance for much of their popularity. Sex and eroticism have largely been sublimated in highly symbolic scenes until recently. These films are popular in all linguistic areas of India, the cities and in the rural areas or suburban settings [India is still a largely rural nation with villages predominating]. The young comprise a significant section of the audience who ‘read’ the films closely. We look at this phenomenon in this tutorial.

Activities

• Find at least 5 websites devoted to Bollywood and comment on them briefly.

• From your perusal of the Internet identify 5 major contemporary male stars.

• What sort of masculine/feminine image do they project?

• Why are Bollywood movies becoming a transnational phenomenon in Asia and even in the West?

Reading Module 7 (Apr 10) 13 Bollywood: A Critical Genealogy. By V. Mishra: http://researchrepository.murdoch.edu.au/id/eprint/13269/