Bollywood's Popular Culture in the South Asian Diaspora

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Bollywood's Popular Culture in the South Asian Diaspora

The centre of the Indian movie industry is in the Indian city known as

Bombay, which has since been renamed Mumbai. Owing to the industrial

resemblance with the American movie city Hollywood, the Indian movie

industry came to be known as Bollywood. Bollywood is now an industry

of massive proportions, and far from simply producing cinema; it is

also closely interwoven with industries concerned with music, clothes,

magazines, DVDs, jewellery and cosmetics. Bollywood has become

popular culture, which is distributed worldwide and sells at a

phenomenal pace. The Bollywood film, far from its popularity being

isolated to India, has also found popularity amongst ‘Indians’ in Asia

(Indonesia, Singapore, Sri Lanka etc), countries where Indians were

originally sent as indentured labourers such as South Africa, Jamaica

and Mauritius, and increasingly with the growing group of Indians in

western countries, especially Great Britain, Australia, Canada and the

USA.

The Swedish anthropologist Hannerz describes these groups of people

descending from one source culture and living across the globe as a

global ecumenicity. The concept no longer refers to the biblical

diaspora in which the expulsion of the Jews determined the image. The

present notion of diaspora is detached from its religious meaning and

now refers to physically scattered but, but still culturally related

communities, who all form a specific global ecumenicity. (R

Gowricharn, Professor of multicultural cohesion and transnational

studies at the University of Tilburg, The Netherlands)

In this sense, communities of Indian ...

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for them This is why I believe the crossover films best encompass all

the attributes desired by the South Asian diaspora market – they

entwine two cultures seamlessly, creating a unique and individual

cinema that truly appears to reflect the emerging identity of the

South Asian diaspora.

Bibliogrpahy

Rajinder Dudrah : Vilayati Bollywood: popular Hindi cinema going and

diasporic south Asian identity in Birmingham (2002)

Jinga Desai : Beyond Bollywood: the cultural politics of the south

Asian diasporic film (2004)

K Moti Gokulsing & Wimal Dissanayake : Indian Popular Cimema: a

marrative of cultural change (1998)

Preben Kaarsholm : City Flicks: Indian cinema and the urban experience

(2004)

Manjunath Pendakur : Indian Popular Cinema: industry, ideology and

conciousness (2003)

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