The magic of boolywood at home and aboard

List of Tables ix List of Abbreviations xi Foreword by Ishtiaq Ahmed xiii Acknowledgments xvii CHAPTER 1 Anjali Gera Roy PART I Brand Bollywood and the New Bollywood Film CHAPTER 2 Mains

The Magic of Bollywood

Thank you for choosing a SAGE product! If you have any comment,

observation or feedback, I would like to personally hear from you

Please write to me at contactceo@sagepub.in

—Vivek Mehra, Managing Director and CEO, SAGE Publications India Pvt Ltd, New Delhi

Bulk Sales

SAGE India offers special discounts for purchase of books in bulk

We also make available special imprints and excerpts from our

books on demand

For orders and enquiries, write to us at

Marketing Department

SAGE Publications India Pvt Ltd

B1/I-1, Mohan Cooperative Industrial Area

Mathura Road, Post Bag 7

New Delhi 110044, India

E-mail us at marketing@sagepub.in

Get to know more about SAGE, be invited to SAGE events, get on

our mailing list Write today to marketing@sagepub.in

This book is also available as an e-book 

The Magic of Bollywood

at home and abroad

edited byanjali gera Roy

Copyright © Anjali Gera Roy, 2012

All rights reserved No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form

or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or

by any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

First published in 2012 by

SAGE Publications India Pvt Ltd

B1/I-1 Mohan Cooperative Industrial Area

Mathura Road, New Delhi 110 044, India

London EC1Y 1SP, United Kingdom

SAGE Publications Asia-Pacific Pte Ltd

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

The magic of Bollywood : at home and abroad / edited by Anjali Gera Roy.

p cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

1 Motion pictures—India 2 Motion picture industry—India 3 Motion pictures, Hindi I Roy, Anjali Gera.

PN1993.5.I8M325 791.430954—dc23 2012 2012007429

ISBN: 978-81-321-0732-3 (HB)

SAGE Production Team: Neelakshi Chakraborty, Puja Narula Nagpal

and Anju Saxena

Disclaimer: All images used in the cover of this book are for representative purpose only and

List of Tables ix List of Abbreviations xi Foreword by Ishtiaq Ahmed xiii Acknowledgments xvii

CHAPTER 1

Anjali Gera Roy

PART I Brand Bollywood and the New Bollywood Film

CHAPTER 2

Mainstream Hindi Cinema and Brand Bollywood:

CHAPTER 4

Bollywood and Soft Power: Content Trends

David J Schaefer and Kavita Karan

CHAPTER 5

A Regional Mosaic: Linguistic Diversity and India’s Film Trade 81

Sunitha Chitrapu

PART III Indian Films’ Traditional Markets: South Asia,

Southeast Asia, Africa, and Russia CHAPTER 6

“Dada Negativity” and Pakistani Characters in Bollywood Films 107

Kamal ud Din and Nukhbah Taj Langah

CHAPTER 7

Shahnaz Khan

CHAPTER 8

Bollywood Film Culture in Indonesia’s Mediascapes 144

Shuri Mariasih Gietty Tambunan

CHAPTER 9

Indian Films in the USSR and Russia: Past, Present, and Future 161

Elena Igorevna Doroshenko

CHAPTER 10

Indophilie and Bollywood’s Popularity in Senegal:

Gwenda Vander Steene

CHAPTER 11

“Bollywoodization” as (H)Indianization? Bangladesh Film

Zakir Hossain Raju

contents vii

PART IV New Territories: Bollywood in the West—

Australia, Canada, and Europe CHAPTER 12

From Tawa’if to Wife? Making Sense of Bollywood’s

Teresa Hubel

CHAPTER 13

Bollywood in da Club: Social Space in Toronto’s

Addressing the Nonresident: Soft Power, Bollywood, and

list of Tables

4.1 T-Tests Comparing Indigenous versus Exogenous Content

4A.3 Breakdown of the Respondents’ Demography 785.1 Indian States Market Size and Film Production 925.2 Persons of Indian Origin around the World

(Top 25 Countries—Reproduced from the Report

5.3 Indian Language Speakers in the United States 965.4 Share of Indian Films on British Charts (by Language) 975.5 Revenue Share of Indian Films on British Charts

5.6 Share of Indian Films on Malaysian Charts (by Language) 99

list of abbreviations

AICC Australia International Cultural Council

ASAAP Alliance for South Asian AIDS Prevention

Bt Bacillus thuringiensis

DFAT Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade

DDLJ Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge

GSDPs gross state domestic products

HAHK Hum Aapke Hain Koun !

IBEF India Brand Equity Foundation

ICCA Indian Council for Cultural Affairs

ICCR Indian Council for Cultural Relations

KANK Kabhi Alvida Naa Kehna

KKHH Kuch Kuch Hota Hai

KPMG Klynveld Peat Marwick Goerdeler

MIT Massachusetts Institute of Technology

NDA National Democratic Alliance

NBC nontraditional Bollywood consumers

REM Rapid Eye Movies

TPI Televisi Pendidikan Indonesia

Professor Anjali Gera Roy’s latest edited undertaking, The Magic of

Bollywood: At Home and Abroad, is a joy to read Not only does it bring

together a collection of very insightful and authoritative essays probing the multifarious reach and impact of Bollywood movies within and outside India, but it also sets the stage for a scholarly appreciation of the relationship between culture, politics, international relations, and the power games that such relationships entail

The core question most of the essays address is the following: “Is Bollywood an extension of India’s growing soft power?” The concept of

“soft power” was coined by the American political scientist Joseph Nye, who argued that states gain power over other states not only through coercion and temptation but also through attraction; the concept of power itself representing an unequal relationship—if A can make B do what A wants, then the former has power over the latter

Indeed, feature films provide entertainment and excitement to eager audiences Such stimulation unsurprisingly sets forth standards of good and bad, beauty and ugliness, friend and foe, patriotism and treachery,

as well as fashion and shape, and often times, in an imperceptible, subtle manner, the human mind Logically then, those attracted to such a dream world cannot but be under the spell of its soft power

So far so good, but the intriguing question to pose would be: “What does this soft power exuded by a national film industry translate into in terms of social relations within the so-called nation-state and between it and those states and societies exposed to its soft power?” British, French, Iranian, Swedish, and, I am sure, national film industries in Latin America and elsewhere, with which I am less familiar, reach out beyond their

national and regional domains Most certainly they acquire constituencies

of filmgoers that especially enjoy their mode of filmmaking A friend recently introduced me to the very sophisticated Iranian cinema that dares to probe themes that the Iranian theocracy considers anathematic

So does it mean that the soft power or attraction of Iranian cinema that

I do not want to resist makes me a victim or object of Iranian soft power traceable to the Iranian state? I do very much hope not

On the other hand, there is no denying that the United States’ power and influence in the world is augmented by Hollywood America, as the land of opportunities, freedom, democracy, and human rights, still holds immense attraction all over the world, and Hollywood films and film stars, directors, and script writers are admired and idolized far and wide They have played a very important part in enhancing and extending US soft power the world over I would not be surprised if the Americans were

to open their borders, millions of people from other parts of the world would try to get in and set up home

As a teenager, I flocked to Hollywood films showing in Lahore cinemas and would invariably side with the white man fighting the Red Indians

I now regret that response, but at that tender age I was in no position

to resist US soft power However, despite my opposition to American aggression on Vietnam and its one-sided support to Israel, I remained

an ardent consumer of Hollywood films merely because they excelled in entertainment and that must be granted to them notwithstanding US international politics

Simultaneously, I was a voracious consumer of Bollywood films and

remain so My addiction to Raj Kapoor’s Awaara (1951) was proverbial

I would have continued to go and watch it each time it would have been shown in Lahore, were it not for the 1965 India–Pakistan War that

resulted in a complete ban on Indian films Dilip Kumar’s Mela (1948),

Deedar (1951), and Sangdil (1952); Dilip–Raj Kapoor’s Andaz (1949);

Balraj Sahni’s Humlog (1951); Dev Anand’s Taxi Driver (1954); the great musical Baiju Bawra (1952); and several other such Bollywood

productions fascinated me to the point of obsession

I am not sure, if such fascination detracted from my Pakistani patriotism I saw good Pakistani films as well and enjoyed them thoroughly On the other hand, when General Zia ushered in Islamic fundamentalism, my appreciation of Indian secularism and pluralism increased without Bollywood playing any great part in that change of attitude

Bollywood films had been in great demand from the time India became independent Besides Pakistan, eager viewers have existed in the Soviet Union, Afghanistan, the Middle East and Turkey, and later in Bangladesh Western Europe and North America and now Southeast Asia are home to large Indian, Pakistani, and Bangladeshi diasporas Naturally, the market for Bollywood films is constantly expanding Simultaneously, India’s economic power is growing India is a nuclear power and maintains

a huge military complex that claims a large share of its gross national product (GDP) Indian leaders and nationalist intellectuals have been unabashedly expressing an ambition to be recognized and respected as not only a regional but also a global power

Where does Bollywood fit into this list of ambitions? The essays in this study do emphasize a linkage between the current state and global project and Bollywood’s potential to produce the soft power to make India realize its ambitions I have heard about India’s ancient links to Southeast Asia, particularly Cambodia, Laos, and Thailand as well as Indonesia, which established Hinduism and Hindu rule in the past Can Bollywood generate soft power in them based on religious affiliations?

I doubt that very much Some of the perceptive authors contributing to this study caution against reading too much into such Bollywood soft power I tend to agree with them

In the years ahead, India’s role and stature in the world is most likely

to grow and, indeed, Bollywood will be part of that undertaking If India succeeds in becoming a democracy that is not only about free and fair elections, but is also genuinely pluralist and fair, and where poverty and social degradation have been eradicated, it is bound to earn the respect of the world Bollywood’s ability to generate the soft power needed to render such deep-going respect and admiration need not be overemphasized

On the other hand, I doubt that an aggressive or imperialist India will

be able to lure the world through the mystique of Bollywood Power is ultimately relational For A to exercise power, B is needed In other words,

A has power over B because B empowers A Some scholars distinguish between power and force When brute force becomes the means whereby the power wielder extracts compliance from others, then actually it is an indication of a decrease in power

US power has been declining ever since it began to wage unjust wars, one after another On the other hand, Hollywood films have continued

to improve in technique and quality and with the audiences remaining steadfast, but without US soft power being enhanced as a consequence

In other words, soft power should be further distinguished between genuine attraction, on the one hand, and deception and manipulation,

on the other The former is likely to be more enduring

In the years ahead, therefore, the growth of Indian power—hard and soft—will be a subject on which much ink will be spent There is no doubt that Bollywood will acquire more diversified and global audiences and its attraction will grow The soft power it will generate will be the subject of lively discussion and debate This timely study sensitizes us

to watch Bollywood’s impact on the world more closely and critically

Ishtiaq Ahmed

Professor Emeritus of Political Science, Stockholm University, SwedenHonorary Senior Fellow, Institute of South Asian Studies, National University of Singapore

This book is one of the outcomes of a collaborative research project

on “Bollywood’s Transnational Flows and Its Role in Promoting India Canada Relations” involving the Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur, and two institutions in Canada—the University of Western Ontario, London, and Huron University College, London

I will begin by thanking the Shastri Indo-Canadian Institute, Canada, for generously funding the project that facilitated my travels to Canada between 2008 and 2010 and enabled me to organize an international Seminar on Bollywood’s Soft Power in India in 2009 In particular, I would like to thank Sarmistha Roy, the then Director of the Shastri Institute for her support, and Prachi Kaul, who expertly took over from Sarmistha, ensuring the smooth flow of the project I would also like to thank all others at the Shastri Institute, particularly Anju Taneja and Meenakshi Malhotra, who facilitated the project in various ways

I would also like to thank the collaborators of the research project I owe a big thanks to Nandi Bhatia and Teresa Hubel for their intellectual contributions to the project through formal presentations at conferences, scholarly essays, and informal conversations and discussions at home and abroad In addition to the scholarship they brought to the project, I am indebted to both my Canadian collaborators for extending every possible support to me during my visits to Canada between 2008 and 2011 Nandi Bhatia not only invited me to present my findings in seminars and workshops she organized during this period, but also provided me

a home in Canada I would also like to thank Suresh Kumar Pillai, the Indian collaborator, for the creative touch that he brought to the research

as a filmmaker And finally, Suhail Abbasi, the unofficial collaborator,

for lending his support to this project in a number of ways, including designing all publicity and exhibition material.

Thanks are also due to many others in different parts of the world: to Lynne Alexandrova of the Marshal McLuhan Center for arranging several talks and exhibitions in Toronto, Canada; to Omme-Salma Rahemtullah for putting me in touch with a huge Bollywood community in Canada and outside; to Margaret Walton-Robertsfor arranging for a poster exhibition

on Bollywood’s Soft Power and to Doris Jakobsh for reasons she knows best; to Ato Quayson for filling me in on the contexts of Bollywood in Africa and May Joseph for the same in Tanzania; to Abrahim Khan and Chelva Kanaganayakan for their continued support to all my endeavors;

to Nicola Mooney and Satwinder Bains of the University of the Fraser Valley, Canada, for introducing me to Bollyscapes in Vancouver; to Chua Beng Huat for broadening my geographical and intellectual horizons and

to Ishtiaq Ahmed for helping me focus on home; and to the Bollywood fans worldwide who shared with me their love for Bollywood films and Bollywood film stars

It would not have been possible to extend the scope of the study beyond Canada, had scholars from different parts of the world not responded to my invitation to contribute essays covering Bollywood’s flows to regions other than Canada Thanks to them, the anthology has expanded to encompass five continents across which Bollywood has flowed since the 1930s to the present Finally, I would like to thank the anonymous reviewers of the manuscript for their feedback and constructive suggestions

C H A P T E R 1

Introduction

Anjali Gera Roy

MAd AbouT bollywood

“‘The people in Afghanistan will kill for a Hindi film They watch nothing but Hindi films ’ director Kabir Khan, who shot his ‘Kabul Express’ there, told IANS over phone from Mumbai” (Indo-Asian News

Service [IANS] 2010a) Hindi films “are hugely popular in Bangladesh

and locals can get their Bollywood fix on cable TV and through pirated copies which circulate widely” despite being officially banned since 1972 (Lim 2010) Speaking on behalf of the people of Myanmar, Aung San Suu Kyi admitted, “We all love to watch Hindi movies—Bollywood is better suited to Myanmar’s cultural sensitivities” (Jagan 2010) Despite their injunctions against screening Bollywood films, Nepal’s Maoists share

with its former royals an interest in Bollywood (IANS 2010b) Shahrukh

Khan and Katrina Kaif performed at the coronation of the Bhutan King Jigme Khesar Namgyel Wangchuck, who is a big fan of Bollywood films,

in 2008 (Shukla 2010) Sri Lankans are also huge fans of Hindi films

according to Lankan actor Jacqueline Fernandez (IANS 2010c).

Anecdotal evidence, rather than hard data, is often cited to prove that neither masses nor cineastes are immune to the magic of Hindi cinema, now popularly known as “Bollywood.”1 The term, whose origins have been traced to the coining of the phrase “Tollywood” in 1932 (Prasad 2003), entered common parlance in the 1990s and has gradually emerged

as an umbrella term to refer to the Mumbai-based Indian film industry despite the film industry and scholars objecting to its homogenizing strains and its suggestions of Indian cinema’s derivativeness Ashish Rajadhyaksha, the first to deconstruct the term in his essay, “The Bollywoodization of Hindi Cinema,” differentiated Indian cinema from the culture industry that he defined as Bollywood Arguing that the corporatization of the film industry following the liberalization of Indian economy had significantly altered the content, form, and address of the cinematic text, Rajadhayaksha demonstrated that it had engendered other Bollywood-centered cultural practices such as dance, music, fashion, lifestyle, and so on (ibid.) M Madhava Prasad, in his brief note “This Thing Called Bollywood,” further unpacked the term and viewed it as

an “empty signifier” that may be “applied to any sets of signifieds within the realm of Indian cinema” (ibid.) While agreeing that this cinema has produced a new genre of sorts that has brought the nonresident Indian (NRI) to the center of the picture and reflects the new emerging culture

of India oriented to consumer capitalism, Prasad argued that the linguistic change should be seen as “an index of social transformations” (ibid.) He concluded that if the formal transformation of Bollywood is viewed as

a set of relations in terms of elements internal to the text but also those that constitute its habitat, “‘Bollywood’ may well provide insights into the changing modalities of Indian national identity in a globalizing world” (ibid.) However, it was Vijay Mishra’s academic legitimation

of the term in his erudite analysis of Hindi cinema or Bombay cinema

in his book Bollywood Cinema: Temples of Desire that naturalized the

use of the term, encouraging its often unproblematic use in studies of

1 While the term “Bollywood” has been deconstructed by film scholars to produce diverse definitions, this book uses Bollywood as a shorthand for referring to Hindi commercial cinema Rajadhyaksha, for instance, uses the term as a temporal marker to refer to a new phase in the history of Indian cinema and includes in it the entire culture industry centered

on Hindi cinema (2003) Similarly, Madhava Prasad attempts to define Bollywood’s specific difference from Hindi cinema Others such as Mishra, Dudrah, and Kaur use it in a loose fashion to allude to Bombay cinema or Hindi commercial cinema in general (Mishra 2002; Dudrah 2006; Kaur and Sinha 2005).

Introduction 3

Hindi cinema that followed (Mishra 2002; Kaur and Sinha 2005; Dudrah 2006) While exhibiting a familiarity with the discourse centered on the label, the essays in this book use Bollywood as a shorthand for referring

to commercial Hindi cinema produced in Mumbai

While Hindi cinema’s old fans always swear by their favorite films and film stars, it has won new converts in its new Bollywood avatar

in previously uncharted territories among diverse ethnic groups from Australia and New Zealand to Japan, Europe, North and South America, and Canada (Hassam 2010; Rajadhyaksha 2003; Desai 2004; Brosius 2005; Khan 2009; Dudrah 2006; Kaur and Sinha 2005) The attractiveness of India’s disavowed commercial cinema to viewers across the world celebrated by the media as India’s soft power has forced the Indian state to finally grant grudging recognition to what has been one

of India’s biggest exports for decades By reviewing the magic of Hindi popular cinema, reinvented as Bollywood2 in the mid-1990s in dispersed sites within and outside South Asia, this book critically examines its claim

to be the instrument of India’s “soft power” by focusing on the following questions How far is the claim substantiated by actual cinematic exports and viewership through other media? How and when did India’s disavowed commercial cinema become elevated to the status of the ethno-cultural signifier of Indian national identity and come to be regarded as the vehicle for the articulation of the nationalist ideology? Who is attracted to this glitzy form of entertainment and why? Does the attractiveness of its images to certain people necessarily lead to acquiescence in its ideological framework? Can the soft power of Bollywood or other cultural practices function independent of hard power? Finally, how does soft power work?

SofT PowER, HARd PowER, And bollywood PowER

“Soft power,” a term coined by the political scientist Joseph Nye in his

book Bound to Lead: The Changing Nature of American Power (1990)

2 It must be pointed out that Bollywood is more than a diachronic shift in Hindi cinema serving as a signifier of a certain kind of film centralizing the NRI as the symbol of global consumerism that is addressed to a global audience In spite of Bollywood’s emergence as the dominant mode and style in the films produced since the mid-1990s, other films that address more local rural and urban concerns warn one against the conflation of Bollywood with Hindi or Indian cinema.

and developed later in Soft Power: The Means to Success in World Politics

(2004), is now naturalized in the terminology of international relations and diplomacy Nye (1990) argues that “power is the ability to alter the behaviour of others to get what you want, and there are three ways to do that: coercion (sticks), payments (carrots) and attraction (soft power).”

By soft power, he means “the ability to get what you want through attraction rather than through coercion” (ibid.) He contrasts soft power with hard power or ordering others to do what one wants and considers

“soft, co-optive power,” which is “less transferrable, less coercive, less tangible,” as important as hard command power (ibid.: 167) Agreeing that America has been viewed as the archetypal exponent of soft power, Nye (2005) asserts that the soft power of Asian nations such as Japan, India, and China is on the rise.3 At the Davos meet in 2006, it was Nye who pointed out that “Indian films with a sprawling audience across Asia, Middle East and Africa, are the cutting edge of the country’s soft power”4 (quoted in Diwakar [2006])

Since then, soft power has entered the jargon of Indian policymakers The Indian Minister of State Shashi Tharoor was the first to introduce the term “soft power” into the language of diplomacy and define it in relation

to Bollywood in his article “India’s Bollywood Power.”5 After looking into

3 Although “getting others to want what you want and soft power resources—cultural attraction, ideology and international relations” (Nye 1990: 167) is not new, soft power was first used to denote the “pull” of American popular cultural products—film, music, and fashions worldwide Unlike the other superpower in the Cold War era, America largely increased its impact over the rest of the world through the appeal of American ideas, values, and belief systems disseminated through American popular culture.

4 It was Nye himself who, pointing out that a “country’s soft power rests upon the attractiveness

of its culture, the appeal of its domestic political and social values, and the style and substance

of its foreign policies,” cited Bollywood as an example of India’s rising soft power (Nye 2005).

5 Allocating `750 million in the 2008–2009 budget to project soft power, P Chidambaram, India’s finance minister, acknowledged that “India’s music, literature, dance, art, cuisine and especially films are attracting huge interest around the world” and underlined the need to project “the ‘soft power’ of India” in “a sophisticated and subtle manner” (PTI 2009) But when the prime minister of India, Manmohan Singh, outlined a new role of Bollywood as an instrument of foreign policies while talking to Indian Administrative Services

probationers in 2008, Bollywood truly received the official stamp of recognition (Indian

Express, June 11, 2008) The increasing importance placed on culture as an instrument of

foreign policy is also reflected in statements such as those made by the Indian Council for Cultural Relations (ICCR) Director General Virendra Gupta: “The new overseas centres fall within the matrix of our overall foreign policy in which soft power (culture) is a major component The expansion of cultural presence is one of the new goals of India’s foreign policy” (quoted in Chatterjee [2009]).

Introduction 5

several indicators to illustrate India’s global success, Tharoor maintained that “something much less tangible, but a good deal more valuable in the twenty-first century, may be more important than any of them: India’s

‘soft power’” (Tharoor 2008a) Stating that “Bollywood is bringing

its brand of glitzy entertainment not just to the Indian diaspora in the

US, UK or Canada, but around the globe, to the screens of Syrians and Senegalese alike,” he considered “the movies of Bollywood” as an example

of soft power (Tharoor 2009) Notwithstanding the persuasive rhetoric

of his statement about “the country that tells a better story” winning

in today’s world, Tharoor’s solutions have been criticized as quixotic for a number of reasons (Parameswaran 2010) In making a case for Bollywood power, Tharoor also appeared to reiterate exaggerated media claims about Bollywood’s global invasion that cannot be substantiated

by hard facts as they appear to be at sharp variance with actual figures

on cinematic exports

The fact that Indian films continue to enjoy nearly 95 percent share of the domestic market even after the liberalization of the Indian economy and Bollywood’s “contra flows” (Thussu 2007) has introduced a note

of disjuncture in the Hollywoodization theory But the initial euphoria about Bollywood’s global invasion has been toned down by sobering reminders of Indian cinematic exports constituting barely 10 percent of the total global market Although South Asian diasporas still form the major transnational market of Bollywood films, non–South Asian viewers’ increasing global interest in Bollywood films has raised the industry’s hopes about garnering a larger share of the global market by 2013, echoing filmmaker Shekhar Kapur’s reassuring optimism about Bollywood’s increasing influence6 (2008) However, neither the mainstream success

of crossover films nor the niche audience among alternative whites in small urban pockets has significantly altered the wider perception

of Bollywood films or of India in the West Therefore, Siddharth Roy Kapur, marketing and communications chief of UTV Software Communications, a leading Bollywood studio, expresses his doubts about whether “we can claim to be in the same league as Hollywood

6 The exports of Indian films to the West, which formed barely 10 percent of total film exports until 1962, jumped to 10 percent in the United States and 19 percent in the United Kingdom

in 1996–1997 and peaked at 20 percent and 31 percent, respectively by 2000 The rise in cinematic exports to the two nations could be attributed to the increase in South Asian migration but also to the increasing interest in Bollywood among non–South Asian audience.

on exploitation of our content amongst non South Asian audiences”

(The Age 2007)

bollywood AS An InSTRuMEnT of SofT PowER

Reservations about Bollywood’s re-signification as soft power also stem from the concept’s specific provenance in international relations and foreign policy that might be strategically deployed by nation-states and from absence of evidence of its conscious deployment by the Indian state

in this manner until recently.7 Although culture undoubtedly constitutes

an important element of soft power, commercial Hindi cinema has been historically marginalized to officially produced national cultures in the staging of national identity in India and abroad.8 Its elevation to the signifier of Indian ethno-cultural identity in the Indian diasporas is still greeted with cynicism by elite definers of Indian culture The prospect

of the “trashy,” commercial, mass cultural product as playing a key role

in diplomacy and international relations was not something that the postcolonial Indian state had anticipated But it was this cinema, rather than state-promoted art house cinema, that unwittingly became complicit

in the projection of the nationalist ideology.9

However, since commercial Indian cinema has historically functioned independent of state agendas and objectives, statist interventions in the promotion of commercial films have not been conclusively established The legal exports of Indian films in theaters in Ghana, Nigeria, Thailand, and Indonesia until the mid-1970s do not rule out formal or informal

7 According to Nye, power means “an ability to do things and control others, to get others

to do what they otherwise would not” (Nye 1990, 154) and “could be cultivated through relations with allies, economic assistance, and cultural exchanges” (ibid.) Soft power, Nye points out, is more effective because it is projected without a propagandist agenda.

8 However, images of actors Raj Kapoor and Nargis accompanying Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru during his visit to the USSR in 1960 suggest that cinematic exports to the West, the majority being directed to the USSR and Eastern Europe, might have been part of a relation-building exercise by the Indian state.

9 Export figures between the 1950s and 1960s confirm the worldwide presence of Hindi films including in the West But the state’s role in promoting their exports has not been examined

On the other hand, the support provided to the art house cinema of Satyajit Ray, Ritwik Ghatak, and others through the film festivals and the awards circuit appears to indicate the state’s leanings toward a certain kind of cinema in the staging of Indian culture overseas.

Introduction 7

political arrangements between these states and India that enabled the screening of Indian films in cinema halls and their virtual monopoly in these markets in the absence of a local industry and a Hollywood incursion (Warnk 2009; Khoo 2006) In markets such as Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Bangladesh where the state did attempt to protect its industry and citizens from Bollywood’s hegemonic or “corruptive” influence by banning its imports, citizens devised ingenious strategies to evade state regulation

by smuggling them.10

SofT PowER oR bRAnd bollywood

Although the official export of cinema by the postcolonial state in the 1950s and 1960s through theatrical screenings, participation in film festivals, and tours by film stars suggests its co-option by the postcolonial Indian state in propagating its ideologies, the Bollywood film industry appears to be less interested in controlling others than in maximizing profits While emphasizing its soft power, it must be remembered that Bollywood has made a considerable dent on the consciousness of millions

of people across the world through the market and in spite of the market Since “soft, co-optive power” is, by nature, “less transferrable, less coercive, less tangible,” Bollywood gets what it wants but not by consciously altering the behavior of others but by its ability to attract diverse audience across different continents

10 While the DVD boom sounded the end of the theater audience for Hindi films, it simultaneously signaled the possibilities for deregulating the state regime of licensing, import and export, and the entry of an unorganized market for videocassettes and DVDs including pirated ones, the largest being in Pakistan where latest Hindi films found their way within days of their release and were watched hidden from the gaze of the totalitarian state (Ahmad 1980) If the closure of the cinema halls detoxified a new generation of viewers through the pacifying effects of Hollywood, it also altered the class composition of the Bollywood audience as Bollywood viewing shifted from elite to working-class viewers in Thailand or Lagos with the videocassette and DVD transforming into a formidable unorganized sector for the sales and distribution of Hindi films While elite anglicized viewers now switched over to Hollywood style fare in the newly constructed multiplexes, the working classes acquired a penchant for Indian cinema through dubbed versions in Dari, Thai, Malay, Turkish, and Arabic New technologies and facilities effectively surmounted the linguistic barrier and informal distribution networks such as neighborhood grocery stores or DVD shops began to stock latest Bollywood films with the choice of both subtitling and dubbing

in multiple languages.

In emphasizing the role of culture in projecting a nation’s soft power, Nye and policymakers advocating Bollywood’s soft power have also tended to overlook both its limits and its appropriation by capitalist forces often with the complicity of producers Since both the cinematic and actor text are increasingly incorporated as products in a professionalized media and culture industry, political gestures as those made by Bollywood actors are either dismissed as tokenist and ineffectual

or as targeted at improving the film or the actor’s brand equity As film celebrities are equally appropriated in the consumerist industry and in public service and policy initiatives, there is a confusing confla- tion of ideological interpellation with soft power and brand management However, both converge on an amazingly portable actor and cinematic text lending itself to a variety of uses and abuses ranging from serving

as ideological instruments of the national, state, and regional powers

or of corporates

Although the film industry and the state have functioned indepen- dent of one another, the Hindi film’s implication in the ideological imperatives of the state at any given time makes their agendas intersect with one another, particularly at present when “the Indian state today

is ideologically close to mainstream cinema and that its social concerns are as asymmetrical as those of Bollywood” (Raghavendra 2010: 32)

bollywood’S MAny ATTRACTIonS

Considering that the state has begun to flex its soft power through Bollywood only recently, it is more important to investigate the source of Bollywood’s appeal Who finds Bollywood attractive and why? While its popularity within South Asia and among South Asians is a well-established fact now, new findings about its reach among ethnic groups from Armenia

to Nigeria and Uzbekistan, even in places without an Indian diasporic presence like Senegal, reveal that the Hindi film’s magic has silently been

at work for several decades (Larkin 2002; Tharoor 2009) But it is only lately that Bollywood has generated considerable global interest among filmmakers, musicians, and audience helping its crossover, which has been

facilitated by diaspora films such as Monsoon Wedding (2001), Bollywood

Hollywood (2002), and Bend It Like Beckham (2002) (Desai 2004) Not

only Bollywood films but a culture industry centered on it including

to the number of films exported and poor production quality, confirming the noneconomic value of cultural expressions Due to the unconventional dissemination media and exhibition spaces through which Bollywood films continue to invade the most remote localities across the world, official figures on their distribution and screening cannot be taken as reliable guides for the projection of their soft power.12 But the mismatch between Bollywood’s ubiquity and insignificant trade figures also substantiates cultural economists’ caveat about quantitative data being an imperfect mechanism for determining the symbolic value of a cultural product.13

While Indian cinematic exports have always been negligible in comparison

to Hollywood, Indian cinema has had an intrinsic social or even political value since its inception, not only to the Indian diasporas overseas but also other ethnic groups.14 Although the cinematic export to the

11 In every global city—London, New York, Sydney—South Asian youth congregate at Bollywood Nights to perform their unique identities accompanied by those of other ethnicities Not only is Bollywood dancing very popular in the United States, Canada, and Australia, but Bollywood-style weddings are also celebrated by white, black, and other couples just as Bollywood fashions have influenced global youth styles.

12 Ninety percent of the audience for Bollywood films in cinemas in the United Kingdom and the United States are still South Asians But non–South Asians’ familiarity with Bollywood films is probably through DVDs “Non-South Asians are not going to the theater (to see Bollywood films),” Raghu Sethi said “A lot of people check out the movies on DVD, but

if you go to a theater you rarely see a non-South Asian sitting there watching the film” (Jordan 2010).

13 As Sunitha Chitrapu points out in her essay in this book, Bollywood’s share of the global film trade is minuscule compared to that of Hollywood In order to assess Bollywood’s impact on

a global audience, it might help to look at its symbolic import rather than revenues earned.

14 As Vijay Mishra, Manas Ray, Vijay Devadas, and others have effectively revealed, cinematic images of India often served as the sole means of connecting with the homeland for Indian diasporas in the days when the world was less connected (Mishra 2002; Ray 2004; Devadas and Velayutham 2012) In the age of long-distance connectivity, Bollywood continues

to serve as the diasporas’ link with the homeland and has acquired the added burden of answering second- or third-generation South Asians’ need to connect with their roots (Mishra 2002; Ray 2004; Devadas and Velayutham 2012) Bollywood films are often used

by parents of Indian origin to transmit cultural knowledge to younger members in Indian diasporas But more recently, it is the younger generation that has taken a lead in using Bollywood for constructing diasporic identities and in introducing other ethnic groups to its magic (Dudrah 2006; Desai 2004).

West comprised only 10 percent of total film exports and only 100 films were exported to that region between 1956 and 1962, the recall of films like

Awaara (1951) and Jagte Raho in China, USSR, and Turkey proves that

notions of value are not related to revenues Similarly, the identification of non–South Asian groups with cultural values associated with Bollywood such as Hausa youth in Nigeria or Malay women in Southeast Asia shows that Bollywood’s symbolic impact is disproportionate to official exports or revenues (Larkin 2003) Prasad’s notion of ideologeme or “a conceptual

or belief system” of the binary modernity–tradition, which regulates thinking about modern Indian social formations, fits a large number of field notes from diverse regions reporting the inexplicable preference for Bollywood over Hollywood cinema in several parts of the world (1998) Brian Larkin’s astute analysis of the ideologeme offering Hausa youth

a form of modernity without the ideological baggage of “becoming western” can be extended to understand the identification of Muslim audiences in other Islamic societies such as Pakistan and Bangladesh with the conceptual or belief system projected through the Hindi film even

as they “disidentify” with its Hindu ideological underpinnings15 (Larkin 2002; Raju 2012) This “parallel modernity,” as Larkin defines it, of the Hindi film offers a multitude of viewers to subvert traditional oppressive structures through a version of modernity that is not synonymous with Westernization Viewers in Iran might wish to watch Bollywood films in the comfort of their homes, but their love for Hindi films, similar to Farsi films that are “family-oriented and full of romance,” accounts for the large market for the DVDs of Hindi films in Teheran (Sutar 2006) Ashish Rajadhyaksha’s (2003) location of the strange fascination for “Hindu family values” through which tradition is defined in opposition to Western individualism and appropriated in diasporic Indian techno-nostalgia in the wake of globalization is transferable to new Western converts to Hindi cinema Like diasporic Indians who find in the celebration of “Hindu family values” in the new Bollywood films an alternative to Western modernity, Western viewers’ techno-nostalgia often leads them to the

15 Larkin shows that Hausa viewers’ rejection of both Islamic Puritanism and Western modernity that they associate with the Hollywood films leads them to identify strongly with traditional family values portrayed in the Hindi film To these viewers, the tradition– modernity binary enables the retention of traditional Hausa values while aspiring to a form

of modernity that is not Western.

Introduction 11

exoticization of the romanticized representations of Indian traditions and values in the Hindi film.16 However, Euro-American “Bollymania” has disturbing orientalizing echoes in its fetishization of male and female Indian bodies, family values, and song and dance The new Bollywood films’ auto-exoticizing strategies pit them against aestheticized images of poverty produced by the West in a virtual war of representation

The predicted “summer of Bollywood” never really surfaced in America, belying media reports about “the Bollywood mania” and “the Bollywood moment” in the United States, but a slower influence of its

“fantastic” aesthetic is becoming visible in Western productions It is ironical that the “fantasy world” of Bollywood, which was denigrated for preventing the cinema’s evolution into the classic realist model should not only have transformed into the source of its appeal but also into a parallel aesthetic for cinema Rather than classic Hollywood films that articulate the realist aesthetic through their fidelity to photographic realism, the failure of this “not yet cinema” that parallels the nation’s uncompleted race to modernity turns to be its advantage as the simulacra comes to represent the cultural condition of postmodernity However, the convergence of the Western desire on Bollywood’s fantasy world requires its disengagement from its originary location, that is, Bombay, and transforms Bollywood into a “free-floating signifier” that might be

appropriated in British or North American productions such as Slumdog

Millionaire (2009) or Moulin Rouge (2001) For a large number of viewers,

Bollywood has come to signify a certain aesthetic, a style of filmmaking

or dancing that could be read in isolation from its Indian location or

in conjunction with other signs producing Indochic In either case, the portability of Bollywood that could be appropriated for a number of uses makes it possible for the Bollywood audience to enjoy the pleasures it offers while disidentifying with India

16 If Bollywood cinema in the 1950s served as the instrument for the propagation of Nehruvian model of socialist development, it becomes the site for the debate on the future

of the nation and national identity in the era of global capitalism Once again the nation’s engagement, oppositional or collaborative, with the dominant political structures occurs through cinematic texts The nation converges on the reconstructed premodern village and its traditional values to offset the crisis of identity brought by the advent of faceless globalization even as it seamlessly integrates into the commodity capitalism ushered in by the new globalized economy projecting an image of modernity that is comfortable with premodern family and community values

How SofT PowER woRkS

The Bombay bombings following peace initiatives by the Indian state

mirrored in Bollywood love stories such as Veer Zaara demonstrate that

soft power does not always work in predictable ways.17 It is also not quite clear how effectively the soft power of stakeholders in the industry might be used to make a difference in lived situations as soft power is impossible to quantify

Ranciere’s notion of “the distribution of the sensible” is particularly useful in defining the relationship between the political and the aesthetic practices Ranciere (2007) calls “the distribution of the sensible the system

of self-evident facts of sense perception that simultaneously discloses the existence of something in common and the delimitations that define the respective parts and positions within it” and which “establishes at one and the same time something common that is shared and exclusive parts.”18 Arguing that “artistic practices are ‘ways of doing and making’ that intervene in the general distribution of ways of doing and making

as well as in the relationships they maintain to modes of being and forms

of visibility,” he contradicts the Platonic denigration of mimesis with reference to theater, writing, and painting by showing that “a sensible politicity exists that is immediately attributed to the major forms of aesthetic distribution such as the theatre, the page, or the chorus” and concludes that “these ‘politics’ obey their own proper logic, and they offer their services in very different contexts and time periods” (Ranciere 2007) He also shows how “the ‘planarity’ of the surface of depicted signs, the form of egalitarian distribution of the sensible” stigmatized

by Plato, intervened as the principle behind an art’s “formal” revolution

at the same time as the principle behind the political redistribution of shared experience and that theatre and writing “are susceptible to being

17 While the blasts compelled the Indian state to resort to hard counterterrorism offensives, non-state actors affiliated themselves with global agendas to use the Bollywood film to de-demonize the Muslim terrorist In this case, Bollywood’s soft power targeted the misrepresentation of Muslims both at home and abroad, sometimes functioning in opposition to certain state actors.

18 By showing that “apportionment of parts and positions is based on a distribution of spaces, times, and forms of activity that determines the very manner in which something

in common lends itself to participation and in what way various individuals have a part in this distribution,” he provides a rational explanation for Plato’s exclusion of artisans from the shared or common elements of the community (Ranciere 2007).

Introduction 13

assigned to contradictory political paradigms” (ibid.) He pleads that “the question of the relationship between aesthetics and politics be raised at this level, the level of the sensible delimitation of what is common to the community, the forms of its visibility and of its organization” (ibid.: 25) and that “it is from this perspective that it is possible to reflect on artists’ political interventions” (ibid.: 25) It is at the level of the sensible delimitation of which is common to the community that artists’ political interventions become meaningful because artists’ particular position in social formations provides them a greater visibility and thereby power This contradicts the Platonian view of the artist’s preoccupation with other activities leaving him little time to participate in what is common

to the rest

Unlike South Indian film stars, Hindi film actors have, on the whole, failed to make a significant direct political intervention in matters of the state even when nominated by the state or elected However, they have emerged as powerful ethno-cultural signifiers in the new millennium competing with other state players in the contestation over the form of the state accentuating their ideological meanings Despite his aborted political career, Amitabh Bachchan’s dramatic gesture declining an honorary degree from an Australian university in protest against the plight of Indian students in Australia did a lot to bring media and official attention to the injured youngsters and their grieving parents, reinforcing the politicity of the aesthetic Similarly, the exposure of racial profiling through the allegedly random frisking of actor Shahrukh Khan at the Newark Airport in the summer of 2009 demonstrates that the sellers of dreams proscribed from Plato’s republic can indeed intervene in political matters Khan’s politicization of the situation that many decried and his controversial statement about the inclusion of Pakistani players in the Indian Premier League (IPL) that caused the fundamentalist Hindu

leadership in Mumbai to ban the screening of his film My Name Is Khan

hint at a politicity that is intrinsic to aesthetic practices

The controversy over the screening of Johar’s My Name Is Khan (2010)

foregrounds larger questions related to the form of the Indian state in the new millennium as the actor’s utterances acquire a symbolic significance

in reviewing the nation-state’s secular, democratic claims In spite of the sensationalism characterizing the news media in the present, the release of

a film making front-page headlines relegating more pressing matters like

the Maoist insurgency, terrorist attacks, and the Bacillus thuringiensis (Bt)

brinjal to the background is a relatively new phenomenon Like the Roja controversy that sparked off a heated debate on the pages of the Economic

and Political Weekly nearly a decade ago, the controversies surrounding My Name Is Khan became the converging point for discussions on the nature

of the secular, democratic state in the face of a rise in fundamentalism and terrorism It is another instance of the politicization of the aesthetic and

of a Hindi film actor’s utterance raising a heated debate on the form of the state The simple act of viewers flocking to watch the banned Johar film despite the Shiv Sena diktat proved that India’s secular credentials cannot be destroyed by regional parochialism For soft power functions not through direct intervention but indirect persuasion, and the aesthetic becomes the political through subversive acts rather than political

or military action

SofT PowER vERSuS HARd PowER

Finally, critics of soft power argue that soft power needs hard power

to be truly effective and attribute Bollywood’s new respectability to India’s increasing economic and military power John Lee (2010: 3), for instance, argues that India’s enormous “soft power” potential in Asia is based not on the growing popularity of Bollywood movies and Indian cuisine but on the fact that a rising India (unlike China) complements rather than challenges the preferred strategic, cultural, and normative regional order The US proposal to rope in Bollywood stars in domestic and international peace initiatives uncovered by WikiLeaks appears to take Nye’s suggestion too seriously failing to appreciate that soft power

“is not really a power source independent of hard power, but rather an instrument used to increase the impact of more coercive methods in foreign policy” (Parameswaran 2010) The attractiveness of the Bollywood film cannot be confused with acquiescence in its ability “to set the political agenda and determine the framework of debate in a way that shapes others’ preferences.” Belying utopian longings about culture as a means of transcending political difference underlying the Indo-Pakistani

peace initiative appropriately titled Aman ki Asha (Hope for Peace 2010) through cultural exchanges initiated by the Indian daily the Times of

India and the Pakistani Jang in 2010, the popularity of Indian films in

Introduction 15

Pakistan did not reduce hostilities across the border nor prevented terrorist attacks.19 Ironically, one of the stories that Mohammed Ajmal Kasab, the prime suspect in the Mumbai blasts of 2008, made up was about his arriving in Mumbai to chase his “Bollywood dreams.” Despite the craze for Bollywood films in Afghanistan noted by Tharoor, the US diplomat’s suggestion in March 2007 that Bollywood stars tour Afghanistan to help stabilize the war-ravaged country betrays an inability to understand the relationship between the attractiveness of cultural products and

acquiescence in their ideological underpinnings (IANS 2010a) Nye’s

realization that hard problems need hard power and that soft power needs

to be combined with hard power has, therefore, led to his coining the term

“smart power.”

Bollywood’s deployment in international relations and foreign policy would, therefore, need to be projected as smart power rather than soft power

THE MAny fACES of SofT PowER

Despite the acknowledgment of Bollywood’s soft power and anecdotal allusions, there is a relative absence of scholarly essays engaging specifically with the way it is projected Nye argues that soft power depends on

“intangible power resources such as culture, ideology and institutions” (1990: 156–157) Since one of the main forms that soft power assumes

is ideology, the focus on the ideological underpinnings of Indian cinema

by leading scholars of Bollywood cinema such as M Madhava Prasad, Sumita S Chakravarty, Ravi Vasudevan, and others may be particularly illuminating in the relationship between the ideology of Hindi cinema and its rising soft power (Prasad 1998; Chakravarty 1993; Vasudevan 2002) Film studies of the 1980s largely succeeded in redirecting attention to the political functions and uses of aesthetic and cultural forms by connecting

19 The reflection of India’s foreign policy in Pakistan in Bollywood films confirms the sneaking suspicion of their serving as instruments of foreign policy Their ambivalent relationship with Pakistan fluctuates between Pakistan bashing with the intensification of conflict and Pakistan loving when relations improve (Maini 2009).

their aesthetics with their politics.20 While Prasad, Vasudevan, and other film scholars focused largely on the interpellation of the national subject through the cinematic apparatus and address, their engagement with its transformation into the ethno-cultural signifier of the nation facilitated its emergence as the instrument through which Indian soft power could

be projected internationally (Prasad 1998; Vasudevan 2002)

The essays in this volume bring a variety of theoretical and empirical approaches to focus on Bollywood’s appeal to diverse ethnic groups dispersed across the world to address this shift A few of these (Raghavendra, Schaefer and Karan, Hassam, Athique, Chitrapu, Hubel, and Din and Langah) specifically engage with Nye’s notion of soft power while the rest unpack the “attractiveness” of Bollywood films by focusing on their content, audiences, uses, and gratifications Although

it has not been possible to include all the regions in which Bollywood films enjoy immense popularity, an attempt has been made to include case studies representative of both South Asian and non–South Asian regions, of Hindi films’ loyal fans and new Bollywood converts, places with an Indian diaspora, and those without, while factoring in variables

of ethnicity, gender, race, religion, and age

Claims or denials about Bollywood’s soft power unsupported by empirical data about the demand for Bollywood films and the composition

of the audience are difficult to substantiate To this end, Sunitha Chitrapu’s essay, which produces impressive figures to demonstrate that the jubilation over Bollywood’s globalization might be premature considering the low percentage of the revenues they earn overseas in comparison to an average Hollywood production, offers a timely caveat Chitrapu’s thesis about the economic power of the exporting nation and its film industry having a direct impact on their exports is corroborated

20 In particular, Madhava Prasad views Hindi cinema as “a cultural institution whose unique features can be related directly or indirectly to the specificity of the socio-political formation

of the Indian nation-state” and studies it as “an institution that is part of the continuing struggles within India over the form of the state” (1998) His Althusserian analyses of Hindi cinema through what he calls “the ideology of formal subsumption” draws on and opens the way for other political readings through which its co-option as an ideological state apparatus for the production of the nation and the national subject becomes visible The exposition of Hindi cinema’s appropriation and complicity in the production of the nation established the alliance of cultural practices and nationalist aspirations The identity

of the cultural artifact with the form of the nation-state highlighted by Prasad facilitates the conflation of the Bollywood film with the Indian nation-state in the global imaginary.

Introduction 17

by the belated awakening of the Indian film industry to the century-old cinema’s revenue-earning potential and of the Indian state to its strategic use in foreign policy that occurred after the post-globalization production

of India Shining.

An examination of the representational dynamics of soft power compels a fresh look at a cinematic genre with a transnational or global address produced through a strategic incorporation of global cinematic preferences Distinguishing the old Hindi film targeting the nation from the new Bollywood film that addresses the global Indian, M K Raghavendra defines Bollywood as a brand, which “is not the content

of cinema—as constituted by film narrative—but a certain kind of allure produced by a characteristic visual excess brought in by spectacle, choreography, costume, and music.” Raghavendra’s view of the emergence

of Bollywood as a global and local global brand that functions as a floating signifier” decoupled from its place of origin lends itself to a variety

“free-of appropriations from within and without

Borrowing Ritzer’s categories of the glocal and the grobal, Schaefer

and Karan argue that the increasingly “modern” component and the altered visual design of Bollywood films promoting a new imaginary

in films intended for global consumption indicates a shift toward a less

glocal, more grobal presentational style that threatens to erase indigenous

Indian content from Bollywood films They conclude that Hindi films’ shift toward a more global content in the post-liberalization era “reflects

a strongly hybridized Indo-Eastern/Western-global orientation, reflecting the industry’s efforts to globalize its content in order to appeal to wider global audiences.” Concurring with their view of Bollywood’s global orientation, Meena T Pillai examines a new kind of film that she defines

as B(H)ollywood and argues that “contemporary universalizing tendencies

of capital have forced it to address the deterritorialized and portable identities of ‘Indian’ audiences both outside and inside the boundaries

of the nation, leading to the dilution of its ‘nationalist’ ideology into a more anonymous ‘globalised’ process at work.”

Conceding that the notion of soft power is relatively new in inter- national discourse, Tharoor had pointed out that soft power does not

rest merely on the government actions (Tharoor 2008b: 86) Despite the

abysmally low cinematic exports of Bollywood films in comparison with Hollywood, their symbolic significance to a wide variety of audience to whom they “leak” through informal distribution networks cannot be

underestimated Cultural proximity, an important component in soft power, has been cited as the prime cause for their appeal to certain viewers Shahnaz Khan looks into the contentious issue of Pakistani audience’s identification with Bollywood themes and characters despite their anti-Muslim and anti-Pakistan messages and cites their Muslim subtext, cultural contiguity, and family values as the factors contributing to their popularity in Pakistan Through her ethnographic study of Pakistani audience, Khan reveals the complex process of “dis-identification in identification” as the Pakistani audience appropriate Bollywood’s brand

of consumerism consonant with traditional values as “our” culture in opposition to western modernity in a fashion similar to Larkin’s Hausa viewers The dis-identification in identification of Pakistani viewers is echoed in Indonesian Muslims’ response to specifically Hindu rituals in the essay by Gietty Tambunan

But Bollywood’s increasing appeal to a non–South Asian audience demonstrates that cultural difference could equally function as the source of its attractiveness Their convergence on Bollywood as exotica

is reminiscent of earlier orientalizing waves in Euro-American history Teresa Hubel examines the genre of courtesan film, which figures as

an absence in the West, with the objective of theorizing “how this distinctly Indian genre of film might be received by audiences outside

of India, in places such as Canada, where there is no cultural equivalent

to the courtesan and where her representation in subtitled DVD copies might therefore be inevitably exoticized.” Florian Krauss’ essay traces the history of Bollywood’s dissemination in Germany since the 1950s

to the present to argue that the circulation of Shahrukh Khan films produced by Karan Johar by a small Cologne-based company named Rapid Eye Movies working together with the television channel RTL

II since 2004 has produced a stereotype of Bollywood in Germany that displays strong orientalizing strains While the use of film celebrities’ endorsement in marketing products is a time-tested advertising strategy familiar to marketing professionals, Krauss’s essay provides a glimpse into the emerging research on Bollywood or the Bollywood actor as a brand that produces an idea of India in Germany The production of India as the exotic other in the West despite the similarities perceived with the other is also the theme of Elena Doroshenko’s piece on an under-researched region where the popularity of Indian films predates the Bollywood invasion Unlike Krauss who focuses on the post-2000 flows of

Introduction 19

Bollywood films, Doroshenko revisits the 1950s exports of Indian films to Russia to uncover the decline of a flourishing dubbing industry that translated Bollywood films for the Russian audience In looking at Indian films’ traditional market in Indonesia before its reappropriation of Bollywood as the new cool, Gietty Tambunan’s essay, like Doroshenko’s, situates the global flows of the present in the pre-global ones of the 1940s and 1950s

As Ashish Rajadhyaksha, Raminder Kaur, and others have pointed out, Brand Bollywood is not restricted to Bollywood films but has expanded to refer to the entire cultural industry centered on Bollywood that includes music, dance, ringtones, television soaps and reality shows, fashions, lifestyles, and even food (Rajadhyaksha 2003; Kaur and Sinha 2005; Dudrah 2006) The essays by Omme-Salma Rahemtullah, Teresa Hubel, Gietty Tambunan, Florian Krauss, and Gwenda Vander Steene examine the reach of the culture industry in places as far removed as Canada, Germany, and Senegal In drawing on postcolonial theory

to inquire “if the exotic shifted from its site of primary signification where its fetishistic functions are to disguise or displace—could also work as a vehicle for revealing, revisioning, and even for the purposes

of social justice,” Hubel takes up an embodied example of the

“decontextualized commodity” that Raghavendra speaks about Salma Rahemtullah’s examination of the Besharam party in Toronto city illumines a space in which second- and third-generation gendered South Asian identities are performed in relation to Bollywood dancing Drawing on Henri Lefebvre’s concept of space, Rahemtullah demonstrates the performance of alternative, elective identities and sexualities in a metropolitan Western space in which Bollywood dancing becomes the site for the interrogation of the nation space Gwenda Vander Steene travels to Senegal to investigate the role of Bollywood song and dance in the performance of Fulani and other Senegalese subjectivities Through revealing a Bollywood space in a region without a South Asian diaspora, Vander Steene’s essay breaks new grounds in disengaging Bollywood’s travels from South Asian migration In throwing light on the centrality

Omme-of Bollywood song, dance, and fashions on the alternative subjectivities performed by Indophiles in Senegal, Vander Steene’s essay confirms the pre-globalization travels of Bollywood films outside India while showing that Bollywood spectatorship is differentiated by class, gender, and ethnicity

Two essays in the volume turn to examine Bollywood’s efficacy as an instrument of soft power in foreign policy Kamal ud Din and Nukhbah Langah, focusing on the demonization or exoticization of the Muslim

as other, frame it within constructionist theories of Dada negativity and

conclude that the negative images of Pakistanis in Hindi films can actually bring positive results taking a rather charitable view of Bollywood’s soft power From the eastern side of the border, Zakir Hossain Raju traces three nationalist moments in the 40-year-old history of Bangladesh when anxieties about the “Hindiization” of the nation through consumption

of Hindi films led to protectionist policies by the state to demonstrate how Bollywood’s “soft power” reigns in Bangladesh through the (H)Indianization of the Bangladesh audience

The two essays by Andrew Hassam and Adrian Athique throw light on an unexplored angle of Bollywood’s diasporic economy by calling attention to the important role played by South Asian diasporas

in international relations and diplomacy Andrew Hassam, arguing that “Indian cinema has become a medium for international cultural diplomacy and images of Australia in Indian cinema are increasingly employed to attract Indian tourism, students, trade and investment,” demonstrates how the intervention of Bollywood star Amitabh Bachchan and the film fraternity following the racist attacks on Indian students in Australia actually forced the Australian state to initiate diplomatic moves Hassam considers

the contribution of South Asian Australians to cultural exchange between hostland and homeland, looking in particular at Bollywood internet forums in order to assess the role of South Asian Australians as “everyday ambassadors” of Australia rather than of India and the importance of Bollywood as a medium for this informal Australian cultural diplomacy

In an essay that complements as well as supplements those of Hassam and Rahemtullah in its exploration of the diasporic subject in the textual economy of the new Bollywood film, Adrian Athique illustrates “some of the competing claims that are being made upon non-resident Indians in various guises where the consumption of cinema is seen as indicative of

a confluence between ethnicity and cultural influence.” His situation of Bollywood in multiculturalism and globalization speaks to Rahemtullah’s critique of Canadian multiculturalism that compels South Asians to perform a unified Indianness; it also picks up Raghavendra’s point in its

In fact, the production of Brand Bollywood and its global visibility has made it available for the state to use it for diplomatic purposes

While being sensitive to the diplomatic provenance of soft power, the multidisciplinary essays in this book demonstrate the convergences as well as divergences between the attractiveness of Indian films, their brand marketing by a global cultural industry, smart power, and soft power

REfEREnCES

Ahmad, Faraz 1980 “Indian films: Invading Pakistan.” Times of India, October 26 http://

www.cscsarchive.org:8081/MediaArchive/art.nsf/(docid)/041F63091F301B566525694 0004E8848 (accessed on January 20, 2012).

Aman Ki Asha 2010 An Indo-Pak peace project launched by the newspapers the Times of India and the Jang http://www.amankiasha.com/ January 1, 2010 (accessed on February

8, 2010).

Brosius, Christiane 2005 “The scattered homelands of the migrant: Bollyworld through the

diasporic lens.” In Raminder Kaur and Ajay Sinha (eds), Bollyworld: Popular Indian Cinema

through a Transnational Lens (pp 207–238) New Delhi: SAGE Publications

Chakravarty, Sumita 1993 National Identity in Indian Popular Cinema: 1947–1987 Austin:

University of Texas Press

Chatterjee, Madhushree 2009 “India adding ‘cultural tone’ to foreign policy.” IGovernment

July 10, 2009 http://igovernment.in/site/India-adding-cultural-tone-to-foreign-policy (accessed on February 8, 2010).

Devadas, Vijay and Selvaraj Velayutham 2012 “Cinema in motion: Tracking Tamil cinema’s

assemblage.” In Anjali Gera Roy and Chua Beng Huat (eds), Travels of Bollywood Cinema:

From Bombay to LA (pp 164–182) Delhi: Oxford University Press.

Desai, Jigna 2004 Beyond Bollywood: The Cultural Politics of South Asian Diasporic Film New

York: Routledge.