Indian Diaspora and Bollywood

Indian Diaspora and Bollywood

For diasporic Indians, the Bollywood movie experience was one way of going back, of revisiting, albeit briefly, the homeland that one has left behind. But after the 1990s owing primarily to the purchasing power and imaginative hunger of this very nostalgic diaspora, Bollywood registered a radical shift in both its form and content. Bollywood's visual culture became more global and cosmopolitan so as to attract audiences in the West. In the 1990s, the diaspora had become a market to reckon with, a territory for film distribution, whose earnings could supplement, if not rival, box office collections from India itself. The process of not only globalizing itself, but spreading images of India abroad and thereby Indianizing the globe is happening in unprecedented ways. From being the subaltern second cinema of the world, it is becoming the dominant second cinema of the world- may be not as dominant as Hollywood, but dominant nonetheless.

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An article by Makarand Paranjape.