Bollywood and Globalization

Rini Bhattacharya Mehta is Visiting Assistant Professor of Comparative and World Literature at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. She has published articles on the politics of religion in nineteenth and early twentieth century Bengal and is currently working on an anthology of South Asian literature; a manuscript on nineteenth century Indian nationalism’s revisiting of the Indian past; and a co-edited volume on Partition.Rajeshwari V. Pandharipande is Professor of Linguistics, Religion, and Comparative Literature at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, and has written several books, including a collection of her original Hindi poems and more than sixty research articles and chapters.

• Acknowledgements; Notes on Contributors; Bollywood, Nation, Diaspora: An Incomplete Introduction to Indian Cinema in the Era of Globalization; Sentimental Symptoms; Is Everybody Saying ‘Shava Shava’ To Bollywood Bhangra?; Bollywood Babes; Globalization and the Cultural Imaginary; Rang de Basanti; Between Yaars; Imagining the Past in the Present; ‘It's All About Loving Your Parents’; Select Bibliography

‘As the [book suggests], “global Bollywood” has become an important site for assessing (and projecting notions of) complex changes taking place in Indian society since the early 1990s. And like the phenomenon itself, the perspectives on offer are as often perplexing as illuminating. The signifiers of globalization—the corporatization of culture, the ubiquity of consumption, the mediatization of everyday life, the technologization of the economy—have found in Bollywood their prime symbolic real estate, and herein lies both its relevance and its attraction for the foreseeable future.’ —Sumita S. Chakravarty in ‘TOPIA: Canadian Journal of Cultural Studies’