Viewing the West through Bollywood: A celluloid Occident in the making

Abstract

Since the 1990s, the popular film industry in India has succesfully renewed its popularity among the South Asian Diaspora and the globalised Indian middle class. Its recent films have undergone a thematic shift where the characters encounter the West in a variety of situations reached through travel and migration. The films sport a fantasy-like, rich look, trendy locations and designer clothes worn by young men and women. The present article locates the Hindi films in the realm of fast-changing contemporary India with its new market-friendly economy, a globalised and upwardly mobile middle class, a vast dispora that constantly searches for authentic Indian values, and a huge, exportable, techno-savvy workforce that thrives on growing western pop-dominated cultural forms such as Bhangra/Indi pop-music and Hinglish theatre. The search for authentic Indian values, however unintentionally, reveals the long-held images of the West and the eventual making of a cellulod Occident.