The Magic of Bollywood: At Home and Abroad

Anjali Gera Roy

Jul 2012 · SAGE Publications India

About this ebook

Few would deny that the most significant weapon in India′s cultural and artistic armory is its avowedly commercial cinema, now known as Bollywood. This anthology aims to portray the "soft" power of Bollywood, which makes it a unique and powerful disseminator of Indian culture and values abroad. The essays in the book examine Bollywood′s popularity within and outside South Asia, focusing on its role in international relations and diplomacy.

In addition to contributions that directly engage with the notion of soft power, a number of essays in the volume testify to the attractiveness of Bollywood cinema for ethnically diverse groups across the world, probe the reasons for its appeal, and explore its audiences′ identification with cinematic narratives.

Established and emerging scholars in literature, theater, film, dance, music, media, cultural studies, and sociology from different parts of the world present their views from multidisciplinary perspectives based on case studies from Australia, New Zealand, the UK, Germany, Russia, the US, Senegal, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Indonesia and Canada, in addition to India.

About the author

Anjali Gera Roy is a Professor of English in the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences at the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Kharagpur, West Bengal, India. She has carried out extensive research on various aspects of Bollywood, as part of a Senior Research Fellowship of the Indo-Canadian Shastri Institute in 2007, as well as on Bollywood’s transnational flows at the Asia Research Institute National University of Singapore in 2008–2009.

She has published essays in literary, film, and cultural studies and has also authored and edited several books. She has co-edited with Nandi Bhatia a volume of essays, Partitioned Lives: Narratives of Home,

Displacement and Resettlement (2008), on the Indian Partition of 1947; and with Chua Beng Huat another volume Travels of Bollywood Cinema: From Bombay to LA (2012). Her book on Bhangra’s global flows, Bhangra Moves: From Ludhiana to London and Beyond was published in 2010.