The Politics of Hindi Cinema in the New Millennium

This book charts a new direction in scholarship on Indian cinema. It argues that with mainstream Hindi cinema becoming 'Bollywood' and the diaspora becoming a key commercial factor, the constituency addressed by the mainstream Hindi film has significantly changed. Consequently, the audience for Hindi cinema has become more asymmetric. With the emergence of a new knowledge economy in the 1990s and Indian professionals traveling and settling abroad, a new 'Anglophone Indian Nation', the one with the greatest spending power, was born. Where mainstream Hindi cinema had been regarded as a pariah by the Indian state, the commercial success of Bollywood globally gave it immense respectability in the government. This work expresses the hope that understanding such an asymmetry will help us appreciate some of the alignments in India and the political forces which often masquerade as 'opinion'. Apart from bringing out the transformation of the mainstream Hindi film after it became 'Bollywood', the book provides fresh insights into political developments in India in the past decade outside cinema.