Bollywood, the Indianmovie industry, has come a far way and made many popularity spikes over thelast centuries. Early amateur screen images have been transformed into a vast globaleconomic empire. Bollywood is classified as one of the largest movie industriesin the world and over the course of its growth India’s cinema powerhouses havemade progress in all areas, such as retail infrastructure, financing,marketing, and distribution of their films. With the growth of the brand “India”an extreme diaspora has overtaken the international market.
Globalizationhas many definitions, prominently, the movement of goods, capital, technology,and people across various borders. Whileexploring the globalization of film and the increasing interconnectedness ofIndian society in the modern world, we see a booming economy and in its waveboth positive and negative receptions of Indian ideologies and culture. As wecome across challenges and questions regarding global brand building, reachingforeign audiences, and acquisitions with international players, we can assumethat Bollywood’s share in the global movie market is budding and will requirean enormous amount of effort and funds to surpass the audience’s expectations. Todo this, India’s entertainment kingpins don’t purely aim to reach the billionSouth Asians at home, they tailor for export (Therwath). Bollywood hasutilized the audience’s power of an “India diaspora” to begin its growth as thebiggest global cinema industry. Indian diaspora continually exists in countrieslike The United States, the UK, Canada, and South Africa all representing anenormous market share for Indian films with NRI’s immigrating and settlingglobally. During the path towards global prominence various films and moviesgained traction internationally. There have been many changes during the 21stcentury when the title of an industry was acquired, after that Indian film hasdeveloped extensively.
One such change in the 1990’s that allowed interplaybetween the local, national, and global levels. In just under those few yearsthe industry became an organized business rather than an art form, producersbecame interested in creating corporate structures and individuals beganpouring money into cinema as ‘investments’. The government proposed to use Bollywood to shape up India as a ‘softpower’, believing that they had the capability of acquiring roughly fivepercent of the international market, initially starting from two. KishoreLulls, the CEO of Eros International, a U.K listed company, releases over 30new Bollywood films each year and truly believed that the governments targetcould be easily and effectively achieved. Secondly, in terms of funding andcapital, the industry kept receiving investors funds from abroad.
For example,film companies like Eros, India Film Company and UTV have raised almostmillions of pounds from recognized investors on the London Stock Exchange andwestern companies took advantage and grabbed a significant equity share. Interms of the tech boom, for many years’ numerous Indian producers have usedspecial effects technology and guidance from various different countries,particularly Hollywood. And lastly, India has made significant progress interms of casting. Hindi movies have more and more memorable stars now such asAmitabh Bachchan and Sharukh Khan, people who are now globally recognized, andnotable people working on international movies, particularly again inHollywood, whereas also more and more artists from abroad begin to work for theIndian movie industry.Bollywood whollydirects in film production in the Indian national language, which is Hindi.
LeadingBollywood to have the biggest market share in India, despite the fact that itisn’t where the highest production is located. This can be credited to theseemingly low and muted prices of tickets. “The Bollywood annual turnover wascalculated at 575 thousand dollars in 2005.
Contrary to Hollywood, in which thesame year won 23 million.” (Achland).Provided that the major of sales derived from the Indian market, where theticket’s price was low and the level of piracy notably high. So, the varianceof two incomes was not irrational. Bollywoodrepresented the 15% of India film production and justified the 40% of India’sincome, with an annual growth rate of 10 and 20%. Economic performance of Bollywood increasedrapidly.
In 2006, Bollywood was recognized from the investors as the mainindustry of development in India, which has overcome the first stage and hasbeen developing in order to become a future global power in the film industry. The revenues inglobal markets were skyrocketed. “Between 1998 and 2005, the revenues fromabroad cable and satellite broadcast were increased by 450% and in 2009, theyrepresented the 15% of the whole revenues.
” (Achland). Since 2010, Bollywood has become the biggest foreign exporter at theentertainment market of the USA and the most successful movies were beingviewed almost up to seventy-five cinemas in the USA. The proceeds ofthese movies can be compared to those of some of the Hollywood movies. Thereare Bollywood movies that have achieved a total gross margin higher than 50%than the international. Furthermore, the movies have gathered two to threetimes higher international revenues in comparison with national bestsellers. Overall Indian economic growth may haveslowed but the entertainment industry is in good health, contributing Rupees50,0000 crore to the economy, equating to 0.5% of GDP in 2013. The sectoralso supports 18.
8 lakh jobs. As the thegovernment began to make overseas entertainment earnings tax-free, media firmshave focused on foreign markets more than ever. India’s movie exports jumpedfrom $10 million a decade ago to $100 million last year, and may top $250million in 2020. That greatly surpasses Hollywood’s $6.7 billion in overseasprofits last year.
Attracted by a growing Indian middle class and a morewelcoming investment environment, foreign companies are flocking to Bollywood,funding films and musicians while helping India’s pop culture reach a wideraudience base. Multinationals like Sony and Universal have taken a new interestin Indian entertainment. Since New Delhi began to ease rules on foreigninvestment in 1991, such companies have set up shop in Mumbai, targeting bothdomestic and international markets. Indian entertainment executive Amit Khanna,playing off of the “Pax Britannica” of the British Raj, calls thespread of Indian pop culture a “Pax Indiana” an empire ofsong-and-dance dramas, Indi-pop songs and Hindi television soap operas (Johnson). With a moveinto global territory, the concept if Indian cinema as a ‘national third worldcinema’ has been both compromised and protested. This invites new labels suchas ‘Asian’, ‘global’, and ‘transnational’. These labels help broadenunderstanding of the changes that have taken place within the industry. Whenperceived as ‘third world cinema’ films are analyzed as instruments of socialchange and homogenizing all works.
On the other hand, when seen as ‘firstworld’ some argue that owing to its commercial studio base and Hollywood styleproductions it no longer can hold its old model. Following Rajadhyaksha’sconcept of ‘Bollywoodization’, he argues that “Bollywood’s world profile is suspect as itsimpact and presence in the West has been non-cinematic, or rather extra-cinematic.Bollywood’s marginal success as a recognizable world cinema is thereforeregarded as purely a by-product of marketing and political multi-culturalism,as the cinema fails to satisfy world cinema’s taste for high modernism,realism, genre, serious subjects and political engine.” This suggests thatBollywood can only push further boundaries if the west expands its restrictivecriteria of what is good and bad in world cinema. The most recent and arguably the most appropriate category used toexplore and analyze current manifestation is that of ‘transnational’ cinema.Popular Indian cinema has diffused and become infused with other culturesthrough a variety of ways.
Not only has it exposed itself through aestheticsand subject matters but also has promoted and filmed abroad in seemingly exoticforeign locations. Such as the sensation Race,filmed in South Africa or even SalaamNamaste, filmed in Australia. Despite fears of appropriation andethnocentrism, scholars have been investigating cross-cultural andinter-cultural play within these ‘transnational’ films. Transnational cinema”self-Orientalizes through an ‘auto ethnographic gaze’ consciously exploiting,eroticizing, parodying and critiquing both home and foreign culturalconventions. It has enabled Bollywood cinema not only to negotiate Indianidentity among multiple identities, but also to dismantle and re-mystify Indian-ness.” (Carriere).
Surprisingly,Western film reviewers seem to be the usual suspects contributing to the waveof negative feedback Bollywood has received over the years. The fact isconveyed that mainstream Bombay cinema had, up until the mid-1980s, remainedgenerally ignored, ridiculed or misunderstood by Western critics leading togoverning bodies within India making ‘defensive apologies’ on behalf of thecinema. As a consequence, Indian cinema’s recognition in the First World leavessomething still to be desired.
It has been argued that Indian cinema stands inopposition to the very things Western critics tend to value in cinematic worksof art: a carefully paced narrative, textual meaning, socio-politicalundertones; a commitment to originality; a gracefulness in execution; a genuineemotion; and spatial accuracy. There have been counter arguments that thecinema solely asks the grown-up adult to engage in infantile displays ofemotion, to return to a naive sense of the world and to forget the real,logical or rational in favor of fantasy and imagination. It asks the spectatorto externalize emotions taking away one’s privacy, depth, and individuality.
It seems thatthese same negative attitudes are still festering, and additional scholars havetried to bring the same discussion to a more modern context. In discussing itsplace in the global age, the concept of world cinema is problematic forcontemporary Bollywood when considered from a Western critical perspective.Bollywood’s failure in the west is a result of its generic impurity. It lacksthe kind of defined genre which assist film understanding and typically help westernaudiences to appreciate foreign films. The cinema’s fundamental characteristicsare frequently and unavoidably devalued and evoke displeasure, particularly inthe West. By acknowledging these internal prejudices, we may be able toovercome them. It is necessary to comprehend these judgments in order to betteraccess and comprehend Bollywood, particularly in its newer more modern form (Wright). Althoughnegative attitudes towards Indian cinema exist, there is no doubt that thepopularity was to cease.
Hindi film retains what most believe to be a ‘cinemaof attraction’. The relationship between a performance sequence and a narrativeis loosely structured exemplifying that its roots were embedded in India, yetdrew influences from around the world. In the modernity of global flowsadvances in communication technologies and socialization help to carry all ofthe interesting and nuanced positivity that comes with Bollywood. Through itsintriguing song, dance, dress and more, the Bollywood film industry effortlesslydraws attention from viewers worldwide. The same cultural messages that havebeen understood by many in India also apply globally.
While some neighboring countries, such as SriLanka and Nepal share the dominant religion of Hinduism, other neighbors arepredominantly Islamic, such as Bangladesh, Pakistan, and Afghanistan. Theexpectancy of humble characteristics by these similar cultures makes Bollywoodmore appealing and acceptable. Indian communities in these non-native domainshave added to these countries’ culture, and have been able to broaden theircommunities’ film and musical options. It is not only Indian immigrants who areinterested in Bollywood. The minds of some people were not narrow, and thefilms and music have been able to entertain and intrigue a number of diverseindividuals. As Bollywood continuesto grow and prosper with the assistance of the diaspora of the brand “India” wecan see a transformative global economic empire emerge.
What began asentertainment intended for Indian audiences gradually flourished into aworldwide phenomenon. Although an enormous amount of effort and funds arerequired to surpass the audience’s expectations and prove opinionated criticswrong in the near future with a drive for growth and takeover, the country’sfilm industry will continue to play a larger part on the global cinematic map.
