Travels of Bollywood Cinema From Bombay to LA

This book examines the historical and spatial flows of Indian popular cinema for nearly a century culminating in the Bollywood-inspired-Oscar-winning filmSlumdog Millionaire. Bringing together essays by eminent scholars of anthropology, history, and cultural, media, communication, and film studies, this volume shows that Bollywood cinema has always crossed borders and boundaries. The essays argue that Bollywood has had a century-long history of travelling to the British Malaya, Fiji, Guyana, Trinidad, Mauritius, East and South Africa with the old diasporas, and with and without the new diasporas to the former USSR, West Asia, the UK, the USA, Canada, and Australia. It brings together perspectives on Indian cinema from different disciplinary and geographical locations to re-conceptualize the understanding of national cinemas. This book looks at the meaning of nation, diaspora, home, and identity in cinematic texts and contexts, and examines the ways in which localities are produced in the new global process by broadly addressing nationalism, regionalism, and transnationalism, politics and aesthetics, and spectatorship and viewing contexts.

Anjali Gera Roy is Professor, Department of Humanities amd Social Sciences, IIT Kharagpur and Senior Research Fellow, Asia Research Institute, National University of Singapore.

Chua Beng Huat is concurrently Leader, Cultural Studies in Asia Research Cluster; Convenor, PhD Programme in Cultural Studies in Asia; and Professor, Department of Sociology, National University of Singapore.