Manufacturing global Indianness: Bollywood images, 1995-2005

This project has analyzed changing image cultures in Bollywood in the context of globalization of the Indian economy and the impact of new materialism in India. Bollywood melodrama has been transformed not just in terms of a revitalized production, but through a rearticulation of the Indian identity that shows radical shifts from the premises on which modern Indianness was based. The ever-increasing circulation of the films implicates the Indian diaspora as both subjects and consumers of contemporary narratives. By incorporating the context of the diaspora in North America and the rising middle-class in India, this study has analyzed how a transnational Indian identity within popular films is constructing a discourse of global Indianness. It has demonstrated how the expansion of the terrain on which Indianness is being expressed has a considerable impact on representations of Indians anywhere.