ABSTRACT
The last decade has seen an increasing level of academic and commercial interest in Asian media. This new awareness of the media industries operating across the region has been fueled by the contemporary manifestation of global economic liberalization. It is in this context that Arjun Appadurai has emphasized the rapid spread of electronic media and their transformative effects upon the social imagination, particularly in the global south, as evdience of the “cultural dimensions of globalization” (1996). However, the contemporary focus of Appadurai’s argument should not obscure the fact that photomechanical feature fi lms have been inherently mobile cultural artifacts addressing globally dispersed audiences for almost a century prior to the current period of media proliferation. India has historically been an exporter of fi lms and this is highly relevant to understanding the global nature of Indian cinema.
