ABSTRACT
South Asia in the 1990s and 2000s experienced the liberalization of the economy, the proliferation of consumerist lifestyles and rapid changes in its mediascape. The media in South Asia today may be seen as a key site where the trade deregulation policies adopted since the 1990s had some direct infl uence. There has also been acceleration in the dissemination of South Asian media worldwide. The transnational media migrations into, out of, and within contemporary South Asia prove that we can no longer talk about one way traffi c of media from the West to Asia, which some scholars dubbed “invasion from the skies” (Chadha and Kavoori 2000). Arjun Appadurai therefore emphasized the “cultural dimensions of globalization” and the effects of multi-directional media fl ows upon the social imagination, particularly in the global south (1996). Within this context, the increased infl ow of Western screen media into South Asia and the rise of Bollywood as a carrier of “Indian” culture and a transnational, globalizing agent since the early 1990s increased conversations about mediated cultural exchange and globalization. In the face of globalization, scholars started questioning the idea of nation and national culture as unifi ed entities (Anderson 1991; Bhabha 1990a, 1990b; Ashcroft 1989). Appadurai (1994), Hall (1996) and Featherstone (1995) also argued that globalization of market and media transformed old categories of nation and culture and made way for the intercourse of the local and the global. This essay is an attempt to understand the circulation and consumption of Bollywood in South Asia in such intercourse at a time when the transnational visual media are easily and quickly permeating the national borders in this region. By “Bollywood,” I mean here not only the Hindi-language fi lm industry of India, but also the associated popular cultural paraphernalia of this industry, such as songs of Hindi fi lms, posters of the fi lm stars, and so on.
