ABSTRACT
As twenty-first-century India aspires for First World status and emerges as a global economic power, its media and cultural industries are also expanding rapidly to meet escalating domestic demands for entertainment products. In particular, Indian cinema has been one of the most visible creative industries expanding its operations to cater to an emergent Indian leisure economy. With a sizable Indian global diaspora (nonresident Indian [NRI] or people of Indian origin communities) keen to engage with the popular cultural products of India, a ready-made market exists for these products in foreign countries. Alongside this diasporic or NRI demand, there exists a complementary rising interest amongst non-Indian audiences for Indian popular cultural products like cinema—dubbed the “Slumdog effect” in reference to Danny Boyle’s (2008) India-set, but not Indian-made Academy Award winner, Slumdog Millionaire. This transcultural reach and appeal make the reception of Bollywood in Malaysia an apt illustration of the crossover phenomenon. Before proceeding, two terms that need to be defined are Bollywood and the crossover wave. Bollywood can be categorized as a global Indian industry, “spinning the screen fantasies” of millions of fans around the world (Rajadhyaksha 2003, 25). With its unique mix of song, dance, melodrama, sentiments, and fights, it made an enormous global impact and developed into a strong brand (Lorenzen and Taeube 2007).The emerging middle class in the 1990s also placed a demand on Bollywood films as their essential entertainment media (Kaur 2002). The term crossover encompasses a wide range of features ranging from content and theme crossovers to production crossovers. For many years, after 1991, crossover was more or less applied to the diaspora-themed films that attract mainly the diasporic population (such as the film Dilwale Dulhaniya Le Jayenge [Chopra 1995]). Later on, filmmakers like Mira Nair and Gurinder Chadha, Deepa Mehta and Anoop Kurian, and other UK- and U.S.-based Indians ventured into some crossover movies made in English that served to appeal to a largely Western audience. Films like Salaam Bombay (Nair 1988) and Water (Mehta 2005) are fine examples for this trend of crossover cinema.
