ABSTRACT
The end of the historical period I have defined as “Old Bollywood” (Booth 2008) was marked by a series of observable changes in the technological sophistication, aesthetics, human and physical infrastructure, regulatory and economic environment, and industrial structure and practice of popular film and music production that occurred in Mumbai. Each kind of change that I suggest here had its own sequence of events moving at their own rates of speed; but all were especially noticeable during the late 1980s and throughout the 1990s, even though some carried on into the twenty-first century. Sometime in the early years of the twenty-first century almost everything about the production and distribution of commercial Hindi-language films-and much having to do with the content of those films-was different than it had been in 1989. These inconsistent, and only partially related, processes of change led to what I have called a “New Bollywood” that is very much part of a global culture and industry.
