ABSTRACT
By almost all accounts, the past two decades have been characterized by an explosion of scholarly interest focusing on popular Hindi – or “Bollywood” – cinema. As noted by Gehlawat, “in the past decade alone, nearly a dozen new books have been issued on the subject” (Gehlawat 2010: xi). Themes highlighted by these authors often include the role of cinema in forming or reflecting Indian identity policies relative to the nation-state (Chakravarty 1996; Mishra 2002; Prasad 1998; Virdi 2003), the rise in the importance of Indian diasporic communities (Desai 2004; Mishra 2002), and globalization and “Bollywoodization” (Gopal and Moorti 2008; Kaur and Sinha 2005; Kavoori and Punathambekar 2008).
