ABSTRACT
Since the implementation of economic liberalization policies in the early 1990s and the rise of satellite television, India has witnessed a media and cultural transformation on a scale so profound that it raises many questions for students of globalization, media, and audience studies. One of the biggest challenges worth noting is the fact that the enormous growth in media in this time has not resulted in a simple process of Westernization. Instead, most global media corporations have been forced to localize their programming in some form or another, even as the substantial local media industries in India such as the Hindi fi lm industry (popularly known as “Bollywood”) held their own and confronted globalization in a number of ways. As a result of these localization strategies, the Indian mediascape has come to be marked by narratives and discourses that seek to join the foreign and the domestic, the global and the national, the modern and the traditional, and the scientifi c and the religious.
