ABSTRACT
As the founder of the first dance academy in Britain to offer classes in ‘film-inspired’ modern Indian dance, Kalaria has a material stake in advertising Bollywood’s transformative powers. Her enthusiasm is also part of a broader international interest in Bollywood that took off in the mid-1990s with the release of Hindi films like Dilwale Dulhaniya Le Jayenge (1995), Pardes (1997), Dil to Pagal Hai (1997), and Kuch Kuch Hota Hai (1998). Targeting South Asian expatriate audiences with fantasies of middleclass mobility driven by the loss and recovery of ‘traditional Indian values,’ the international success of these films helped launch Dil Se to the box-office top ten in Britain in 1998 and Taal into the US top twenty a few years later. In 2000, six screens of a 30 screen multiplex built just outside Birmingham were dedicated to Hindi films, part of a growing trend throughout the UK. For decades, Hindi cinema had traveled to Britain, Fiji, Trinidad, Dubai, Tanzania, South Africa, Mauritius-in fact, any country home to a significant South Asian diaspora-across legal distribution networks, non-and quasilegal, large-scale, pirate reproduction industries, and more mobile forms of tactical media exchange such as smuggled prints, dubbed videocassettes and multi-generation
audiotapes. This interoperability of legal and non-legal distribution networks has long enabled the distribution of Hindi cinema among broader audiences in the Soviet Union, Nigeria, Malaysia, Afghanistan, Egypt, Singapore, Japan and the US. However, when Hindi film icon Amitabh Bachchan’s Madame Tussaud’s wax effigy was unveiled in 2000, the year after he had been voted ‘Star of the Millennium’ in a BBC News Online poll and the same year that the Film Federation of India announced that Indian film exports had topped $100 million for the first time (with Hindi films making up 95 per cent of the haul), it was taken as a sign that Bollywood had officially arrived as a global cultural force.
