Bollywood's global push

Nabila Kanji was 7 years old when she fell for Bollywood megastar Shah Rukh Khan. She vividly recalls watching him in "Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge" ("The Big Hearted Will Take the Bride"), the epic love story of two first-generation British Indians struggling to persuade their culturally conservative parents that they should be together.

"I remember thinking they were so hip and cool but I could still relate to them because they were like me, like my family," says the second-generation South Asian who grew up in Markham, Ontario.

Ms. Kanji wasn't alone in her love for "DDLJ," as it is referred to by its millions of fans. Released in 1995, it was really the first Hindi film to present a story from the perspective of nonresident Indians. It went on to become the largest-grossing film in Bollywood history and the first to make a significant chunk of its earnings in Western markets.

Kanji has never lost her love of Bollywood or Mr. Khan, who she hopes will make an appearance at the International Indian Film Academy Awards (IIFA) being held in Toronto on June 23-25.

She snagged two $300 tickets for the glamorous awards show and has been offered up to a thousand dollars per ticket. For Bollywood fans, "it's kind of like the royal wedding," she says.

The Hindi-language film industry based in Mumbai has had a global following among the South Asian diaspora and in other Asian, African, and Middle Eastern countries since the 1950s. But over the past decade, the world's most prolific film industry has been making inroads into mainstream North American and European consciousness and in so doing seems to be helping to burnish India's global sheen or its "soft power," to use the term coined by Harvard political scientist Joseph Nye.

Just as the American culture industries, especially Hollywood, were instrumental in constructing and disseminating the narrative about the attraction of the United States that helped make it the most influential player on the world stage in the 20th century, the rise in the popularity of Bollywood films could help to do the same for India in the 21st, Professor Nye says by e-mail from a book tour in Europe.

"Hollywood played a significant role in developing the soft power that helped to end the Cold War. I hope that Bollywood can help India with its image among its neighbors [such as traditional rivals Pakistan and China]," Nye says, who observes that in many countries Bollywood films are more popular than Hollywood films.

Sangita Gopal attributes the enduring popularity of Indian films abroad to the extravagant song-and-dance sequences that don't require viewers to understand the language in order to enjoy them. But the author of "Global Bollywood" says it goes beyond that. "On one level they are utterly commercial, but they also probe themes ... that are incredibly resonant in societies battling between tradition and modernity" – themes such as class, family, and interreligious conflict. "These films often take up the question of how to live with people who are different from you."

This type of social-justice theme wrapped up in "emotion and melodrama is a very powerful narrative form ... in countries like Nigeria, where these films are extremely popular. They are more easy to relate to than Hollywood films," agrees Tejaswini Ganti, an assistant professor of anthropology at New York University and author of the upcoming book "Producing Bollywood: Inside the Contemporary Hindi Film Industry."

Professor Ganti points out that Bolly­wood has "always been a global cinema.... It is just now that the mainstream American media is catching up."

Source: http://www.csmonitor.com/The-Culture/Movies/2011/0613/Bollywood-s-global-push/%28page%29/2