The End of the Hollywood ‘Rip-Off’? Changes in the Bollywood Politics of Copyright

Abstract

Although ‘Bollywood’ has, over the years, become a more and more neutral and descriptive term (Dissanayake, 2004, p. 143), the apparently simple blending of ‘Bombay’ and ‘Hollywood’ has a long history of critics, especially from within the Hindi film industry, who reject the term’s allegedly pejorative connotations. Their complaints are comprehensible. Even at a very basic level, the neo-colonial overtones of the term are obvious, since it designates an Indian entertainment industry via the globally hegemonic Western entertainment industry. Moreover, the reference to Hollywood emphasizes the commercial imperatives and industrial production processes dominating popular Indian cinema, thus implying formulaic film fare rather than works of originality and artistic merit. This goes hand in hand with the notion that films made in ‘Bollywood’ are often derivations and imitations of Hollywood films, which, due to a lack of financial, technical, artistic, and organizational resources, have difficulty living up to their American models. Derivativeness, with all its connotations of secondariness and unoriginality, thus emerges as a central tenet of the Bollywood stereotype, so much so that the English Wikipedia entry on ‘Bollywood’ features a full paragraph on the topic of plagiarism.