Introduction

Abstract

With the disciplinary incarnation of film studies in India, ‘Bollywood’ ceases to be a loosely applied term, even though academicians and industry persons differ considerably on its usage. Bollywood refers to the globalized cinema and media cultures of the industry located in Bombay (now Mumbai), and it is associated with the economic l iberalization of the 1990s and some subsequent corollaries. Bombay cinema in the pre-liberalization era is referred to as Hindi popular cinema. Around the early 1990s, the neologism ‘Bollywood’ became attached to the Mumbai-based commercial Hindi cinema. Ashish Rajadhyaksha (2007) has defined Bollywood as an industry where cinema itself is reduced only to a memory, a part of the nostalgia industry. He has mentioned how the film trade journals like Screen invented and circulated the self-deprecating term through their page called ‘Bollywood Beat’. In order to define culture economically, Rajadhyaksha concentrates on the larger significance of the culture industry beyond the confines of traditional cinema exhibition, the emergence of the corporate- industrial-financial capital and the proliferation of the ancillary sector of film production/exhibition. Above all, the export of a globalized version of Indian nationalism to be consumed by the diaspora finds an extremely significant place in his argument.