Selected Bollywood Films as Sites of LGBTQ Contestation, Assertion and Cultural Disruption

Films are popularly believed to be reflection of reality as well as a representation of the societies in which they were produced. They are excellent windows into their societies of origin and could thus serve as good anthropological or historical documents containing data about socio-political events that have happened in their societies of origin. One of the multiple data one can extract/gather from films is the socio-cultural and political dynamics prevailing in the society in which the films subsist. This paper attempts to illustrate this thesis through a review of relevant Bollywood and Nollywood films. Specifically, the study hinges on a review of relevant selected films to show how Bollywood and Nollywood are a reflection of cultural and political dynamics in India and Nigeria respectively. The paper starts with a brief background which examines the extent to which Nollywood and Bollywood films could be considered a reflection of contemporary Nigeria and India. It proceeds to defining the concept of cultural and political dynamics, with strict respect to the Indian and Nigerian experiences. The paper ends up with an examination of how these cultural and political dynamics are reflected in relevant Bollywood and Nollywood films. It concludes that both Nigerian and Bollywood films reflect social and political dynamics in their societies of origin in the same way.

Exposure to tobacco, alcohol and fast-food use in films is associated with initiation of these behaviours. India is the world's largest film producer, but the extent of such imagery in Bollywood (Hindi cinema) films is unclear. We therefore aimed to describe the extent of and trends in tobacco, alcohol and fast-food imagery in Bollywood films, between 1994-2013. For the 15 top-grossing films each year between 1994-2013, the number of five-minute intervals containing product images were determined separately for tobacco, alcohol and fast-food. Both the proportion of films containing at least one image occurrence, and occurrences per film, were described overall and by year. Negative binomial regression described associations between film rating and occurrences/film, and estimated time-trends in occurrences/film, adjusted for rating. We analysed 93 U-rated (unrestricted), 150 U/A-rated (parental guidance for children aged <12 years) and 55 A-rated (restricted to adult audience) films, containing 9,226 five-minute intervals (mean intervals/film 30.8, SD 4.0). 70% (n = 210), 93% (n = 278) and 21% (n = 62) of films contained at least one tobacco, alcohol and fast-food occurrence, respectively. Corresponding total mean occurrences/film were 4.0 (SD 4.9), 7.0 (4.7) and 0.4 (0.9). Tobacco occurrences were more common in U/A films (incidence rate ratio 1.49, 95% confidence interval 1.06-2.09) and A films (2.95; 1.95-4.48) than U-rated films. Alcohol occurrences were also more common in A-rated films than U-rated films (1.48; 1.15-1.85). Tobacco occurrences/film became less common over the observed period (adjusted trend -4% per annum; -2 to -7%; p <0.001), while alcohol (+2%; 0-3%; p = 0.02), and fast food (+8%; 2-14%; p = 0.01) occurrences/film became more common. Although the extent of tobacco imagery in Bollywood films fell over 1994-2013, it is still frequently observed. Alcohol imagery is widespread, even in U-rated films, and trends in both alcohol and fast-food imagery are upwards.

Background and aimsExposure to tobacco, alcohol and fast-food use in films is associated with initiation of these behaviours. India is the world’s largest film producer, but the extent of such imagery in Bollywood (Hindi cinema) films is unclear. We therefore aimed to describe the extent of and trends in tobacco, alcohol and fast-food imagery in Bollywood films, between 1994–2013.MethodsFor the 15 top-grossing films each year between 1994–2013, the number of five-minute intervals containing product images were determined separately for tobacco, alcohol and fast-food. Both the proportion of films containing at least one image occurrence, and occurrences per film, were described overall and by year. Negative binomial regression described associations between film rating and occurrences/film, and estimated time-trends in occurrences/film, adjusted for rating.ResultsWe analysed 93 U-rated (unrestricted), 150 U/A-rated (parental guidance for children aged <12 years) and 55 A-rated (restricted to adult audience) films, containing 9,226 five-minute intervals (mean intervals/film 30.8, SD 4.0). 70% (n = 210), 93% (n = 278) and 21% (n = 62) of films contained at least one tobacco, alcohol and fast-food occurrence, respectively. Corresponding total mean occurrences/film were 4.0 (SD 4.9), 7.0 (4.7) and 0.4 (0.9). Tobacco occurrences were more common in U/A films (incidence rate ratio 1.49, 95% confidence interval 1.06–2.09) and A films (2.95; 1.95–4.48) than U-rated films. Alcohol occurrences were also more common in A-rated films than U-rated films (1.48; 1.15–1.85). Tobacco occurrences/film became less common over the observed period (adjusted trend -4% per annum; -2 to -7%; p <0.001), while alcohol (+2%; 0–3%; p = 0.02), and fast food (+8%; 2–14%; p = 0.01) occurrences/film became more common.ConclusionsAlthough the extent of tobacco imagery in Bollywood films fell over 1994–2013, it is still frequently observed. Alcohol imagery is widespread, even in U-rated films, and trends in both alcohol and fast-food imagery are upwards.

Bollywood films are known for their songs, and in many cases Bollywood films are known because of the songs. It is not merely in Bollywood films that songs have a significant role, but also in the lives of myriad composers, lyricists, singers and so on, lending an opportunity for their creative expression in addition to serving as a means of livelihood. Ideally, it should be possible for composers to be able to earn an income by composing music for films, as well as by being a member of a collecting society in such a way as to maximize their returns. From the bundle of rights they have, the composers should be able to transact with both the producers and the collecting societies, but with rights that do not overlap. However, in reality the rights could get tangled in a legal quagmire between the collecting society and film producers, as each demands exclusivity. The article is an attempt to show how the rights of composers is meddled with by both the film producers and the collecting societies, leading to gross unfairness in the distribution of the returns from exploitation of their rights. To this end, the article examines the UK Court of Appeal decision in B4U Network (Europe) Limited v Performing Rights Society Limited, which upheld the rights of the collecting society, and compares it with the Indian Supreme Court decision in Indian Performing Rights Society v Eastern India Motion Pictures, where the rights of the film producers was upheld. This article then goes on to examine what it means to the composers if the film producers’ rights trump those of the collecting societies. The article also explores how the amendments introduced to the Indian Copyright Act in 2012 address the situation.

Bollywood films are increasingly drawing scholarly attention for their global appeal and reception. Transnational studies have examined the reception of Bollywood in Australia, Britain, Scotland, South Africa, Russia, the United States of America, Bangladesh and Nepal. However, academic work on the Southeast Asian reception of these films is scarcer. This research seeks to fill this gap by looking at the reception of Bollywood in Malaysia from 1991-2012. The thesis adopts a contextual approach where the reception of Bollywood is situated within the broader Malaysian socio-political and religious contexts. Bollywood, which reached Malaysia as early as the 1930s, has an audience that goes beyond the nation’s Indian diaspora. The thesis uses qualitative discourse analysis to look at the representations of Bollywood in the Malaysian media, and the broader context of such representations. As Malaysia has a long history of screening Bollywood movies, this thesis adopts a linear historical approach, tracing developments in Bollywood’s appeal, which then serves as a foundation for the rest of the study. It is revealed that Bollywood is not only a part of Malaysian film culture, but that it also forms a part of Malaysian socio-politics. This shows a “mainstreaming” of Bollywood films in the Malaysian context, which, in this thesis, is termed ‘Malaysianisation’. The study shows that Bollywood in Malaysia has a dual and contradictory image – as a religious threat and as a marketing tool to help brand Malaysia overseas. This unique representation and reception reflects the contradictions existing in the larger Malaysian socio-political sphere, which also substantiates the concept of Bollywood’s ‘Malaysianisation’.

Bombay Cinema's Islamicate Histories comprises fourteen essays on the history and influence of cultural Islam on Bombay cinema. These essays are written by major scholars of both South Asian cultural history and Indian cinema working across several continents. Following Marshal Hodgson, the term ‘Islamicate’ is used to describe Muslim cultures in order to distinguish the cultural forms associated with Islam from the religion itself. Such a distinction is especially important to observe in South Asia where, over a thousand-year history, Muslim cultures have commingled with other local religious and cultural traditions to form a rich vein of syncretic aesthetic expression. This volume argues that the influence of Muslim cultures on Bombay cinema can only be grasped against the backdrop of this long history, an argument that informs the shape of the whole. The book is divided into two sections. The first, ‘Islamicate Histories’, charts the historical roots of South Asian Muslim cultures and the precursors of Bombay cinema’s Islamicate idioms in the Urdu Parsi Theatre, the Courtesan cultures of Lucknow, the traditions of miniature painting, poetry, song and their performance, and the various modes of story-telling that derive from Perso-Arabic traditions. The second section, ‘Cinematic Forms’, discusses the way in which these Islamicate histories are partially constitutive of the traditions of representation, performance and story-telling that give Bombay cinema its distinctive character, traditions that have continued into Bollywood. It explores ‘Islamicate’ genres like the ‘Oriental’ film and the ‘Muslim Social’, as well as forms of poetry and performance like the ‘ghazal’ and ‘the qawwali’. Bombay Cinema’s Islamicate Histories is published at a time of acute crisis in the perception and understanding of Islam, where Islamophobia stereotypes Muslims as incipient fifth column and Hindu fundamentalism is ascendant. It demonstrates that Muslim and Hindu cultures in India are inextricably entwined and shows how the syncretic idioms of Islamicate cultural history inform the very identity of Bombay cinema, even as that cinema has also instrumentalized Islamicate idioms to stereotype and even demonise the Muslim, especially in contemporary Bollywood. This book argues that many of the idioms of Bombay cinema that we love are derived from the historical influence of Muslim cultures as they interacted with other traditions in the Indian subcontinent. It traces the emergence of cultures of poetry, dance, song, performance and story-telling out of the thousand-year history of Islam on Indian soil, and describes the ways in which they underlie and inform the expressive forms of Bombay cinema. It is timely to be reminded of the contribution of Muslim cultures to the distinctive and widely recognized popular cinema of India at a historical moment when the cultural influence of Islam on India is being denied by forces which seek to turn the country away from cultural pluralism towards Hindu fundamentalism. Bombay Cinema’s Islamicate Histories features contributions by major scholars of both South Asian cultural history and Indian cinema working across several continents. The audience for this book will be primarily graduate and advanced undergraduate students of film studies. The writing is accessible and lively and individual chapters will be suitable for classroom use. It will be of value in disciplines outside film studies, where the Islamicate tradition in general and its impact on film in particular is taught. It will find an audience in disciplines such as history, cultural studies, women's studies, visual studies and South Asian area studies. It will also be of interest to anyone who wants to know how cinema negotiates the parameters of Muslim identity in response to historical and contemporary events in India.

This introductory chapter explains how Hong Kong and Bollywood film industries have repositioned themselves as new players in the pantheon of global cinema. It focuses on the force of globalization that has driven local filmmakers to make films for nontraditional audiences; to engage moral, political, and socioeconomic controversies in their works; and to gain legitimacy from and negotiate with the various state authorities. It poses the question of what is gained and lost in the flow of cinematic styles, meanings, practices, and norms among Hong Kong, Bollywood, and global cinema. Balancing the cross-cultural analysis of Hong Kong and Bollywood's appeals at home and abroad, it offers a new inter-Asian framework for understanding these two highly globalized Asian film industries.

In today's global world of movement our personal identities are changing. So, ‘where is my “home”?’ and ‘what is my “identity”?’ have become essential questions in one's life. In recent times, more and more diasporic communities visit their homelands, perhaps to reroot their identities. This study explored the influence of Bollywood movies in the Indian diaspora's identity construction and notions of home and tourism behaviour to India. Findings revealed that the Indian diaspora's imagination of India is strongly informed by Bollywood movies. Yet, different generations of the Indian diaspora have different reasons for travelling to India. The first generation's nostalgia arises from watching Bollywood movies, and as a result, creates a motivation to travel to India. The second generation's main to travel behaviour to India is to experience the new ‘modern’ country, portrayed in the affluent surroundings of contemporary Bollywood movies. And, for those first generations, who have never seen India before, Bollywood movies enable them to romanticise their homeland and create an urge to visit India. Thus, Bollywood movies have immense importance in the Indian diaspora's identity construction, promote diaspora tourism and constitute a huge opportunity for economic development.

Music and songs are integral parts of Bollywood movies. Every movie of two to three hours, contains three to ten songs, each song is 3---10 min long. Music lovers like to listen music and songs of a movie, however it is time consuming and error prone to search manually all the songs in a movie. Moreover, the task becomes much harder when songs are to be extracted from a huge archived movies' database containing hundreds of movies. This paper presents an approach to automatically extract music and songs from archived musical movies. We used song grammar to construct Markov Chain Model that differentiates song scenes from dialogue and action scenes in a movie. We tested our system on Bollywood, Hollywood, Pakistani, Bengali, and Tamil movies. A total of 20 movies from different industries were selected for the experiments. On Bollywood movies, we achieved 97.22% recall in song extraction, whereas the recall on Hollywood musical movies is 80%. The test result on Pakistani, Tamil and Bengali movies is 87.09%.

Objectives: To analyse how across the decades, representation of Indian Women in Hindi Cinema has observed substantial change. Methods/Statistical Analysis: Scores of movie samples have been analysed to decipher the changing patterns in treatment of female characters in Hindi Cinema. The analysis includes how women across the decades particularly in post liberalized India, have been conforming to preconceived notions about womanhood in cinema. Old Hindi movies are compared and contrasted with relatively new cinema. Findings: The “New Woman” of liberalized Indian Cinema has experienced a remarkable shift in the representation of their identities. Indian media scenario underwent a rapid change in the way it reached to its audience. Waves of change in the Indian media industry penetrated into the Hindi film industry as well. This marked a departure of the Hindi popular cinema from the way it operated in the eighties and deliberately changed the wаy its ways both as аn industry and as a commercial product as well. Liberalization brought along not only economical shift, it impacted socio cultural aspects of life as well deeply. Women came across their new found identities which were both perplexing and liberating. Suddenly there was a huge unexpected world to be explored which so far had stayed out of purview, in fact did not exist at all. Same socio-cultural sensibilities found a medium in Cinema that gradually matured to give a due place to its female characters, who had just awaken to their new find freedom. Application/ Improvements: The analysis of changing dynamics in the representation of women in Hindi Cinema has wider social concerns and issues dealing with treatment of women in society as it is reflexive of norms and conditions prevalent around. Keywords: Changing Dynamics, Hindi Cinema, Liberalization, Representation, Women

This article delineates the transition of the representation of Dalits in Hindi cinema. For that purpose, the article categorizes Hindi cinema into two phases—first, the pre-liberalization phase, and the second, is the post-liberalization phase for the understanding of—why Dalits are treated as ‘Others’. The question of Dalit is fixed in the imaginaries of upper-caste as a matter of consumption. In the pre-1991 era, Dalit’s were represented as poor, wretched, non-heroic, and absolutely clientele characters. In the post-1991 scenario, Dalits came up as educated, skilled, competent and confident in the modern institutional setup, but Hindi Cinema did not present Dalits as protagonists. The continuous clientele depiction of Dalit characters in Hindi Cinema aggravates upper-caste prejudices against Dalits. The article argues that there is an ‘Absence of Presence’ of Dalit experiences beyond upper-caste imaginaries, and also, there is a complete exclusion of ‘New Dalit Middle Class’ from the popular cinema narratives. A commoner troupe is used to represent the Dalit and it further extends the question of ‘Real’ and ‘Reel’ representation. Thus, this article tries to investigate the above-mentioned questions in the broad context of post-liberal Hindi cinema and flag some theoretical issues emerging from this engagement.

Reviewed by: Dancing with the Nation: Courtesans in Bombay Cinema by Ruth Vanita Mobeen Hussain Ruth Vanita, Dancing with the Nation: Courtesans in Bombay Cinema. Bloomsbury Academic, 232 pp., £103.68. ISBN:9781501334436. The courtesan is an enduring figure within South Asian visual and literary cultures. She is also an uncomfortable figure to talk about–one that has been constantly re-worked and redefined during the colonial period, in social reformer narratives and in nationalist debates about ideal womanhood, often tied to a mythical Hindu past. In Dancing with the Nation, Ruth Vanita takes a comprehensive sample of 235 films to examine courtesans and courtesan imagery in Bombay cinema. Vanita notes that only one study, in Hindi, has seriously considered the role of courtesans in films and that courtesans are missing in studies of cinematography; they are typically mentioned in passing as the 'other' and/or as antagonists in the analysis of heroines. She looks at how courtesan characters intersect with various activities in the making and representation of the nation. For instance, she challenges the stereotype that depicts courtesans as Muslim individuals in the making of a Hindu nation and argues that the culture of courtesans was one of hybrid Hindu-Muslim identities. However, her main lens for examining courtesan films is gender and sexuality in modern India and she maintains that hers is not "primarily a film studies book" (Vanita 3). Vanita foregrounds her study with an explanation of the terminology used to describe female entertainers. Courtesan is used as "a catch all term" which includes tawaif, nachnewali, veshya, randi and nartaki (1). This exposition adds to the scholarship of Katherine Butler Schofield (2012), Erica Wald (2009), Veena Oldenburg (1990) and Amelia Maciszewski (2006), among others, which classifies the courtesan as a temporally, multi-layered entertainer. In her previous works on rekhti poetry (2012) and same-sex relationships (2005), Vanita has looked at the salient figure of the courtesan within cultural discourse, but this work connects the centrality of the courtesan to the evolution of the Indian film industry. In doing so, Vanita argues that courtesan characters and real-life courtesans bought classical music and dance to large swathes of modern Indian populations and are intertwined in the cinema industry (18-19). Courtesans appear in various prisms within the life of entertainment cultures in South Asia from ancient Indian and religious iconographies, Mughal courts and nawabi cultures to becoming the first actresses and playback singers in modern India. Women from tawaif backgrounds were also the first woman producers, directors and choreographers in Bombay cinema. Almost every major female actor has played the role of the courtesan in its various guises; such actresses include Meena Kumari and such films include Namoona (1949) and Shair (1949). Vanita markedly illustrates how tawaif lineages are "deeply embedded in the DNA of Bombay cinema" by providing various examples including the tawaif Daleepbai and her daughter Jaddan Bai; Jaddan Bai was the mother of the actress Nargis and grandmother of Sanjay Dutt (6). Vanita also depicts how discursive representations of courtesans in cinema changed over time. In tracing a direct line from early film cultures of the 1930s and 1940s, Vanita portrays how the figure of the courtesan has shaped the modern Indian imagination and cinematography from romantic heroines in court films and immoral, tortured souls to vamps, item number entertainers and modern 'It-girls'. By doing so, Vanita persuasively illustrates how courtesans undermine the popular stereotype that, before the 1970s, women were either "highly sexed "vamps" or good and chaste heroines" (10). Through her deconstructions of the dynamics within families, heteronormative and same-sex relationships and kinship networks, she considers various topics. The book progresses thematically starting with Family, Eros, Work and Male Allies, and ending with Nation and Religion. [End Page 70] This thematic structure, as opposed to a tedious, chronological format, enables succinct analyses and allows for readers to develop an understanding of courtesan tropes in cinema. Additionally, courtesan cultures and cinema are heavily invested in aesthetic appeal; thus images are vital to this study. Film stills are weaved throughout the book to reinforce Vanita's arguments, including images of dress, domestic and public interiors, and patron-courtesan interactions. The study...

The phenomenal growth of World Wide Web has caused an easier and faster access to multimedia contents. The volume of available multimedia contents like Hindi movies’ music databases online has been exponentially increased. It results in dire need of automatic music retrieval from such databases. In recent years content-based music retrieval has been viewed as a potential solution to it. The ability of content based music retrieval is to automatically identify different characteristics of music data such as its genre. Unfortunately, the existing genre identifiers that are mostly tested on western music databases, has very low accuracy on Hindi movies’ music databases. Moreover, all the existing approaches of genre identification are based on music audio. In this paper, we propose a framework to automatically identify genre of a Hindi movie song using its video features. We used video shot duration and actor movement to classify the songs in pop, romantic, and tragic classes. We performed our experiments on 105 popular Hindi movies’ songs falling evenly in three proposed genres. An accuracy of 89.5% has been achieved that proves the effect of music video on its genre.

This introductory chapter provides an overview of the use of the English language in India, considering its story as the story of a people's vernacular in a postcolonial democracy. It defines vernacular English before tracing the history of the legislative adoption of English in India. Now more than ever in India, English is seen on bureaucratic documents, billboards, clothing, and storefronts—and heard in political slogans, classes in spoken English, and Bollywood films. This economy of literary, sonic, and visual English across languages and media—its use by people outside of traditional privileges of class, urbanism, and education—diminishes the authority of English as a language of global and colonial power. With such profound ubiquity, English demands newer ways of reading and conceptualizing language and power. The chapter explains that this book follows how English lives in other Indian languages and media, such as Hindi literature, bureaucratic documents, language legislation, Bollywood and international films, and public protests.

Celebrity studies have largely focused on media stars in America and Europe. Stardom in contemporary Hindi cinema is an attempt to redress that balance with an examination of a variety of film stars in the present-day Mumbai-based Hindi film industry. The reach and significance of the Hindi film industry extend across the subcontinent into Africa, South America, Europe, Central Asia and now China. For these reasons alone, the shape celebrity takes in the Hindi industry is arguably as relevant for developing global models of stardom as any model elaborated elsewhere. On the one hand, Hindi film stars confirm what has been argued already about stardom; on the other, Indian stars seem to overflow the boundaries of Western celebrity in part through the kinds of roles and personas they adopt, and in part through the particular nature of their relationship to their audience. Other particularities of stardom in the Hindi industry worth consideration include cultural codes of concealment and exposure, as well as the stark contrast of industry insiders and outsiders. This volume’s parts group together the studies of individual film stars that draw out additional themes and concerns with the goal of inspiring continuing studies of Hindi (and perhaps another industry’s) film celebrity.