Bollywood Research Articles

India’s soft power diplomacy in West Asia

India’s soft power in West Asia has been shaped by a combination of cultural, historical, economic, and political factors. India’s cultural influence can be seen through the popularity of Bollywood movies, music, dance, and cuisine in the region. Historical ties between India and West Asia date back to ancient times, with trade and cultural exchanges being recorded as early as the 1st millennium BCE. India’s economic ties with West Asia have been strengthened through the import of crude oil, the presence of Indian IT companies, and investments in infrastructure projects. India’s non-alignment policy and involvement in peacekeeping efforts in the region have also contributed to its positive image in the region. Overall, India’s soft power in West Asia has helped establish it as a reliable partner and a source of inspiration for many in the region.

Task-Specific and Graph Convolutional Network based Multi-modal Movie Recommendation System in Indian Setting

Nowadays the Recommendation System, a subclass of information filtering system does not require any introduction, and the movie recommendation system plays a vital role in the streaming platform where many movies are needed to analyze before showcasing a perfectly matched subset of them to its users. Most of the available datasets contain the rating information of user-movie pairs and this is the reason of regression-based works that predict the rating value for a user-movie pair. We have also found that there is no work on the Indian regional language-based dataset containing no users’ feedback in the rating scale.In this paper, we have introduced a recommendation system for the Indian language-based multi-modal Hindi movies’ dataset where users’ feedback is from the three different classes, i) Dislike, ii) Like, and iii) Neutral. Here, we have used the Flickscore dataset and added the audio-video information of the trailers of its movies for making it multi-modal. Besides that, we have investigated the performance of a classification-based model having two modules, (i) Task-Specific (TS) and (ii) Graph Convolutional Network (GCN). The performance of different combinations of these modules is tested on different modalities of the dataset. We have tested its performance in cold-start scenarios also. Modality wise different embedding processes have been introduced here and the experimental results tried to conclude how the model works in uni-modal, bi-modal, and all-modal information of movies in an information system where no rating information is present.

Recommendation System Based on Double Ensemble Models using KNN-MF

In today's digital environment, recommendation systems are essential as they provide personalised content to users, increasing user engagement and enhancing user satisfaction. This paper proposes a double ensemble recommendation model that combines two collaborative filtering algorithms, K Nearest Neighbour (KNN) and Matrix Factorization (MF). KNN is a neighbourhood-based algorithm that uses the similarity between users or items to make recommendations. At the same time, MF is a model-based algorithm that decomposes the user-item rating matrix into lower-dimensional matrices representing the latent user and item factors. The proposed double ensemble model uses KNN and MF to predict missing ratings matrix and combines their predictions using stacking. To evaluate the performance of the proposed ensemble model, we conducted experiments on three datasets i.e. Movielense, BookCrossing dataset and Hindi Movie dataset and compared the results with those of single algorithm approaches. The experimental results demonstrate that the double ensemble model outperforms the single algorithm approaches regarding accuracy metrics such as Mean Square Error (MSE), Root Mean Squared Error (RMSE), Mean Absolute Error (MAE). The results indicate that stacked KNN and MF lead to a more robust and more accurate recommendation system.

Mythical Association of Male Body in Baahubali Series

This study entitled as “Mythical Association of Male Body in Baahubali Series” explores how S.S. Rajamauli destabilizes the cinematic convention of the constructed female body in consideration of the male gaze in the Bollywood film industry. It investigates the entertainment industry’s presentation of the male body for both the male and female gaze in Baahubali Series. Moreover, the manuscript highlights the glorification of the male body through rigorous training and constant maneuver in resonance with the Eastern mythologies and Hindu scriptures. The study discovers the reworking of myth and archetype in film and an ideal male body prepared in gym centers and training institutions. Cinematic representations of Bhima, Krishna, Lord Vishnu and Arjuna mythologize male bodies. The research paper examines the texts from the perspectives of Body Studies and the body myth from the Eastern epic traditions, including Mahabharata, Ramayana and Hindu hymns. Similarly, the body of Baahubali rehearses Bhima and Krishna, the body of Bhalla Deva with Duryodhana and the body of Bajjala Deva with Dhritarastra. The Hollywood film industry’s projection of the body with resonance of myth and archetype subverts the traditional notion of body as impure trivial thing. Since the representation of the body in Bollywood movies has barely been explored, this study can be significant source for the researchers of myth, movie and masculinity in the future.

REINVENTING RELIGIOUS MODERATION IN INDIA THROUGH SUFI CONTENT IN BOLLYWOOD MUSIC VIDEO

Religious violence in India has become one of the bloodiest humanitarian crises in history. There have been many efforts to stop or reduce these conflicts, one of which is promoting religious moderation using art media. Within the last decade, incorporating Sufi content in Bollywood music videos has become a new trend. Sufism, as a mystical form of Islam, has been viewed as more pluralistic and acceptable for all societies in India. Therefore, this study aimed to observe the Sufi content in Bollywood music videos and measure its role as a new approach to religious moderation in India. Using Roland Barthes' semiotics theory, this qualitative research observed how Sufism is depicted in Bollywood music videos and analyzed how it represents religious moderation. The research results revealed that the Sufism depiction in Bollywood music videos is represented in two forms: visualized music videos and the lyrics. Sufi content in the selected Bollywood movie songs has some religious moderation principles like tasamuh (tolerance), i'tidal (justice), qudwah (leadership), i'tiraf al-urf (respecting tradition), and anti-violence. Analyzing the comments on Youtube featuring those music videos, it could be concluded that the Sufi content in Bollywood music videos has successfully influenced the audience to be more religiously moderate.

Indian Hindi Cinema and Queer Gaze: Presentation Of LGBTQ+ In Bollywood

Cinema has long been a pillar of our culture. On a variety of subjects, it shocked, amused, inspired, and exceeded hopes and expectations. Film is also seen as a powerful tool for accelerating social change, subtly influencing society's way of thinking. Indian cinema is said to have different genres as they should appeal to a wide range of audiences. The topic undergoes constant paradigm shifts. Various epics, myths, tales, and retellings of side stories were shown at the beginning of the movie. The film then highlighted the ideas of the freedom movement and Gandhi's philosophy. More recently, true events have been incorporated and film actors have waged battles for social justice. In addition, through widespread publicity, they started enacting important changes that affected politics and other political dramas. The contents of the film are frequently taken from society and vice versa, and the term is used to designate a broad range of sexual identities, including non-cisgender. Without a doubt, the LGBT movement in India has benefited enormously from the movies. Like many other modern social movements, the Indian queer movement seeks to change society. a shift in our perception of sexuality away from seeing it as a passing phase. His objective is to dismantle the constructed barriers of predominate notions that characterize the typical adult's sexual world.

Portrayal of Pakistan in Bollywood: A Content Analysis of Movies

Films have become an effective tool of propagation of messages, cultures, conflicts and ideologies. USA, Russia, China, Iran and other countries are also using it to achieve their goals to project their national agendas. Indian film industry has become the largest film producing industry in the world, and the Bollywood movies are being watched and liked all over the globe. Since the partition in 1947, India and Pakistan are considered harsh rivals. This study examined the portrayal of Pakistan image in Bollywood movies during the year of 2013. The researcher used mixed method to conduct this research. The Sample of this study was Bollywood movies released in 2013. For this purpose, the researcher scientifically investigated and analyzed about how and to what extent Bollywood movies are showing the face of Pakistan querulously. The study applied theory of framing to investigate that how Bollywood represent Pakistan.

Twisted Skeins of Women and Wilderness

Anthropogenic development has reduced the concept of stability to an imaginary state. Thomas Nail prefers the term “Kinocene” to Anthropocene or Capitalocene to describe modern times since it suggests a reconfiguration of human-nonhuman relations. This is where the interpretation of classic tales through contemporary lenses becomes relevant concerning re-imagining them in the context of marginalized voices. An example of this is the Bollywood film Sherni, which finds its tropes in the Shrew tales, famously used by Shakespeare.
 This article is divided into three sections, followed by a conclusion. The first section introduces Thomas Nail’s concept of border, allowing the analysis to focus on extensive and intensive movements. The former pertains to the observation of external manifestations of hegemonical exercise perpetuated within India as a legacy of colonialism. Following the discussion of the colonial legacy, examining the intensive movement illustrates how Shakespeare’s Shrew tropes emerge as the film expresses its resistance to patriarchy and creates empathy for the nonhuman actor.

Construction of Religious Minority Groups in Bollywood Cinema: A Historic & Critical Thematic Analysis

This article deals with the dominant themes that emerged in the Bollywood Cinema about religious minority groups Like Muslims, Christian, and Sikhs. The research utilized the structure provided by the Clerk and Brown 2006 in terms of thematic Analysis. Thirty movies were selected through purposive and random sampling. Ten movies were represented by each minority Group. The dominant themes found with regard to the Muslim community in Bollywood movies were Islamic terrorism, Islamophobia, economic, education backwardness, and Muslim identity, Sikh dominant themes were found as Comedian, Sikh Identity, Brave, and truthful. Similarly, Christian themes were Westernized, Christian Identity, erotic, and Prostitute. Based on Historic and the critical thematic analysis as well as theoretical grounds of Hall’s representation, Said's Concept of Orientalism, and Noam Chomsky’s propaganda model concept, the research clearly indicated that the Bollywood Cinema blurred the identity of religious minority groups and decorated them as others, for example, it distorts the religious concepts, promotes Islam phobia and connecting Islam with the terrorism, in terms to Muslims treated as brutal, extremist, shelter provider, the danger for the state, etc and Sikh as a painted comedian, drinkers and their culture in merged with the Hindus rituals as well as Christian minority female painted erotic object, westernized and Hypersexual. The research clarifies that the Bollywood cinema articulates the content of the movies under the umbrella of the elite political mindset. 

Assessing the Role of Items Songs from Bollywood Movies in Delineating Gender Roles in India

ABSTRACT Crimes against women are common in India due to oppressive cultural norms. Bollywood offers an opportunity to investigate gender role representations. This research examines 20 Bollywood item songs through an intersectional lens. The study is concerned with how aural affordances in item songs delineate oppressive gender roles and violence against women. The study discovered four major themes: increased substance use and gang culture depiction, lower-middle-class women’s hypersexualization, the problematic item girl persona, and female sexual liberation. The study explains how item songs can positively influence public opinion about gender roles and violence against women.

A daydream and a nightmare in Muqaddar Ka Sikandar: Formulas, fantasies and 1970s action Hindi cinema

1970s Hindi formula films have been described within Hindi film scholarship as melodramatic, and masochistic fantasies, the latter in terms of the hero’s desire to return to a pre-Oedipal state. In my analysis of Muqaddar Ka Sikandar (1978), the biggest hit of the year, I focus on its staging of scenes of fantasy and dream-like episodes and its foregrounding of childhood episodes involving father substitutes, primary figures I argue in the staging. By examining the film’s psychical–spatial terrain, I also consider the figure of the rival and villain, played by Amjad Khan, and I argue that Khan’s villainy reworks scenes of staged enmity with the hero into reconciliation. I conclude with some observations on the contemporary circulation of formula films on YouTube, where the films and their songs remain remarkably popular and generate a large archive of likes, views and comments, and user-generated content.

Editor’s Introduction

Editor’s Introduction

Bollywood Actresses’s Evolving Figure Consciousness & Role in Hindi Cinema: Comparative Study From 1950 to 2020

Abstract: Bollywood is the name given to the Hindi film business because it is based in Bombay (Mumbai). For decades, Bollywood has been a popular source of entertainment for millions of people not only in India but also around the world. Dada Saheb Phalke launched the Indian cinema business with silent films, and from that time until now, Bollywood has experienced numerous ups and downs and undergone significant changes in terms of technology, fashion, and the impact of political, social, and cultural developments in the nation. The primary Hero (protagonist), The Heroine (his love interest), and the Villain (his enemy) are a few aspects that, despite all these variations, are consistent and common in Bollywood film plots. These components can be found in any Bollywood film from any era. Without it, a Bollywood film is incomplete. The Bollywood heroine has been the style symbol for decades, from Madhubala and Nargis of the 1950s to Sridevi and Madhuri Dixit of the 90’s to Deepika and Katrina of the 2020s. They might be seen as a reflection of the social and cultural attitudes about beauty parameters of the period. Women, in addition to young girls, also look up to and emulate these heroines for their beauty, fashion sense, and way of life. This study paper analyses the changes in the attractiveness and Physical appearance of Bollywood heroines, as well as the reasons for these changes.

Do weak readers in rural India automatically read same language subtitles on Bollywood films? An eye gaze analysis.

Same Language Subtitling (SLS) of audio-visual content on mainstream TV entertainment to improve mass reading literacy was first conceived and piloted in India. SLS is now being scaled up nationally to ensure that the reading skills of one billion TV viewers, including 600 million weak readers, remain on a lifelong pathway to practice, progress, and proficiency. Will weak readers ignore or try to read along with SLS? Our eye-tracking study investigates this question with 136 weak readers drawn from a remote village in Rajasthan state by showing them popular Hindi film clips of dialog and songs, with and without SLS. We developed an interactive web-based visual analytics tool for exploring eye-tracking data. Based on an analysis of fixations, saccades, and time spent in the subtitle and non-subtitle areas, our main finding is that 70 percent of weak readers engaged in unprompted reading while watching film clips with SLS. We observed that saccadic eye movement is a good indicator to quantify the amount of reading with SLS, and saccadic regression can further differentiate weak readers. Eye-tracking studies of weak readers watching subtitles are rare, and ours may be the first with subjects from rural India.

The image of Spain as a tourist destination through audiovisual productions. The case of Zindagi Na Milegi Dobara (Zoya Akthar, 2011)

This article studies the tourist image of Spain projected by the Bollywood film Zindagi Na Milegi Dobara, directed by Zoya Akhtar. Released in 2011, the film is a paradigmatic example of tourism promotion of the Spanish territory by foreign audiovisual media, that identifies the country as a destination with a wide tourist offer characterized by important cultural, landscape, artistic, and gastronomic attractions. The text is divided into two sections. In the first, the tourist implications of audiovisual productions are analysed in general terms and, more specifically, the economic impact and marketing activities, as well as the shaping of geographical imaginaries, derived from film screenings. Later, this conceptual framework is applied to the specific case of Zindagi Na Milegi Dobara, explaining the possible correlation between its premiere and the increase in Indian visitors to Spain within the framework of the I need Spain campaign (2010-2016). Next, the film is studied as a road movie that promotes experiential tourism and generates specific geo-touristic imaginaries through landscape beauty, neo-romantic exoticism, and gender stereotypes.

Yeh Hai Bombay Meri Jaan: Requiem for a Cosmopolitan City

Critical toponymies, instead of viewing place names as transparent signifiers that designate places as ‘objects’ or ‘artifacts’, have foregrounded the necessity for understanding place naming as ‘a contested spatial practice’ and attempted ‘a critical interrogation of the politics of place naming’. In view of the frequency of colonial erasures and appropriations of the spaces of the colonised, post-colonial reclamations of place resort to technologies of toponymic cleansing, founding and restoration as acts of resistance. Toponymic resistance can occur on both the creation and deployment of alternative names and the use of alternative pronunciations for established names. Viewing ‘pronunciation to be an important element of the cultural politics of place naming within post-colonial societies’, Kearns and Berg argue ‘that even when widespread agreement on the name of a place prevails, the way the name is pronounced reflects, and contributes to, the constitution of imagined communities’. Arguing that plural pronunciations of the city’s names – Bombay, Bambai and Mumbai – evoke multiversal cosmopolitan urban imaginaries that are sometimes disjunctive, this article shows that Hindi cinema employs ‘multiplicity of means’, amalgamating the linguistic tools of toponymy with paralinguistic and extralinguistic codes, to produce the myth of the cosmopolitan city or ‘the Bombay Dream’.

Cinema as a Discourse on Critical Geopolitics: The Imagery of India–Pakistan Borders in the Narratives of Bollywood Movies

ABSTRACT This paper attempts to map the modes by which cinematic narratives of select Hindi movies produced by Bollywood can be employed as a discourse on critical geopolitics. The focus is to understand how the representations of the India–Pakistan border in a select set of Hindi films tend to portray the psychology of cartographic fundamentalism. Situating the imagery of divided cartographies of the Indian Subcontinent in Hindi cinema, the paper looks at the ways in which the filmic narratives attempt to construct the psychology of border cleavages between India and Pakistan in the demotic consciousness of the viewers. Cinematic representations play a definitive role in constructing popular imagination regarding the issues of identity, refugee crisis and notions of cultural and psychic frontiers. The effects on collective imagination can be visualized by engaging with the narratives and powerful images that cinema is capable of presenting to the viewers. This in turn helps construct and deconstruct the popular notions by altering the dialectics of cognitive mapping. Placing our analysis in this conceptual framework, the paper examines how the psychology of divided cartographies gets inextricably linked to the nationalist construction of the image of India as the righteous self, and the portrait of Pakistan as the vicious other and country's primary enemy. The movies that have been analyzed in the paper are Border (1997), LoC (2003), Bajarangi Bhaijan (2015) and Filmistaan (2012). These movies have portrayed border as conflict-ridden non-porous zones. The paper employs discourse analysis as its methodology and discusses the cinematic reconstruction of the idea of the divided cartographies of the subcontinent on the foundations of the epistemic framework of critical geopolitics.

Transadaptation and Bollywoodisation in Tanika Gupta’s Hobson’s Choice and Wah! Wah! Girls

Abstract Tanika Gupta’s varied work as a playwright encompasses transadaptation in a range of forms. This article will focus on two of her plays, Hobson’s Choice (2003/2019) and Wah! Wah! Girls (2012), exploring the ways in which she depicts representations of South Asian communities in Britain in different ways. Hobson’s Choice reworks the original 1916 play to being set among the Bengali community working in the rag trade in Salford. The play focuses on the father of the family, Hari Hobson, who runs a clothing factory and lives with his three daughters. The 2019 reworking of the play changes the setting to a Ugandan Asian family in Manchester in 1987. Wah! Wah! Girls is set in East London, having been commissioned as part of the Cultural Olympiad. Focusing on a mujra-style dancing club and the different communities surrounding it, the play includes transadaptations of well-known dance routines from Bollywood films integrated into the action, playing on nostalgia and familiarity for South Asian communities, as well as offering a picture of contemporary multicultural London. Both plays, in different ways, use transadaptation of setting and form to examine what it means to be British and Asian in different contexts, and this article will analyse whether this is successful in creating a meaningful interrogation of the experience of British South Asians on stage.

Historicizing Hindutva Ideology

Historicizing Hindutva Ideology

Representations of the Mughals in Present-Day India: From K. Asif’s Akbar to the Babur of Nikkhil Advani

The Hindi film industry (Bollywood) has been fascinated since practically its beginnings with revisiting history and rewriting it. Over the years, we have had several historical period films, and of them a number have been on Mughal emperors and princesses. This article tries to review the content of some of the celebrated movies based on the Great Mughals, produced after independence: starting with Mughal-e-Azam of K. Asif to Jodhaa Akbar of Ashutosh Gowariker and a recently shot historical serial. The basic argument of the article is that compared to Western endeavours, or even other Asian film-makers, the products of the Hindi film industry, or even the OTT platforms, have somehow failed in conforming to established historical facts while constructing their romances. The article examines how the films often depart from reality to reconstruct a mythical past. The recent tendency towards communalisation, however, is not here studied.