for Mumbai's movie moguls and their camp followers, these are exciting times. Entertainment exports from India have grown from $40 million in 1998 to upwards of $200 million. It is therefore easy to be carried away by the hype and hoopla that surrounds the supposed emergence of Indian cinema, Bollywood films to be more precise, as a force to reckon with on the world stage. This book, a compilation of informed essays, is an attempt to temper the rising tide of exuberance and place the nascent process of Indian cinema's globalisation in the right perspective. Its purpose is to weigh the pros and cons, separate the myths from the ground realities and identify the highs and lows to facilitate a clearer and more balanced, though by no means necessarily comprehensive, understanding of the new phenomenon.
Is Mumbai cinema of the popular kind really poised to conquer the world? The essays on the following pages, which have been authored by film critics, media experts and filmmakers, articulate convergent standpoints. But taken as a whole, they clearly establish that the Mumbai film industry has shown no signs yet of proving that the global success of Lagaan and Monsoon Wedding, two films that belong to different ends of the Indian filmmaking spectrum, is more than a mere flash in the pan.
Some of the song and dance extravaganzas that Bollywood churns out with frenetic regularity have, indeed, repeatedly broken into the US and UK popularity charts in recent years but that has been fuelled almost entirely by the growing size and purchasing power of the Indian Diaspora. There has been nothing yet to suggest that India's formula films have found ready acceptance among western audiences as well.
Although it is increasingly fashionable in the new millennium among a section of film scholars and watchers to extol the virtues of the Bollywood idiom, the fact remains that films emerging from Mumbai are still seen around the globe as oddities, manifestations of a quaint but kitschy method of storytelling. While the interest aroused by the inimitability of this form of filmed entertainment may be absolutely valid and, therefore, worth serious critical examination, Indian cinema as an art form is still represented internationally by the works of such diverse directors as Shyam Benegal, Adoor Gopalakrishnan and Buddhadeb Dasgupta, among others.
While Benegal lives and works in Mumbai in the physical sense, spiritually and artistically he is as far removed from the profit-driven ethos of Bollywood's dream factory as Gopalakrishnan, who is based in Thiruvananthapuram, Kerala. Their films are watched and appreciated around the globe-they do not break into Top Ten charts because they do not play on the conventional commercial circuits - but they would hate it if their films were to be placed in the same bracket as the fare that is produced by Bollywood.
**Contents and Sample Pages**
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