SRK and global Bollywood

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.

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%.

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.

The thematic and formal difference between Hindi cinema and other cinemas is predicated on its being structured by the principles of oral narrative traditions. South Asian film scholars have convincingly located its origins in indigenous narrative and performing arts. Their examination of Indian epic, narrative, visual and theatrical traditions underpinning cinematic texts has elevated Hindi cinema from a bad copy of Euro-American cinema to an alternative cinematic genre with a distinctive visual and narrative grammar derived from a diversity of ancient and modern sources. While these studies engage in great depth with the ancient legacies of the epics the Mahabharata and the Ramayana and with more recent ones such as Parsi theatre and calendar art, which reveal a certain intermediality, their privileging of the Hindi film's Hindu Sanskritic sources over others marginalizes those producing a homogenous discourse of indigeneity. While acknowledging the contribution of the dominant Hindu Sanskritic tradition to the shaping of popular Hindi cinema, this article aims to explore the alternative narrative streams that have irrigated storytelling in Hindi films, particularly the alternative Perso-Arabic legacy that has been erased or marginalized in the studies of Hindi cinema. Through tracing the imbrication of the Perso-Arabic heritage with the Hindu Sanskritic, it aims to show that its inherent syncreticism makes a diverse variety of cinematic audiences identify with the narrative conflicts in Hindi cinema.

The Indian film industry is one of the most robust and vibrant sectors of the country’s economy. It adds to the creation of jobs and entertainment, strengthening India’s soft power internationally. The sociocultural fabric of India has been reflected and influenced by women in Hindi film. The way that gender discrimination is depicted in the media has generated a great deal of debate and controversy throughout the years. Bollywood, one of the largest film industries in the world, has a significant impact on social norms and views. Bollywood films’ depiction of gender norms and stereotypes have the power to influence viewers’ attitudes, beliefs, and actions especially young people. This study focuses on assessing, beliefs and actions especially young people. This study focuses on assessing the perceptions and attitudes of college/university students in Chittorgarh, Rajasthan regarding the portrayal of gender discrimination in Bollywood films. The study’s findings demonstrated that individuals are more willing to admit bias when they are aware of gender stereotyping practices. It indicates that, whether intentionally or unintentionally, Bollywood is igniting significant discussions about gender standards. However, these discussions also highlight a sad reality: film frequently lags behind society’s evolution. Even movies that aim to represent strong women can occasionally fall into the trap of superficial empowerment that offers independence without narrative control and strength without depth.

BackgroundSmoking in Hollywood movies is a known risk factor for teen smoking in the USA and Europe, but little is known about the association between exposure to tobacco use in...

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.

Current discussions around citizenship and belonging in India and South Asia are perpetually influenced by the Partition, which serves as "the condition of possibility for the gendered ethnicization of citizenship and belonging in postcolonial South Asia." Although it remains prominent in popular consciousness, the violence and trauma have mostly been obscured as the Indian state has declined to commemorate the event in any form. In the lack of institutional memorialization, literature and films about Partition, coupled with personal accounts, serve as a significant medium for commemorating the human suffering, requiring a re-evaluation of Partition violence. While historians offer a broader context for comprehending Partition violence, the intricate nuances of loss, pain, and suffering are often more effectively conveyed in the works of creative writers and filmmakers, serving as a counterpoint to official narratives by focusing on individual experiences. Hindi cinema, commonly known as Bollywood, has been instrumental in safeguarding and promoting India's extensive cultural history. This research study examines the relationship between Hindi cinema and the preservation of Partition narratives within it. This study examines how Hindi cinema serves as a potent tool for cultural preservation by highlighting many facets of Indian culture, historical authenticity, traditional rites, festivals, familial systems, and regional customs.

Though popular Hindi cinema is frequently identified by its song-and-dance sequences, little has been written specifically about film dance. This article analyzes film dance and female stardom in Hindi films of the late 1980s and 1990s through an examination of the star text of Madhuri Dixit, the leading dancer-actress of the time. It tracks the kinesthetic history of the Dixit star text from Tezaab (Acid, dir. N. Chandra, India, 1988) to her most recent films and television shows and examines how her brazenly sensuous dance numbers have transformed the construction of the female body on-screen and indeed the very conditions of female stardom in Hindi cinema. This article analyzes the dance numbers from three films featuring Dixit and demonstrates the tensions and alterations provoked in the popular Hindi film narrative by the dissolving divide between the coy heroine and the raunchily dancing vamp. It suggests that these refigurations often revolve around dance, which operated as a critical site for the negotiation of cultural anxieties around female sexuality during the period. This article employs a body-space-movement framework to consider the strategies that nineties Hindi cinema deployed in its attempt to manage a new and potentially dangerous circulation of the heroine's body. By highlighting these strategies' frequent failure to contain Dixit's flamboyantly dancing body, this article posits that the dancer-actress engenders a distinctive mode of performance that suggests a different model for understanding female agency and the authorship of film narratives and star texts.

This book analyzes the representations of the subjects of Hindi cinema as a way of gaining insights into the hegemony of the upper-caste Hindu male in narratives of nationhood. Given that Hindi cinema has narrativized the nation after 1947, the book examines how these subjects were chosen and argues that they were upper-caste, Hindu and predominantly male. The author's analysis shows asymmetries in the constitution of the ‘imagined nation’ in the public consciousness. Women, the marginalized categories, and minorities were presented as ‘others’ with separate stories for the issues dealing with them—but distinct from that of the nation. Stories centered on women primarily highlight their position within society. In this context, the book argues that it is the male protagonist whose story mirrors that of the nation as allegory. A novel contribution to the field of Bollywood Studies, this insightful work will be of interest to those studying Hindi cinema and film studies, political science and history, as well as gender studies.

Voice conveys information as well as emotion in the film. The film sound production starts with voice recording, and it informs the subsequent sound design. This paper examines the influence of sync sound recording technologies on the aesthetics of voice and sound design in the Hindi cinema since 2001. In the landscape of Indian cinema with the practice of dubbing, a unique aesthetics of voice evolved, privileging the human voice over all other sounds, imbuing it with ‘God-like’ acoustic properties. However, at the turn of the millennium, one observes a shift in the pattern of sound design with the re-emergence of sync sound recording technologies in the Hindi cinema. The present paper analyzes ten case studies of Hindi films through critical listening and comparative analysis of dubbed and sync sound films between 2001 to present. Observations from the analysis reveal that sync sound recording has caused a profound shift in sound design principles within mainstream Hindi cinema conforming more closely to global sound design aesthetics of realism.

This research will attempt to understand the politics of the representation of Christian women characters in Hindi films, Julie, and Bobby from a postcolonial feminist lens. This paper studies the portrayal of Christian women characters as ‘westernized’ and ‘common’ in Hindi films. To prove this argument, a postcolonial feminist approach with the theories of Partha Chatterjee’s idea of the role of nationalism in the representation of the ‘westernized’ and ‘common’ women; Gopal Guru’s argument of the exclusion of the minorities from the mainstream imagination of the nation, and Diana Dimitrova’s discourse of ‘Otherism’ will be used. This research implies that the minority Christian women characters as the lead heroines in Hindi films are typecasted into the roles of immoral, sexually alluring, and unchaste woman who through her association with the Hindu hero poses a threat to the purity of Hindu dharma and hence the majoritarian idea of ‘Indianness’.

If there is one phrase that has been used most often by Western audiences for popular Indian cinema, it is the phrase “musicals.” The description gestures both at the fixation of Indian cinema on an earlier stage of cinematic evolution and the simple and uncomplicated pleasure derived by the audience from popular Hindi films that have an audience all over the world. This essay examines Hindi film “song and dance” spectacles as the art of deferment in the postmodern cinema of seduction, a notion derived from the work of Jean Baudrillard and the insights of Freud-Lacan-Zizek and Baudrillard himself on deferral and seduction. This chapter makes this claim not as an overarching theoretical nomenclature for all song and dance sequences in Hindi films. Instead the author argues for the primacy of the art of deferment and play in a postmodern cinema of seduction within the limited scope of her reading of a North Indian subaltern/folk-inspired song and dance Hindi film, Amol Palekar and Sandhya Gokhale directed Paheli (Riddle, 2005).

Purpose This paper aims to examine the strategic issues of risk for independent theatrical film distributors in the Hindi film industry in India. Design/methodology/approach The study adopted qualitative grounded theory approach to explore contextually relevant strategic issues of risk for independent theatrical film distributors. Semi-structured in-depth interviews with Hindi film distributors helped to gain explorative insights about the risk behaviour of film distributors operating in Mumbai “circuit”. Findings The findings suggest that risk faced by distributors is a function of product (film content) features, contractual terms, resources such as finance and strength of strategic alliances with the producers. The study develops a business risk model for the film distributors from a series of propositions. Originality/value The paper contributes to the literature on motion picture industry by highlighting the importance of distribution risk in the film value chain.

Ali Husain Mir is a Bollywood lyricist and script writer and a professor of Management at William Paterson University. Mir visited the Hindi Urdu Flagship at the University of Texas at Austin to speak to Flagship students about his career in Bollywood production and the changing role of Urdu in Indian cinema. Mir is the author of Anthems of Resistance, the definitive book on the All India Progressive Writers’ Movement; he is also an acclaimed lyricist and script-writer for Hindi and Urdu films (Iqbal, Dor). Mir’s oeuvre engages issues of religious minorities and secularism in South Asia.