DEUTSCH
Bollywood and Europa
Date: 23rd July 2011
Time: 04.00 PM
Space: Hall Cardiff (Millennium Hotel)
ATTENTION: This Tea Talk is in english language!
The flows of Indian commercial cinema, christened Bollywood by the Euro-American media, illustrate the appropriation of global networks by non-western producers to initiate 'contra flows' to the west assuaging apprehensions about the homogenizing drive of globalization. While Indian popular cinema in Hindi and Tamil has been travelling to different parts of the world since the 1930s, 'the Bollywood invasion' of Europe, North America and Australia is a post-1995 phenomenon. The speed and ease with which Bollywood has made incursions into the remotest corners of the world since the 1990s has made it a part of the global popular cultural imaginary.
Indian cinematic exports are located in the contemporary narrative of global flows. Yet Germany has had a much older connection with Indian cinema through the involvement of the German filmmaker Franz Osten with Himanshu Rai, pioneer of Indian cinema. Similarly, the symbolic import of Raj Kapoor's 'Awara' (1951) for the German audience is reported to have compensated for the small number of films exported to Germany during this period. Despite the strong Indian-German collaboration and the thin trickle of popular films to Germany since the 1950s, Indian popular cinema did not become popular in Germany until the mid-1990s following its reinvention as Bollywood.
Since Bollywood reached nearly 2 million homes with the cable channel RTL 2’s screening of Karan Johar’s 'Kabhi Khushi Kabhi Gham' in 2004, Bollywood films have become a rage among German youth, particularly among young women. Bollywood’s current popularity in Germany complicates audience and reception studies through its being decoupled from a South Asian diaspora and from narratives of homeland, belonging and identity in which Bollywood flows were formerly located. It is also important to note that Bollywood’s incursion into Germany occurred through the arthouse circuit and that although the audience for Bollywood films in Germany is small, it is highly dedicated engendering fan activities and Bollywood centred cultural practices like dancing, singing and theme parties.
Speaker
Anjali Gera Roy is Professor in the Department of Humanities of Social Sciences at the Indian Institute of Technology Kharagpur. She has published essays in literary, film and cultural studies, translated short fiction from Hindi, authored a book on African fiction, edited an anthology on the Nigerian writer Wole Soyinka and co-edited another on the Indo-Canadian novelist Rohinton Mistry. Her new publications include a co-edited (with Nandi Bhatia) volume Partitioned Lives: Narratives of Home, Displacement and Resettlement (2008) on the Indian Partition of 1947 and a monograph Bhangra Moves: From Ludhiana to London and Beyond (2010). She researched the transnational flows of Bollywood cinema on a Senior Visiting Fellowship in the Asia Research Institute National University of Singapore and has co-edited (with Chua Beng Huat) an anthology The Travels of Indian Cinema: From Bombay to LA (2011) and edited a volume of essays Bollywood's Soft Power: At Home and Beyond(2012). She is visiting Germany on a Baden-Wüttemberg Professorial Fellowship at the South Asia Institute University of Heidelberg to work on Bollywood in Germany.
