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Journal of International and Intercultural Communication

ISSN: 1751-3057 (Print) 1751-3065 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rjii20

“I Need an Indian Touch”: Glocalization and Bollywood Films

Shakuntala Rao

To cite this article: Shakuntala Rao (2010) “I Need an Indian Touch”: Glocalization and Bollywood Films, Journal of International and Intercultural Communication, 3:1, 1-19, DOI: 10.1080/17513050903428117

To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/17513050903428117

Published online: 07 Jan 2010.

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‘‘I Need an Indian Touch’’: Glocalization and Bollywood Films Shakuntala Rao

This article examines the audience demand that Bollywood films, in order to be popular

among Indians, have ‘‘an Indian touch’’ even while exhibiting global influences.

Audience responses to the use of English, Western clothing, musical styles, and settings

range from anxiety to pleasure and vary from subject to subject, but audience members

expressed an almost universal expectation that Bollywood films contain traditional

clothing and music, that they retain the emphasis on familial emotion, and that they

reinforce Indian values. Such reciprocal adaptation between the symptoms of globaliza-

tion and the retention of ‘‘an Indian touch’’ is discussed using the theoretical framework

of glocalization in international communication.

Keywords: Glocalization; Bollywood; Films; India

Just borrowing a story from Hollywood will not mean that the film will be a hit. I

need something in the film that has the Indian roop [touch]. Even in Punjabi

videos, everything will be Western, they will be wearing jeans and shorts, but the

dhol [drum] will be playing in the background, which is the essence of our

civilization. I will always need that Indian touch in films. (informant: Meenakshi)

In this article, I examine the audience demand that Bollywood films, in order to be

popular among Indians, have ‘‘an Indian touch’’ even while exhibiting global

influences. Audience responses to the use of English, and to Western clothing,

musical styles, and settings range from anxiety to pleasure and vary from subject to

subject, but audience members expressed an almost universal expectation that

Bollywood films contain traditional clothing and music, that they retain the emphasis

on familial emotion, and that they reinforce ‘‘Indian’’ values. The active audience of

Bollywood films in India does not passively succumb to complete Westernization, but

rather successfully demands a compromise between Westernization and India:

Shakuntala Rao is Professor at the Department of Communication, State University of New York, USA. The

author wishes to thank Erin Mitchell for comments and suggestions. Funding for this project came from State

University of New York’s Presidential research grant. Correspondence to: Dr. Shakuntala Rao, Communication

Disorders and Sciences, State University of New York, Plattsburgh, NY 12901, USA. Email: [email protected]

ISSN 1751-3057 (print)/ISSN 1751-3065 (online) # 2010 National Communication Association

DOI: 10.1080/17513050903428117

Journal of International and Intercultural Communication

Vol. 3, No. 1, February 2010, pp. 1�19

indeed, that Western adapts to India. I interpret such reciprocal adaptation between

the symptoms of globalization and the retention of ‘‘an Indian touch’’ as an instance

of productive intersection between two very different epistemologies and imaginaries,

and thus as an instance of what Robertson (1997, p. 25) and others have termed

glocalization. In the new phenomenological era of global consciousness where there

has been large-scale proliferation of visual images in people’s media repertoire,

glocalization can provide a theoretical framework to better understand the global-

local nexus in audience reception. I contend that understanding audience response to

(and filmmakers’ accommodations to audience expectations in) Bollywood movies as

a process of glocalization can help us theorize the ways that Indian audiences live

through, articulate, and construct the multifaceted intersections of the global

and local.

The Emergence of Bollywood

Used both pejoratively and with pride as shorthand for a film industry located in

Mumbai, previously named Bombay, the term Bollywood has come to refer to the

roughly 150 Hindi films that roll out each year from the city’s studios. Well known

for its frequent remaking and reformulating of Hollywood films, the label Bollywood

has come to represent both an acknowledgment of the debt Mumbai filmmakers owe

to Hollywood for creative ideas as well as a description that challenges the hegemony

of Hollywood. According to Rajadhyaksha (2003, p. 25) the ‘‘Bollywoodization’’ of

Mumbai cinema must be understood as a ‘‘diffused cultural conglomeration

involving range of distribution and consumption activities’’ signified by the complex

and contradictory forces of globalization, privatization, and liberalization which has

changed the production and consumption of Mumbai films. The near universal

legitimation of the term Bollywood (instead of Hindi cinema, Bombay cinema,

Indian popular cinema, etc.) is an index of larger social transformations taking place

in India.

The Indian media scenario completely changed in 1991 with the arrival of

international television. Hong Kong based Star TV, a subsidiary of News Corporation,

and CNN started broadcasting into India using the ASIAST-1 satellite. The arrival of

satellite-distributed television was followed by the rapid and dramatic expansion of

cable television. The government’s new ‘‘open skies policy’’ allowed for media

audiences to have access not only to several Hindi and regional language channels but

also to foreign entertainment programming including latest Hollywood films (Sinha,

2001, p. 77). Changes in the media landscape along with policy initiatives by the State

precipitated a further series of changes which dramatically impacted the film

industry. When the government granted ‘‘industry status’’ to films in 1998 (Mehta,

2005, p. 139), the film industry was eligible for infrastructural and credit supports

available to other industries as well as reduction in custom duties on cinematographic

film, complete exemption on export profits, and tax incentives. At the same

time as policy-shifts were liberalizing the industry, multiplexes began to replace

single-screen theaters, especially in the metropolitan cities of Mumbai, Delhi,

2 S. Rao

Bangalore, Kolkata, Hyderabad, and Chennai. By the late 1990s, the buzz word had

become the ‘‘corportization’’ of films: Web sites became increasingly important

marketing sites for films and film studios; film music was strongly promoted

(popular film songs could be downloaded as cell phone ringtones, for example);

television and radio advertised aggressively; ticket prices went up; and stars made

themselves available for press interviews, press appearances, and pre-release

campaigns (Bose, 2006, p. 32). The circulation of thousands of new media objects

in the forms of print flyers, signage, mobile phones, music cassettes, and CDs, writes

Sundaram (2005, p. 57), created a ‘‘visual frenzy’’ centered around Bollywood.

Films increasingly began to depict India’s shifting relationship with the world

economy through images of a hybrid relation between the national and global. Since

the economic liberalization of the 1990s an ever-increasing number of Indians have

traveled abroad, often to visit their overseas family; this diaspora has come to

represent an important part of the market for Mumbai film producers. The

increasingly consumerist lifestyle of India’s elites and wealthy Indians living in the

West has led to frequent depiction in films of hugely extravagant interiors, lavish

jewelry, designer clothes, shopping at malls, eating and drinking out at clubs and

bars, and engaging in expensive sports such as skiing, water-gliding, and motor-

racing. The strategies adopted by the filmmakers to accommodate such expanding

audience tastes and desires can be best described as taking global formats and visual

styles, while ‘‘localizing, adapting, appropriating, and Indianizing’’ them (Ganti,

2002, p. 281). Such strategies, and the audience expectations that produced them, can

be labeled as glocalization, and can contribute to a theoretical framework to better

understand the global-local nexus among Bollywood audiences.

Globalization versus Glocalization

Most scholars agree that globalization has been responsible for major transformations

in the structures of media production and reception in the South. The process of

globalization is changing people’s ‘‘perceptions of time and space’’ (Lie & Servaes,

2000, p. 317): On one hand it is broadening and widening boundaries and on the

other hand, strengthening and firming existing boundaries of self, identity, and

culture. Some globalists believe, in a deterministic sense of the word, that the mere

presence of global forces is prima facie evidence that local culture can have no power

of resistance, and that globalization requires ‘‘the local to surrender, now incapable of

radical resistance’’ (Thornton, 2000, p. 80). Everyday practice has shown a

simultaneous solidification of global flows and the consolidation of local identities.

Wilson and Dissanayake term this, ‘‘a new world-space of cultural production and

national representation which is simultaneously becoming more globalized (unified

around dynamics of capitalogic moving across borders) and more localized

(fragmented into contestory enclaves of difference, coalition, and resistance) in

everyday texture and composition’’ (1996, p. 1). Today’s globalizing culture is thus

characterized by ‘‘organization of diversity rather than a replication of uniformity’’

(Banerjee, 2002, p. 525).

Journal of International and Intercultural Communication 3

In media studies, scholars working with global sensitivities had been limited to a

broadly defined and loosely categorized academic arena of international commu-

nication. For long international communication was defined only by geography,

media policy between nations, and by linear definitions of nation-states. Ignored were

roles that nongovernmental agencies or non-State actors played within a nation or

across national borders. Globalization when discussed was assumed to be American-

ization and Americanization, in turn, was not understood in local terms except for

‘‘Western domination’’ (Chalaby, 2005, p. 18). International communication rarely

involved ethnographies or other audience-based or reception studies which

accounted for diversity in audiences and media practices and consumptions around

the globe.

Ferment in international communication has occurred for at least a decade now. A

recent surge of critical scholarship is charting new research terrains. According to

Thussu (2005), the expansion of the mainly Western transnational media empires

and a global rush to deregulate and privatize has made it imminent for us to discuss

the phenomenon of media globalization and, particularly, in the countries of the

South. Heuristic conceptual efforts have included the introduction of postcolonial

studies and non-Western worldviews to international communication (McMillan,

2007; Parameswaran, 2002; Shome & Hegde, 2002), the critical application of

Western mass communication theories to post-Soviet East Europe (Downing, 1996),

and introduction of critical ethnography to studies of international mass commu-

nication (Kraidy & Murphy, 2003; Kumar, 2006; Mankekar, 1999). Critical works in

intercultural communication such as those theorizing communication and cultures

from a dialectical-dialogical perspective (Martin & Nakayama, 1999) collectively have

exhibited that the ‘‘international communication ‘canon’ is indeed undergoing an

expansion’’ (Kraidy, 2003, p. 31).

The notion of glocalization is introduced and articulated in this paper as an

alternative to traditional international communication framework. While glocaliza-

tion as an epistemological and intellectual inquiry has been around for some time, its

use among media scholars and in media studies has been limited. Glocalization as a

theoretical formation has been floated by authors such as Giddens (1990), Sreberny-

Mohammadi (1996), and Sparks (2000), but it is in the works of Robertson that

glocalization is best articulated for the purposes of international communication.

Globalization, for Robertson, falls short of rendering the complexity of international

dynamics, and glocalization is offered as a more appropriate notion to theoretically

ground the paradoxical forces of the global and local.

Rejecting the false dialectical opposition of the global-local, center-periphery,

universality-particularism models as inadequate, Robertson writes that glocalization

‘‘captures the dynamics of the local in the global and the global in the local’’ (1997,

p. 29). Citing the definition from the Oxford Dictionary of New Words, Robertson

notes that glocalization has been modeled on Japanese dochakuka (deriving from

dochaku, living on one’s own land), originally the agricultural principle of adapting

one’s farming techniques to local conditions, but also adopted in Japanese business

for ‘‘global localization, a global outlook adapted to local conditions’’ (p. 28).

4 S. Rao

He proposes the theory of glocalization as a way of accounting for both global and

local, not as opposites but rather as ‘‘mutually formative, complementary compe-

titors, feeding off each other as they struggle for influence’’ (Kraidy, 2003, p. 38). His

idea of glocalization allows media scholars to escape ‘‘the pull of the global/local

polarity’’ and the fear that the local is dead (Robertson, 1997, p. 29). Rather than

pitching global against the local, glocalization hopes to break down the ‘‘ontologically

secure homes’’ of each and present them as interconnected forces (p. 30). While some

social theorists have attacked the concept of glocalization as being particularly

apolitical, ‘‘without any teeth or resistance to the sinister forces of globalization’’

(Thornton, 2000, p. 79), Robertson calls for both understanding of the global-local

nexus and of seeing glocalization as a tool of resistance and accommodation. The

central project of glocalization is to understand the reconfiguration of locality and

local subjects, to account for new cultural forms emerging at the intersections of the

global and local, and to counter the frequently expressed thesis of homogenization

that is often associated with global flows of labor, culture, and capitals. Glocalization

is a recognition that when ideas, objects, institutions, images, practices, and

performances, are transplanted to other places, they both bear the marks of history

as well as undergo a process of cultural translation. The appeal of glocalization is in

its conceptual elasticity and its ability to understand that locales (global, regional,

national, provincial, local) overlap and mutually influence contexts and identities.

Ethnographic Notes

Past ethnographies in media studies have rarely focused on non-Western audiences

(Rajagopal, 1996). Most Bollywood audience studies have been primarily focused on

viewers located in North America, Australia, and Great Britain, among international

students or diasporic communities from foreign countries studying or living in the

UK or America. The ways non-Western audiences understand or appropriate

messages substantially differ from the ways Western audiences do; little writing has

addressed these local modes of viewing globalized products. There is now a gradual

increase in studies critically and empirically addressing issues of media consumption

in India or Southern countries where Indian films are consumed. Such audience

studies include studies of Bollywood film texts (Juluri, 1999; Ram, 2002; Srinivas,

2002), on film-going experiences of audiences (Derne, 2000; Dickey, 1993), and

ethnographies regarding Indian film workers (Ganti, 2002).

This analysis draws on seven months of fieldwork, which I conducted in the state

of Punjab in Northern India in 2005 and 2006. I documented 49 formal and informal

interviews with young men and women, between the ages of 22 and 39 years. Most

subjects were students at Punjabi University and their family members. Students at

Punjabi University come from Patiala or other small towns and villages all over

Punjab (a small minority come from the nearest city, Chandigarh). Many come from

other midsize cities in Punjab, such as Ropar, Jullundhar, Ludhiana, and Amritsar.

Most subjects categorized themselves as moderate viewers of films, which meant they

would go to the theaters no more than once a month, and would watch one or two

Journal of International and Intercultural Communication 5

films a week on television. I often conducted interviews using a formal pre-prepared

questionnaire, but I also spent time with the subjects, visited their villages and homes,

and accompanied them to watch films. I came to know some of their families well,

and would often be invited to their homes. To avoid what Seiter (1990, p. 61) has

called ‘‘absences’’ within a nondirective interview strategy, I would converse with the

subjects about various social and political issues unrelated to films. Such practice

often allows a researcher like me ‘‘to understand the social and cultural networks that

often situate an individual viewer’’ (Griffiths, 1993, p. 62).

Exhibiting the Glocal: Local Appropriation of the Global

Informant Meenakshi’s insistence on the Indian roop (quoted at the beginning of the

paper) shows that audiences want globalized productions to reflect, and compromise

with, local knowledges. Media representation can depict India’s shifting relation with

the world economy, but must retain its ‘‘Indianness’’ in moments of dynamic

hybridity. Bollywood film images have begun to show a productive hybrid relation

between the local and global, and have begun to help rework a national identity

within newly formed cultural parameters. Audiences read, and respond anxiously,

ironically, acceptingly, resistingly, or even with pleasure, to the signs of the global

featured in Bollywood films. These signs include the new styles of clothing, music,

dance, and cinematography, as well as the diverse, worldwide settings of the films.

Despite the variety in their responses to the signs of the global in films, audience

members agreed that Bollywood films should (and do) retain some traditional

clothing, dance and musical styles, and emphasize familial emotion along with

‘‘Indian’’ values. In other words, Punjabi or Indian (Meenakshi, as is typical among

my subjects, conflates her regional identity with being Indian) audiences demand that

in order to be popular, globalized Bollywood films successfully negotiate between the

global and the local, or, instantiate the glocal.

Glocalized Clothing

While a host of tailors and dressmen have been historically employed by the Indian

film industry to dress the stars, only recently have clothes become signed artifacts,

and have Bollywood styles and fashions become themselves separately marketable.

Since liberalization, Western fashion magazines such as Verve, Vogue, and Elle publish

Indian editions which feature glossy photographs of Bollywood stars and models.

These magazines provide extensive coverage of fashion shows and of Indian designers

who dress Bollywood stars and act as dress designers for Bollywood movies. In her

work among Mumbai tailors, Wilkinson-Weber’s (2005, p. 136) findings reveal a shift

in the way film costumes and clothes are being designed and produced. In an era of

economic liberalization, and having been exposed to cable television, with its

plethora of fashion and style-based channels, filmmakers believe that marketing a

Bollywood film requires emphasizing fashion. ‘‘Indian styles in film have themselves

been subject to a fashion reinterpretation,’’ writes Wilkinson-Weber, ‘‘contemporary

6 S. Rao

designers have incorporated both their own designs, and designer label clothes from

international markets into the looks they create for their actors’’ (2006, p. 594). Dress

designers for films maintain parallel careers by selling their fashions in high-end

boutiques catering to upper middle-class Indians.

Audiences recognize the changing sartorial look of film stars; they point to the

increasing use of Western clothes.

Mona: If you watch old movies, Saira Banu or Tanuja will wear skirts or pants

only in one or two scenes. Now a heroine can be in jeans and skirts in

most of the film.

Nancy: But, at least, in one scene she has to be seen wearing a sari or salwar

kameej. It is what makes her Indian.

Well-known heroines like Hema Malini and Mala Sinha, who were immensely

popular in the 1970s and 1980s, often refused to wear clothes that were considered

Western, revealing, or risqué. While there were variations in the types of saris and

salwar kameej worn by actresses, the outfits were historically laden with a ‘‘cultural

meaning of nostalgia, tradition, womanhood, and nationalism’’ (Dwyer & Patel,

2002, p. 87). Overtly Western clothing, such as short skirts and tight pants, were attire

for vamps who personified the urban and modern tastes of society and ‘‘the

temptations and corruptions of anti-Indianess where being Indian meant identifying

with, and committing to, constructions of tradition and virtue’’ (Wilkinson-Weber,

2005, p. 138). As India anxiously embraced global modernity, representations of men

and women’s wearing Western clothing was no longer marginalized in the films or by

audiences. As Mazzarella (2005, p. 89) points out in his study of Indian advertising,

the dilemma of how to capture and define locality simultaneously with making

reference to global culture has been ingeniously solved by disarticulating an older

connection between development, austerity, and Indian identity, and replacing it with

a discourse that maps consumerism onto a reconstituted and commodified

Indianness. Specifically what we have seen is repositioning of Western apparel from

connotations of deviance and dangerous modernity, to conformity and reassuring

cosmopolitanism, ‘‘a look that seamlessly combine elements of global fashion with

localized cuts and colors’’ (Wilkinson-Weber, 2005, p. 153). Western clothes ceased to

represent anti-Indianness. Instead, it began to project a character’s ability to be

cosmopolitan, ‘‘at home anywhere in the world’’ (Dwyer & Patel, 2002, p. 97).

Audiences point to the interpenetration of local and global styles in clothing, and

their acceptance of such a mix.

Surinder: In the film Dus, in one scene Abhishek Bachchan is in brand-name

pants and T-shirts and in next scene he is wearing a sherwani. Sherwani

or Armani, he looks good in both.

Surinder’s jocular reference to ‘‘sherwani or Armani’’ exemplifies the changes in the

Bollywood fashion landscape, where actors and actresses are often seen on screen

wearing traditional Indian attire like saris, salwar kameej, and sherwanis along with

dresses, skirts, T-shirts, and sportswear. Audiences find pleasure in watching actors

Journal of International and Intercultural Communication 7

and actresses who can, in one informant’s words, ‘‘carry off both Indian and Western

clothes nicely.’’

According to Mona and Nancy, however, audience members accept Western

clothing styles, but also want the Indianness of the heroine clearly marked by her

wearing sari and salwar kameej at least some times during the narrative, even if her

way of wearing such traditional clothing is innovative and fashion-driven. The way a

salwar kameej is ‘‘cut’’ or made, the way a choli (or blouse) is stitched to be worn with

the sari, and the way a sari is draped by the heroine are increasingly influenced by

global fashion trends. Viewers acknowledge the influence of global fashion trends on

the look of traditional Indian clothes:

Ramanjyot: Heroines today will wear the dupatta [worn with the salwar kameej] like a scarf.

Mona: Sometimes the choli resembles a swimwear. Ramanjyot: The salwar has the jeans cut which makes it look like pants.

For audiences, as Ramanjyot and Mona’s comments indicate, while Indian clothing is

adopting global styles, audiences nevertheless desire that sari, choli, and sherwani

continue to mark simultaneously both the cosmopolitan and Indian attributes of the

characters and that clothing remain a sign of global sophistication and Indianness of

characters. The glocalization of clothing celebrated in contemporary films does not

appear in discrete scenes (or in discrete characters such as the vamp), but constitutes

a ceaseless replacement of consumer items by new ones, the appropriateness of

wealth, visual beauty, limitless acquisition, improved taste and intelligence, and

Indian values.

Glocalized Locations

The world economic integration, brought about by global treaties and transnational

organizations such as the World Trade Organization (WTO), has allowed for the

emergence of market-driven and advertiser-supported consumption on a scale that

has been quite unprecedented. Such changes have allowed mobility in travel and

tourism among the burgeoning Indian middle classes. Increased air traffic, cheaper

fares, and less restrictive immigration and visa procedures have allowed Indians to

take vacations and travel to exotic locations. If one picks up a Sunday daily newspaper

in any metropolitan city, the back pages are filled with advertising of travel packages

and cruises to major world destinations. As more Indians travel and live abroad,

Bollywood films have expanded their settings and begun filming, as Hollywood has

for years, in a variety of natural, found, and purpose-built locations (Goldsmith &

O’Regan, 2005). Within the past 15 years, Bollywood audiences have witnessed,

because film technology around the world is increasingly available and cheap, a

hypermobility of film production: A single film can be shot in four or five different

countries, and sometimes, audiences see scenes change within the span of one

3-minute song. While the postindependence films of the 1950s had been a time of

inward reflection for India, a time spent searching for a definition of Indianness, the

8 S. Rao

1960s saw a move towards a more international look. In films like Sangam (Kapoor,

1964), Jewel Thief (Anand, 1967), Love in Tokyo (Chakrovorty, 1966), and An Evening

in Paris (Samanta, 1967), the West was presented as an exciting, exotic, and modern

place where romantic fantasies can be played out. The difference in contemporary

filmic location is the ubiquity of the international landscapes. In 1964, Sangam was

the exception advertised as being the first and only film to be ‘‘partly shot in Paris,

Rome, London, Venice and Switzerland’’ (Dwyer & Patel, 2002, p. 168). Today, as one

informant noted, ‘‘Every film has to have at least one song set in New York or Hong

Kong.’’ Another informant observed, ‘‘The canvass of Indian films has expanded.

Shah Rukh Khan and Kajol were in Delhi, Switzerland, Cairo, and London in one

song in [the film] Kabhi Khushi Kabhi Gham.’’ Audiences are acutely conscious of the

differences between the contemporary location production environment and that

which existed in older Mumbai films.

Harsharan: It used to be that all films were shot in Kashmir, Shimla or Ooty [in India]. Then it was Switzerland. Now people are bored with Switzerland. Now they are looking for something else. Kaho Na Pyar Hai was filmed in New Zealand.

Bollywood hypermobility also causes anxiety among audiences that their own lives

and places are being excluded from this expanding panorama.

Rajesh: They don’t show the life of the rural people or even small towns. Earlier the movies in the 1970s, they used to show India but now Bollywood has become urbanized and international.

Filmic location-shifts can create a sense of placelessness, a sense that any place can

become a stage for a story that is Indian (Matheson, 2005). The feeling of

homelessness and alienation can be a disturbing consequence of globalization, but,

as Escobar (2001, p. 140) reminds us, ‘‘culture sits in places’’ and ‘‘place cannot be

dropped from the globalization craze.’’ While audiences recognize the allure of

foreign locations, they also feel some loss and dissolution of long-held identities

associated with spaces. The spatial loss is domesticated by the emphasis in the

film narratives of the Indianness of the characters. As an example, informants

often referred to the film Kal Ho Naa Ho (Advani, 2003), a film entirely set in

New York. The narrative makes little reference besides backdrop images of the city

and the space where the story is enacted. The characters walk the streets of New

York, sing on the Brooklyn Bridge, take the ferry around Staten Island, and dance

to Hip Hop tunes without ever acknowledging*culturally, linguistically, and politically*the non-Indian space which they inhabit. While Hollywood heroes and narratives have had the political authority to travel cross-culturally, these

films provide a national allegory of longing and desire for Indians to do the same.

An Indian identity is now resiliently reinvented with a free-wheeling propensity

for appropriation.

Although the films change, often rapidly, the settings their characters inhabit, such

exotic (as with any space characterized as exotic) spaces remain irreducibly bound

by local meanings, stories, and metaphors which are constantly reinvented and

Journal of International and Intercultural Communication 9

reinvigorated. ‘‘People look for foreign locations when they go see a movie because it

is different,’’ says Sonia, ‘‘but the movie has to have an Indian feel and story that we

can connect with.’’ The geographically diverse settings of Bollywood films are

populated and domesticated by characters who speak mostly Hindi. Very rarely do

natives of the places enter the actual story line. The increasing emphasis on the

international settings (Cape Town, Vancouver, Prague, New York, Seoul) does not

entail that the people and cultures of those exotic settings are represented. Instead,

these spaces and geographies (and, implicitly, cultures) are Indianized by locating

Mumbai film actors, actresses, and extras, speaking Hindi, in them. While watching

Bollywood films, audiences desire to see their local experiences replicated in locations

throughout the world. ‘‘It doesn’t matter where the film is set, New Delhi or New

York,’’ says Shoma, ‘‘the story will be about an Indian family, the boy, the girl, the

parents, and marriage.’’ Bollywood responds to both global and local imperatives by

exporting Indianness to exoticized (and thus unthreatening and unproblematic)

backdrops.

Glocalized Songs and Dance

Audiences associate a centrality of song and dance with Hindi film, and Bollywood,

despite the influence of often song-and-danceless Hollywood films, has maintained

that unique film structure. In the early days of Hindi films, the mushaira, ghazal, and

qawali traditions dominated film music. Mushaira had been a gathering of poets who

recite their poetry in accordance with specific tradition, behavior, and rhyme. At a

mushaira, poets engaged in jugalbandi, a competition where one poet would follow

another with a recitation as a response. Qawali was a type of singing where singers

sang in tandem creating waves and waves of rhythm and lyrics. Ghazal were songs

often sung at mujras which accompanied the dancing of Kathak, a traditional Indian

dance. Urdu, the dominant language of mushaira, was elegant and flowery often

associated with urban theater, and also the language of film song lyrics. In the early

years, a ‘‘lot of attention was paid to the lyrics, the tune, and, finally, the presentation

so that the song became a film within a film, a testimony to the filmmakers’ artistic

credo’’ (Bhugra, 2006, p. 69).

Song and dance numbers lie at the heart of Bollywood films, ‘‘both stylistically and

economically’’ (Dudrah, 2006, p. 51). Scholars and filmmakers provide a number of

reasons that song and dance became integral to Mumbai films: Songs express hidden

feelings and emotions which could not otherwise be expressed in words; Hindustani

classical music and its varied musical traditions entered film narratives at the time

when the film industry was developing in India; and songs were often the only space

in the film’s text where sexual fantasies were most visibly displayed and where most

eroticized communication took place.

Audiences are acutely conscious of the role of music in culture and in films.

Sonia: Indian culture is musical and music is always part of our tradition. Look at

Ramayana [Indian epic]*it is one long song.

10 S. Rao

Rajesh: [Films] emphasize songs more because in India, it is songs that sink or

save a movie. If the music is good, even if the movie is OK, it will do well.

As Rajesh states, music is essential to the marketing and success of popular films. Few

films without successful musical tracks, and even fewer without any songs and

dances, succeed. All songs for films are pre-recorded by playback singers who provide

the vocals. Ganti’s research among Mumbai filmmakers reveals that, in their attempts

to Indianize Hollywood films, filmmakers work tirelessly to create situations that

integrate singing and dancing into the story. ‘‘Many films would lose their narrative

coherence if their songs were removed,’’ writes Ganti, ‘‘filmmakers spend a great deal

of time and energy crafting the song sequences, which provide the main element of

cinematic spectacle’’ (2002, p. 294).

Audiences also recognize that Indian film music has changed with the advent of

global television.

Rajesh: The music in Indian movies has totally changed*it used to be classical and slow and now it is mostly dance music and pop especially after cable

has come. Early movies the songs were very traditional.

The changes in the music are categorized by the audiences in two ways: (1) the

changes in the lyrics of the songs which include a mix of Hindi and English

words (a language referred to as Hinglish); and (2) changes in the types of music

given an increasing influence of global musical trends such as Salsa, Pop, and

Hip Hop.

Audiences acknowledge that English, as a Western and global language, has entered

mainstream Bollywood films. ‘‘It used to be that heroines would say nameste or Adab

[Hindi and Urdu greetings],’’ says Kuldeep, ‘‘Now they say Hi, even to their mother-

in-law and father-in-law.’’ Famous lyricists in Hindi film industry had been Urdu

writers and poets who would often supplement their literary endeavors by writing

songs and dialogues for Hindi films. Urdu as a spoken and written language dates

back several centuries as one of the two major languages used under the Mughal rule,

the other being Persian. After independence, the mass migration of Punjabis to the

Mumbai film industry shifted the use of language from Urdu to a Mumbai and

Punjabi Hindi. The lyrics of today’s successful songs, according to the audiences, are

often in Hinglish. ‘‘One area where the influence of globalization is most evident is

the language of media,’’ writes Thussu, ‘‘Linguistic purists in India might disapprove,

but a hybrid media language, a mix of Hindi and English or Hinglish is steadily

gaining acceptance among the urban youth across the country’’ (1998, p. 285).

Hinglish has become the standard language in television game and chat shows,

comedy, and drama serials. The use of Hinglish in Hindi music lyrics is a significant

departure from the use of Urdu and Hindi. According to Dwyer (2000, p. 109), the

Hindi in Hindi films had always been a ‘‘colloquial language which was understood

by speakers of Hindi and Urdu, but without any of the sophisticated connotations of

the literary forms of either languages’’; Hinglish in songs and dialogues has replaced

the colloquial Hindi.

Journal of International and Intercultural Communication 11

Maninder: We all speak in Hinglish. We like John Abraham [actor] whose Hindi

is not perfect and his dialogs are not in Urdu. When he speaks, he uses

lot of cool English words.

Maninder sees the use of Hinglish, as a form of linguistic glocalization, as necessary

for his generation to enjoy music. India’s nationalist ideology, according to Prasad

(2003, p. 3), had historically been held together by a ‘‘metalanguage which could

properly articulate one nationalist sentiment.’’ The undisputed role of Urdu as the

metalanguage of Mumbai cinema has now been challenged by English. Prasad writes,

‘‘English provides the ideological coordinates of the new world of Bollywood films’’

(p. 3). In scripts which are now primarily written in English and then translated to

Hindi, and on posters which no longer carry the title of a film in Urdu script,

‘‘English phrases and proverbs are liberally used to construct a web of discourse

which the characters inhabit’’ (Prasad, 2003, p. 7). Maninder reports that ‘‘Songs have

English, Spanish and French words,’’ and shows that song lyrics have indeed gone

glocal by inserting foreign words into mostly Hindi lyrics.

Acutely conscious of the vast range of musical choices available to them, the

audiences accept the glocalization and creolization of Hindi song lyrics and music as

inevitable.

Shoma: Our mothers only listened to Hindi film songs. We have more variety. We

listen to Western music and Indian pop, Spanish songs, American Idol,

and Indian Idol.

Arjun: We listen to Shakira and Ricky Martin as often as we listen to Sonu

Nigam and Shaan [Indian pop singers].

While Mumbai films have always appropriated the latest trends in world music,

particularly Pop and Disco in the late 1970s and 1980s, the presence of global music

styles, musicians, and formats in film songs increases steadily. Audiences recognize

the various genres that are being integrated into Hindi film music.

Maninder: Gone are the days of songs with one sitar and one tabla. Now they

have synthesizers, voice modulators, and other instruments to add

beat and rhythm to the song.

While there is a sense of loss (‘‘People will soon forget classical Indian music’’ says

Maninder), the new music gives pleasure to audiences in its very hybridization.

Not all songs are accompanied by dancing, but most are. Film song videos are

currently pre-released and played on Indian MTV, VH1, and other all-music channels

prior to the actual release of the film. Influenced by MTV-style music videos, which

came to India in the mid 1990s, the dance numbers include a large coterie of dancers,

many foreign, mostly white and blonde, women. Since the early 1990s, there has been

an explosion in the number of foreign women dancers who are used as extras for the

song and dance sequences in films (Mumbai film industry’s demand for foreign

dancers has brought a large number of women from Eastern Europe and former

Soviet Republics to India). They remain backup dancers and do not play significant

roles in the films. According to Gangoli (2005, p. 148), starting in the 1960s and

12 S. Rao

1970s, Mumbai films began representing Western Anglo women as primarily

‘‘immoral and sexually accessible to the Indian male’’ and as embodiments of

‘‘unbridled sexuality.’’ Audiences recognize the influx of foreign women into the song

and dance sequence of Bollywood films, and they equate their presence with the overt

sexualization of film dancing.

Harsharan: There is more skin shown in the songs and [these] women wear almost nothing. Sometimes they are dancing in a bikini. At least, the Indian woman will have some modesty.

Audiences note that Indian heroes and heroines seen accompanying these dancers

look and act ‘‘sober,’’ because they wear less revealing clothes than the backup dancers

do, and because they do not participate in sexualized dancing.

Shalini: Their culture is like that, our culture is different. At the end of the film, we like to see the girl and boy follow our parampara [tradition]. We will not accept the heroine as too sexy. She has to be shown as having Indian values.

Although the overt sexualization of the dance creates anxiety, such tensions are

appeased with a logic that the ‘‘foreign’’ backup dancers can be sexy but the ‘‘Indian’’

heroines and heroes have to maintain the decorum of modesty and tradition. While

globalization has created a niche for the ‘‘Indo Anglo heroine’’ who can dress and dance

Western (Gangoli, 2005, p. 156), the foreign dancers are often seen in the films as

performing the more risqué dance moves and wearing the more revealing costumes.

While the films and audiences integrate the ‘‘MTVization’’ of dance borrowed from

Western MTV music videos, the Indian touch remains in the way the heroes and

heroines are perceived as untainted by the overt sexualization of the other dancers (Lal,

1998, p. 229).

Familial Emotions

Nancy: We can make films as Western as we want but our films have to have feelings with lot of crying, anger and fighting. Western films are without emotions and that will never work here.

Nancy’s comments resonate with Ganti’s (2002, p. 291) findings among Mumbai

filmmakers, who use the concept of emotion to ‘‘underscore the alien nature of

Hollywood’’ in their remaking of Hollywood films. Ganti writes, ‘‘Hindi filmmakers

frequently describe Hollywood films as ‘dry’ or ‘lacking in emotion’ and claim that in

order to ‘Indianize’ a film, one has to add emotion’’ (p. 291). In his study of MTV in

India, Juluri (2004, p. 125) found similar ‘‘emotional experience derived from

relational narratives’’ among audiences. Juluri concludes that, ‘‘Emotional experience

is seen not as a secondary, individual state, but as the level at which reception takes

place as a social experience’’ (p. 126). Ganti finds that it is through an emphasis on

kinship (parents, siblings, lovers, community), that filmmakers represent relational

emotions such as love, anger, and sacrifice.

Filmmakers depend upon a uniquely Indian theory of emotion, largely derived

from rasa theory as laid out in natyasastra, Bharata’s treatise on dramaturgy

Journal of International and Intercultural Communication 13

composed in the 11th century (Apparao, 1967; De, 1960). In natyasastra, Bharata

described the principles of rasa (aesthetic pleasure), bhava (emotion), abhinaya

(acting and histrionic representation), vritti (style), pravritti (means of application),

and siddhi (successful dramatic performance). Natyasastra provided readers details

for body movements, postures, and gestures, the swaras (musical notes), gana (song),

the use of attoodya (musical instruments), and rangamancha (prescriptions for actors

and actresses). The Bhakti and Vaishnav traditions in medieval India reinterpreted

rasa as emerging out of different bhavas such as santa bhava (calm and grace), dasya

bhava (humility and obedience), sakhya bhava (friendship), vatsalya bhava (the love

of mother for her child), and sringara bhava (erotic love). ‘‘Emotions have a very

strong and clear moral influence on how everyday actions and life are conceived and

evaluated,’’ writes Bhugra, ‘‘In most Hindi films the underlying predominant theme

involves one or more of these emotions’’ (2006, p. 38). While the look of Bollywood

films has changed with globalization, these films have retained an emphasis on

familial emotions.

Harsharan: In every film the hero and heroine’s parents will show up, at least in one scene.

Sonal: Our films always have to include the family even if it is about a gangster. In Western films, there is no portrayal of emotional connection to the family.

The ‘‘emotional connection’’ to the family and kin, as Sonal explains, drives

Bollywood film narratives. Film representation heightens the emotional experiences

of audiences and enables them to experience their ‘‘true identity’’ which is social and

emotional rather than individual and rational. This emphasis on familial emotion in

Bollywood films and audience reactions to them exhibits an active resistance to the

global, as exemplified by the lack of emotion in Hollywood films, and an insistence

that the local trumps the global.

Understanding the Global and Local in the Glocal

In studying media audiences, questions of global and local must be punctuated with

how audiences imagine what is global and what is local. Very rarely one finds

informants specifically use terms such as globalization or localization in their

conversations about media consumption. This, however, does not mean that

audiences do not reflect on their own cultural and political location in relation to

the world. One needs to scrutinize what the audiences mean by the global and the

local in order to fully conceptualize the glocal.

It would not be an overstatement to say that Mumbai film industry, from its very

inception, evolved as a national cinema more so than other films made in India.

Dhondy writes, ‘‘Hindi film inherited the magnificent task of becoming the

discernible conscience of the nation. It was the defining medium of what it meant

to be Indian’’ (2006, p. 22). While the ideological positioning of Bollywood is no less

national than Mumbai films of early years, the global has made its mark in every

14 S. Rao

aspect of film production and content. The visual culture of Bollywood films,

according to Dwyer and Patel, has responded to and reflects ‘‘changes in economic,

political, social and ideological structures in contemporary society associated with

globalization’’ (2002, p. 215). On one hand, the preferred meaning of globalization as

a process of Western hegemony is countered by the informants of this research who

see the global and local as a hybrid space where they live and experience media; they

also equate global with Western and the local with nation (India) and region

(Punjab). The culture and meaning of Bollywood films is mediated through this

prism of Western-national-regional and the intersections create both pleasure and

anxiety.

Rajesh: I like the movies that portray the Indian culture. Indian culture cannot go

too far away in films. People will like Westernization but their culture is

their own and remains intact. They are influenced by the culture of their

region, their country and Westernization. They want some variety and

diversity in their culture but they don’t forget their own culture.

A perfunctory reading of audiences might mean that Rajesh’s comments point to a

nativism where a celebration of one’s ‘‘own’’ culture, tradition, or ‘‘true’’ identity

implies ethnocentric exclusiveness. Instead, one must read Rajesh’s absorption of the

global, in Juluri’s (2004, p. 128) terms, as ‘‘a moment of self-reflection along an

inexorable historical passage’’ where being Indian and being Punjabi is synthesized

with the acceptance of global and Western. Being Indian is used not in a jingoistic or

patriotic sense but as a cultural space where Rajesh lives his life. From its early history,

Hindi films has been a hybrid product, adapting, incorporation, and responding to a

diverse range of influences. While films today project a lifestyle (ultramodern,

affluent, glamorous, exciting, consumerist), one that on a global level is only shared

by the few and is unobtainable to most, but is desirable and aspirational to many,

they still maintain their distinct Hindi film structure through their projection of

traditional cultural and religious values. While the seeming imposition of the global

on the local can induce moments of anxiety attended by a sense of fear and loss,

mapping the local on the global allows for the audiences’ identities to flourish.

Pleasure is aroused when global images are domesticated by the films and given ‘‘an

Indian touch.’’

There is no withering away of the nation or national imaginations as a result of the

global but the nation (and national identity) is reconfigured by global images. The

nation remains the most powerful cultural element among film audiences. It is not

surprising given that Mumbai films have historically reflected and rewritten the

national identity as ‘‘subsuming personal identities and collectivities identified by

class, gender, sexuality, community and caste’’ (Virdi, 2003, p. 206). With the changes

in media production, consumption, and exhibition, ‘‘locality is produced as one’s

sense of difference from the global,’’ writes Bourdon, ‘‘but the new locality is no

longer a spontaneous expression of given, long-held local traditions’’ (2004, p. 95),

rather it is cultural imagination anew. Glocalization not only involves the linking of

localities but also the ‘‘invention of locality’’ (Robertson, 1997, p. 35) where

Journal of International and Intercultural Communication 15

imaginations are redrawn and reconceptualized. The signifier ‘‘Indian’’ is understood

as changing as is the recasting of Indian identity in the content of films and in

audiences’ readings of films. While the famous song from Raj Kapoor’s film Shri 420

(1955), ‘‘Mera Juta Hai Japani / Phir Bhi Dil Hai Hindustani’’ (My shoe is Japanese /

But my heart is Indian) signified the interpellation of the global-national in

postindependence cinema, the casting of India and Indian identity in films of Raj

Kapoor was dramatically different from the films of today. The nationalist sentiment

of Kapoor’s song state that, while he is dressed in an odd assortment of clothes from

around the world, his heart and soul were ‘‘Hindustani’’ (Indian). To the public,

Kapoor’s Hindustani soul encapsulated the very essence of the Utopian society that

the films of the 1950s aimed to create. Contemporary producers and directors are

acutely conscious that their ‘‘local’’ extends far beyond the boundaries of India and

that the ‘‘Hindustani’’ of Kapoor’s film is no longer viable in a globalized media

mélange. From the 1990s on, filmmakers have successfully established a visual culture

with a slick and sophisticated look reflecting consumerist lifestyles, appeal for

affluence and modernity, and comprised a new group of heroes and heroines with

beautiful toned bodies. Such globalized themes have been, concurrently, balanced

with familiar ‘‘Indian’’ themes of family values, emotional connections, and song-

and-dance routines.

In this paper, I have redirected scholarly attention to glocalization as a theoretical

framework for international communication and for its use in audience and

reception studies. For glocalization to be a useful framework, scholars must recognize

the complexity of international communication process, cross-cultural hybridization,

and local epistemological and power issues. The idea is also to reject theories of

media globalization which have a tendency to cast globalization as inevitably in

opposition to the idea of localization but to accept, in Mazzarella’s words, ‘‘global is

constructed locally just as the local is constructed globally’’ (2005, p. 17). In order to

understand the multifacetedness of international processes, we need to redirect our

efforts on the relational intersections between the global, national, regional,

provincial, and local. Glocalization can provide a useful interpretive-analytical tool

to better understand such dynamics.

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