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BOOK REVIEW

Global Bollywood: Travels of Hindi song and dance, edited by Sangita Gopal and

Sujata Moorti, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008, 352 pp., US$75 (cloth),

ISBN 978-0-816-4578-7; US$25 (paperback), ISBN 978-0-816-4579-4

Students of popular Indian cinema have eagerly awaited Sangita Gopal and Sujata

Moorti’s anthology Global Bollywood, one of the first English-language studies of

Bollywood music. The paucity of research on this topic is surprising given the centrality of

song and dance to commercial cinema in India as far back as the silent era. Song and dance

sequences are the most marketable commodities of the Bollywoo culture industry today.

Indeed, the current hip-ness of Bollywood owes much to the musical and aesthetic appeal

of these sequences. Yet there have been only a handful of books on Indian film music,

Bollywood or otherwise.

To some extent, this lacuna reflects a blind spot of film studies. While particular

filmmakers and theorists, from Bresson and Deleuze to Gorbman, have analyzed cinematic

sound and music, most still treat film as a visual medium, not an audiovisual one. There is

a substantial body of work on musicals, especially Hollywood musicals, but the use

of music in other genres has not received as much attention. Two recent anthologies,

Wojcik and Knight’s Soundtrack Available and Beyond the Soundtrack (edited by

Goldmark et al.), offer a much-needed corrective, juxtaposing perspectives on film music

from a variety of disciplines, national contexts, and cinematic genres. Anna Morcom’s

Hindi Film Songs and the Cinema and Gregory Booth’s Behind the Curtain broke new

ground by focusing on the workings of the Hindi film music industry.

Global Bollywood is an invaluable addition to this body of work, for it constructs a

rich, layered history of the Hindi film song. Approaching Bollywood song-dance from a

cultural studies perspective, this collection demonstrates that the soundtrack is not simply

an undervalued but ultimately minor, ancillary element in popular Hindi cinema. In fact,

Hindi song and dance sequences have a life of their own: they often circulate independent

of their ‘parent’ film, and can engender experiences and genres that have little to do with

India or cinema per se. Global Bollywood is also instructive in the way it frames Hindi film

music as a global form – one that is more than just a ‘national’ cinematic quirk – even as it

articulates the culturally specific incarnations these songs take in their international

travels. Keeping the global and the local in play at all times, the essays in this anthology

stand as useful models of cultural studies scholarship.

Global Bollywood opens with a well-written and comprehensive introduction outlining

the history of Hindi film and film music, and the complicated cultural work these genres

perform, both in the subcontinent and abroad. One of the most valuable aspects of this

essay is its extensive and detailed set of footnotes documenting virtually all the scholarly

work published so far on popular Hindi cinema. Gopal and Moorti also identify many

different – and different kinds of – connections between the essays in the volume, thus

proposing several alternatives to the structure of their anthology. This is important because

the current categorization relies on a spatial and intellectual geography that is all too

familiar and problematic. Section one, ‘Home Terrains,’ focuses on the production and

ISSN 1474-6689 print/ISSN 1474-6697 online

DOI: 10.1080/14746681003798102

http://www.informaworld.com

South Asian Popular Culture

Vol. 8, No. 2, July 2010, 203–205

consumption of film songs in India. Essays in the second section, ‘Eccentric Orbits,’

elaborate the unexpected (eccentric?) forms that Hindi film music takes in Indonesia,

Egypt, and Israel. The third and final section, ‘Planetary Consciousness,’ discusses the

varied uses to which Bollywood music is put in the USA and UK. This geographical

compartmentalization and ‘the home and the world’ logic – rather, ‘the home, the rest of

the non-West, and the West’ logic – it implies falls apart in the text of Gopal and Moorti’s

introduction as well as the other essays.

The anthology critiques the epistemological schema described above by making two

points about the global nature of Bollywood song and dance. The first is that Hindi film

music has always been inextricably linked to other world cinemas and musical forms.

Biswarup Sen’s essay charts out the varied musical influences that have shaped the sound of

Hindi films, including western classical music, rock, disco, and bebop. Elsewhere in the

anthology we learn that this hybrid music in turn helps voice ‘alternative cosmopolitanisms’

in other parts of the world (26). For instance, in Indonesia, the ongoing influence of Hindi

film music is audible in dangdut, a pop musical form that stages multiethnic contestations

over class, religion, and modernity (David). Bollywood style becomes a critical resource in

gay and lesbian clubs in the UK, as desi queers use song and dance to imagine and perform

counter-normative notions of gender and sexuality (Dudrah). In Israel, meanwhile, the

national television corporation uses the format, music, and typically utopian thrust of

Bollywood song sequences to portray Israeli culture as a paragon of stability and harmony

(Parciack). The diversity of Bollywood-inspired contexts represented in this volume draws

attention to the vast array of new pleasures and meanings Hindi film songs help generate in

their travels.

The second important theoretical claim Global Bollywood makes has to do with

market forces. All of the contributors to the volume display a keen attention to the way

global capitalism shapes – has always shaped – the consumption and development of

Hindi film song and dance. For instance, Anna Morcom lays out the commercial history

of the Hindi film song in India from the 1930s to the turn of the century. Nilanjana

Bhattacharjya and Monika Mehta complicate this story by analyzing how two other power

brokers, the Indian state and the world music industry, jostle to direct the meanings and

monies generated by Bollywood music to their own ends. The exoticizing discourse that

Bhattacharjya and Mehta identify is further elaborated in Edward Chan’s essay, as he

explores the problem of difference in the non-traditional Bollywood consumer’s visceral,

inevitably ‘unclean’ encounter with Hindi film songs in the US.

The complexity of the cultural and economic circuits of which Bollywood music is a

part challenges the boundaries (of nation and culture) and the hierarchical assumptions

undergirding the anthology’s table of contents. This very complexity also demands an

integrated analytic approach. Global Bollywood provides several useful models in this

regard. One finds close readings of particular songs and their picturization (Basu,

Parciack); analyses of extra-filmic, live dance performances (Dudrah, Shrestova);

discussions of industry and legislative matters (Bhattacharjya and Mehta, Kumar); and

thick descriptions of the media contexts in which Bollywood is consumed (Armbrust,

David, Zumkhawala-Cook). My only quibble is that there are no essays offering detailed

musical analysis. If Hindi song and dance is as important a site of pleasure and

contestation as this volume posits, it is imperative that we listen as carefully and critically

as we watch and read.

Nonetheless, the interdisciplinary and international scope of Global Bollywood makes

it a very timely and valuable contribution to film and music history, and to the study of

South Asian popular culture. The anthology hastens attempts to move Indian film studies

204 Book Review

out of the ‘national cinemas’ rubric that continues to marginalize non-western cinematic

traditions in the academy. It also steers contemporary scholarship on popular Hindi cinema

away from its overwhelming focus on nation, and towards a broader discussion of

postcolonialism, modernity, and globalization. In this regard, Global Bollywood shares the

spirit of books like Priya Jaikumar’s Cinema at the End of Empire, Ranjani Mazumdar’s

Bombay Cinema, and the collection edited by Anandam Kavoori and Aswin

Punathambekar (also entitled Global Bollywood). The South-South exchanges described

in section 2 are especially illuminating for they challenge ‘dominant paradigms of

transnationalism that tend to read this as a conversation between the West and the rest’ (9).

Finally, the clear writing and detailed elaboration of cultural context in most (if not all) of its

essays make Global Bollywood as important a resource in the classroom as it is for research.

Pavitra Sundar

Dartmouth College

E-mail: [email protected]

q 2010, Pavitra Sundar

References

Booth, Gregory D. Behind the Curtain: Making Music in Mumbai’s Film Studios. New York: Oxford UP, 2008. Print.

Goldmark, Daniel, Lawrence Kramer, and Richard Leppert, eds. Beyond the Soundtrack: Representing Music in Cinema. Berkeley: U of California P, 2009. Print.

Jaikumar, Priya. Cinema at the End of Empire: A Politics of Transition in Britain and India. Durham: Duke UP, 2006. Print.

Kavoori, Anandam P., and Aswin Punathambekar, eds. Global Bollywood. New York: New York UP, 2008. Print.

Mazumdar, Ranjani. Bombay Cinema: An Archive of the City. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2007. Print.

Morcom, Anna. Hindi Film Songs and the Cinema. Aldershot: Ashgate Publishing, 2007. Print. Wojcik, Pamela Robertson, and Arthur Knight, eds. Soundtrack Available: Essays on Film and

Popular Music. Durham: Duke UP, 2001. Print.

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