Wednesday,September 23, 2009

3-5pm

CHAT Lounge, 10th Floor Gladfelter Hall

Tejaswini Ganti

New York University

“How the Hindi Film Industry Became ‘Bollywood’”

 

About her talk, Teja writes: This talk provides a preview of the main themes of my forthcoming book, Producing Bollywood which examines the transformations of the Hindi film industry starting in the mid-1990s that have enabled it to become “Bollywood.” A key feature of this transformation is how Hindi cinema and the film industry more broadly have acquired greater cultural legitimacy and symbolic capital from the perspective of the state, the English-language media, and English-educated elites in India. While this greater legitimacy is connected to the increasing scholarly attention to popular Hindi cinema, the avid consumption of these films by the South Asian diaspora, and the growing recognition of Hindi films in Western cultural spaces, I focus on a less explored dimension – the Hindi film industry’s own efforts to accrue symbolic capital, social respectability, and professional distinction.

About the speaker:
Tejaswini Ganti is Assistant professor in the Department of Anthropology and its Program in Culture & Media at New York University. A visual anthropologist specializing in South Asia, her research interests include Indian cinema, popular culture, cultural policy, nationalism, postcolonial theory, and globalization. She has been conducting ethnographic research about the social world and filmmaking practices of the Bombay film industry since 1996. She is the author of the warmly acclaimed Bollywood: A Guidebook to Popular Hindi Cinema (Routledge 2004) and is currently finishing a book (forthcoming from Duke UP) that examines the social and institutional transformations of the Bombay film industry wrought by India’s program of economic liberalization. She has also produced the documentary, Gimme Somethin' to Dance to! (1995) which explores the significance of bhangra music for South Asians in the U.S.