Bollywood in the Age of New Media: The Geo-televisual Aesthetic

Focusing on popular Indian cinema's phenomenal output between 1991 and 2004, Anustup Basu considers the influence of globalization, new media, and metropolitan Hindu fundamentalism on the rise of Bollywood. Beginning in the early nineties, popular Hindi cinema evolved a spectacular style inspired by liberalizing trends and the inauguration of a planetary media ecology. Films increasingly featured transformed bodies, fashions, lifestyles, commodities, gadgets, and spaces, often in nonlinear, "window-shopping" ways?in other words, without any obligation to narrative. The unbounded flow of deisre, affect, and aspiration transcended the limits of story and milieu. Haqeeqat (1995) features poor, working-class characters, but through the magic of a music and dance sequence, these downtrodden souls become transported to the streets of Switzerland, redressed and remade in new designer suits. Basu calls this cinematic-cultural ecology the "geo-televisual aesthetic" and connects it to the uneven processes of globalization transforming India in this period.