Bollywood goes Hollywood

Interesting article in the NYT today about how Bollywood movies have the potential to be appealing to American audiences. I have often thought about the possibilities of Hindi cinema, especially since it has graduated from the classic love and family drama in the 1990s to a grittier, more complex art today. The NYT article sums this up quite accurately:

It also helps that the definition of Bollywood has become more elastic. No longer a monolithic style that denotes stars, songs and melodrama, Bollywood has also come to encompass something else; over the last decade new filmmakers have tweaked the traditional form so that Hindi cinema also includes films without songs that are stark and rooted in contemporary Indian realities.

The movies from the 1990s were appealing to much of Southeast Asia, Africa, and the Middle East for their family values and conservative clothing, but things are likely to change as the themes get more contemporary and the clothing becomes racier, shifting some of the fan-base to western audiences. In many ways, this shift mirrors the change that India itself is going through, as it slowly leaves behind the developing world and joins the ranks of economic superpowers.

Bollywood in the 1990s

Bollywood in the 2000s