Bollywood Cinema at the Crossroads: Tracking the Dimensions of Globalization in Postcolonial Popular Hindi Cinema

Hindi film scholars have been slow to adopt content analysis methodologies. Given the potentially changing social-political-economic context of Hindi cinema, this study utilized content analysis to investigate the prevalence of five globalization dimensions-geographical, cultural, nationalistic, infrastructural, and artistic-in the highest grossing Hindi films of the postcolonial era between 1947 and 2007. The films were coded to address multiple hypotheses theorizing that changing transnational contexts would be related to significant increases in global aspects of content. The findings suggest that the oft-repeated conclusions of scholars regarding the widespread influence of global forces on Hindi film production-particularly in the current era of "Bollywoodization"-are more complex than suggested in prior research.