Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs
Center for Contemporary South Asia

Swapnil Rai Book Adda — Networked Bollywood: How Star Power Globalized Hindi Cinema

Friday, March 1, 2024

2:00pm - 4:00pm EST

Joukowsky Forum, 111 Thayer St

Commentators:

Darshana Sreedhar Mini, University of Wisconsin-Madison
Anuja Jain,
Wesleyan University
Meheli Sen, Rutgers University

Dr. Swapnil Rai is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Film, Television, and Media at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. As an interdisciplinary scholar, she works at the intersection of media studies, critical cultural communication, women's and gender studies, and industry studies. Focusing on the global south, she investigates how transnational networked cultures intersect with the media industries and with questions of policy, geopolitics, and audiences. 

She has published her scholarship in a range of journals such as Communication, Culture & CritiqueFeminist Media Studies, International Journal of CommunicationSouth Asian Popular CultureMedia, Culture and SocietyJumpCutJournal of the School of Literature (JSL), and Cinephile.

 Dr. Rai earned her Ph.D. from the Department of Radio, TV, and Film at the University of Texas at Austin. She also served as a Postdoctoral Visiting Fellow at the Center for Contemporary South Asia at Brown University and taught at the College of Film and the Moving Image at Wesleyan University.

In her prior experience as a journalist, writer, and editor, she covered beats pertaining to cinema, art, and culture. She also worked in the multimedia and information services industry for Thomson Reuters. She tweets @i_swapnil_rai. 

Book Adda

About the book: Networked Bollywood provides an interdisciplinary analysis of the role of the stars in the transformation of Hindi cinema into a global entertainment industry. The first Indian film was made in 1913. However, filmmaking was recognized as an industry almost a hundred years later. Yet, Indian films have been circulating globally since theirinception. This book unearths this oft-elided history of Bollywood’s globalization through multilingual, transnational research and discursive cultural analysis. The author illustrates how over the decades, a handful of primarily male megastars, as the heads of the industry’s most prominent productions and corporations, combined overwhelming charismatic affect with unparalleled business influence. Through their “star switching power,” theorized here as a deeply gendered phenomenon and manifesting broader social inequalities, India’s most prominent stars instigated new flows of cinema, industrial collaborations, structured distinctive business models, influenced state policy and diplomatic exchange, thereby defining the future of Bollywood’s globalization.