Bollywood on Bollywood : intertextuality and the rise of digital participatory culture

Abstract

This thesis examines how postmillennial intertextual Bollywood films anticipate audiences’ cinephilic knowledge of and familiarity with the aesthetics of Hindi popular cinema and its stars. I argue that while the use of intertextuality is indicative of multiple factors—the industry’s uneasy relationship with “originality,” Bollywood’s digital turn, the increasing popularity of multiplex films, and the waning commercial power of stars—the most important aspect of these films is the changing dynamic between Bollywood and its audiences. I demonstrate that intertextual Bollywood films foster the rise of a new participatory spectatorship in the wake of digital culture.

The thesis investigates the ways in which these intertextual films encourage active engagement and participation from cinephiles and fans on the Internet vis-à-vis the broader cinephilic discourse of Bollywood. Digitality, or the conditions of digital media and culture, is therefore of central importance here. Digitality not only shapes intertextual film form but also engenders the digital environment that facilitates this new participatory culture and its modes of spectatorship. Focusing on the digital-ness of these films not only reveals that intertextual film form is particular to new media objects and creation in the digital age, but also helps us devise ways to begin mapping the popular cultural imprint of Bollywood in the digital era.

This thesis also addresses a methodological gap in the study of Bollywood cinema. In addition to the use of existing scholarship on Bollywood films which have analysed reflexive tendencies in postmillennial films and have investigated the cultural economy of stardom and spectatorship, this thesis makes a crucial theoretical-methodological intervention by bringing in theories of digital cinema, fan studies, participation, and digital humanities and applying them to study Bollywood films. Critically engaging with theoretical frameworks that have previously not been applied to study Bollywood films, such as those devised by Thomas Elsaesser, Henry Jenkins, Kenneth Goldsmith, Marjorie Perloff, and Lev Manovich provides a new understanding of postmillennial Bollywood popular films as distinct products of the new media ecology. It also provides the unique opportunity to explore how intertextuality and the changing patterns of film consumption and media creation are functions of the digital era we currently inhabit.