About Conference

About the Conference

The mainstream commercial Indian cinema is now popularly referred as Bollywood worldwide. Of course there is a longstanding debate on how the Bollywood specifically refers to Mumbai based Hindi cinema. No doubt, regional cinema in India – Tamil, Telugu, Kannad, Malyalam, Marathi, Bhojpuri. Assamese, Manipuri and Bengali cinema – has its own identity which in many cases is very distinct, and is not considered less appealing than Bollywood. Nevertheless, Hindi films are in the mainstream and unarguably, the term Bollywood is being used as a brand name for Indian commercial cinema.

Since 1990s, driven by the demand of the non-resident Indians, especially settled in the West, Bollywood cinema has gained grounds in countries such as UK, USA, Canada and Australia. Hindi cinema has always been popular in the African, Eastern and Mid-eastern countries, from Nigeria, Egypt, Morocco, Dubai, to Malaysia and Russia.

Bollywood cinema with its own specific narrative style, plot-line, genre, technique, use of music, song and dance and star system, works in a very different manner than Hollywood or any other Western film industry. Indian cinema is now more than 100 years old and its popularity seems to be growing each day. No wonder Bollywood has helped India’s soft power grow very strong and is today one of the biggest exports, through its multi-platform links of film, music, song, dance, promotional/advertising films etc.

This conference will look at various aspects of Brand Bollywood and how its reception and consumption, collaboration and distribution have changed over the years, especially post 2000s. Every possible aspects of Bollywood will be researched, analyzed and discussed by scholars and filmmakers in various sessions of the conference.

With changing technology, the distribution of content and the viewing habits have changed. Having passed through the stage of theatres to cable TV and satellite TV, we have entered in internet regime. We are now using the alternative networks of Amazon Prime and Netflix which are providing services of video on demand. The news and entertainment industry has also moved to Over-the-top (OTT) system where content providers distribute streaming media as a standalone product directly to consumers over the internet bypassing telecommunications, multichannel television and broadcast television. The conference will also cover such alternative networks.