Asian Cinema, Fall/Winter 2011 160 Ram Gopal Varma, Bombay, and Globalization V. Vamshi Krishna Reddy Globalization has inspired various research trajectories. Its impact is wide and pervasive, inluencing disciplines such as the sciences, sociology, anthropology, economics, psychology, and cultural studies. Cinema too has a strong relationship with the globalization from its emergence in the 1990s. The economic developments brought by globalization have led the Indian entertainment industry to scale new heights. Television, advertising, and ilm as interrelated spheres have expanded rapidly and comprise a signiicant and powerful industry today. This process identiied Hindi popular cinema as “Bollywood,” the product of the ilm industry based in Mumbai. As a result, Bollywood is established as a prominent culture industry in the country. Ever since Bollywood became an industry, it is competing with its products in the world market as soon as the Indian government opened the doors for global market. Now, Bollywood involves a wide range in distribution network, market activities, and products which cover websites to music industry, cable to radio, the local market and the international market. Bollywood was launched to propagate new trends, values, and images to suit its new industry status. Sometimes, these new trends kept Bollywood aloof from its older trends, styles, and values. One has to sample the ilms of the pre-globalization era to mark the changes that occurred after globalization. Crisis in the nation’s political and social system inspired Bombay cin- ema’s portrayal of the rapidly changing urban life after the 1970s. The dream of Rama Rajya and liberal democracy collapsed when Indira Gandhi imposed Emergency that denied people civil rights. Unemployment rose rapidly. Sub- sequently, various social movements (led by Jayaprakash Narayan and other regional movements in Andhra Pradesh and Tamilnadu) spread through the country. For the irst time, people’s faith in the idea of federal India was shaken. As the urban population led the initiative to ight corruption and the Emer- gency, idealization of the village and its utopias were pushed to the periphery. Urban space and its milieu occupied the central position because of fast-paced economic changes in the society. Over the past three decades, urban India has experienced rapid and tremendous transformation. The mushrooming of small towns side by side with the metropolitan cities have expanded the urban experience. Ranjani Mazumdar explores the result of population increase in the cities in her book Bombay Cinema, an Archive of the City (2006) and its attributes. She writes “the experiences of mass crowds, urban violence and chaos, consumption and spectacle, and the spread of television. Shock, anxiety, and tactile pleasures of urban life are now experienced by millions, something that has accelerated rapidly and radically after globalization” (53). Globalization inluenced urban taste and brought new cultural practices,