Question
To what extent has Indian cinema proliferated throughout the world?
Answer
I'll preface this by saying I've gradually been losing touch with Indian cinema. I think I last watched an Indian movie almost a year ago.
They are popular among non-Indians in parts of Africa, Central Asia and the Middle East. Isolated bits and pieces have modest levels of subculture popularity in Japan and Russia.
Where it has appeal, it is either because the movies reflect more traditional values than Hollywood or because they have a certain camp value.
They do not have widespread global popularity and never will. The mainstream stuff has shoddy writing, lousy production values, terrible, melodramatic acting and showcase cringe-worthy hybrid Indian-Western cultural and aesthetic values. These monstrosity sundaes have as their cherry low-minded pandering to the supposed tastes of the diaspora, a major market. There's enough expats around with tortured, unreconstructed Indian identities, a vague permanent homesickness and enough money to go see this dreck that it is worth the while of producers to do this pandering. This goes along with the tradition of loud, noisy Bollywood "shows" abroad.
The only differentiating feature is the song-and-dance stuff which has pretty much lost the unique identity it had a few decades ago. Now it is mostly clumsy repackaging of Western music and dance trends. Movies with unforgettable soundtracks are becoming increasingly rare. I don't keep up much, but the last one I sort of liked was Bunty aur Babli (a fairly okay Bonnie-and-Clyde type story).
This stuff is often terrible for purely external reasons: it is driven by mob financing and the capricious tastes of mobsters who mainly want to launder money and party with young actresses in Dubai. Forget script-driven versus star-driven. There isn't even a semblance of a script.
There are three other movie scenes that are all much better but inaccessible to global audiences.
One is what you might call alternative-mainstream. This includes movies like Munnabhai, MBBS and Khosla ka Ghosla (for comedy) and Sarkar and Guru (drama). This stuff is sometimes brilliant but mostly inaccessible to non-Indians because much of the subtlety is in the Hindi dialogue and detailed contextual references (Sarkar is a thinly-veiled movie about a well-known right-wing politician, with heavy borrowing from The Godfather. Guru is a movie about Dhirubhai Ambani, and unless you understand something about India in the 70s and 80s, you will miss most of what's going on).
Then you have the self-consciously "modern" movies that attempt to speak to the relatively well-off parts of the middle class. They feature upscale lifestyles and sometimes even have dialogue in English. But unlike the mainstream, which showcases rich lifestyles as aspirational/escapist mind-candy for the masses, this is about appealing to the rich themselves. This is hit-and-miss stuff. The style is still finding its voice. It tries to hit Hollywood levels of story quality. Mostly it fails. If/when it starts to work reliably, I think it will again get too Indian for export.
Finally you have the Satyajit Ray stuff, the traditional art-house scene. It seems to be slowly dying out. I haven't heard of any movie that comes even close to something like Pather Panchali in over a decade.
They are popular among non-Indians in parts of Africa, Central Asia and the Middle East. Isolated bits and pieces have modest levels of subculture popularity in Japan and Russia.
Where it has appeal, it is either because the movies reflect more traditional values than Hollywood or because they have a certain camp value.
They do not have widespread global popularity and never will. The mainstream stuff has shoddy writing, lousy production values, terrible, melodramatic acting and showcase cringe-worthy hybrid Indian-Western cultural and aesthetic values. These monstrosity sundaes have as their cherry low-minded pandering to the supposed tastes of the diaspora, a major market. There's enough expats around with tortured, unreconstructed Indian identities, a vague permanent homesickness and enough money to go see this dreck that it is worth the while of producers to do this pandering. This goes along with the tradition of loud, noisy Bollywood "shows" abroad.
The only differentiating feature is the song-and-dance stuff which has pretty much lost the unique identity it had a few decades ago. Now it is mostly clumsy repackaging of Western music and dance trends. Movies with unforgettable soundtracks are becoming increasingly rare. I don't keep up much, but the last one I sort of liked was Bunty aur Babli (a fairly okay Bonnie-and-Clyde type story).
This stuff is often terrible for purely external reasons: it is driven by mob financing and the capricious tastes of mobsters who mainly want to launder money and party with young actresses in Dubai. Forget script-driven versus star-driven. There isn't even a semblance of a script.
There are three other movie scenes that are all much better but inaccessible to global audiences.
One is what you might call alternative-mainstream. This includes movies like Munnabhai, MBBS and Khosla ka Ghosla (for comedy) and Sarkar and Guru (drama). This stuff is sometimes brilliant but mostly inaccessible to non-Indians because much of the subtlety is in the Hindi dialogue and detailed contextual references (Sarkar is a thinly-veiled movie about a well-known right-wing politician, with heavy borrowing from The Godfather. Guru is a movie about Dhirubhai Ambani, and unless you understand something about India in the 70s and 80s, you will miss most of what's going on).
Then you have the self-consciously "modern" movies that attempt to speak to the relatively well-off parts of the middle class. They feature upscale lifestyles and sometimes even have dialogue in English. But unlike the mainstream, which showcases rich lifestyles as aspirational/escapist mind-candy for the masses, this is about appealing to the rich themselves. This is hit-and-miss stuff. The style is still finding its voice. It tries to hit Hollywood levels of story quality. Mostly it fails. If/when it starts to work reliably, I think it will again get too Indian for export.
Finally you have the Satyajit Ray stuff, the traditional art-house scene. It seems to be slowly dying out. I haven't heard of any movie that comes even close to something like Pather Panchali in over a decade.