Bollywood and Cultural Hegemony amongst South Asian Millennials

19 min readJul 17, 2023

Bollywood refers to the Hindi film category of Indian cinema, though one would ascribe Bollywood to modern-day India. The industry itself is older than the existence of the Indian Republic. The ‘B’ in Bollywood stands for Bombay (now Mumbai), one of the most influential cities in the South Asian cultural universe, followed by Lahore, Calcutta and Karachi (Punatahambekar, 2013). However, the events of 1947, followed by a somewhat controversial colonial demarcation, were a turning point for South Asian cinema; like all other aspects of a nation-state, films, music, and culture had to be labelled as either Indian or Pakistani.

The initial project hypothesis states that Bollywood, in all its forms, has maintained its cultural hegemony amongst South Asian millennials, whether at home or abroad. Though the said hegemony predates the social media era, one can recently observe old Bollywood films on the Instagram and Twitter handles of large Hindi film production houses. Most visual research and cultural analytics scholarship revolves around Western cultural productions, including American, English, or French films, theatre plays and drama.

This project shall investigate how Bollywood films are remediated on Instagram for a global south asian millennial audience (Gehlawat, 2010). This particular line of research is not only unexplored but also holds immense potential in uncovering discursive techniques for understanding newer forms of visual models, groupings, engagements, trends, and rankings essentially in Hindu or Urdu cultural productions, which as of now is spoken or understood by close to an approximate audience size of two billion plus. It is important to note that during the preliminary stages of this paper, one had to go constantly back and forth with narrowing down the line of research, where initially the research question revolved around the impact of Bollywood films on Indian origin diaspora, in another attempt, the research question aimed at how the Indian nation-state uses Bollywood for socio-political, and economic dominance. Such questions, though they hold scholarly relevance, could not account for the use of social media and its significance in visual research. Therefore this paper went ahead with the remediation angle, with select platforms, audience segments and Instagram handles.

The audience in question are recipients of Bollywood in their late twenties and early thirties, born in India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh or to South Asian parents abroad. Whereas from a visual perspective, the primary empirical data sources will be the official Instagram account of Yash Raj Films (@yrf) and Dharma Productions (@dharmamovies), and secondary data sources will be Spotify India (@spotifyindia), Spotify Pakistan (@spotifypakistan), and Netflix India (@netflix_in). The rationale behind the said Instagram handles stems from the fact that both these production houses produced some of the most popular films in Hindi cinema, from likes of K3G (Kabhi Khushi Kabhi Gham), DDLJ (Dilwale Dulhaniya Lejayeing), Mohabattein, and Kuch Kuch Hota Hai. Most of the said films were produced in the late 1990s and early 2000s, but still, they constitute an integral part of the production house’s Instagram strategy.

Additionally, the secondary platforms, including Netflix and Spotify chapters of India and Pakistan, are predominantly global entertainment platforms but have recently adopted platform localisation where all of the above handles routinely invoke films under purview (1) for audience engagement, promotions, lead generation, which in this specific case would be present-day films, merchandise, or advertisements.

Theoretical Framework

Cultural hegemony has been an integral part of Western political thought. However, we see little or no dominant cultural scholarship focusing on the global South. This paper is premised on the fact that the Bollywood fraternity, namely production houses and film fraternity along with the Indian state, has successfully maintained its cultural hegemony despite political tensions, economic woes, and even military stand-offs amongst the audience segments in question visa vi, India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh. It further defies the US or Eurocentric version phenomenon of cultural hegemony and reinforces its version of hegemony amongst south asian audiences (Thussu, 2012). Lastly, it resorts to a Gramscian understanding of hegemony as to how the Indian ruling establishment, including corporations, bureaucracy, and the politico-military elite, aim to assert control over the South Asian masses through Bollywood films. Per Gramsci, the powers in the state have a significant advantage in the struggle for hegemony by their superior organisation, information, and means of communication (Bates, 1975). In this paper’s case, the means of communication implies the excessive economic, political, and moral support the Hindi film industry received from successive Indian governments until 1998, when Bollywood was given the ‘industry’ status (Punathambekar, 2013), transforming the state-cinema relationship, and its broader consequences.

Connecting earlier works on hegemony to modern-day Bollywood, this paper shall rely on Devasundaram’s (2016) idea of ‘meta-hegemony,’ where according to the author, not only did the Indian state endorse Bollywood at the highest levels of executive power, in fact, systematically pushed for Bollywood’s monopoly over the Indian cultural production streams, and instrumentalised it for soft power purposes.

A case in point example would be an average south asian millennial coming across an Instagram post, originally from the movie, Veer-Zara (Appendix 1.6), from a Gramscian standpoint, that would be considered as ‘spontaneous consent,’ one that the dominant social class has imposed on the masses due to their prestige and position of power in the cultural production realm. This particular example would fall under clusters 1 and 4, which propagate Indian nationalism and hopeless romance. For a brief overview, the film’s plot revolves around an Indian airforce pilot who develops intimacy with an aristocratic Pakistani girl. Zara risks his career and life to travel to Pakistan, an implied enemy territory, to profess his love for Zara. However, Zara’s family and fiance get Veer arrested on espionage charges. The film was initially released in 2004, but to date, YRF employs the film’s visuals, dialogues, and nationalistic gestures to represent the nation through the national cinema and build an appetite for hopeless romance, where despite the challenges, the protagonist’s love shall come through, which in Veer’s case came after twenty-two years, when he was released from custody (Tambunan, 2019). This form of storytelling differs from ‘traditional coercion’ and relies more on the relationship between the user and the platform’s algorithm. The same film goes far beyond entertainment and storytelling. It goes on to reflect on the discourse on gender, spatial, geographical boundaries, and contentions between Hinduism, Islam, visa vi, India, and Pakistan, all through a tragic love story. Gramsci would place a film like Veer-Zara way above the executive, legislature, and judiciary, as for him, the parliament and polling booth are mere forms, and the accurate content lies with adequate control of the cultural organisation and lines of communication.

Though most of the above fall outside the purview of this paper, the following theoretical frame of reference is Rahman’s (2020) work on consuming cultural hegemony in Bangladesh. Though this paper does not reference a Bangladeshi-based Instagram handle directly, Rahman’s entire work premises on how despite cultural and linguistic differences, Bangladeshi audience, especially the middle classes, Rahman’s ethnographic works reveal that a substantial segment of the Bangladesh middle class consumes Hindi films, and music for ‘pure entertainment.’ He further invokes Bourdieu’s (1975) notion of cultural capital, which explains why one’s educational and socio-economic background corresponds to their consumption patterns. Per Bourdieu, cultural consumption is not restricted to watching a specific film or listening to a song; it constitutes an integral part of the said class’s cultural ‘habitus’ and cultural subscription towards Hindi films. For this paper, one can assume that the same cultural subscription takes place through the aforementioned Instagram handles, which embody and institutionalise the Bollywood-based cultural capital under the garb of regional modernity towards global south asian millennial audiences. While most cultural scholars attribute their research and hypothesis to Western audiences and means of production, one can also categorise Bollywood’s approach as hegemonic under the Stuart Hall school of thought. Out of all the approaches laid out by Hall, including negotiated, oppositional, and hegemonic, local Indian production houses and global platforms like Spotify and Netflix use the latter for mass communication purposes. Where the subject encodes the message as intended, whether it is espousing nationalism, depicting unreal romance, or making people feel at home at times of cultural celebrations, including Eid, Diwali, Ramadan, weddings, and universal days, some scholars and activists lean towards wider consequences of the said hegemonic approach and have considered this strategy ‘cultural occupation,’ which may wipe out the local language, culture, and traditional practices of other South Asian countries and regions (Rahman, 2020, p. 185). It would be fair to argue that such concerns have recently garnered much attention from civil society, cultural scholars, and even the states in question due to high percentages of their population consuming Hindi film-centric content through social media, particularly Instagram.

Methodology and Data Collection

This paper uses discourse and content analysis techniques to measure the extent of remediation of Bollywood films on Instagram by the said handles. Additionally, since the metadata may vary according to type, size, audio, or visual, the paper remains open to multiple interpretations and specific techniques required to dissect the images posted on respective handles. The data collection was divided into multiple phases. In the first phase, multiple search queries were run on each Instagram account through zeeschuimer, initially on both @yrf and @dharmamovies, until it was decided to include supplementary handles of Spotify and Netflix. It is important to note that, while running the queries, one knew that a substantial amount of metadata was irrelevant or outside the purview of this paper, which was considered later during the clustering process.

The first phase had three zeeschuimer queries, categorised as @yrf, @yrf1, and subsequent for each handle; there were initial queries and were meant to gather all possible visuals, including images, reels, tweets and captions (Anjaria. 2021) along with comments, likes, and other measurement metrics. After running the first few queries and observing a pattern of films, this paper restricted itself to some of the top-grossing films laid out in Appendix 1, similar to each of the downloaded xlsx. files were merged into one sheet with their respective attributes, including the timestamp, username, likes, comments, captions, and hashtags. Similarly, since the zeeschuimer search follows a scrolling protocol, one would have collected the same metadata for each additional query unless filtered for newer images. Therefore the paper restricted itself to a cumulative total of 1577 images, with no specific selection criteria for each handle.

After the initial queries, two for both @yrf and @netflix_in and one for each @spotifyindia, @spotifypakistan, and @dharmamovies, the next phase was to apply both qualitative and quantitative filters, including restricting the dataset to greater than 1000 likes and 200 comments. On the qualitative side, the total number of visuals was filtered based on relevance, contextual background, and intended audience. The same set of visuals was also uploaded on the VGG image annotator. However, due to time constraints, and technical difficulties, this paper resorted to manually coding the visuals on google sheets. Since most of the images followed a similar pattern and concerned themselves with each image falling in a particular cluster instead of attributing different segments of the images into different clusters, that approach, though in-depth, would have complicated the final dataset, which is aimed at investigating the hegemonic use of old Bollywood films for a particular audience segment on Instagram. Similarly, a qualitative study of the images in question reveals a much more nuanced take on the Gramscian understanding of the ideal Indian husband, lover, and patriot, in Veer-Zara’s case both, where the protagonist is not only faithful to his country but also to his romantic interest that too despite the risks involved. Such visuals are repurposed on modern-day Instagram handles ideally to reinvigorate younger audiences into believing in relationships, both platonic and romantic, family values, and the significance of cultural celebrations to keep them intact with Bollywood and to penetrate deeper into their consumption patterns so not only the incumbent generation but even the forthcoming ones, never sway from Hindi films.

Clustering

While clustering, this paper was cognizant of how each film requires a rigorous discourse-specific approach to develop a solid conclusion later. Therefore each cluster was designed to cater to the underlying research question and unravel what lies behind the images and text. The first cluster is ‘India first’ (2.1), which attempts to espouse Indian nationalism amongst audiences both at home and abroad. The films about the said cluster do not have to be Hollywood-style military films where Indian soldiers are at war with the enemy. Bollywood presents a unique form of nationalism which reaches out to the average Indian.

In some cases, the handles used a scene from K3G (1.2), where the protagonist lands in London, with Indian music in the background, along with classical dances. In another scene of the same film, we see an Indian student singing the national anthem (1.2a) in front of his family amongst white audiences. In the collected datasets, Dharma referenced the scenes on the Indian republic day, January 26, and independence day, August 15. The second ‘family values’ (2.2) and third, ‘friends like family’ (2.3) clusters aim to celebrate the infamous Indian or south asian family system and friendships.

Interestingly, this cluster also covers a majority of images by @netflix_in and @spotify_in, where they invoke Western coming-of-age revelations, including Stranger Things, Riverdale, and Sex Education, along with Hindi subtexts.

For another series, Queen Charlotte and Bridgerton, one could observe references to joint family systems and how elders should be respected in Indian society. Lastly, the fourth and fifth clusters relate to hopeless romance (2.4) and cultural celebrations (2.5). The first cluster, though broad, unravels some of the most significant underpinnings of the research question, which is to remediate the notions of hopeless romance, primarily a Hindi film notion propagated through famous actors like Shahrukh Khan, Saif Ali Khan, Varun Dhawan, and Hrithik Roshan. The latter, however, is a classic case of seasonal campaigns, where specific scenes about Hindu and Muslim festivals are replugged on Instagram for traction and emotional engagement. This cluster specifically targets South Asian origin diaspora in Western capitals and encashes their feelings of homesickness and missing out on cultural celebrations at home. An important sub-cluster within cluster 5 is the Indian wedding scene beginning early November to late February. During the said months, the handles routinely plug wedding scenes from the films like Kuch Kuch Hota Hai (1.1) and DDLJ (1.3).

Similarly, Spotify came up with visuals and wedding playlists. The sixth cluster, ‘outside the purview (2.6)’, is attributed to all those images which do not lie in any other cluster. The rationale behind adding the sixth cluster is to lay the groundwork for further research inquiries into Bollywood’s domination of one’s Instagram feed through multiple handles, from local production houses to global platforms. One can also look into as more and more global platforms launch in South Asian markets, they may use the same Instagram strategy as employed by Spotify and Netflix.

Initial & Final Codes

Upon finalising the clusters, the next step was to develop a codebook, as most of the images follow different thematic patterns, embedded messages, hashtags, and even the choice of actors. Therefore for each cluster, this paper went back and forth with codes including the idea of a nation-state, joint family system, represented in films like K3G, and Kuch Kuch Hota Hai, similarly for cultural celebrations, following codes include Eid, Diwali, Ramadan, Weddings, and even Father’s, and Mother’s day. This cluster, however, remains up for usage throughout the year, where the said handles do not restrict their celebrations to Indian or South Asian origin events. They tend to replug their films wherever they deem appropriate, including, ‘world music day,’ ‘Valentine’s Day,’’ bicycle Day,’ and so on.

While going through the codes again, concerning the visuals, some of the codes were later changed; for instance, ‘nation state’ was moved to the second place with ‘pan Indian’ preceding it because the films in question depict an idea of an Indian identity regardless of one’s respective nation-state. Most films focus on one’s pan-Indian identity and then try to reciprocate the cultures of respective nation-states. For instance, Jab Tak Hai Jaan (1.9) and Pathaan (1.10) make sublime references to Pakistan. ‘Hopeless romance’ (2.4) seems to be the most famous cluster across all handles with the following codes, including ‘one-sided love’ and ‘chasing the girl.’ Upon review, another code was added to the cluster, ‘heartbreak,’ prevalent across most films.

Findings & Discussion

Due to the high concentration of visuals, this paper went ahead with drawing inferences from a sample of twenty shortlisted visuals across the metadata from all available handles, followed by an overview of the observations from the complete dataset.

Sample Study

After coding the visuals, one could observe dominant and marginal visual formats and themes (Colombo et al., 2023). For instance, the specified primary Instagram handles repeatedly use famous Bollywood actor Shahrukh Khan’s dominant images from the early 2000s to garner attention with the hashtag ‘#srk’ and #ShahrukhKhan’. Some of these images are iconic and persistent to the extent that they have already been widely circulated for decades, as laid out in Appendix 1.1a, 1.3a, and 1.7a. The marginal formats, however, include a standard practice across all the selected handles, which follow a much more text-centric approach than plugging in iconic and persistent visuals. For example, with every new Spotify playlist, or Netflix, they use infamous dialogues from the said films. Primarily because global platforms refrain from getting too entangled with local cultural productions and audiences to keep up with the trends and refrain from a turf war with local production houses, Rogers (2018) would argue that the inherent difference between Dharma, YRF, and subsequent secondary Instagram handles is strategic and might as well relate to consumer futurism and trends. The audience segment is transitioning from big cinema screens to over-the-top streaming platforms. Even if not driving revenue growth, platforms like Netflix and Spotify feel the need to maintain their presence in an otherwise Bollywood-dominated space. Out of the twenty visuals, cluster 4 outperformed the other clusters, whereas, within the cluster, twelve visuals pertain to @yrf and one to @dharmamovies.

A hashtag analysis further reveals that #ShahrukhKhan dominated the said sample. In contrast, the same hashtag to date not only has multiple variants but close to five million posts on Instagram by different private, public, and fan pages. Similarly, @yrf and @dharma tend to use multiple hashtags together for all of their posts, even if the said films differ by genre, plots, and release dates, primarily to target the intended audience into a non-stop loop of consuming their existing and all forthcoming content. At the same time, such hashtags are used in coherence with a complimentary female protagonist. Since Bollywood by far relies on heterosexual on-screen romance, one could observe #ShahrukhKhan coupled with popular female leads, including #Kajol, #RanMukherjee and #PreityZinta.

Interestingly, the hashtag representing male lead couples with different female lead hashtags gets higher traction than if the same would have been practised and vice-versa. From a platform perspective, the said handles repeatedly use the carousel feature in Instagram with no particular order; they club together both old and new films following an internal clustering process. From a visual standpoint, how do these production houses come up with internal filters and clusters, is it purely market-based, or do they dedicate themselves to audience research and changing demographics?

In another observation, one could argue that classic notions of Hindi cinema ranging from cluster 1 to cluster 3, premised on family values, professing love, and Indiansim, were prevalent in metadata obtained from @yrf and @dharmamovies, while the majority of the metadata from global platforms was either outside the purview of this paper, or contingent on celebrating festivals, establishing linkages between the said films, and their local productions and using Bollywood for clout purposes. Global platforms might also change their Instagram strategy or sway away from Bollywood later, considering the trends and algorithms. The local production houses will continue to remediate the open box office hits to target the global south asian millennial audience. With the rise of over-the-top streaming platforms, even local production houses might have to come up with various remediation angles, for instance, using the famous dialogues as chatbot conversations, linking them to an ongoing conspiracy or going beyond the dominant hopeless romantic theme. Similarly, the characters and famous actors embedded in the select images are already at the lower end of their careers with dying fandom and on-screen appearances. Therefore, @yrf and @dharmamovies will remediate upcoming Bollywood actors sooner or later. Whether or not they stick with the same clusters is for researchers privy to Bollywood should monitor. It would be interesting to observe how almost half a century-old production houses adapt to emerging new media practices and move on from traditional cinema-going audiences to the same target audience, now making consumption decisions off Instagram.

Limitations & Recommendations

Bollywood is far entrenched in an average South Asian lifestyle, from food to weddings, cultural celebrations, and family ties, mostly from films, actors, dialogues, and plots. Therefore to assess the impact of Bollywood on global south asian millennial audiences goes far beyond two production houses and global platforms, which use Bollywood for social media vanity metrics, and to promote their content in a relatively emerging market. There are other major production players in the same space, including UTV, Eros and Star, with, if not at par, high digital presence and penetration numbers with the same target audience. Bollywood does not represent India (Punathambekar, 2013) in its entirety, a country of 1.4 billion plus people with a multitude of regional languages comprising Telugu, Tamil, Malayalam, Gujarati, Marathi, Bhojpuri and Kannada., with a substantial consumer segment. Since the said industries are regional and only garner a little attention abroad, they are often dismissed by the cultural scholarship studying Bollywood and its implied viewers (Gehlawat, 2010). Even within India, there are cities, or perhaps provinces, where regional films and culture outperform Bollywood regarding viewership, ticket sales, and the blogosphere. However, studying the said industries’ presence on Instagram would also warrant researchers who are well-versed in the corresponding languages and have adequate institutional knowledge of the regional cultural industries.

For research concerning itself with geographical and spatial boundaries within the cultural analytics realm, one would require additional methods such as digital ethnography, where researchers can conduct cyber trials into online users to determine whether they belong to India, Pakistan or Bangladesh and their content preferences provided that the users have an authentic online presence. It could also lead to inferences such as similarity indexes between Hindi and Urdu-speaking Bollywood audiences from India and Pakistan as opposed to Telugu, Tamil, or Bengali audiences in certain Indian provinces and Bangladesh. It further reveals the extent of complications and cultural differences across the subcontinent. Investigating a platform or a production house requires a relatively huge sample size, considering the population numbers and indigenous research into cultural analytics and visual models for social media image analysis. Additionally, though all the countries in question have high digital penetration numbers, their Instagram presence still does not accurately reflect the film-watching audience. To date, you can still go to the cinema for as low as one dollar in India, and a substantial segment of that audience is not active on Instagram or social media, for that matter. TikTok, now banned in India, would be a better platform to pursue the remediation angle. However, collecting data off TikTok would require tools to capture video and reel-like visuals instead of zeeschuimer, which was suitable for images on Instagram. From an attribute standpoint, a TikTok visual can be further dissected into different image formats revealing internal image rankings, hierarchies, and even a calculated sequence (Rogers, 2021).

Conclusion

The purpose of this research was not only to investigate Bollywood’s hegemony over global millennial south asian audiences but also to direct visual social media research into relatively unexplored ever-growing cultural spaces exclusively taken up by south asian academics. It would be fair to argue that the paper stands corrected in proving Bollywood’s hegemonic attitude in the global Indian entertainment space but lacks thereof to measure the said hegemony.

Similarly, since each visual required detailed observation, this paper eventually resorted to individual coding after a few attempts at online tools and analysis methods provided in the course, primarily due to the qualitative nature of the visuals. Therefore it is equally possible to code an image with a different cluster if the researcher’s background or content preferences differ. Nevertheless, that is the theoretical underpinning of social media research, where one can deduce patterns, strategies and critical insights to develop metrics beyond the purview of vanity (Rogers, 2018, p.468). While reviewing the datasets, a few more clusters seemed appropriate for the visual. However, this paper restricted itself to the aptest cluster, which may be significant to the research question. For future research, one begs the question of the way forward for South Asian cultural industries, do they remain under Bollywood’s shadow or what some say ‘cultural imperialism.’ If yes, should Pakistani and Bangladeshi filmmakers try to differentiate between their respective film industries based on their interstate relationships? This may serve as a setting stone for cultural scholars focusing on post-colonial cinematic audiences. Despite sharing the same culture, language, and attributes, filmmakers must differentiate themselves based on state preferences or compete for hegemony. At this stage, the paper seems incomplete with the choice of data collection and analysis techniques; however, with more time, and resources, one can make a significant scholarly contribution towards Bollywood’s social media presence and its impact on political economy, social structures, poverty, crime, mental health, and the broader perception of India, as a modern nation-state.

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