About

Bishnupriya Ghosh is a Professor of English at the University of California, Santa Barbara, where she teaches postcolonial theory and global media studies. She holds a B.A. from Presidency College, India, a B.A. from Wellesley College in the United States, and completed her M.A. and Ph.D. at Northwestern University. Her scholarly work primarily interrogates the relations between the global and the postcolonial, area studies, and transnational cultural studies, with a focus on popular, mass, and elite cultures. Her research includes examining contemporary elite and popular cultures of globalization. Her first two books, 'When Borne Across: Literary Cosmopolitics in the Contemporary Indian Novel' (2004) and 'Global Icons: Apertures to the Popular' (2011), address the dialectical relations between emerging global markets and postcolonial literatures, as well as visual popular culture's role in constituting the global. She is currently working on a third monograph titled 'The Unhomely Sense: Spectral Cinemas of Globalization,' which explores the relations between globalization and cinematic/post-cinematic images.

Research topics

• Sociology
• History
• Art
• Political Science
• Law
• Aesthetics
• Art history
• Environmental science
• Gender studies
• Visual arts
• Media studies
• Political economy

Selected publications

• Review: <i>The Celluloid Specimen: Moving Image Research into Animal Life</i>, by Benjamin Schultz-Figueroa

  Film Quarterly · 2025-01-01

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• The Respiratory Politics of Air-Breath:

  Michigan State University Press eBooks · 2025-08-01

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• Tolerance Is a Wasteland: Palestine and the Culture of Denial

  Journal of Palestine Studies · 2025-04-03

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• The Plague Check: Population Culling as Pandemic Realpolitik

  Catalyst Feminism Theory Technoscience · 2024-05-26

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  The COVID pandemic presented a bioeconomic opportunity to re-entrench extant differences (racial, sexual, ethnic, religious, or otherwise) and to escalate the ongoing engineering of imagined communities. This paper examines how this general paradigm unfolded in India’s lockdown of March 2020, and the consequent “long walk home” for migrant laborers. Narendra Modi’s decision exemplifies an autoimmune drive that splits the national body-politic into a visible citizenry, groomed as electorate, and the teeming masses, marked as threat and slated for expulsion from a unified body politic. Such a drive draws on moral and science-based sanctions for rationalizing what Christina Sharpe has named premature and preventable deaths. The moral sanction draws psychic force from dominant cultural symbols that mystify, sometimes sacralize, the body politic (Modi’s “Lakshman Rekha metaphor), while science-based biosecurity measures sort and segregate populations for the management of health. Plotting Malthusian historical resonances between war, famine, and disease, I characterize the Modi regime’s readiness to countenance migrant deaths as a “population culling” that is, unfortunately, an iterative feature in the archives of global pandemics.

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• The Making of the Hindu Normative

  boundary 2 · 2023-05-01

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  Abstract This essay reviews Anustup Basu's book Hindutva as Political Monotheism (2020) in the context of current debates over Hindu political theology after the Bharatiya Janata Party's electoral wins of 2014 and 2018. The book charts the consolidation of Hinduism as a monotheistic imperative ever since its inception in the second decade of the nineteenth century, and its axiomatic place in present-day masculinist majoritarian India—“Modi's India.” This review places the book's historical reading of political Hinduism and its arguments on an informatic Hindutva mediascape (Hindutva 2.0) alongside recent books with similar ambitions.

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• The Virus Touch

  2023-03-03 · 1 citations

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  In The Virus Touch Bishnupriya Ghosh argues that media are central to understanding emergent relations between viruses, humans, and nonhuman life. Writing in the shadow of the HIV/AIDS and COVID-19 global pandemics, Ghosh theorizes “epidemic media” to show how epidemics are mediated in images, numbers, and movements through the processes of reading test results and tracking infection and mortality rates. Scientific, artistic, and activist epidemic media that make multispecies relations sensible and manageable eschew anthropocentric survival strategies and instead recast global public health crises as biological, social, and ecological catastrophes, pushing us toward a multispecies politics of health. Ghosh trains her analytic gaze on these mediations as expressed in the collection and analysis of blood samples as a form of viral media; the geospatialization of data that track viral hosts like wild primates; and the use of multisensory images to trace fluctuations in viral mutations. Studying how epidemic media inscribe, store, and transmit multispecies relations attunes us to the anthropogenic drivers of pathogenicity like deforestation or illegal wildlife trading and the vulnerabilities accruing from diseases that arise from socioeconomic inequities and biopolitical neglect.

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• Emergence and History

  History of the Present · 2023-04-01 · 1 citations

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  What does it mean to write histories of global pandemics? As global forms defined by their wide geographic extension, minimal population immunity, and contagiousness, among other criteria, pandemics are notoriously difficult crisis-events to plot temporally or to scale spatially (see Movens, Folkers, and Fauci for criteria). The problem is a conceptual one, for “true emergences” are multitemporal nonlinear occurrences unfolding across different orders of association—biological and ecological, social and political. What happens at one level might not have direct causality or a positive correlation to what happens at another. Such an understanding of emergence as an unprecedented event that cannot be entirely predicted or tracked to one point of origin has settled as an epidemic episteme ever since deadly pathogenic viruses (Hanta, Marburg, HIV, and Ebola) burst onto the scene in the early eighties. Scuttling the post–World War II war on germs, these sudden emergences recast global pandemics as iterative, cascading “emerging infectious disease” events (see Cooper). But what challenge does the notion of “emergence” pose for writing pandemic histories? Or, indeed, what kinds of histories does the thick temporality of a viral emergence command?As the Latin root for emergence, emergere signifies what is new and what appears. In terms of the current COVID-19 pandemic, the shock of the new compelled very different narrations of the same crisis-event depending on the “epistemic object” in question. Tracking the microbial agent (SARS-CoV2) privileged biological (a mutating virus) and ecological (animal origins) plotlines, while the disease entity (COVID-19) highlighted medical and public health ones. The many pasts and futures of COVID-19 jockeyed for precedence; all narrations sought to construct causes and effects, structure and agency, to make sense of the evolving “crisis”—a term whose Greek root, we might recall, signified a decisive turn in the progression of disease. Such narrations index the multiple “thought communities,” as historian of science Ludwik Fleck once characterized them, whose debates configure what later hardens into scientific fact. Fleck’s study of syphilis as disease emergence in the mid-thirties analyzed how a multisymptom syndrome came to be reconstituted as a single biological event after the advent of mid-nineteenth-century microbiology. The debate on whether one could characterize the syndrome that included sores, dementia, and progressive paralysis as a disease entity raged through centuries before germ theory established a single cause: the Spirochaeta pallida bacterium. The thoroughfare between disease concepts and evidence, argued Fleck, regularly marginalized—kept secret, unseen, inadmissible, or exceptional—whatever appeared to contradict standardized definitions. Even as systemized vade mecum sciences (for general experts) followed linear disease causalities, establishing Spirochaeta pallida as the cause of syphilis, the difficulties of identifying one particular form of this parasite livened discussions in journal science (for researchers). Fleck invokes protracted negotiations in whose shadow we find what does not cohere, what must remain peripheral, once a proper scientific history settles as cultural fact. If one were to follow what becomes aberrant to that history, dallying with the inadmissible or the irrelevant, one would be in the realm of improper histories—conjectural, speculative, incomplete. In Fleck’s account, pursuing such trails reveals syphilis to be an eminently “fuzzy” concept, as Hans-Jörg Rheinberger argues with reference to the gene. As a syndrome, syphilis sets in motion the times, spaces, and agencies of a microbial agent, a clinical disease, an illness, and a social catastrophe. Contra germ theory, such fuzziness disinters the stable disease entity into a complex disease emergence.My reflections on narrating disease emergence engages smallpox and its causative agents, Variola major and Variola minor. I tag these reflections with the Latin moniker to deliberately objectify the pathogen, plucking it from constitutive relations and processes, to foreground the modern scientific history against whose tides I constellate three vignettes. What better time than this to open the smallpox playbook amid monkeypox (a cousin hailing from the same Orthopoxvirus genus) outbreaks! Some scientists argue that the eradication of one virus might well open the door to others, filling the niche, a biological-ecological argument that throws a wrench in global histories of biomedical triumphalism (see Rimoin).The eradication of smallpox is classically considered a biomedical triumph; it was declared as such by the World Health Organization (WHO) in 1978 after the last case of Variola major in Bangladesh (1973) and of Variola minor in Somalia (1977). As a symptomatically visual disease, smallpox epidemics date to ancient times: we find notations in histories of the Athenian plague and in research on Egyptian mummies. Scientists now understand variola to be a rodent virus that skipped the species barrier into human farming communities almost ten thousand years ago (Crawford 52–53; Oldstone 53–101). Smallpox continued to emerge through the centuries; in the twentieth century alone, Variola infection killed half a billion people. Beyond the historical viral agent that laid waste to armies and empires, variola holds a significant place in the modern Western sciences of diseases. It was the control of variola that motivated the first successful biomedical advances against viral diseases and the first modern public health campaigns. One could devote several volumes to variola stories: to Edward Jenner’s cutaneous insertions of the vaccinia virus (a microorganism named after its host, vacca, Latin for cow) to prevent variola infection; to the eighteenth-century smallpox vaccination campaigns that institutionalized medical intervention on mass scale; to the many conspiracy theories of espionage, lab leaks, and bioweaponry emergent around the only remaining stocks of live attenuated variola at the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC, Atlanta, Georgia) and at the Russian State Research Center for Virology and Biotechnology (VECTOR, Novosibirsk, Siberia). These histories often occlude other temporalities, as triumphalist narrations are wont to do. Those temporalities motivate my excursions into three improper histories of smallpox, each suggesting a different temporality.As COVID-19 vaccines become available for the youngest, we are reminded of all the child mediums that functioned as animal models and carriers of smallpox vaccines. Before Edward Jenner’s experiments, variolization (a technique that inserted live attenuated variola into uninfected bodies) was widely practiced in China, India, and Turkey. Historian David Arnold has shown how variolization and vaccination were positioned as competing medical practices in mid-nineteenth-century Indian anticolonial repudiations of British rule. Over time, it was Jenner’s circulation of the vaccinia inoculation that came to be regarded as the global biomedical landmark. In that scene, an eight-year-old orphan boy, James Phipps, makes an appearance in May 1796. The boy had suffered a typically mild episode of cowpox; later that year, Jenner infected him with infectious matter from smallpox pustules, and indeed, Phipps failed to contract smallpox altogether. The success has been recorded in sketches and paintings enshrining the moment (fig. 1 is an early twentieth-century oil-on-canvas commemoration). But around this famous sacrificial child, other ghostly children gather as risk-bearing subjects: they remain unseen, marginal, hovering at the periphery, scattered across distant archives, tangential to the tale of medical triumph.That smallpox vaccination campaigns met fierce resistance in the British Empire’s Indian colony is well-documented. Less well-known are the children who literally carried the vaccine to the subcontinent. In scholarly analyses of the Wadiyar queens of Mysore, who were vaccinated as early as 1805, for instance, a mixed-race child emerges: Anna Dusthall, the three-year-old daughter of a British servant, marked in the Bombay Courier by the blackness of her skin. She comes into view as tangential trace, bringing with her other child mediums: the Armenian child’s lymph nodes that brought the vaccine from Vienna to Baghdad; the boy from Basra who was part of the arm-to-arm supply chain; and then Anna Dusthall, the first to be vaccinated in India. The following week, five other children were vaccinated with pus from Anna’s arm; further records catalog three other “half-caste” children who then carried the vaccine to the rest of India. These child mediums are “string figures,” as Donna Haraway names them, whose “stories tell stories.” In their stories, we find not only a global history of modern variola vaccination logistics but also subaltern notes to the story of scientific achievement. The children are marginal figures, some unnamed, calling colonial medical benevolence’s bluff. It turns out that medical benevolence—bringing modern medicine to the sick—was predicated on a malevolent exercise of racialized power. The social positions of the child models and carriers reveal a secret, inadmissible history of public health.The string figures tie disparate places and subjects, viruses and lymph nodes, scientists and campaigns. They prompt a speculative practice of history that alights on a key contradiction in viral emergence obtaining between the leveling agencies of biological agents and the uneven social distributions of therapeutics and prophylactics. We know this contradiction well from its tragic replays during COVID-19. No doubt the lateral transmission of live vaccinia from child mediums cut across class, gender, and caste; after all, viruses are equal opportunity agents. But it is equally clear that the most vulnerable child mediums bore the greatest risk as experimental models: orphans, servants, mixed-race and half-caste children. As they transmitted vaccinia from Vienna to Baghdad to Bombay, they galvanize a history of social power that makes nonsense of flat viral ontologies.A second tale of prophecies and destinies. At the center is an iconic figure, the celebrity epidemiologist Larry Brilliant (fig. 2), who had played a key role in the WHO’s eradication of smallpox in the seventies. Brilliant is an illustrious figure who drew inspiration early in his career from Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., whom Brilliant became acquainted with as an undergraduate at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, and from his guru, Neem Karoli Baba, whom Brilliant met when he spent a few years on the subcontinent in the seventies. Landing in India on a spiritual quest, Brilliant was not averse to celebrity: he appeared as a hippie groupie sharing a toke in the famous Hindi-language film Hare Rama, Hare Krishna (1971). In his travels, Brilliant met Neem Karoli Baba, a holy man who prophesized that Brilliant was destined to lead the final eradication of smallpox, God’s gift to mankind. The rest is history, as they say.In his interviews, Brilliant described his participation in the WHO’s smallpox eradication campaign as the “serendipitous” fulfillment of this prophecy. It accompanied him as he traveled from Bihar, Uttar Pradesh, and northern India to Pakistan; on the eastern edge, Brilliant witnessed the last smallpox survivor of Variola major in Bangladesh in 1971. He would go on to become a public advocate for stopping epidemics before they explode as global pandemics.In this virus story, the prophetic drives modern history. Towering figures and not just scientific efficiencies lie at the heart of smallpox management in uneasy admixtures of religion and science. The easiest interpretation would be to dismiss Neem Karoli Baba’s prophecy as the psychological motivation for Brilliant’s public health ventures. But more important is the temporal logic of prophecy that underlaid Brilliant’s lifelong embrace of preemption as the modern science of disease emergence. The idea was unusual in the seventies when the war on germs had reached its zenith; only maverick scientists imagined other temporalities, projecting multicausal scenarios of sudden emergences into the future. Critical of expensive therapies, microbiologist René Dubos, for one, offered a counter-philosophy of permanent struggle. As early as 1959, he argued that what we have to mobilize against is not the emergent pathogen but against emergence itself. Impossible as it was to pin down the “constellation of circumstances” that give rise to pandemics, what one could identify were well-known patterns that create the conditions of pathogenicity (Dubos 86–90). The argument came home to roost in early years of the twenty-first century when conceptions of planetary health established deforestation, changing land use, extractive mining, illegal wildlife trading, and industrial farming as key anthropogenic drivers of pathogenicity. These drivers make an appearance in Steven Soderbergh’s prescient Contagion (2011), a fiction film in which a virus (named MEV-1) is depicted as transmitted via aerosolized respiratory droplets. The film was made after the first coronavirus entered human populations in the SARS-CoV outbreak of 2003; soon after, in 2012, a second, MERS-CoV, would emerge. To imagine the multitemporal emergence of the fictional MEV-1, Scott Burns, the screenwriter, turned to Larry Brilliant, no less, as consultant on scientific facts surrounding bats as reservoirs and pigs as intermediate hosts. With COVID-19, horseshoe bats in the Yunnan province give credence to such speculative histories, even as we struggle to contain the suddenness of zoonotic spillovers by situating the origin in human hands (as the lab leak theory goes). In the early months of COVID-19, Contagion was on constant televisual replay, signaling popular science warnings. Brilliant’s speculative plot had materialized around him.A final story about an antidote to smallpox infection designated as “traditional medicine” in the annals of modern Western medicine. In India, variolization was one among a series of health practices preventing or ameliorating smallpox infection that included diets (cucumber, curd), herbs and potions (sandalwood paste rubbed on the body, fenugreek, and neem), and hygiene (cold water baths for cooling and drying pustules). These ayurvedic prescriptions embedded health within an ecological network of human and nonhuman relations. In parts of India, these were Indigenous cosmological knowledge-practices encoded in the worship of Sitala (the cold one; fig. 3), the goddess of pox widely venerated in North India, West Bengal, Nepal, Bangladesh, and Pakistan. But in the colonial story, such immunological practices were dismissed as mere superstition.At center stage of these practices was the neem plant (Azardirachta indica L.). Beyond cooling smallpox pustules, neem is widely used for its spermicidal and antidesertification properties across South Asia; as such, it is inimitably a part of the regional medical and ecological commons. Cosmological notations index these commons: in her beneficial role, the goddess Sitala is often depicted as carrying neem. In recent biopiratical times, the neem was the locus of an epic ten-year battle when the W. R. Grace corporation tried to patent the plant’s fungicidal properties in 1995, a battle that the Indian government ultimately won (see BBC News). Thus, neem is a potent concept-metaphor for complementary and alternative medicine as well as the site of struggle for global medical commons.In the smallpox story, neem has antiviral properties that, in combination with variolization, worked to stem infection within populations: neem rubbed into early sores brought cooling relief but also prevented the progression of the disease. The latter was not held as scientific fact, inadmissible as such without modern experimental verification. Yet, as recent studies on the herpes simplex virus type 1 (HSV-1) have demonstrated, neem has verifiable antiviral agencies. Aqueous extracts prepared from the bark of the neem plant act as potent inhibitors to the entry of viral particles into target cells (see Tiwari et al.). All of this is to say, the concert of neem extracts and variola particles in cosmological medicine affords another pathway into managing illness through a holistic approach to health, one that has become soft science with the emerging lifestyle therapies (from yoga to acupuncture) of the twentieth century. Tracking neem opens a “future anterior” to antiviral therapies because of its long and widely practiced association with smallpox. As Reinhart Koselleck notes in Futures Past: On the Semantics of Historical Time (2004), the “future anterior” designates an active temporality of pasts that open into futures that did not come to be but that remain as potentialities. Neem as an element of the variola network opens into a future anterior where health broadens beyond the biomedical solution to wider health-care practices and to health as global commons.■ ■ ■These virus stories—the marginal, the speculative, and the inadmissible—are provocations for crafting improper histories of the present viral emergence. As a novel multispecies relation emerges, spelling large-scale losses for differentially vulnerable populations, we learn of the cross-species transmission from horseshoe bats, of the mutating virus, of the comorbidities, of uneven vaccine distributions, of failing health infrastructures, of disrupted supply chains, of the of populations, of the in global we as histories? the present Variola histories a playbook even as the thick temporality of pasts and futures We live this time amid the to to in from hygiene to social to global supply chains, all to the virus

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• A multispecies cinema of apprehension

  Journal of Environmental Media · 2023-12-01

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  This essay theorizes the cinematic experience of apprehension accompanying representations of multispecies relations in the age of global pandemics. Globally synchronous experiences of cascading epidemics in the late twentieth- and early twenty-first centuries have made spectators aware of the microbes that inhabit ‘us’, the animals that carry ‘them’ and the mediums (water, air, soils) that sustain all these forms of life. In this historical situation, cinematic zoonoses generate fear, anxiety and foreboding alongside creative prehensions of living as multispecies: this is the ‘pandemic viewing condition’. I elaborate the claim in three films – Prateek Vats’s first fiction film Eeb, Allay, Ooo! (2020), Amit Datta’s artistic Saatvin Sair ( The Seventh Walk ) (2013) and Shaunak Sen’s documentary All That Breathes (2023) – that articulate multispecies encounters as spatial experiences. On the one hand, aesthetic compositions of cinematic zoonoses lure spectators into textured cinematic milieus of multispecies encounters, even as the protective cinematic frame provides the comfort of distance; on the other, the historical contingencies of spectatorship induce projections of cinematic surrounds where the multispecies continuum surfaces sensorily, affectively and intuitively. Together the cinematic milieu and cinematic surrounds orient spectators towards their actual living milieu, an unsettling space where neither bodily integrities nor species distinctions hold any longer.

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• DIASPORA AND POSTMODERN FECUNDITY

  Communicare Journal for Communication Studies in Africa · 2022-11-03 · 1 citations

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  Central to the experience of postmodernity is the increase in, and the intensification of, transnational encounters. The globalization of capital, culture, work-forces, and identities leads to patterns of homogenization whose totalizing tendency is undercut by intense fragmentation and the local play of differences. Thus Coca-Cola and IBM feel the need to acknowledge the heterogenity of the world market, even as they capture it. The increased productivity in economic and cultural terms marks the postmodem as remarkably fecund. This perception of fecundity comes from the various, and often opposing, groups on the pOlitical continuum.1 The 'triumph' of transnational capital in Asia and the entry of Eastern Europe into the capitalist fold have created unprecedented economic and financial flows. Simultaneously, the antifoundational dismantling of epistemological hierarchies release long-repressed energies that create new flows and open up fresh possibilities. These new flows and structurations require cognitive refigurations, as older modes of knowing the world have become inadequate. The nation is one social and cul-tural formation that has come to be rigorously Interrogated in the light of the global-local· dynamisms. A rise in the volume of migrations and the increasing visibility of varied diasporas - communities that transcend the geopolitical boundaries of the nation-state - demand a new sense of national belonging: national heritage, essence, tradition etc. have lost their immanent valences. For instance, Chow (1993) stresses the need to "unlearn Chinese ness" in order to foster Chinese diasporic identity. Our object of study is the Indian diaspora as it redefines the Indian nation. We look at specific political controversies among immigrant/expatriate Indians about what it means to be properly Indian. We trace the Indian diaspora's relation to 'home' and 'host' nations in cinematic representations originating both in and outside of India. As diasporic cultural productions are celebrated as part and parcel of the glob~1 postmodernism, we use this occasion to take a hard look at the promises of postmodern fecundity.

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• The Global-Popular: A Frame for Contemporary Cinemas

  Cultural Critique · 2022 · 5 citations

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  • Sociology
  • Political Science
  • Sociology

  The Global-Popular:A Frame for Contemporary Cinemas Bishnupriya Ghosh (bio) and Bhaskar Sarkar (bio) That we now inhabit the global-popular has become something of a commonplace. Upsurges from the Arab Spring to right-wing populisms; the number of active Facebook users crossing the billion mark; the popularity of Psy's Gangnam Style and Shah Rukh Khan fan clubs sprouting all over Europe; the dissemination of alternative medical practices (e.g., acupuncture), health regimens (e.g., yoga), and lifestyle orientations (e.g., feng shui); the proliferation of bottom-up low-tech "make-do" modes like gambiarra and jugaad: these popular creativities and mobilizations constitute an experiential realm that appears so ubiquitous and self-evident that cognition and mapping become difficult. If the global and the popular are now everywhere, how does one conceptualize the conjugation global-popular? What specifically does the hyphen between the two seemingly banal and all-encompassing terms do? If the conjunction is not simply additive, how are we to theorize it? The global-popular is primarily experienced in three overlapping realms: the economic, the political, and the cultural. Discourses of globalization focus on top-down economic forces. Economic accounts of the global culture industry, for one, conflate the global-popular with the global-corporate, reducing political and cultural dimensions to epiphenomena. Our understanding of the global-popular includes bottom-up practices that cut across the three realms. The casting of Scarlett Johansson as the lead in the 2017 remake of Ghost in the Shell, a pop cultural event, fueled a pointed debate about global racial politics.1 The global convulsions around #MeToo, a popular political groundswell, are inducing changes in workplace cultures, dating rituals, and representational regimes that have routinely idealized lotharios and stalkers [End Page 1] as romantic heroes. Renewed demands for social justice ricocheting across continents in the wake of the Black Lives Matter movement spur an impetus to think about the structural congruencies between embedded hierarchies such as caste and race.2 This salience across multiple domains adds to the difficulty of characterization, let alone rigorous definition, of the global-popular. In this issue, we examine cinematic formations within global-popular cultures. Even as we track economic and political entanglements, our focus remains attuned primarily to cultural circulations. Comprising six new articles and an introduction, the issue explores how the concept of the "global-popular" might be productive for cinema studies. This means asking, among other things, what happens to cinema under the sign of the global-popular? "Cinema" here is broadly construed to include its diffuse multimedial manifestations and cultural extensions. Simultaneously, we ask: What does this focus on cinema bring to our understanding of the global-popular? Keeping with the cinematic theme, we begin with a "trailer" for each of the issue's organizing concepts. First, cinema. The last four decades, the era of contemporary globalization, have witnessed the phasing out of celluloid cinema. This gradual demise is related to tremendous developments in digital media technologies and the proliferation of screens. Cinema's "death" has brought about its efflorescence in novel multimedia formats, including its replatformings and remediations.3 Two other modes of proliferation—financial-speculative opportunisms and popular-representational practices—contributed to the explosion of cinema in the postcelluloid era. Writing about the transformation of Bombay cinema into Bollywood, Ashish Rajadhyaksha argues that Bollywoodization has meant the formalization, standardization, and corporatization of the Bombay industry, transforming it from a celluloid-based cinema into a veritable culture industry (Rajadhyaksha 2009). While "films" remain its imputed center, the Bollywood juggernaut now involves a wide array of activities, products, and services from television franchising, music videos, and star concert tours to online fan communities, fashion zines, and gallery art installations. The same is true of J-pop, K-pop, Hong Kong cinema, Hollywood, and Nollywood. The following image featuring a snapshot of Bernie Sanders at the 2021 US presidential inauguration, and rumored to have originated from Cairo, has appeared in a global torrent [End Page 2] of memes (Figure 1). Whether or not the rumor is true, anecdotally, we can report on the Cairene passion for aflam hindiya and, in particular, the blockbuster Sholay (1975) that we encountered during a visit in...

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Frequent coauthors

• Bhaskar Sarkar

  3 shared

• Bipul Pal

  Indian Institute of Science Education and Research Kolkata

  1 shared

• Abdul Fatah Che Hamat

  Universiti Sains Malaysia

  1 shared

• Michael Madsen

  1 shared

• Brinda Bose

  Jawaharlal Nehru University

  1 shared

• Sachin Gupta

  SC Johnson (United States)

  1 shared

• Muhammad Syukri Salleh

  Universiti Sains Malaysia

  1 shared

• M.Z. Abdad

  Universiti Sains Malaysia

  1 shared