PhD defence A.S. (Apoorva) Nanjangud

Dissertation in short:

As the global appeal of Bollywood continues to grow, Bollywood tourism is increasingly becoming popular among its fans. But what inspires and motivates these fans to conduct these trips to places beyond their regular scope? What kind of experiences do they have on site? And in the end, how do they evaluate their experiences? This dissertation attempts to understand these questions through empirical research in varying transnational contexts. By examining the diasporic consumption of popular cinema and their cinematic imagination of their Homeland, the embodied experiences of filmi song tourists, and finally, by locating the experience of Indianness at Bollywood Parks Dubai, this dissertation has considered a variety of media formats to generate, analyze and infer from interview data and observations aiding theoretical refinement of the phenomenon. In doing so, this dissertation attempts to place Bollywood tourism practices within larger discussions of contemporary culture and make sense of how and why Bollywood tourists are becoming important within the wider tourism discourse.