This online exhibition explores how South Asian artists living in Britain have used Bollywood to understand and reinterpret Western life and culture.

Bollywood is a multi-billion pound industry based in India that generates nearly 1,000 films a year in 20 languages, reaching an estimated total of 5 billion viewers worldwide. In recent years, films such as Lagaan , Asoka , Monsoon Wedding , Vanity Fair and Bride and Prejudice have launched Bollywood into the centre-stage of the Western film industry and enjoyed mainstream commercial success with Western audiences.

This mainstream appreciation of Bollywood not only has impacted the British film industry, but also the very way in which South Asians are represented and thought of by non-Asians. Bollywood has become a short-hand symbol for South Asian people and culture. Selfridges’ 23 days of Bollywood, a retail celebration and marketing of anything and everything South Asian, Andrew Lloyd’s Weber’s West-End musical Bombay Dreams , the Victoria and Albert Museum’s exhibition Cinema India: The Art of Bollywood and the hosting of From India with Love , a song-and-dance performance by Bollywood superstars held in Hyde Park, are a few examples in which Bollywood features as the primary means for mainstream society to appreciate and comprehend South Asian culture and ways of life. For many non-Asians in the UK, Bollywood has become a recognizable and entertaining way to approach and understand its largest ethnic minority.

This interpretative quality of Bollywood is not one sided however. As Asians increasingly migrated to the Britain post-Partition, Bollywood played an essential role in combating the social and political discrimination that Asian communities encountered. Bollywood was used by many South Asians to make sense of British culture and society. The works by the artists featured in the exhibition demonstrate this creative and social use of Bollywood: the Singh Twins use Bollywood in their paintings to identify and critique mainstream social trends; both Nation Records and Outcaste Records have produced a series of compilations that perform the similarities between Bollywood music and modern Western Music, between South Asia and the UK; the South-Asian arts organisation Sampad commissioned school children in the Midlands to script and produce a Bollywood movie in order to spread greater awareness about South Asian heritage.

When asked by the Western press what defined and made Bollywood, Gurinder Chadha, director of the acclaimed Bend it Like Beckham and Bride and Prejudice , remarked: “Oh! Just all the singing and dancing, big musical numbers, bright colours, big emotions!” The gathered pictures, soundtracks and texts propose a less obvious understanding of Bollywood; focussing instead on the very real impact that ‘all the song, dance and colour’ of Bollywood has had on the position of Asian communities in Britain.