IBSS case study on Bollywood cinema

Case study title	A comparison of the audience’s engagement with Indian Mumbai-based Hindi cinema (Bollywood) in Indian and Diaspora contexts, with special emphasis on diasporic identity
Name	Anne Schumann
Job title	Editorial Assistant
Institution	IBSS
Qualifications	BA (Hons) African Studies and English Literature;  MSc African Politics

I started my search by simply typing in “Bollywood” to see what I would find – I did not expect to find very much using this search term, as some academics prefer not to call Indian cinema Bollywood, since this term is seen as derogatory in some circles. However, I got an impressive 21 results. All of these were relevant.

I then proceeded with my search in a more structured manner. I used the search terms (keywords) “Diaspora” AND “identity” and combined these with the geographic terms “India” OR “South Asia”. It was important to me to be able to use the Boolean operator “or” to get all of the relevant results regardless of whether the researcher is referring specifically to India or South Asia more generally.

• The search on Diaspora and identity resulted in 532 records
• The search on India or South Asia resulted in 49964 records.

Obviously this amount of hits is quite unwieldy, but luckily a combination of these two searches resulted in a manageable 50 records, of which 19 where relevant to my research.  

Since my main focus is on Indian Hindi-language cinema I then searched for “cinema” OR “film” and obtained 4734 hits. I combined this with the above mentioned geographic search on “India or South Asia” and still got an impressive 139 results. When browsing these, I noticed a high number of reviews for the same two or three books, so I limited the search again to include only articles, books or chapters.

I was left with 76 records, of which 57 were relevant. I also tried narrowing the search by restricting it to the fields of anthropology and sociology only, but found that this made very little difference since the area of my research is located squarely in these disciplines.

Some samples of the type of articles I was looking for are included below:

Conclusion: I was impressed not only by the amount, but also by the quality of the material that I was able to find – especially since the topic of my research seemed to be quite unusual and not mainstream. The high number of hits made the search features of being able to combine and limit searches particularly useful.

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