Cinematic itineraries and identities: Studying Bollywood tourism among the Hindustanis in the Netherlands

Abstract

For decades, the ‘make-believe’ world of Bollywood has created elaborate imaginaries of India. A sizable part of its audience consists of diasporic communities, who not only consume Bollywood movies for entertainment but also as a way to stay connected with their Indian heritage. This study closely looks at one such diasporic community, namely the Dutch Hindustanis, investigating how Bollywood cinema affects their image of India, and how influential Bollywood cinema is in influencing their travel decisions to India. In-depth interviews indicate that Bollywood is a dominant cultural source for defining the respondents’ relationship with India. Moreover, the repeated consumption of Bollywood cinema stirs the desire to actually travel to India, seldom in search of ‘home’, but to visit sites associated with multiple Bollywood movies. Bollywood cinema being from their ‘distant homeland’ also incentivizes their travels to India thereby making it a meaningful experience. This study contributes to film (and) tourism research by introducing the concept of ‘cinematic itinerary’ to refer to these comprehensive film tourism practices.

Audiovisual fiction and tourism promotion: The impact of film and television on the image of tourist destinations and contributions from textual analysis

“…For example, there is no analysis of the possibility that an overall positive projected image in a production might generate a negative perceived image. Only a few studies point to this possibility when they relate audiovisual productions to other media texts (Nanjangud & Reijnders, 2020;Ozretic-Dosen et al, 2018;Ertz et al, 2020).…”

“…Most of the articles are case studies focusing on one or a few audiovisual productions. When they go further, they explore genres related to a specific country, such as Turkish soap operas (Ozretic-Dosen et al, 2018) or Korean soap operas (Chan, 2007;Zeng et al, 2015), or very generally to Bollywood films (Nanjangud;Reijnders, 2020) or Hollywood productions (Spears et al, 2013), or they examine a corpus of films to offer anecdotal evidence of their impact on tourism (Riley, Baker, & Van-Doren, 1998). Finally, some of the studies of the effects of audiovisual fiction on tourist destination image (8 out of 25 articles) base their findings on convenience sampling (surveys or interviews with university students at the researchers' institutions after playing them a film).…”

“…It is significant that all the articles that draw on textual theory and analysis attempt to go beyond a description of content or effects to take an explanatory approach, in an effort to establish how and why audiovisual fiction influences destination image a series on its image. A positive image projected by audiovisual fiction productions can compensate for negative images projected by news media, but the latter may also eclipse the effect of the former (Nanjangud & Reijnders, 2020;Ozretic-Dosen et al, 2018;Ertz et al, 2020).…”

On the Tracks of Musical Screenscapes: Analysing the Emerging Phenomenon of Bollywood Filmi-song Tourism in Iceland

“…Some of these visitors will be strongly motivated by specific films or music videos and show a deep desire to visit the related filming locations (e.g. Lundberg and Ziakas, 2019; Reijnders, 2016), potentially as part of a larger ‘cinematic itinerary’ (Nanjangud and Reijnders, 2020); other visitors will be motivated by a larger cluster of sources, in which the cinematic representation of Iceland neatly merges with more general tourism imaginaries. But in both cases, the influence of Bollywood popular culture is undeniable (Visitor Survey Report, 2016, p. 61).…”

“…This study intends to make meaningful contributions to the growing corpus of research on the interrelation between popular culture, place and tourism (Månsson et al, 2020; Reijnders, 2016 etc.) by bringing in a (critical) Indian perspective that is still largely missing in media tourism research (but see: Angmo and Dolma, 2015; Biswas and Croy, 2018; Mishra, 2018; Nanjangud, 2019; Nanjangud and Reijnders, 2020, 2021). Such a critical commentary fills in for much elusive discussions on the storytelling format and the specificities of the films from the region that has global effects on transnational mobilities that, perhaps cannot be generalized using existing research dominated by western case-studies.…”