Throughout this book, I have aimed to demonstrate some of the fundamental and peculiar ways in which Bollywood cinema has formally changed after its economic liberalisation at the turn of the twenty-first century. All the film texts I have analysed, which spring from this millennium period, incorporate some form of aesthetic enterprise serving the principles and traits of the postmodern. My case studies have verified that Bollywood, as well as being global and transnational, has reached a postmodern stage and that this postmodern tendency has enabled the cinema to adopt new critical tools (such as self-critique and dismantling the authority of other dominant cinematic forms), thereby offering up new ways of reading Bollywood.

We have explored how certain aspects of Bollywood filmmaking, previously regarded as primitive, formulaic or mediocre, have become the very attributes fuelling Bollywood's creativity and artistic experimentation today. Figural excess and hyperrealism are two such devices at the core of New Bollywood's unique cinematic language, which enable the cinema to operate differently as an art form and film language. I have elaborated on how these rather complex traits function to provide a particular kind of pleasure and experience for their audiences, such as offering access to sublime emotions, a greater level of submersion in the text, multi-dimensional perspectives and synaesthesia, whilst also demonstrating how these traits may be the very aspects of Bollywood cinema that lead to increased displeasure for the Western critic or spectator, and ultimately obstruct the cinema's ability to perform well critically or commercially in other parts of the world.

This book has also challenged the common assumption that contemporary Bollywood cinema still works to maintain and preserve a pure sense of Indian national identity and cultural tradition by having these conflict with and prevail over representations of the ‘modern’ and the ‘West’ as Other. I have demonstrated how, in newer films, clear distinctions between modern/traditional, East/West and Western/Indian no longer stand. Bollywood films no longer exclusively work to unambiguously serve certain socio-political or nationalist sentiments. Instead, they now actively seek to blur or intersect these binaries in order to produce an altogether fragmented, dismantled and often contradictory representation of global Indian identity.

Further to the above, I have also revealed how these post-millennial films embrace a dissolving of distinctions between, and an alignment of, Hollywood and Bollywood formal aesthetics.