“It does have a future, but you don’t see it,” the father says, using the league as a metaphor for the country. “But the future of this league does not lie in the hands of white men.” Then, in speaking of the need for India to imbue modernity with her own essence, the father gives voice to a deeply disturbing emotion, an anger that boils up in societies bombarded by foreign influence. He says: “It is only when an Indian starts pummelling white men into the ground that the seats of that stadium will get crammed full of people.”

Bollywood’s reach extends well beyond India. These melodramas, which are so distasteful to the contemporary European and American palate, play well in Kuala Lumpur and Cairo. This is the cinema of the global South, a fun house mirror image of Hollywood.

In America, one rarely hears about what the transmission of global culture — which is in fact American culture — feels like on the receiving end. But it is not a neutral process. This transmission creates a profound disturbance. It reconfigures a society — its mores, its values, its relationships. It can deal a blow to the morale of a place. The word “confidence” comes up again and again in “Sultan,” and it speaks to the trauma an old society undergoes as it tries to absorb the appeal of a foreign culture, while at the same time trying to remain true to itself and its genius.

What I love about Bollywood is that it is the only popular medium in which I can see these concerns reflected. We live in an age when civilizational anger has been so taken over by Islamic extremism that it has been rendered untouchable. Bollywood films like “Sultan” are a reminder that the rage of feeling culturally encircled is not limited to the Islamic world. Nor is it incomprehensible.

That afternoon, as I wept my heart out on the last day of the brief appearance of “Sultan” in Manhattan, I realized that I was watching something that was commercial cinema for a vast portion of humanity, and yet utterly marginal in this center of Western power where I was watching it.