A reading of Bollywood cinema as a site of melancholia for Indo-Mauritian Muslim female youth

Abstract

Using questionnaire and interview findings from 120 young Mauritians, this paper explores the ways in which young Mauritian Muslim women form part of a cross-religious and cross-national intimate public consuming Hindi films. Bollywood romances are among the most significant cultural resources through which young Mauritian Muslim women imagine their female selves and reconnect with their Indo-Muslim heritage, despite overlapping local/global cultural politics that encourage purist versions of Islam and Hinduism, expunged of Indo-Muslim legacies. Bollywood cinema is an intensely private experience that allows informants to harness a form of modernity that is a socially tolerable alternative to Western popular culture. This paper suggests that young Muslim women's relationship to their Indo-Muslim lineage as mediated by Bollywood can be read in terms of melancholia, as their apparent emotional investment into Bollywood romances is anxiously mitigated, marking a lack of consciousness of, and ambivalence towards the lost object: a composite Indo-Muslim culture.