Bollywood in the Indian-American diaspora

Abstract

This article brings together ethnographic detail and a thematic reading of Kabhi Khushi Kabhie Gham ( K3G) to examine the mediation of consensus regarding ‘Indianness’ in the diaspora. I argue that K3G’s emotional resonance with viewers in the diaspora is attributable in part to the departure that its narrative marks from Hindi cinema’s earlier efforts to recognize and represent expatriate Indians. In positioning and drawing the diaspora into the fold of a ‘great Indian family’, K3G articulates everyday struggles over being Indian in the US to a larger project of cultural citizenship that has emerged in relation to India’s tentative entry into a transnational economy and the centrality of the NRI (non-resident Indian) figure to India’s navigation of this space. I argue that this process of mediation follows a transitive logic involving K3G’s representational strategies, first generation Indian immigrants’ emotional investment in the idea of India and the Indian nation state’s attempts to forge symbolic and material ties with the expatriate community.