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.
Highlights
The Dutch Hindustani community is a prominent group in the Netherlands that has its roots in various parts of North India
This study provides an analysis of interview data with 17 Dutch Hindustanis who are Persons of Indian Origin (PIO), underscoring the role of Bollywood cinema in their cultural identity formation, their cinematic imagination of the country and its influence on their travel decisions to India
This article aimed to investigate how the various cinematic imaginations of India are developed by the Dutch Hindustanis under the influence of Bollywood cinema and how that motivates their travel decisions to and experiences in India
Summary
After Suriname gained independence in 1975, there was a wave of migration of this community to Holland (Hira, 2008). This pattern of double migration led them to be connoted as the ‘Twice-migrants’ (Verstappen and Rutten, 2007). Decades of spatial detachment later, they still actively maintain a keen interest in their distant homeland-India. This connection is reflected in, for example, their voracious consumption of Indian popular culture, practicing Indian performing arts or the manner in which they celebrate Indian religious festivals at home. The Netherlands has the second largest Indian diasporic community in Europe – including Persons of Indian Origin (PIO) and Non-Resident Indians (NRI) (Longkumer, 2013)
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