Abstract
Bollywood films are a unique visual repository of India’s public imaginings, and they can, therefore, serve as guides to how India sees its past, present, and aspirational future (Dwyer, 2010). Through close intertextual readings of three key popular films depicting British Indian youth, this article explores the ways in which the UK-born/raised second-generation Indian diaspora has come to be represented within Bollywood. We argue that inter-generational negotiations around long-distance nationalism, social reproduction, and marriage are pivotal to the articulation and regulation of diasporic youth subjectivities in Bollywood films. By foregrounding the interplay of gender, sexuality, and nation, our analysis illuminates the role of Bollywood in mediating a transnational Indian identity which is tethered simultaneously to economic neoliberalism and social conservatism.
Highlights
Film making in India is more than a century old, but the term Bollywood is a neologism that signifies a diffuse cultural conglomeration or a brand whose global reach has come to be construed as an instrument of India’s soft power (Rajadhyaksha, 2003; Thussu, 2016; Vasudevan, 2011b)
It is a wider culture industry wherein commercial films occupy only one part, in consort with a swathe of other distribution and consumption activities pertaining to music, dance, fashion, advertising, and radio, among others (Rajadhyaksha, 2003). It is a by-product of the constellation of rapid and far-reaching changes unleashed in India in the early 1990s by economic liberalization and the forces of global capital, with the term itself emerging in the West as a direct consequence of the unprecedented success of diaspora-themed films starting with Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge ( DDLJ) in 1995 (Dwyer, 2014; Rajadhyaksha, 2003; Vasudevan, 2011b)
This article has demonstrated how Indian diasporic youth in the UK are represented in popular Bollywood films, especially in the first decades of Bollywood
Summary
Film making in India is more than a century old, but the term Bollywood is a neologism that signifies a diffuse cultural conglomeration or a brand whose global reach has come to be construed as an instrument of India’s soft power (Rajadhyaksha, 2003; Thussu, 2016; Vasudevan, 2011b) It is a wider culture industry wherein commercial films occupy only one part, in consort with a swathe of other distribution and consumption activities pertaining to music, dance, fashion, advertising, and radio, among others (Rajadhyaksha, 2003). Kabhi Khushi Kabhie Gham... (2001), and Namastey London (2007) – in an effort to decode and explicate the cultural politics of Bollywood’s representation of second generation British Indian diaspora – a theme underexplored in Bollywood research
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