Dwelling-in-motion: Indian Bollywood tourists and their hosts in the Swiss Alps

Abstract

ABSTRACTUntil recently, tourist routes typically led from ‘the West’ to the so-called ‘rest’ of the world, and travel guides and travel novels were the essential media for planning a journey. In recent years, however, the intensified circulation of place images through global communication media has connected more and more places with more and more imaginations, while the price reductions in and the expansion of travel offers as well as the economic upswing in parts of the global ‘East’, ‘Middle East’, and ‘South’ have set a rising number of these places within potential reach for ever more people. This paper investigates the places and performances of Indian Bollywood tourists and their hosts in and beyond a small town hotel in the Swiss mountains. The Swiss Alps are quite a ‘traditional’ destination of Indian tourism, as they were discovered by the Indian Bollywood film industry as a filming set as early as in the 1980s. Today, many Swiss towns display a comprehensive tourist infrastructure that specifically cares for the services needs of Indian tourists. Building on ethnographic field research and based on recent tourism mobilities studies, this paper explores the practices of Indian tourists in a transitory mode of dwelling and in a place familiar to them through the images produced by the film industry. Moreover, it retraces the way in which the Indian tourists’ practices of dwelling-in-motion have been co-produced and received by service and sales personnel as well as the local population, and how rather immobile imaginations rooted in colonial times structure both the discourses and interactions in the local tourist space.