Film and migration, South Asia

Abstract

Abstract Recent writing on South Asian cinema has begun to focus very prominently on the issue of migration as being substantially definitive of the manner in which the cinemas of South Asia have begun to imagine themselves in contemporary times. A number of distinct historical experiential axes have been invoked in examining South Asian cinemas through the prism of migration. For a long time the cultural dynamics of the South Asian region, consisting in the main of India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh, were seen by historians as being significantly defined by the large‐scale migrations of populations, first during the Partition of the Indian subcontinent into India and Pakistan in 1947 and subsequently during the creation of the modern independent state of Bangladesh in 1971. Over time, a new axis of scholarly studies on the impact of migration on South Asian film culture was added with the consideration of the welter of films produced mainly in the UK about South Asian diasporic populations.