Flexible Identities: Muslim Diasporas and the Bollywood Film Industry

Abstract

In Dreaming in Canadian: South Asian Youth, Bollywood, and Belonging (2010), Faiza Hirji notes that the 1990s marked a notable shift in the history of Indian cinema: whereas earlier films were meant to appeal to local populations from the Indian subcontinent, the films that emerged during this period—such as Hum Aapke Hain Koun (1994), Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge (1995) and Kuch Kuch Hota Hai (1998)—which incorporated diasporic locales, “modern” rather than strictly “traditional” fashions and a mix of Hindi and English were targeting the growing South Asian diasporic audience in the West, and the global community more broadly. From Hirji’s perspective, perhaps even more important than the history of these films is their impact on the formation of South Asian diasporic identity. As these “modern” Bollywood films were being produced, signifiers of a kind of hybridized “Indianness” were becoming increasingly visible in diasporic spaces, so much so that “Indian clothes and jewelry were acquiring a certain cachet, although they continued to be viewed as exotic or unusual” (4). This observation—first made when Hirji was herself just a young scholar—forms the basis of Dreaming in Canadian, a book which sets out in ten chapters to explore the possible links between Bollywood film and South Asian diasporic identity formation.