Locating the diaspora: Delhi 6 and its challenge to Bollywood's image of the transnational Indian

Abstract

Since the mid‐1990s, Bollywood films have aimed to appeal to the Indian diaspora and its emotional investment in the idea of India by depicting an upper-class, affluent, Hindu milieu; family-centered narratives with little reference to social and political issues in India; and, most importantly, a transnational Indian protagonist who resides outside of India but upholds an unmistakably Indian heart and cultural identity. I argue that Rakeysh Omprakash Mehra's Delhi 6 (2009) shatters Bollywood's complacency toward projecting such a transnational ideology, demanding a fundamental rethinking of this standard model. It challenges what I term Bollywood's ‘global orientation’ by calling upon members of the Indian diaspora in the West to situate themselves firmly and physically back in their homeland, in their city, in their locality. Through its characters, the film asserts that complex compromises between the global and the local inevitably force one to make a choice, and that the right decision is not simply an emotional investment in India from afar, but an actual relocation to the cities and regions of India with an involvement in their conflicts and needs, and a commitment to their solutions. The film's judgments offer tremendous potential to provoke discussions among Indians, whether living in or outside of India, as they constantly deal with unresolved negotiations between their local, national, and transnational identities.