Abstract
This article draws upon a small-scale research undertaken between January and March 2010 amongst a community of Indian Sikhs living in Novellara, a small town located in north-central Italy. The purpose of the research was to examine the role of Indian films in the shaping of what could be called, following Stuart Hall, the positioning of an Indian diasporic identity in the Italian context.2 The idea for this study began to take shape almost ten years ago, when I was writing my master’s thesis on Indian cinema. At the time, finding Indian films in Italy was extremely difficult. Even Bollywood was still a largely unknown phenomenon and, apart from the few of Satyajit Ray’s films available in selected film libraries, it was impossible to buy or rent Indian films. I thus sought help from an Indian immigrant who ran a call centre in the city in which I lived. The call centre was also a clandestine DVD shop, where immigrants of South Asian origin could buy, or rent, pirate copies of all sorts of Indian films, from the classics of the 1950s and the 1960s to the latest Bollywood hits. As I was the only white Italian renting Indian DVDs there, whenever I entered the shop my presence created excitement amongst customers: everyone was ready to discuss with me the films I rented and to suggest new titles. The owner even decided that I should pay just the symbolic price of one euro per week, no
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