"My Heart's Indian for All That": Bollywood Film between Home and Diaspora

In the spring of 1995, I had just begun to work on issues having to do with the global reception of Indian popular film. I was particularly interested in the consumption of Bollywood films in South Asian diasporic communities and was doing some preliminary research in Iselin, a small town in central New Jersey, with a large and thriving “Little India” neighborhood. Since I was also interested in the changes taking place in the Indian popular film industry itself, I had been following the case of Mani Ratnam’s film Bombay, which had been released earlier that year, in Tamil and Hindi, to a mix of acclaim and controversy in India. Because the film deals with the communal violence that gave rise to rioting that shook Bombay in 1992 and 1993, some authorities were concerned that screening the film in areas experiencing communal tensions might lead to more violence. Consequently, the film had been temporarily banned in several parts of India, including Hyderabad and Karnataka and, as of April 1995, had not yet been screened in Bombay itself (Niranjana, “Banning Bombayi ” 1291–2). But at a party that spring, I found myself discussing the film with a colleague who had come from Bombay to study comparative literature at Rutgers. Bombay was quite an interesting film, she assured me, and I should watch it as part of my research. I must have looked puzzled, for she then added, “We found a copy on video in Iselin last week.” The particular conjuncture that can be found in this example, between the recent history of the Indian popular film industry and the reception of the films produced by this industry among audiences in the South Asian diaspora, will form the basis of this essay. Much of the theoretical work that has addressed the consumption of popular film in the South Asian diaspora has concentrated on the larger process of diasporic cultural consumption as constituting an act of nostalgia, an attempt to maintain an imaginary connection to a lost homeland. Simply invoking the term “diaspora” in this context implies the need to talk about loss—loss of homeland, of xxxxxxxxxxxx