Coming of Age in the Diaspora: Bollywood and the Representation of Second Generation British Indian Diaspora

Authors

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.5195/cinej.2021.366

Keywords:

diaspora, Bollywood, Hindi cinema, British Indian, gender

Abstract

Bollywood films are a unique visual repository of India’s public imaginings, and they can, therefore, serve as guides to how India sees its past, present, and aspirational future (Dwyer, 2010). Through close intertextual readings of three key popular films depicting British Indian youth, this article explores the ways in which the UK-born/raised second-generation Indian diaspora has come to be represented within Bollywood. We argue that inter-generational negotiations around long-distance nationalism, social reproduction, and marriage are pivotal to the articulation and regulation of diasporic youth subjectivities in Bollywood films. By foregrounding the interplay of gender, sexuality, and nation, our analysis illuminates the role of Bollywood in mediating a transnational Indian identity which is tethered simultaneously to economic neoliberalism and social conservatism.

Author Biographies

Utsa Mukherjee, University of Southampton

Postdoctoral Fellow (ESRC), Department of Sociology, Social Policy, and Criminology

Anil Pradhan, Jadavpur University, Kolkata

PhD Candidate and Junior Research Fellow (UGC-NET), Department of English

Ravinder Barn, Royal Holloway, University of London

Professor, Department of Law and Criminology

References

Anwar, Muhammad. Between Cultures: Continuity and Change in the Lives of Young Asians. London: Routledge, 1998.

Banaji, Shakuntala. Children and Media in India Narratives of Class, Agency and Social Change. London: Routledge, 2017.

Baumann, Gerd. Contesting Culture: Discourses of Identity in Multi-Ethnic London. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004.

Bose, Brinda. The Audacity of Pleasure: Sexualities, Literature and Cinema in India. Gurgaon: Three Essays Collective, 2017.

Brosius, Christiane and Nicolas Yazgi. “‘Is There no Place like home?’: Contesting Cinematographic Constructions of Indian Diasporic Experiences.” Contributions to Indian Sociology 41, no. 3 (2007): 355–386. DOI: 10.1177/006996670704100303.

Dwyer, Rachel. Bollywood’s India: Hindi Cinema as a Guide to Contemporary India. London: Reaktion Books, 2014.

Dwyer, Rachel. “Bollywood's India: Hindi Cinema as a Guide to Modern India.” Asian Affairs 41, no. 3 (2010): 381-398. DOI: 10.1080/03068374.2010.508231.

Dwyer, Rachel. “Indian Values” and the Diaspora: Yash Chopra’s Films of the 1990s. West Coast Line 34, no. 2 (2000): 6-27.

Ghuman, Paul A. Singh. “Best or Worst of Two Worlds? A Study of Asian Adolescents.” Educational Research 33, no. 2 (1991): 121-132.

Ghuman, Paul A. Singh. Coping With Two Cultures: British Asian and Indo-Canadian Adolescents. Clevedon: Multilingual Matters Ltd, 1994.

Gopalan, Lalitha. “Coitus Interruptus and Love Story in Indian Cinema.” In Representing the Body: Gender Issues in Indian Art, edited by Vidya Dehejia, 124-139. New Delhi: Kali for Women, 2002.

Habib, Imtiaz H. “Indians in Shakespeare's England as ‘the First-Fruits of India’: Colonial Effacement and Postcolonial Reinscription.” Journal of Narrative Theory 36, no.1 (2006): 1-19. DOI: 10.1353/jnt.2006.0019.

Ho, Lynn Ee Elaine. “‘Claiming’ the Diaspora.” Progress in Human Geography 35, no. 6 (2011): 757-772. DOI: 10.1177/0309132511401463.

Ho, Lynn Ee Elaine, Maureen Hickey, and Saw Ai Brenda Yeoh. “Special Issue Introduction: New Research Directions and Critical Perspectives on Diaspora Strategies. Geoforum 59 (2015): 153-158. DOI: 10.1016/j.geoforum.2014.12.006.

Huq, Rupa. “From the Margins to Mainstream? Representations of British Asian Youth Musical Cultural Expression from Bhangra to Asian Underground Music.” Young 11, no. 1 (2003): 29-48. DOI: 10.1177/1103308803011001074.

Joshi, Sarah A. “Transgressing the Moral Universe: Bollywood and the Terrain of the Representable.” In Bollywood and its Other(s): Towards New Configurations, edited by Vikrant Kishore, Amit Sarwal, and Parichay Patra, 41-54. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014.

Mani, Bakirathi and Latha Varadarajan. “‘The Largest Gathering of the Global Indian Family’: Neoliberalism, Nationalism, and Diaspora at Pravasi Bharatiya Divas.” Diaspora: A Journal of Transnational Studies 14, no. 1 (2005): 45-74. DOI: 10.1353/dsp.0.0006.

Mehta, Rini Bhattacharya. “Bollywood, Nation, Globalization: An Incomplete Introduction.” In Bollywood and Globalization: Indian Popular Cinema, Nation, and Diaspora, edited by Rini Bhattacharya Mehta and Rajeshwari V. Pandharipande, 1-14. London: Anthem Press, 2011.

Mishra, Vijay. Bollywood Cinema: A Critical Genealogy. Wellington: Asian Studies Institute, 2008.

Modood, Tariq. “Britishness out of Immigration and Anti-Racism,” in Composite Culture in a Multicultural Society, edited Bipan Chandra and Sucheta Mahajan, 32-49. New Delhi: Pearson Longman, 2007.

Mohammad, Robina. “Phir Bhi Dil Hai Hindustani (Yet the Heart Remains Indian): Bollywood, the ‘Homeland’ Nation-State, and the Diaspora.” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 25, no. 6 (2007): 1015-1040. DOI: 10.1068/d441t

Nandy, Ashis, ed. The Secret Politics of our Desires: Innocence, Culpability and Popular Cinema. London: Zed Books, 1998.

Nasta, Susheila, ed. India in Britain: South Asian Networks and Connections, 1858-1950 Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013.

Office for National Statistics. Census 2011. 2014. http://www.nomisweb.co.uk/census/2011/key_statistics_uk.

Prasad, M. Madhava. Ideology of the Hindi film: A Historical Construction. New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1998.

Punathambekar, Aswin. “Bollywood in the Indian-American diaspora: Mediating a Transitive Logic of Cultural Citizenship.” International Journal of Cultural Studies 8, no. 2 (2005): 162. DOI: 10.1177/1367877905052415.

Radhakrishnan, Smitha. “Examining the “Global” Indian Middle Class: Gender and Culture in the Silicon Valley/Bangalore Circuit.” Journal of Intercultural Studies 29, no. 1 (2008): 8. DOI: 10.1080/07256860701759915.

Rajadhyaksha, Ashish. “The ‘Bollywoodization’ of the Indian Cinema: Cultural Nationalism in a Global Arena.” Inter-Asia Cultural Studies 4, no. 1 (2003): 25-39. DOI: 10.1080/1464937032000060195

Sharma, Sanjay, John Hutnyk, and Ashwani Sharma, ed. Dis-orientating Rhythms: The Politics of the New Asian Dance Music. London: Zed, 1996.

Thomas, Rosie. Bombay before Bollywood: Film City Fantasies. Albany: SUNY Press, 2015.

Thussu, Daya Kisan. “The Soft Power of Popular Cinema – The Case of India.” Journal of Political Power 9, no. 3 (2016): 415-429. DOI: 10.1080/2158379X.2016.1232288.

Vasudevan, Ravi. “The Meanings of ‘Bollywood’.” In Beyond the Boundaries of Bollywood: The Many Forms of Hindi Cinema, edited by Rachel Dwyer and Jerry Pinto, 3-29. New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2011.

Vasudevan, Ravi. The Melodramatic Public: Film Form and Spectatorship in Indian Cinema. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011.

Visram, Visram. Ayahs, Lascars and Princes: Indians in Britain, 1700-1947. London: Pluto Press, 1986.

Downloads

Published

2021-12-14

How to Cite

Mukherjee, U., Pradhan, A., & Barn, R. (2021). Coming of Age in the Diaspora: Bollywood and the Representation of Second Generation British Indian Diaspora. CINEJ Cinema Journal, 9(2), 114–146. https://doi.org/10.5195/cinej.2021.366

Issue

Vol. 9 No. 2 (2021): Fall 2021

Section

Articles

License

Authors who publish with this journal agree to the following terms:

  1. The Author retains copyright in the Work, where the term “Work” shall include all digital objects that may result in subsequent electronic publication or distribution.
  2. Upon acceptance of the Work, the author shall grant to the Publisher the right of first publication of the Work.
  3. The Author shall grant to the Publisher and its agents the nonexclusive perpetual right and license to publish, archive, and make accessible the Work in whole or in part in all forms of media now or hereafter known under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License or its equivalent, which, for the avoidance of doubt, allows others to copy, distribute, and transmit the Work under the following conditions:
    1. Attribution—other users must attribute the Work in the manner specified by the author as indicated on the journal Web site;
    with the understanding that the above condition can be waived with permission from the Author and that where the Work or any of its elements is in the public domain under applicable law, that status is in no way affected by the license.
  4. The Author is able to enter into separate, additional contractual arrangements for the nonexclusive distribution of the journal's published version of the Work (e.g., post it to an institutional repository or publish it in a book), as long as there is provided in the document an acknowledgement of its initial publication in this journal.
  5. Authors are permitted and encouraged to post online a prepublication manuscript (but not the Publisher’s final formatted PDF version of the Work) in institutional repositories or on their Websites prior to and during the submission process, as it can lead to productive exchanges, as well as earlier and greater citation of published work. Any such posting made before acceptance and publication of the Work shall be updated upon publication to include a reference to the Publisher-assigned DOI (Digital Object Identifier) and a link to the online abstract for the final published Work in the Journal.
  6. Upon Publisher’s request, the Author agrees to furnish promptly to Publisher, at the Author’s own expense, written evidence of the permissions, licenses, and consents for use of third-party material included within the Work, except as determined by Publisher to be covered by the principles of Fair Use.
  7. The Author represents and warrants that:
    1. the Work is the Author’s original work;
    2. the Author has not transferred, and will not transfer, exclusive rights in the Work to any third party;
    3. the Work is not pending review or under consideration by another publisher;
    4. the Work has not previously been published;
    5. the Work contains no misrepresentation or infringement of the Work or property of other authors or third parties; and
    6. the Work contains no libel, invasion of privacy, or other unlawful matter.
  8. The Author agrees to indemnify and hold Publisher harmless from Author’s breach of the representations and warranties contained in Paragraph 6 above, as well as any claim or proceeding relating to Publisher’s use and publication of any content contained in the Work, including third-party content.

Revised 7/16/2018. Revision Description: Removed outdated link.