Page 80 - Battleground The Media Volume 1 and 2

Bollywood and the Ind an D aspora |

Cultural citizenship, then, can be understood as imagining one’s member-
ship in relation to a national culture even if one is not a citizen of that nation
in strictly legal or political terms. In other words, being Indian American is as
much a matter of consuming Bollywood films, participating in a Bollywood fan
community, or remixing bhangra music as it is about owning two passports and
being a dual citizen.
While acknowledging that definitions of cultural identity in diasporic set-
tings can challenge rigid ideas of what it means to be “Indian” or “American,”
some scholars point out that these seemingly flexible modes of defining one’s
identity are only available at the cost of being commodified and sold as market-
able demographics to advertisers. Critics also point out that governments also
play a role in these processes and work to circumscribe what it means to belong
in a particular nation. In other words, there are some very real limits to “cultural
citizenship.” To understand this complex dynamic—of opportunity and risk—let
us turn our attention to the case of Bollywood in diasporic communities.

CasE sTuDy: BoLLywooD anD ThE
inDian amEriCan DiasPora

Films from India have always traveled to different parts of the world, and have
been an important form of cultural exchange between India and the Middle East,
several countries in Africa, and Eastern Europe. In the United States, Bollywood
films were brought in by Indian families who moved there when the U.S. govern-
ment changed its migration policy in 1965 to allow people from non-European
nations to live and work in the United States. In several cities across the United
States, Indian families met during the weekend to watch a Hindi-language film.
Screenings were usually held in university halls rented for a few hours during the
weekend, with films screened off 16-mm, and later, 35-mm reels. These weekend
screenings, with an intermission that lasted 30 to 45 minutes, were an occasion,
apart from religious festivals, for people to wear traditional clothes, speak in
Hindi or other Indian languages, and participate in a ritual that was reminiscent
of “home.” These screenings were marked as an exclusively Indian space, away
from mainstream society, where families could meet and participate in a ritual
of sharing personal and collective memories of life in India and introduce their
children to different aspects of “India” and “Indianness.”
While this mode of viewing has changed with the availability of videocassettes
and DVDs through Indian grocery stores and through online outlets such as Net-
flix, Bollywood films continue to play a key role in community events such as
the “India Night” cultural shows on college campuses where second-generation
Indian Americans perform song-and-dance sequences from popular Bollywood
films. Further, while advances in communications have facilitated contact with
India, over a period of time, work and other social engagements in the diaspora
result in most migrants gradually losing touch with day-to-day developments in
India. Thus, by defining various social rituals and shaping interactions that these
rituals have created, Bollywood films have helped sustain expatriate Indians’
desire to perform their “Indianness” and define their belonging in “India.”