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Media Industries and the State in an Era of Reform >> 27

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urban space. Building on these insights, I show how changes in state policies
toward the media and entertainment industries and indeed, the very idea of
creating and defining Bollywood as a global media industry, was shaped by
a broader political discourse of cleaning and cleansing (safai) that played out
at urban, national, and diasporic scales throughout the 1990s and 2000s.

Reforming the National Family
In an essay titled “The Diaspora in Indian Culture,” Amitav Ghosh writes
of an “epic relationship” between India and the diaspora to emphasize the
“tremendously historical and imaginative nature of diasporic belonging.” 4
To speak of the “Indian diaspora,” then, is to take into account indentured
laborers who left India to work as coolies on sugar plantations in countries
such as Fiji and Guyana during the colonial era, immigrants in oil-rich Gulf
nations, the more recent wave of high-tech migrants to locales such as the
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Silicon Valley in the United States, and so on. However, despite what is a
long history of travel and migration, it is only since the late 1980s that expa-
triate Indians have begun attracting attention. In fact, for nearly four decades
after independence, the Non-Resident Indian (NRI) was inscribed in the
Indian imagination as someone who had betrayed the nation to seek better
fortunes elsewhere. Positioned squarely within a narrative of brain drain, the
NRI was, until recently, “not really Indian.” As Sinha-Kerkhoff and Bal point
out, unlike Gandhi, who had seen overseas Indians as integral to anticolonial
struggles, Nehru believed that “expatriate Indians had forfeited their Indian
citizenship and identity by moving abroad and did not need the support of
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their mother country.” In the Nehruvian imagination, the “national family”
was territorially bound. This was reflected very directly in official policy as
well, as the following quote makes clear:

It is the consistent policy of the government that persons of Indian origin
who have taken foreign nationality should identify themselves with and
integrate in the mainstream of social and political life of the country of
their domicile. The government naturally remains alive to their interests
and general welfare and encourages cultural contacts with them. As far as
Indian citizens residing abroad are concerned, they are the responsibility
of the government of India. 7

It is important to note that there was considerable opposition to Nehru’s
views. Right-wing groups such as the Vishwa Hindu Parishad (Global Hindu
Council), which was formed during the 1960s with the goal of organizing