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Media Industries and the State in an Era of Reform >> 31

About half an hour later, I had an opportunity to meet Rajat Barjatya and
ask him to explain what he meant by saying Rajshri Productions wished to
appeal to families “from Bihar to Manhattan.” “If you’ve seen films like Dil-
wale Dulhania Le Jayenge (DDLJ), Pardes, and Kabhi Khushi Kabhie Gham
(K3G) you know exactly what I mean,” he began. “Indians in America exist in
two worlds. They have spent many years here and they know what it means
to live in America. But they also have an Indian side, and Bollywood con-
nects them to India. Not only do they watch Bollywood films, they perform
our songs at festivals and local functions. Deep down, they are Indian. Don’t
you think so?” Before I could reply, he continued. “And the family in Bihar
that goes to see a film like Kabhi Khushi Kabhie Gham knows that there are
Indian families in the U.K. or the U.S., and they see that these NRI fami-
lies are also Indian, deep down. They’re successful, they’ve made it big, but
they’re Indian at the end of the day. That’s why these films work in Bihar too.
And that’s what I meant when I said from Bihar to Manhattan.”
Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge (The Brave-Hearted Will Take the Bride,
1995, Aditya Chopra), Pardes (Foreign Land, 1997, Subhash Ghai), and Kabhi
Khushi Kabhie Gham (Happiness and Sorrow, 2001, Karan Johar) are all films
that resonated strongly with viewers in India and abroad and count among
the most successful films of the 1990s and early 2000s. These films, among
several others of the same period, explored the cultural space of Non-Resi-
dent Indians in countries such as the United States, U.K., and Australia, and
as Rajat Barjatya observed, affirmed that the expatriate community remained
“Indian, deep down.” Bombay cinema’s role in mediating the newfound
centrality of the diaspora, particularly the “first-world” diaspora, to India’s
navigation of a global economy is all the more striking given that Tamil- or
Telugu-language films that also circulate worldwide, for instance, did not
address diasporic communities or wrestle with the issue of reterritorial-
21
izing diasporic Indians. So how did Hindi films articulate this sentiment
of remaining “Indian, deep down”? Let me elaborate by turning to Kabhi
Khushi Kabhie Gham (K3G), a film that is particularly relevant here given
that its narrative marks a crucial departure from earlier efforts to recognize
and represent the expatriate Indian community.
K3G is a story about an affluent Indian family: Yashvardhan “Yash”
Raichand (Amitabh Bachchan), his wife Nandini (Jaya Bachchan), and their
two sons, Rahul (Shahrukh Khan), who is adopted, and Rohan (Hrithik
Roshan). The family splits when Rahul falls in love with and marries Anjali
(Kajol), a girl from the working-class neighborhood of Chandni Chowk in
Delhi, instead of marrying the girl his father had chosen. Yashvardhan dis-
owns Rahul, and Rahul and Anjali move to London accompanied by Anjali’s