Page 46 - From Bombay to Bollywoord The Making of a Global Media Industri

Media Industries and the State in an Era of Reform >> 33

Such a positioning of women as the primary custodians of “Indian” cul-
ture in the diaspora is neither new nor surprising. The repositioning of
women in relation to changing configurations of public/private domains
can be traced to representational shifts in Bombay cinema during the 1980s.
Examining changes in Bombay cinema’s representations of romance and the
romantic couple, Sircar has argued that the shift in Bombay cinema’s love-
story genre during the 1980s, coinciding with the project of economic liber-
alization, marked a key change in the configuration of the “Indian woman.”
She observes that “paralleling the ‘celebrations’ of the identity of the New
Woman there also appeared in the media a whole spate of features asserting
the continuity of traditional institutions in the new time.” 25
Jyotika Virdi, writing about Bombay cinema during this period of tran-
sition in India, also focuses her attention on the “return of the romance.”
Examining films such as Qayamat Se Qayamat Tak (From Eternity to Eter-
nity, 1988, Mansoor Khan) and Dil (Heart, 1990, Indra Kumar), she reads the
transition to bourgeois individualism, challenges to parental and patriarchal
authority, and a change in the sites of romance (college campuses emerg-
ing as key spaces, in sharp contrast to the use of nonspecific, often foreign
locales in countless Hindi films prior to this period) as indicative of larger
sociocultural shifts engendered by economic liberalization. As Virdi argues,
even as these films satirized “capitalism and patriarchy’s imbrication in a new
phase of capitalist development in India,” they soon gave way to a neocon-
servative assertion of the “Indian family” as the site to defend against trans-
26
national forces. In films such as Hum Aapke Hain Kaun and Dilwale Dul-
hania Le Jayenge, constructions of the “Indian woman” remain a key realm
of negotiation. Once again, women are expected to participate in the nation’s
progress, marked now by the nation’s tentative entry into a transnational
economy, while simultaneously preserving all that is unique and authentic
about “Indian culture.” Further, as several ethnographic accounts of media
27
consumption reveal, the “synecdochic relationship between the purity/sanc-
tity of women and the purity/sanctity of the nation” that films such as Dil-
wale Dulhania Le Jayenge, Pardes, and K3G have set in circulation is not lost
on first-generation Indian immigrants. 28
This rehearsal and testing of values, ideals, and norms becomes even more
pronounced with questions concerning marriage and the family. Films like
Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge and Pardes sought to fold the diaspora into the
nation by insisting on a return to India to resolve familial conflicts, where
NRIs were asked to demonstrate their cultural competence to belong in
the nation. In his critique of DDLJ, Mishra argues that Bollywood’s rep-
resentation of NRI life reflects a “center-periphery understanding of the