Page 47 - From Bombay to Bollywoord The Making of a Global Media Industri

34 << Media Industries and the State in an Era of Reform

homeland-diaspora nexus in which the diaspora becomes a site of permis-
sible (but controlled) transgressions while the homeland is the crucible of
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timeless dharmik virtues.” In a similar vein, Jyotika Virdi observes that
Bombay cinema’s national family, “imagined . . . over the decades through
binary oppositions—the feudal vs. the modern, country vs. city, east vs. west,
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rural vs. urban—now pits the national against the transnational.” In con-
trast, K3G inaugurated a new imagination of a transnational family in which
the flow of cultural elements that lent authenticity was no longer a heavy-
handed one-way flow from India to its expatriate Other. In exploring and
legitimizing the cultural space of expatriate Indian families, K3G rendered
the diaspora less of a transgressive Other and more as an acceptable variant
within the fold of a “global Indian family.”

The Nation Seeks Its Citizens

K3G’s negotiation of India’s relationship with the diaspora is, as Madhava
Prasad observes, related to a growing sense within India of the “relocat[ion]
of what we might call the seismic center of Indian national identity some-
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where in Anglo-America.” Hrithik Roshan’s character in K3G, Rohan, the
quintessential transnational cosmopolitan who can navigate multiple cul-
tural spaces with consummate ease, needs to be understood in relation
to this. I would argue that Rohan is, in fact, an embodiment of a “super-
Indian” whose Indianness transcends both that of the resident and non-res-
ident Indian.
Rohan arrives in London to the strains of a remixed version of Vande
Mataram—a nationalist song invoked possibly to remind viewers in the
diaspora and within India of the irrevocable link between the homeland
and the diaspora. While billboards and storefronts of international labels
and chain stores frame the first five to ten seconds of his arrival, in subse-
quent frames women wearing saffron-white-green (the colors of the Indian
flag) dupattas walk by Rohan, he is greeted by a group of Bharatanatyam
dancers (the preeminent classical dance form that is highly popular in the
diaspora) in the middle of busy traffic intersection, and sashays down a
boardwalk flanked on both sides by a bevy of white, British women also
sporting clothes colored saffron, green, and white. We then see Rohan in a
cybercafé, looking up a directory listing for his brother’s contact informa-
tion. As the address is pulled up, and the song in the background changes to
Saare Jahan Se Accha, Hindustan Hamara (Better than any place in the uni-
verse, our India), we see Anjali folding her hands in prayer in front of her
parents-in-laws’ framed picture. Not only is the diasporic family rendered