Page 49 - From Bombay to Bollywoord The Making of a Global Media Industri

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

classmates sing “Do Re Mi,” he steps up to the microphone, says “this one is
for you, mom,” and leads his classmates in a rousing rendition of the Indian
national anthem. A close-up shot of the visibly moved diasporic family cuts
to a long shot of the kids singing, followed by pans and cuts to different parts
of a surprised but respectful audience. Anjali is reduced to tears as she runs
down the aisle to embrace her son, and the background music reverts to
Vande Mataram, finally fading into Saare Jahan se Accha, Hindustan Hamara.
Such sequences function both as reassurance for a vast majority of first-
generation immigrants that they can live in the U.K. or the United States,
yet belong and claim cultural citizenship elsewhere, and as a paradigmatic
moment of India embracing the diaspora and defining the NRI as one
of its own. It does not matter that Anjali’s son, a second-generation Brit-
Asian who has never experienced life in India, sings the national anthem
with a British accent, his mispronunciation toward the end is forgotten (the
anthem is completed by Anjali), and his being “half-English” is not a con-
cern any more. Every anxiety of negotiating a sense of Indianness is erased in
those 52 seconds that the national anthem is sung. The diaspora is no longer
different and threatening. In Rajat Barjatya’s words, the diaspora is “Indian,
deep down.”
In one respect, then, Bombay cinema’s mediation of relations between
India and the diaspora can be understood as having set the stage for India to
remap symbolic and material relationships with the diaspora. Such a read-
ing is useful because it allows us to locate our analysis of these narratives
within a broader historical conjuncture and to grapple with the implications
of the state’s efforts to redefine its relationship with the diasporic commu-
nity and articulate a new idea of citizenship that is, as Rajadhyaksha puts it,
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“explicitly delinked from the political rights of citizenship.” In other words,
this concerns the centrality of the NRI figure and why the NRI is now, in
Prasad’s words, a “more stable figure of Indian identity than anything that
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can be found indigenously.” To understand this, we need to first recognize
the implications that India’s decision to integrate itself into a global economy
held for the imagination of the nation in time and space.
In the mid-1980s, when Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi and his team of
technocrats announced that India would have to capitalize on the commu-
nications revolution and participate in the emerging information economy
in order to become a key player in the twenty-first century, they were also
calling for a new imagination of the nation in relation to global moder-
nity. As Nigam points out, the notion of participating in the new infor-
mation and communications revolution in order to reach the twenty-first
century is “not simply the sign of a movement from a point, say, 1999, to