Page 51 - From Bombay to Bollywoord The Making of a Global Media Industri

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

populist commentary, we see Raj attired in the same tattered clothes he had
on when he first migrated to Bombay, and back on the very same highway he
had taken to travel to the city. He begins walking away from the city and his
troubles, singing the famous song:

Mera joota hai japani, ye patloon englistani (My shoes are Japanese;
these trousers are from England)
Sar pe lal topi rusi, phir bhi dil hai Hindustani (A red Russian cap on
my head, yet, my heart is Indian)

Shri 420 is, without doubt, a celebration of a cosmopolitan Indian identity
but also one that links citizenship to the ideal of sacrifice and the deferral of
pleasure through consumption in the interest of the overall project of “devel-
opment” and nation-building. It is this contract between citizenship and
consumption that has been rewritten over the last three decades in India, and
which finds expression in films such as K3G where avowedly “global” NRIs
affirm their belonging in the national family and demonstrate that no matter
what, their dil remains Hindustani (the heart remains Indian). To consider
just one instance in K3G, by teaching his “British” nephew to sing the Indian
national anthem in London, Rohan soothes the anxieties of a nation wor-
ried about the diaspora’s insufficient ties to India. In doing so, he bridges
the spatiotemporal gap between nation and diaspora and inaugurates a new
imagination of a transnational Indian family where belonging is no longer
cast in the either/or language of pleasure/duty, what Mazzarella describes as
a “powerfully elaborated regime of bodily self-discipline that combined the
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austerities of Gandhian swaraj with those of Nehruvian socialism.” In this
new imagination of a global Indian family, belonging is defined in terms of
one’s willingness and cultural competence to participate in India’s integration
into a global economy and the consumerist vision of the nation that under-
girds this transition.
These are some of the imaginative shifts in relation to which we need
to situate negotiations between the state and the diaspora, Bombay cin-
ema’s role in setting the stage for these negotiations, and the state’s deci-
sion to grant “industry” status to the Hindi film industry. In fact, state-
ments from Sushma Swaraj, the Minister of Information & Broadcasting
in the BJP-led government during this period, point to the fact that the
importance of the legitimization of diasporic versions of Indianness by
cinema is not lost on the Indian state. In a speech delivered at the Pravasi
Bharatiya Divas in 2003, Swaraj drew attention to the work done by the