Role Name Affiliation National Coordinator Subject Coordinator Prof Sujata Patel Department of Sociology, University Of
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Role Name Affiliation National Coordinator Subject Coordinator Prof Sujata Patel Department of Sociology, University of Hyderabad Paper Coordinator Prof. Kamala Ganesh ICSSR Senior Research Fellow, Formerly Dept. of Sociology, University of Mumbai Content Writer Prof. Nilufer E. Bharucha Adjunct Faculty, Department of English, University of Mumbai Content Reviewer Prof. Kamala Ganesh ICSSR Senior Research Fellow, Formerly Dept. of Sociology, University of Mumbai Language Editor Prof. Kamala Ganesh ICSSR Senior Research Fellow, Formerly Dept. of Sociology, University of Mumbai Technical Conversion Module Structure Description of the Module Items Description of the Module Subject Name Sociology Paper Name Sociology of the Indian Diaspora Module Name/Title Bollywood and the Indian Diaspora Module Id Pre Requisites Familiarity with Bollywood films. Knowledge of the Indian Diaspora. Objectives This module seeks to : Review Indian/Hindi cinema and analyze Bollywood within this context Foreground the notion of the Global Indian Identity and Indian values/codes Discuss the early depiction of the Indian Diaspora in Hindi Films. Analyse how the diaspora is constructed in contrast to India and is used to image and re-image India itself. Focus on the shift from Hindi Films to Bollywood Discuss the global era of cross-over Bollywood cinema. Familiarise students with some key Bollywood film makers and the films they have made on the Indian Diaspora. Encourage students to watch these Bollywood films through embedded pointers. Problematize the issue of the image of women in Bollywood cinema and the continuing hold of patriarchy on this discourse with reference to appropriate films. Consider the trope of patriotism, secularism and non-casteism in Bollywood cinema in the context of relevant cinematic texts Discuss both the form and techniques of Bollywood films. Introduce the innovations and experimentation available in cross-over Bollywood cinema on the Indian Diaspora. Debate the problematic issue of the imaging of India by Hollywood and other Western cinemas in contrast with the image provided by Bollywood. Discuss the increasing global power of Bollywood and its contribution through actors and film makers to films made in Hollywood. Summarise the impact of Bollywood cinema on the Indian diaspora, including validation of global/hybrid identity. Key words Bollywood, postcolonial, global, cross-over, nostalgia, sentimentalism, patriotism, codes, family values, romance, music, identity, hybridity, projection, self, other, imaging, re- imaging. Bollywood and the Indian Diaspora (Section VI Module 4) QUADRANT 1 1.0.INTRODUCTION Bollywood and the Indian Diaspora today are in a commercial and cultural embrace. For Bollywood, the 26 million strong Indian Diaspora spread over a 100 countries is an important market for its films. Additionally in its avatar as ‘Bollywood’, Hindi cinema, has become more global in its constructs and the depiction of the Indian Diaspora enables it to project a more global image to its audiences both in India and the world. Bollywood also enables the Indian diaspora to retain its Indian values and thereby its Indian identity in a global context. This was in the earlier period done by texts such as the Ramayana as noted in the module on Indian Diasporic Literature in English. In the age of the Moving Image and the Digital Media, it is cinema and its representations on the digital and social media that fulfills this task of retaining the ‘desi’ in the ‘pardesi’ Indians. 2.0. A BRIEF REVIEW OF EARLY INDIAN/HINDI CINEMA The history of the Indian cinema can be traced back much further than that of the globalizing Bollywood films, right back to the 1890s. As for the tag ‘Hindi’ cinema it came into existence along with other tags like ‘Tamil’, ‘Bengali’ and ‘Marathi’ cinemas only with the entry of sound into Indian films in the 1930s. During the silent era, Indian cinema was already a global construct. The first films shown in India were on 7 July 1896 at the Watson Hotel which still stands in a much dilapidated condition very close to the University of Mumbai’s old campus in the Fort area of Mumbai. By the end of the nineteenth century short films were already being made in India, Flowers of Persia (1898) and Wrestlers (1899). With the first Indian feature film, Raja Harishchandra, made by Dadasaheb Phalke in 1913, the Indian film industry was well under way. So the year 2013-14 was the centenary year of Indian cinema. However not just in the West but also in India, it was marked as the ‘100 years of Bollywood’. A fallacious and misleading nomenclature as in India we have many more cinemas than just the Hindi Cinema, today known as Bollywood. Between 1913 and 1934 over 1,313 silent films were made in India and many with foreign collaboration and these films were also distributed in a global market. In the 1930s Himanshu Rai who established Bombay Talkies collaborated with the UFA Berlin and a British company to produce several films directed by the German Frantz Osten with Indian and Foreign actors, such as Shiraz (1928) on the construction of the Taj Mahal and the Throw of the Dice (1929) based on the infamous gambling section of the Mahabharata (Rajyadhaksha and Willemann, 1999). These early films introduced certain ‘codes’/’values’ which have stood first Indian cinema and now Bollywood in good stead when it has come to the attraction of not just a regional/national level but also an international audience. I shall elaborate on these ‘codes’ in a later section of this module. Continuing however with the story of Indian cinema which for the purpose of this module from the 1930s is restricted to Hindi language cinema, now Bollywood, one finds that with the coming of sound the appeal of Hindi cinema becomes restricted to the knowers of this language and in a pre- subtitling/dubbing era, deprives it of its global audience. As for the Indian diaspora in the colonial era it was not able to access these films as the overseas distribution and exhibition channels for Hindi or other Indian language films made in India were controlled by British colonial laws and vetted for any anti-imperial content. A few Indian films did slip by into other British colonies as they were categorized as ‘pure entertainment’ (Schafer and Karan, 2013). It is only in the postcolonial period, in the 1950s that Hindi cinema, once again captured the interest of the world and that of the Indian diaspora. Bimal Roy’s Do Bheega Zamin (1953), inspired by Italian Neo-Realism films, became an internationally lauded film. However it was the Raj Kapoor brand of films in the 1950s such as Shri 420 (1955) and Awaara (1951), firmly rooted in socialist values, due to their scripts written by the Marxist writer K.A. Abbas, but laced with liberal doses of romance and glamour, the forte of Raj Kapoor, that captured audiences around the world. These films made Raj Kapoor and his co-star Nargis household names in countries from the old Soviet Union (including the Eastern European bloc) to the Arab world and Turkey, from the Black African nations to the South East Asian countries. Also fascinated by this cinema were the Indian diaspora and in the U.K. for instance the demand for these films made cinema houses at first show these films in some restricted manner and then with the increasing clout of the diaspora itself, theatres emerged that were dedicated to the exhibition of Hindi films. For the diaspora these films provided role models and reinforced family and social values that might have been lost in the quest of new homelands. These films made it possible for the Diasporics to be Indian as well as British/East African/South African or Canadian. This helped in the evolution of hybrid identities which are today reflected and imaged in the films made by Bollywood. For more information on the subject of hybridity and identities do go to the module on Indian Diasporic Literature in English. 3.0 THE GLOBAL INDIAN IDENTITY AND INDIAN VALUES/CODES: Raj Kapoor in Shri 420, in his persona of the tramp (inspired by Charlie Chaplin) had belted out the song with which that film begins, ‘Mera Joota hain Japani, Yeh Patloon Inglistani, Sar pe lal topi Russi, Phir bhi dil hain Hindustani’ – my shoes are Japanese, my trousers were made in England, I wear a red Russian cap on my head but my heart is Indian. Raj Kapoor’s tramp was at once Indian and International. He was an early ‘Glocal’ construct. This was freshly minted postcolonial India, striving for its own identity but at the same time embracing the best of the first world (represented by England) and the second/Communist world (represented by Russia). In those post-World War II days of the conflict between capitalism and communism, Nehruvian India though socialist in its leanings, stood firmly with the third world - the non-aligned world. So this film showcased not just India’s ideological independence but also her global consciousness. If you are not familiar with Raj Kapoor’s films do see them. Even if you have already watched them, re-visit them with the mental schema of this module. You are bound to find new meanings in them. Also foregrounded in Hindi films were the values/codes by which India has lived. What were these codes/values embedded in Hindi and other Indian films too? They would be attractive of course to Indian audiences as the films would provide a kind of self-reinforcement but why would they appeal to the diasporic Indians. Would this be because they would have a mnemonic value of making them recall their