Bollywood in Australia: Transnationalism & Cultural Production

Bollywood in Australia Bollywood in Australia Transnationalism and Cultural Production Edited by Andrew Hassam and ...

Author: Andrew Hassam; Makarand Paranjape

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Bollywood in Australia

Bollywood in Australia Transnationalism and Cultural Production

Edited by

Andrew Hassam and Makarand Paranjape

First published in 2010 by UWA Publishing Crawley, Western Australia 6009 www.uwap.uwa.edu.au

This book is copyright. Apart from any fair dealing for the purpose of private study, research, criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright Act 1968, no part may be reproduced by any process without written permission. Enquiries should be made to the publisher. Copyright © Introduction and collection, Andrew Hassam and Makarand Paranjape, 2010. Copyright in each essay remains with the individual contributor. The moral right of the authors has been asserted. A full CIP record for this book is available from the National Library of Australia. ISBN: 978 1 921401 08 4 Typeset in 11pt Bembo by Lasertype

Dedicated to the memory of Devika Goonewardene

contents

Bollywood in Australia: Introduction Andrew Hassam and Makarand Paranjape

1

1

The Crossover Audience: Mediated Multiculturalism and the Indian Film Adrian Mabbott Athique

23

2

Cultural Encounters: The Use and Abuse of Bollywood in Australia Devika Goonewardene

45

3

Salaam Namaste, Melbourne and Cosmopolitanism Andrew Hassam

63

4

Chak De! Australia: Bollywood Down Under Makarand Paranjape

87

5

Cook Cook Hota Hai: Indian Cinema, Kitchen Culture and Diaspora Srilata Ravi

105

6

Rangla Punjab in Canberra, Yamla Jatt Folk Night in Sydney, Oorja Nights in Melbourne Anjali Gera Roy

121

7

Orbits of Desire: Bollywood as Creative Industry in Australia Debjani Ganguly

139

8

Sweet Dreams are made of this: Bollywood and Transnational South Asians in Australia Devleena Ghosh

159

9

Interview with AK Tareen, Senior Trade Commissioner—India, Government of South Australia, 27 February 2008

177

Filmography

185

Image Credits

189

Notes on Contributors

190

Introduction

Bollywood in Australia Andrew Hassam and Makand Paranjape

The global context of Bollywood in Australia Makarand Paranjape The transcultural character and reach of Bollywood cinema has been gradually more visible and obvious over the last two decades. What is less understood and explored is its escalating integration with audiences, markets and entertainment industries beyond the Indian subcontinent. This book explores the relationship of Bollywood to Australia. We believe that this increasingly important relationship is an outcome of the convergence between two remarkably dynamic entities—globalising Bollywood, on the one hand and Asianising Australia, on the other. If there is a third element in this relationship, which is equally important, it is the mediating power of the vibrant diasporic community of South Asians in Australia. Hence, at its most basic, this book explores the conjunctures and ruptures between these three forces: Bollywood, Australia and their interface, the diaspora. 1


It would be useful to see, at the outset, how Bollywood here refers not only to the Bombay film industry, but is symbolic of the Indian and even the South Asian film industry. Technically speaking, the term is a neologism of comparatively recent provenance, invented by combining Bombay and Hollywood. The entry of the term into the Oxford English Dictionary was announced in its June 2001 quarterly online update.1 In the following year, its inclusion in the Shorter Oxford Dictionary was noticed by The Times of India.2 A year later the same newspaper marked its entrance to the new illustrated Oxford Dictionary with a picture of Aishwarya Rai from Devdas (2002) holding her lamp of love in her hand.3 However, the term was in circulation in the Western press much earlier, as the title of an article, ‘Hooray for Bollywood’, by Richard Corliss that appeared in Time magazine in 1996, shows.4 There is something distinctly pejorative or patronising about these early uses of ‘Bollywood’; as Corliss observes, somewhat wryly: ‘In any other national cinema the antics in the first reel of Mukul S Anand’s Khuda Gawah (God Is My Witness) might be giggled off the screen’. But, of course, Bollywood films are ‘like no other’: it is sheer ‘pop opera, dealing with emotions so convulsive they must be sung and danced, in a solemn, giddy style’ and ‘curry westerns’ and ‘wet-sari musicals’ are avidly watched by millions across the world. No wonder The Times of India article of 2003 quotes a variety of Bombay film figures complaining about the use of the term. Noted ‘art’ film director Govind Nihalani, for instance, muses: What can I say? It looks like the Oxford Dictionary is moving with the times. But Bollywood is actually a disrespectful reference to our film industry. It primarily means we’re aping Hollywood and have nothing original to offer. In fact, Bollywood as a term puts the focus largely on the song-and-dance cinema and ignores everything else about Indian cinema.5

Subhash Ghai, one of the great showmen of Bollywood, was even more emphatic: ‘Bollywood is actually scoffing at our film industry’. He mentions how the London press was already using the word as far back as 1989, when it sneered at the success of Ghai’s hit film, Ram Lakhan (1989): I saw the coverage on TV and they were saying how the Bombay film industry is copying the style of Hollywood premieres in terms of fashion and jewellery—and they focused the camera on shoes and jewellery of the stars at the party’. 2

Bollywood in Australia: Introduction

The Times of India article concludes: ‘So the dictionary entry is more like rubbing salt on a wound’. Yet it would appear that it is Bollywood that is having the last laugh. If the success of Slumdog Millionaire (2008) is anything to go by, it is Hollywood that is now copying Bollywood. In addition to the vast audience following that Bollywood movies enjoy, the Bollywood culture industry translates into huge revenues for the fashion, glamour, cosmetics, food and jewellery industries and many other related enterprises that benefit, as Frieda Pinto, the debutant star of Slumdog Millionaire, is flashed on the covers of the leading magazines, including Vogue, Maxim, Vanity Fair and Cosmopolitan. Even Anil Kapoor, whose role in Ghai’s movie in 1989 won him no international visibility, rides the tide of global recognition after Slumdog Millionaire, appearing on CNN, BBC, Oprah, not to mention the Oscars in Hollywood. Hence, given its currency, it is no surprise that we use the word ‘Bollywood’ in our book; yet, we do so in its somewhat newer, more comprehensive sense, not only referring to Hindi movies made in Mumbai, but also symbolic of the Indian and even the South Asian film industry. While parody and fun cannot be entirely removed from its connotations, it does denote to us something more serious, a large, vibrant and increasingly global cultural phenomenon. There are many reasons for seeing Bollywood in this broader and more inclusive fashion. In the Indian context, for instance, there has always been considerable integration between the different film fraternities in India, especially between Bengal and Bombay earlier, between Hyderabad and Bombay in the 1970s and 1980s and between Madras and Bombay to this day. So, despite all the different centres of production and the distinct character of all the different language cinemas of India, in some senses there is considerable mixing and amalgamation between them. Similarly, Hollywood, in a broader context, not only refers to the US film industry, but also symbolises the interaction and assimilation of several not just European, but even Australian, elements, including directors, technicians, actors and so on. When we examine the cultural relationship between Bollywood and Australia, we are also, indirectly, implicated in the connections between two larger global entities. Bollywood has long been the world’s second cinema, as one of the papers in this volume asserts. Bollywood films have circulated globally among the Indian and South Asian diaspora as a shared cultural idiom. They have also been immensely popular in the erstwhile Soviet Union and on the African continent. Further, in an age when creative, 3


information and services industries propel economic growth, Bollywood and its modalities of production, distribution and reception, are seen as important players in global culture industry networks. Countries of the developed world—Switzerland, Ireland, The Netherlands, Australia, and New Zealand—go out of their way to welcome Bollywood production teams to shoot in their pristine locales. Local cinema houses in Australia, the United States (US), the United Kingdom (UK) and Europe regularly run shows of newly released Bollywood blockbusters. Many Hollywood producers now outsource their post-production work to Mumbai at costs lower than those they would incur in the US. Yet, only specialists, rather than the general, movie-going public, have known these facts. This is because the dominance of Hollywood has been obvious and widespread in wealthy and technologically advanced societies, while the slow but steady proliferation of Bollywood has not been easily noticeable or recognised. Bollywood produces more films each year than Hollywood—or, for that matter, any other film industry in the world. Its viewership is also probably greater. Bollywood and, more generally, Indian cinema, which is made in more than a dozen languages, is not only popular in the Indian diaspora spread over more than seventy countries across the world, but also, increasingly, among non-Indian audiences the world over. One might argue that such cultural flows as this book explores are merely a part of the broader workings of globalisation, which works to integrate markets, economies and cultures. Yet, such a view would be somewhat simplistic. As we can observe, Bollywood is not integrated with, say, the Czech Republic to the same degree as Australia. Many other factors are responsible for the kind of impact that it has on Australia. Among these are the English language and the older colonial circuits that linked India and Australia. The Indian diaspora finds it easier to migrate to English-speaking countries. These countries, in turn, find it easier to receive cultural products from India. In the case of Australia, its close cultural ties with the UK and the US also make its society more receptive to Bollywood. That is because Bollywood, as mentioned earlier, is also increasingly integrated with Hollywood. Therefore, it can impact Australia not only directly, through the mediation of the South Asian diaspora, but also indirectly, via Hollywood, which has also become a carrier of Bollywood and its cultural cargo. As we were writing this introduction, for instance, Australia has been washed over by the Danny Boyle Slumdog Millionaire wave. The story of the astonishing success of the film is only too well known. Its first brush with fame was its bonanza of Golden Globe awards and then 4


its even more successful and plentiful garnering of nominations for the Oscars. The film was released first in the US, where it has raked in more than US$138 million (A$202.6 million) as of 26 March 2009,6 then in the UK, where the collections were over £30 million (A$62.6 million) as of 22 March 2009.7 The film was finally released in India on 22 January 2009, in the original English version and in the dubbed Hindi version. In Australia, it has been showing to packed audiences for several months; as of 14 January 2009, it had already grossed more than A$3 million,8 but, according to noted critic and academic, Vijay Mishra, it has also created among white Australians an unparalleled interest in Bollywood.9 Whatever it may or may not do for India’s image, Slumdog Millionaire has certainly brought Bollywood to the world’s centre stage. The film sets itself up as a self-conscious, if slightly parodic, tribute to Bollywood, complete with an improbable plot, song and dance sequences and the overwhelming force of destiny driving its protagonist from rags to riches. While a post-colonial reading could easily show how the movie misrepresents or distorts Indian realities, that is beside the point. The movie marks the coming of age of Bollywood in the Western world, even if it is Hollywood pretending to be Bollywood. Clearly, Slumdog Millionaire does instantiate the travels of Bollywood to Hollywood, not only in terms of its directors, actors, technicians and musicians, but also in terms of its style and structure, content and technique. The Cinderella-like transformation of a slum child into a multi-millionaire is not only the stuff of the American Dream, but also very much of Bollywood fantasy. To put it simply, the game show in the movie is itself a symbol of Bollywood, the world’s largest dream factory, which makes the impossible come true. Bollywood, with its links to glamorous film stars and the underworld dons, is also depicted in the movie so extensively that it is almost a tribute to the industry. Jamal’s initial defining moment is literally to rise out of a pile of shit to get Amitabh Bachchan’s autograph. There are several clips from earlier Bachchan movies and one of the early questions in the quiz asks who starred in the superstar’s 1973 hit, Zanjeer. Similarly, the tune of the Surdas bhajan, again a link between Jamal’s life and the quiz show, is taken from a Hindi movie. The depiction of the underworld in the movie is also derived, as several critics have pointed out, from earlier Bollywood films like Satya (1998) or Company (2002). Although, visually, the film is clearly the work of outsiders, the cinematic style mimics Bollywood, as do the dialogues and the improbabilities in the plot. These latter, however, cannot be simply wished away because they are implicated in a politics of representation. 5


The film has been hailed as signifying the arrival of Bollywood in Hollywood. Yet, what is not equally obvious, though it is equally important, is the fact that the movie also illustrates a Hollywood to Bollywood movement. The direction of the cultural flows is not just one-way or two-way, but multidirectional. In Slumdog Millionaire, it is the case of a British director, reaching out to Bollywood for his story and setting, using a multinational film crew to make a product that is sold all over the world, but chiefly in the US, UK and India. The travels, hence, are not just from Bollywood to Los Angeles (LA), but from London to Bombay, then Bombay to LA, Bombay to London and then to Perth, Adelaide, Melbourne, Canberra, Sydney, Brisbane, Cairns, Darwin, Hobart and so on. But it is also important to note that not only is Bollywood the world’s second cinema, it is also an alternative cinema in that it works according to different principles of organisation and meaning. In other words, Hollywood and Bollywood have different grammars of representation and embody different meaning-making systems. If we were grossly to oversimplify, Bollywood is essentially a cinema of emotion and sentiment. It has been called melodrama, though we do not think that that is a particularly happy or apt expression. Bollywood films are also mythopoetic in their structure, conveying their thematic values through archetypes, some of which are ancient and mythic. This is also a cinema in which song, dance, poetry, music and action fuse to create a synthetic and composite form. Bollywood has been accused of being escapist and unrealistic, but it engages with social and political reality more directly than any other medium of creative expression. It does so through the use of exaggeration, symbolic representation and metaphor. Bollywood is also a cinema of excess, that is, of excessive sensuality and stimulation. The costumes, sets, locations, props and so on, are expected to be lavish, to the point of being fantastic. Characters are often larger than life and their abilities amplified till they seem almost caricatures. This is partly because of the pressures of the star system that dominates Bollywood. Films are sold based on the mass appeal of Bollywood superstars, who command fees rivalling Hollywood actors. So it would be financially disastrous to show the protagonist, say, dying halfway through the film, because the enormous fee that the star has been paid would then be underutilised or wasted. Despite its peculiarities, over a billion viewers easily understand its codes. This is because these viewers have been schooled in reading Bollywood films since childhood. Even experts, who have studied these films for years, often fail to pick up the complex subtext of Bollywood films, with 6


their complicated intertextuality, self-referentiality and subtler cultural nuances. To that extent, Bollywood, despite its increasing globalisation, remains somewhat ethnic in its character and constitution. In the last two decades, not only has there has been a greater integration between Hollywood and Bollywood, but more and more Bollywood films are shot overseas, not just to cater to the rich Indian diaspora market, but also to ‘teach’ audiences in India about the rest of the world. Australia has emerged as one of the favoured destinations of such Bollywood films. No wonder today in countries such as Australia, in the domain of popular and material culture, Bollywood circulates as a potent aesthetic and cultural marker of Indianness. Clothes, jewellery, food, footwear and even dance fitness schools proudly wear the Bollywood label. At the Commonwealth Games in Melbourne, held in March 2006, the closing ceremony featured an elaborate dance and musical ensemble on Bollywood themes. This study is intended to mark this coming of age of Bollywood in Australia. The first such book to be published in Australia, this is a collection of academic papers by largely Australian critics and scholars who have made notable contributions to the emerging field of Bollywood studies. A good deal of the book is based on papers presented at an international workshop entitled ‘Transnational Dialogues on Bollywood: Australian Perspectives’, held at the Monash University Law Chambers, 30 November 2006, in Melbourne, Australia. The workshop brought together scholars from around Australia and from India to explore the transnational impact of Bollywood on public spheres around the globe and to assess its contribution to creative industries in Australia. The success of this workshop and indeed of film festivals, exhibitions and above all commercial screenings of Bollywood movies in Australia, shows the rising interest in Bollywood in this country. What is more, Australia reaps considerable commercial and collateral benefits when Bollywood films are shot in here. Besides the direct financial gains to technicians, extras, hotels and other service providers, such films generate powerful, if unintended by their producers, publicity for Australia, making it an important and distinct presence in the Indian imagination, drawing students, tourists and visitors from the subcontinent to Australia. This book has been in the making for nearly three years, somewhat longer than expected. What we have learned by this is that there is a great deal of fluidity and progress in this area of study. Culture itself transforms at a furious pace, as do its manifestations. The situation is 7


no different when it comes to Bollywood in Australia. We have already spoken of the enormous success of Slumdog Millionaire in Australia. This makes it a special case, even if it is, strictly speaking, neither a Bollywood movie, nor one that is set in Australia. Our effort has been to concentrate on films that are both made in Bollywood and set, at least partially, in Australia, or have some other palpable Australian connection. When we started our project the most outstanding example of this kind of film was Salaam Namaste, set almost entirely in Australia. It has been discussed in several papers here. Then, while the manuscript was in progress, another film, Chak De! India, had a crucial Australian connection. The film’s climax is an international women’s field hockey final between an Indian and an Australian team, which takes place in Melbourne. In this film, as one of the papers in the book observes, Australia’s renown as a sporting nation is central to the plot and to the victory of the Indian team over the hosts. The film, thus, engages with an important aspect of Australian culture, not just using the country as an exotic location. More recently, a few more Bollywood films were set in Australia. The first of these, Sajid Khan’s Heyy Babyy (2007), concerns three young South Asian men in Sydney, whose freewheeling lives are changed when they have to take care of a little baby called Angel. The film is a rollicking comedy, with not much going for it except the laughs. As Beth, a Bollywood fan from Champaign, Illinois, put it in her blog: ‘If you have these three clowns as dads, at least they’ll sing and dance for you!’10 The film shows, typically of Bollywood, that rich Indians abroad have white servants and white girls hovering around them (Beth calls them ‘contextless cheerleaders’). Yet, if we set aside such clichéd and superficial references to Australia, we do see, once again, that a foreign country becomes the site of what, by Indian standards, would be a highly unconventional family arrangement, with three males looking after what is supposedly a six-day-old baby (she has teeth). Like Salaam Namaste, the film has a didactic component for audiences at home: it redefines gender roles and emphasises that males need to learn how to nurture and not just treat women as sex objects. Not surprisingly, though, the end restores convention by emphasising that a family, really to be a family, needs both a mum and a dad. The other Bollywood blockbuster that contained a strong Australian connection was Singh is Kinng (2008). It is the story of Happy Singh (Akshay Kumar), a bumbling Punjabi villager sent to Australia to bring back another villager, Lucky Singh, an underworld don on the Gold Coast, where much of the film is set. The film is mostly a farce without 8


serious engagement with the host country. But there are one or two things that do stand out. First, Ben Nott, the film’s cinematographer, is an Australian. Nott is better known for working on horror films and the movie’s official website jokingly highlights the, as yet, negligible collaboration between the Indian and Australian film industries by maintaining, facetiously, that Nott accepted this film by mistake, thinking the title referred to his favourite writer, Stephen King.11 Though the treatment of Australia in the movie is largely superficial, its inversion of the power relationship between the don and the underdog when, as a result of Lucky’s accident, Happy Singh becomes ‘Kinng’, does allow a representation of marginalised black Australians, a representation absent from previous Bollywood depictions of Australia. In one scene, the don’s goons are sent to remove a hot dog seller and his family who are taking custom from an expensive restaurant. The family in question appear more African American than Aboriginal Australian, and the scene could well come out of a Hollywood movie; yet, given the typical Bollywood disregard of verisimilitude, we could read the family against the screen image as Aboriginal and the film offers the hope, and maybe the possibility, that future Bollywood movies set in Australia will portray greater political sensitivity and recognise the existence of Aboriginal Australians as part of a more inclusive Australian society. Finally, a third, Bachna Ae Haseeno (2008), from the Yash Raj film factory, once again directed by Siddharth Anand of the Salaam Namaste fame, was set partially in Australia. Released on 15 August 2008, the film features Ranbir Singh as Raj, a young man with a somewhat instrumental attitude to women. The story, as it unfolds, shows his growth and development over a twelve-year period, from eighteen to thirty, during which time he has three serious relationships. In the first two, he has behaved like a cad, jilting the women who loved him. Now, a successful computer engineer in Sydney, he falls in love with Gayatri, played by Deepika Padukone, a part-time cab driver and business management student. However, this time Gayatri turns him down. Raj embarks on a pilgrimage to his two earlier girlfriends to atone for his sins, serving them until they forgive and release him from the weight of past misdeeds. When he returns, he finds Gayatri waiting for him, having changed her mind. Again, the film only uses Australia as the setting of a part of this largely Indian-overseas Bildungsroman, but it is noteworthy that this country presents fresh possibilities of hope, healing and regeneration. Anand, who is known to play with stereotypes, scores another clever trick by making his Indian studentcabbie a woman. 9


Even as we were preparing to go to press, a spate of attacks on Indian students in Australia, once again, brought to the forefront the complex relationship between the two countries. One of the essays in this volume already noted such events in the past, but the violence was unprecedented and alarming. Curiously, Bollywood was, almost instantly if inevitably, embroiled in the dispute when Amitabh Bachchan turned down an honorary doctorate from the Queensland University of Technology citing the attacks as his reason for refusing the degree. In his popular blog, he wrote: I mean no disrespect to the Institution that honours me, but under the present circumstances, where citizens of my own country are subjected to such acts of inhuman horror, my conscience does not permit me to accept this decoration from a country that perpetrates such indignity to my fellow countrymen.12

Like Bachchan, other Bollywood stars have reacted to these attacks. Aamir Khan, for instance, said, ‘It’s very unfortunate. It’s very sad and very disturbing’.13 Not to be left behind, Bollywood’s biggest union, the Federation of Western India Cine Employees (FWICE), has also banned its members from working down under. Dinesh Chaturvedi, the head of the Union, said, ‘We prefer to call it a non-cooperation movement because we feel what is happening in Australia is painful and shameful. The Australian government is just not taking adequate steps to find the culprits’.14 More amazingly, Mohit Suri, a young Bollywood film-maker, actually plans to make a film about these incidents. Slated for shooting later in 2009, the film features an Indian student in Australia who is the victim of racist attacks. Not surprisingly, Suri plans to shoot the film in Australia, despite the protests and bans: ‘I don’t think banning the country is going to achieve anything’, he said, ‘How can I not shoot in Australia when that is where my story is based?’15 Australia is a popular educational destination for Indian students, with some 95,000 of them currently estimated to be in the country.16 Their total contribution not just to Australian universities, but to ancillary businesses like travel, real estate, retail and so on would be immense. While both countries are in a damage control mode over these incidents, they highlight some of the underlying contradictions in Australian society. On the one hand, many universities are increasingly dependent on foreign students for their revenues. On the other hand, several thousands of these students are interested not just in education, but also in migration. Several small colleges and institutes specifically 10


target and exploit such potential immigrants, offering low-quality education but enhanced opportunities for settlement. But instead of accountancy or engineering or other in-demand fields, many of these students end up as taxi drivers, waiters, shopkeepers, petrol pump attendants and so on, which local Australians find threatening.17 Films like Salaam Namaste, which deal with Indian students in Australia, fail precisely to engage with such tensions. It would be fair to assume that, for many Bollywood films set in this country, Australia remains merely a backdrop rather than the real setting where the story makes a significant intervention. Yet, despite the somewhat superficial treatment of real issues like racial tensions in Australia, Bollywood continues to be interested in and engages with Australia. This relationship, notwithstanding these unfortunate attacks, does not appear to be in jeopardy. We have tried to argue that Bollywood, though a cinema of entertainment, also has elements, at times totally unexpected, of edification. Its engagement with its overseas locations and audiences also keeps changing and progressing in unpredictable ways. By the time this book is released and read, there may be more movies with Australian themes and connections. While it is difficult to predict what directions they may take, as long as there is a market in Australia for Bollywood and in India for Australia, as long as the South Asian diaspora in Australia is dynamic, even expanding, then we may be sure that Bollywood will keep its connection with Australia alive.

Filming Bollywood in Australia Andrew Hassam The use of Australian locations in Indian movies dates from the mid1990s. A lovers’ fantasy song sequence in a Tamil film, Indian, released in 1996, opens with reputedly the first appearance of kangaroos in Indian cinema bounding across the screen;18 and later in the same song sequence, the film’s stars, Urmila Matondkar and Kamal Haasan, dance in front of the Sydney Opera House and on top of the Harbour Bridge. Daud (1997), a Hindi movie released the following year, contains a song in which Urmila Matondkar is filmed in Australia a second time, 11


on this occasion dancing against the Pinnacles in Western Australia with Sanjay Dutt. The rise in Australia’s popularity as a location in Indian films coincided with Urmila Matondkar’s own rise in popularity following the success of Rangeela (1995) and in Deewane (2000) she returned to Australia a third time, dancing again at the Pinnacles, this time with Ajay Devgan. Yet while Indian, Daud and Deewane contained song sequences filmed in Australia, the action of the films was set elsewhere. The first Indian films to base their stories in Australia were Prem Aggan and Soldier, both released in October 1998. The final section of Prem Aggan is set in Sydney, to where the heroine’s father removes her for an enforced marriage, and the villains in Soldier flee to Sydney with their ill-gotten gains. In both films, as in the song sequence in Indian, Sydney is merely a picturesque overseas location. In Soldier, especially, this is not Sydney as it is known in Australia: the replica of William Bligh’s Bounty is a Sydney Harbour tourist attraction rather that the private yacht of an Indian gang boss and Soldier’s hero, played by Bobby Deol, is shown travelling from Sydney airport to Sydney Harbour on a Melbourne tram. Sydney appears in a more familiar form in Dil Chahta Hai (2001), the first Indian film set in Australia to achieve international success, with the Harbour Bridge, the Opera House and the replica Bounty all making their by now predictable appearances. Yet while Sydney, like the action in Dil Chahta Hai, may be more naturalistic (the hero goes there to work and no one gets shot dead), the film nonetheless employs Sydney mainly as a backdrop for a predictable romance between its male and female leads, Aamir Khan and Preity Zinta. Melbourne, lacking Sydney’s Australian iconicity, is less recognisable internationally and took longer to become popular with Indian filmmakers. Melbourne first appeared in a tram scene in Soldier, with the comic actor, Johnny Lever, as a tram conductor. Soldier later sets a romantic song sequence between Bobby Deol and Preity Zinta against the Twelve Apostles on the Great Ocean Road, a Victorian tourist location 280 kilometres from Melbourne also used in Prem Aggan and in the Tamil film, Kaathalar Thinam (1999). Melbourne’s CBD makes a fleeting appearance in Janasheen (2003), a film which, though ostensibly set in Sydney, avoids recognisable Australian locations and footage of Sydney is restricted to Clovelly cemetery, while Sydney’s CBD is represented, in Bollywood style, by shots of Bangkok. The first Indian film to make extensive dramatic use of Melbourne was yet another Tamil film, Nala Damayanthi (2003), though the pull of Sydney’s icons nonetheless proved too strong for the film’s producers: 12


Sydney Harbour Bridge is glimpsed as the hero’s plane lands at Melbourne; the hero, Ramji, commutes to suburban Melbourne across the Sydney Harbour Bridge; and some of the song sequences feature Sydney’s Darling Harbour. Melbourne’s sights are less recognisable to audiences in India and while many will have heard of the Melbourne Cricket Ground, other tourist attractions that appear in Nala Damayanthi, the casino and the aquarium, have no distinctive Melbourne associations. Melbourne, therefore, operates more generically to provide an urban lifestyle environment containing a range of tourist attractions: Ramji (Madhavan) enjoys a family day out in the city, walking in the grounds of the Royal Exhibition Building and visiting the Melbourne Museum; he performs rituals for his dead father by the River Yarra; and he encounters emus and kangaroos at the zoo. Melbourne does have its icons, such as the colourful beach huts at Brighton that are glimpsed in a song sequence in Nala Damayanthi and again in two songs in Koi Aap Sa (2005), but Melbourne’s Brighton Beach is not as famous overseas as Sydney’s Bondi. The song sequences in Indian popular cinema are distinctive and the use of Australia in song ‘picturisations’ seems bizarre to Australians not used to the Bollywood convention, which allows song sequences to be situated outside the time and space of the story. South Asian audiences understand such discontinuities, appreciating song sequences for their emotional intensity rather than their realism, and an Indian diasporic audience in Perth cheered at the song sequence in Aa Ab Laut Chalen (1999) shot in King’s Park in Perth, even though the film was set in the USA.19 On the other hand, Australians from outside the South Asian community are bewildered by the spectacle of Hrithik Roshan and Amisha Patel in Aap Mujhe Achche Lagne Lage (2002) dancing in front of government buildings in Canberra, a bewilderment due as much to the rare sight of Canberra in a feature film as to the disjunction between Canberra and Bollywood dancing. Indian film-makers enjoy the flexibility of being able to choose overseas film locations for their exotic looks, ignoring their connotations for those who live in them. Popular definitions of Bollywood include the convention that they should use exotic locations, though the exotic location in Hindi films is not necessarily overseas and fantasy song sequences have been filmed at locations within India, such as the mountains of Kashmir (Bobby, 1973) or the beaches of Goa (Dil Chahta Hai), locations which contrast with the everyday world of the mass audience. Sri Lanka also continues to be popular, the Tamil film Poi (2006), starring the Australian, Vimala Raman, using it extensively. Film-makers first started filming in 13


more distant locations in the 1960s, thirty years before they filmed in Australia. The arrival of colour cinematography encouraged the use of romantic, outdoor settings,20 and overseas locations were used mainly as outdoor settings for the romances of the period, as in Sangam (1964), Love in Tokyo (1966) and Evening in Paris (1967). Purab Aur Paschim (1970) established London as a location for a story, though more as a site of Western decadence than as a setting for romance, and London’s corrupting influence on the Indian abroad was reinforced in Des Pardes (1978). The replacement of the romantic hero with the angry young man in the social analysis films of the 1970s, associated above all with the film Sholay (1975) and the screen persona of Amitabh Bachchan, made exotic overseas locations less necessary; as Asha Kasbekar puts it: ‘Gory spectacle in disused warehouses and colorful cabaret dances in the sleazy, smoke-filled bars frequented by the hero replaced the mellifluous love songs set in natural scenic beauty’.21 With the return of romance as the dominant element in Bollywood in the late 1980s, there was a return to filming romantic song fantasies overseas. The veteran producer and director, Yash Chopra, turned Switzerland into an Indian honeymoon destination with a number of films beginning with Faasle in 1985 after the troubles in Kashmir prevented filming in India’s mountainous north;22 and Scotland, in Kuch Kuch Hota Hai (1998), and New Zealand, in Daud and Deewane, have often doubled for Kashmir to provide spectacular mountain scenery for song sequences. London and New York are, of course, the market leaders in attracting Indian film-makers, with London featuring in at least a dozen major Bollywood productions in 2007. And Switzerland, Canada and South Africa remain enduring locations. However, recently there has been increased competition from newer global cities, such as Singapore, Hong Kong, Bangkok and Dubai, which have sought Bollywood film production, much as the UK, the US and Australia have done, in order to offer a showcase to attract Indian tourism, business migration and foreign investment. Australia has, nonetheless, witnessed a relative boom in attracting Indian film productions in the last two or three years. Salaam Namaste (2005), Preity Zinta’s third Australian film, did for Melbourne what Dil Chahta Hai did for Sydney and two more Hindi blockbusters set in Australia opened in 2007: Chak De! India, a vehicle for Bollywood superstar, Shah Rukh Khan, much of which was filmed in sports facilities in Melbourne and Sydney, and Heyy Babyy, starring Akshay Kumar, shot on location in Sydney and Brisbane. In 2008, four more big-budget Bollywood movies featuring Australia were released: Love Story 2050, filmed in and around Adelaide; Singh 14


is Kinng, filmed on the Gold Coast; Bachna Ae Haseeno, by the director of Salaam Namaste, Siddharth Anand, filmed in Sydney; and Victory, a cricket movie, filmed during the Australia-India Test matches played in Sydney and Melbourne in 2007/2008. In addition, Salman Khan filmed Main Aur Mrs Khanna in Melbourne in May 2008. Tamil movies make much less impact among non–Tamil speaking audiences, as is the case for those Telugu, Kannada and Punjabi movies that have featured Australian locations, but their contribution is welcomed by the Australian film industry and, having pioneered the use of Australia in Indian movies, Tamil film-makers continue to shoot regularly in Australia. Australia is most often used as a backdrop to one or two fantasy song sequences, as most recently in Maaya Kannaadi (2007) and Pokkiri (Prabhu, 2007), but Nala Damayanthi has been followed by Thiruttu Payale (2006) and Unnale Unnale (2007), both of which also set part of their stories in Melbourne. The volume begins with Adrian Mabbott Athique’s chapter, ‘The Crossover Audience: Mediated Multiculturalism and the Indian Film’, which undertakes a critical examination of the term ‘crossover’ as it is being deployed in the context of the Indian film industry and its engagement with Western media industries and export markets. Within the specific context of Australian multiculturalism, this ‘crossing over’

Figure 1: Tanisha and Vinay in Unnale Unnale in front of a Melbourne tram advertisement featuring Aishwarya Rai

15


is a form of cultural and commercial exchange defined by the success of a media artefact originating in a South Asian ethnic culture with a majority audience located in another, the so-called Anglo-Australian culture. As Athique argues, South Asians resident in the West have given popular Indian cinema a commercially viable presence in the new context of multiplex exhibition, and it has been the subsequent ringing of cash registers that has instigated a new affection for Indian films in the Western media. Events, such as the Indian Film Festival, have been designed to promote Indian films amongst a more mainstream audience, though as Athique also notes, obstacles, such as the need for subtitles and the length of the movies, limit the success of Indian popular cinema in Australia. Against this background, Athique raised the question among a number of young Australians who showed an interest in Indian films of how likely it seemed that a significant crossover audience for Indian films would emerge in Australia. Athique’s conclusion is that it still remains to be seen whether the current flirtation with Bollywood will be just a passing fashion or an ongoing addition to the cultural repertoire of metropolitan Australia. Despite his scepticism, however, Athique believes that enthusiasm for Bollywood is one of the more benevolent examples of Western ignorance of non-Western cultures and should perhaps be encouraged, rather than disparaged. In ‘Cultural Encounters: The Use and Abuse of Bollywood in Australia’, Devika Goonewadene reflects on her own experience of the increasing visibility of Indian popular cinema in Australia from two specific vantage points that are derived from her own political and academic position as a post-colonial, diasporic South Asian: that of migrant–citizen and that of teacher of Indian knowledges in the West. By reflecting on her own cultural engagements with Bollywood in Australia in its different manifestations—from dance and music performances to the cinema and lecture theatres—Goonewardene shows how Bollywood can be used to fashion a social and cultural identity that allows a migrant to feel ‘at home’ in an Australian space through that space’s incorporation in Hindi films. Particularly important is the way Goonewardene recounts teaching International Relations though the medium of Hindi cinema, choosing to do so because the visibility of Bollywood in Australia allows her to utilise, and tease out the implications of, her students’ knowledge of an everyday phenomenon. Goonewardene’s experience of being among the crowd watching the filming of Chak De! India (2007) in Melbourne makes her optimistic of the effect of Bollywood in Australia in a post–September 11 world: 16


At a time when cultural, ethnic and religious difference is the object of international and domestic terrorism…Hindi cinema is one means of showing that there is a ground on which we can all meet peaceably.

While Athique focuses on cinema audiences and Goonewardene on the classroom, in ‘Salaam Namaste, Melbourne and Cosmopolitanism’, Andrew Hassam looks closely at the methods used by Australian government film, tourism and trade commissions to attract Indian producers to film in Australian locations. Taking the internationally successful Yash Raj production, Salaam Namaste (2005), as a case study, Hassam analyses what the Indian producers are looking for in choosing an Australian film location and how far the world of Bollywood matches the ‘Brand Melbourne’ that was pitched to them by state film and tourism commissions. He also considers what images are being excluded by the projection of Australia appearing in Bollywood, such as the lives of the housewives, the shopkeepers and the taxi drivers who comprise the audience of radio station ‘Salaam Namaste’. Hassam concludes that, while Indian film-makers and Australian government bodies collude in the projection of Australian cities as modern, Western and cosmopolitan urban spaces, they do so in different and contradictory ways as a result of differing definitions of cosmopolitanism: Australian government agencies project Australia overseas as a culturally diverse nation, while Indian film-makers seek images of a globalised consumerism for the gratification of audiences in India. The result is Australian government support for a depiction of Australia in Bollywood that not only erases the lives of urban Indigenous Australians, Chinese Australians and, ironically, Australian Sikh taxi-drivers, but also fails to promote the non-elite cosmopolitanism found in Australian suburbs. In ‘Chak De! Australia: Bollywood Down Under’, Makarand Paranjape argues that the film Chak De! India rewrites the earlier Lagaan (2001), with the shift between them, from a colonial cricket match between India and England to an international hockey match between India and Australia, marking the move of Bollywood and the South Asian diaspora into a global arena, an ‘Indianisation’ of the globe. Bollywood is fast gaining recognition and legitimacy as the second cinema of the world, and the first part of this chapter examines, in broad theoretical terms, the relationship between Hollywood and Bollywood: While Hollywood, though appearing to be universal, excludes several sections of the world’s population from participating as equals in its 17


offerings, Bollywood it would seem offers surreptitious enjoyment, even voyeuristic pleasure, to those whom it does not even address directly.

In the second part, Makarand explores how Bollywood is being both shaped by, but is also shaping, the newly globalised Indian. With a complex and evolving history of representation of Indians abroad, Bollywood has not just shown sensitivity to changing social, cultural and economic ethnoscapes, but has also served the ‘education’ of the Indian masses on how to regard Indian expatriates. Bollywood is not only a cinema of allurements, but also of pedagogical engagement: rather than being merely escapist, Bollywood is also educative, ‘teaching folks back at home how postmodern relationships develop and work themselves out’. Srilata Ravi approaches Bollywood in Australia from what she calls a ‘gastropoetics’ standpoint of Bollywood. India is a land of diverse food culture and ‘Cook Cook Hota Hai: Indian Cinema, Kitchen Culture and Diaspora’ is an exploration of not only the role of cooks and cooking that are a key feature of Indian cinema, but also how a ‘gastropoetics’ of Bollywood permits Indian films set in Australia to be compared with those set within other diasporic South Asian communities. Ravi selects four films for discussion, all with professional male cooks as the protagonist: Saif Ali Khan as the suave Nikhil Arora, architect-turned-chef in Melbourne in Salaam Namaste; Madhavan as an unsophisticated cook in the Tamil movie, Nala Damayanthi (2003), also set in Melbourne; Madhavan again in Ramji Londonwaley (2005), the Hindi remake of Nala Damayanthi set in London; and Amitabh Bachchan as the sixty-four-year-old Buddhadev Gupta, owner and head chef of ‘Spice 6’ in London in Cheeni Kum (2007). The four films depict the South Asian kitchen as a transnational space through which professionals, students, tourists, permanent residents and illegal immigrants all pass, and, following a close analysis of the transnational interplay between economics and social practice, Ravi concludes: As owners of small businesses with financial and cultural interests in multiple locations, Nick, Buddha and both the Ramjis are prime examples of a new breed of entrepreneurs who contribute to the efficient circulation of talent, capital and revenues in a transnational world.

Like the films she discusses, Ravi’s study adds a new dimension to culinary politics in the Indian diaspora. She exposes the subtle cultural politics of vernacular cinema and permits a more nuanced understanding of the nationalist politics of global Indian cinema. 18


Anjali Gera Roy’s chapter, ‘Rangla Punjab in Canberra, Yamla Jatt Folk Night in Sydney, Oorja Nights in Melbourne’, considers the ways in which Indian popular cinema has broadened the appeal in Australia of Bhangra, music associated with Punjabi harvest ritual and naturalised globally as a Bollywood song and dance formula. As Roy notes, ‘Bollywood Bhangra, a new Bhangra genre produced in Bollywood, has played a significant role in enabling Bhangra’s crossover from regional folk music to national, and now global, popular music’. Through interviews conducted with Australian Bhangra practitioners in Canberra, Sydney and Melbourne, Roy explores how Bhangra, while serving as the most important ethnocultural signifier of Punjabi identity in Australia, also circulates in Australia through the overlapping global flows of British Asian music and Hindi cinema, placing it at the centre of the production of Asian youth cultures in Australia. Yet Roy also discovers that an increasing number of non-Punjabi fans have developed a taste for Bhangra, due to its inclusion in crossover films like Monsoon Wedding (2001), Bend it Like Beckham (2002) and Bride and Prejudice (2004), as well as in Bollywood hits like Kal Ho Naa Ho (2003) and Kabhi Alvida Naa Kehna (2006). In ‘Orbits of Desire: Bollywood as Creative Industry in Australia’, Debjani Ganguly explores Bollywood as ‘soft power’. Using Joseph Nye’s idea that creative and cultural contributions to the public sphere are as important as military or economic power, she argues that it is Bollywood that is most responsible for the global ‘allure’ of India. According to her, ‘in the last two decades, the fulcrum of Bollywood’s global power has shifted from the transnational impact of popular Bombay films to lucrative zones of extra-cinematic visuality’, which include ‘live dance and musical spectacles, fashion, food, tourism, art exhibitions, aerobic fitness centres, dance classes, music albums, television productions and an array of other digital and web-based modalities of entertainment’. These products create a broader market than just cinema-going South Asians in the diaspora. Examining two case studies from Canberra, Bollywood Dimensions, Canberra’s first dance and fitness school run by Anshu Srivastava and Project Samosa, an intercultural youth film project conducted by Australian National University (ANU) students, Ganguly concludes that: Bollywood, in the eyes of the Australian political and cultural establishment, now appears to epitomise an all-encompassing ‘Indian’ performative modality in a first world multicultural society, as also a placeholder for Indian cultural diversity in late modernity. 19


The last academic paper in the volume is ‘Sweet Dreams are Made of This: Bollywood and Transnational South Asians in Australia’ by Devleena Ghosh. Ghosh starts by commenting on the viewing habits of Indo-Fijian immigrants to Australia, for whom Bollywood films and TV serials are part of a weekly family ritual ‘essential to feeling Indian’. She observes, however, that there are intergenerational conflicts and differences in the manner in which these movies and TV shows are viewed. While the older generation insists on being part of their culture and tradition, the younger, often Australian-born, children often find some of their contents ‘uncool’, if not ridiculous. At the same time, Bollywood-style parties, Indo-chic and remix music do shape a large part of the identities of young South Asian Australians. Ghosh shows how the experience of the South Asian diaspora in Australia is refracted through prisms of the Bollywood culture industry. This experience, she believes, ‘radically transfigures the concept of “Australian”, subverting and shaping the way in which a mainstream Australian youth identity is constructed in the public sphere’. Yet, while such subversion of the received ideas of what it means to be Australian may produce liminality, such liminality does not necessarily result in aimlessly postmodern or floating selves. Instead, the ‘blurred boundaries and radical re-enchantments of both the past and the present reveal the always contingent, contested nature of subjectivity’, a subjectivity grounded in: a thousand plateaus, subjectivities felt and experienced through the body, through historical landscapes, through domestic spaces, and through performance, as well as through the much more difficult realm of the imaginary, of the impact of ideals and the weight of history.

The volume concludes with an insider’s view of the successful bid to attract Harry Baweja to film part of his blockbuster movie, Love Story 2050 (2008), in Adelaide, South Australia. In his interview with Andrew Hassam, AK Tareen, the Senior Trade Commissioner—India, Government of South Australia, talks about the importance of promoting bilateral ties between South Australia and India and the role of film in attracting Indian trade, investment, tourism and skilled migration to Australia. Prior to accepting his current post, AK Tareen worked for almost twelve years for the Australian Trade Commission in India and was instrumental in attracting the very first Indian film to shoot in Australia, a Tamil film called Indian (1996). As he is based in Chennai, Tareen gives an additional perspective from the South of 20


India, a perspective in particular on Tamil movies made in Australia and which, with lower budgets and production values and with a more restricted language community, fail to attract attention outside Tamil communities, including the Sri Lankan Tamil communities, in Australia. However, as Tareen points out, Tamil films such as Nala Damayanthi and Thiruttu Payale (2006) are nonetheless regarded by Australian trade, film and tourism commissions as important ways of promoting Australia in India, a timely reminder that the appearance of Australia in Indian films has an indirect value over and above headline figures of budgets and box office receipts.

Notes to the Introduction 1 ‘OED Online—Quarterly Update’, 14 June 2001, , viewed 30 March 2009. 2 ‘Bollywood Joins the Dictionary’, The Times of India, 21 November 2002, , viewed 30 March 2009. 3 ‘Bollywood in Oxford Dictionary’, The Times of India, 2 July 2003, , viewed 30 March 2009. 4 R Corliss, ‘Hooray for Bollywood!’, Time, 16 September 1996, , viewed 30 March 2009. 5 ‘Bollywood in Oxford Dictionary’. 6 ‘Box office/business for Slumdog Millionaire’, Internet Movie Database, , viewed 30 March 2009. 7 ibid. 8 ibid. 9 Personal conversation with the author, 25 March 2009. 10 ‘More on Heyy Babyy’, Beth Loves Bollywood, 10 September 2008, , viewed 31Â€March 2009. 11 ‘Singh is Kinng: the Crew’, 2008, , viewed 30 March 2009. 12 B Henderson, ‘Bollywood star turns down honorary degree after attacks.’ , viewed 8 August 2009. 13 ‘Attacks on Indians in Australia “very disturbing”: Aamir Khan.’ , viewed 8 August 2009. 14 ‘Bollywood boycotts Oz over racist attacks on Indians.’ , viewed 12Â€August 2009. 15 ‘Bollywood film set in Australia to focus on attacks.’ , viewed 12 August 2009. 16 ‘Bollywood film set in Australia to focus on attacks.’ , viewed 12 August 2009.

21


17 See Michiel Baas’ PhD dissertation ‘Imagined Mobility. Migration and Transnationalism on Indian Students in Australia,’ submitted to the University of Netherlands, Amsterdam, 2009. 18 Interview with AK Tareen, Senior Trade Commissioner—India, Government of South Australia, 27 February 2007; an edited version of this interview appears in the current volume. 19 M Madan, ‘Bollywood Down Under: Imagining New Neighbourhoods’, South Asia, vol.Â€13, 2000. 20 A Kasbekar, Pop Culture India! Media, Arts and Lifestyle, ABC–Clio, Santa Barbara, California, 2006, p. 195. 21 ibid., p. 196. 22 B Jaisinghani, ‘Shooting with a Business Angle,’ Financial Express (Mumbai), 13 June 2004, , viewed 11 June 2005.

22

1

The Crossover Audience: Mediated Multiculturalism and the Indian Film Adrian Athique

I can’t keep it inside my head anymore! All this preaching by the Western media about what I should appreciate from my own popular culture. One Bride and Prejudice (Gurinder Chadha 2004) comes along aimed at ignorant white audiences, and they lap it up because everything Indian is the flavour of the season.1

Writing in Metro at the end of 2005, Sapna Samant, a trustee of the Asia Film Festival Aotearoa, is stirred into action by a sense of indignation at the appropriation of popular Indian cinema by the machinery of the Western media industry. Recent attempts by Hollywood to sell hybridised Bollywood style to Western audiences and the profusion of Bollywood copy in glossy magazines have all served to threaten Samant’s sense of ownership and of privileged inside knowledge, over the products of the popular Indian cinema. As Samant puts it: ‘Bombay cinema is my cinema. I know what it’s all about…I don’t like those Johnny-come-lately ignorant Westerners and media people advising me about it’.2 The argument made by Samant is all about authenticity: that the real experience of Indian cinema can only be accessed by those who 23


are steeped in its cultural context and its history. By extension, those viewers must themselves be authentically Indian or, at the very least, India specialists. This is a position open to criticism in a number of respects, but here I will restrict myself to the specific context of cinema, firstly, by pointing out the long-standing influence of Western film fashions on Indian film-making and the frequent appropriation of Hollywood styles, themes and even scripts for the Indian market; and, secondly, by recognising that Indian cinema has long enjoyed popularity with audiences spread across the globe, who have little detailed understanding of Indian society but who have consistently found enjoyment in the mixture of action, eroticism and sentimentality pedalled by the Bombay filmwallahs. In Samant’s defence, however, it is also fair to say that the breathless insiderism of Western journalists explaining to their readers how to enjoy Indian cinema as kitsch, cult and ‘full of colour’ is every bit as patronising as the scorn that used to be poured upon Indian films when they were laughably unfashionable. It is understandable, therefore, that all this might annoy anyone with a long-standing commitment to the Indian cinema. It may also prove to be the case that, while the blissful miscomprehension of the more subtle aspects of Indian cinema by viewers in Nigeria or Turkey has had little influence over the workings of the industry itself, the newfound interest by dilettantes in the Anglophone world could have far larger implications for the way that the Indian film industry functions. This, however, brings us to the major omission in Samant’s narrative, which is that this is not simply a case of appropriation by the machinery of the Western media, it is also an indication of the new strategies devised by the Indian film industry to sell itself more effectively in a global marketplace and of the larger rebranding of India as a global economic power.3

Imagining a Western audience The notion of a ‘Western viewer’ is as old as the study of Indian cinema. Since the days of the Indian Film Society movements in the 1950s there has been a comparison between an Indian audience, typified by illiteracy and an enthusiasm for escapist fare and an occidental viewer acculturated to a diet of realism rather than fantasy, drama rather than melodrama and psychological motivation over musical excess.4 Of course, besides the music, this realist model of Western audiences rather contradicts the popular fare consumed in European, North American 24

The Crossover Audience

and Australasian cinemas. It did, perhaps, suit the kind of audiences addressed by art-house cinemas and film festivals, which in Anglophone countries have traditionally been the most common environment for the screening of foreign-language films. Prior to the 1990s, the only Indian films to reach any significant Western audiences were art-house films operating in this niche market. As Jigna Desai puts it: The phenomenon of the art house is based on positioning ‘foreign’ films as ethnographic documents of ‘other’ (national) cultures and therefore as representatives of national cinemas. In particular, foreign Third World films that can be read as portraying the other through cultural difference (i.e., gender and sexual experiences or nativist renderings of rural village life) are deemed as most authentic.5

The art-house audience in the West represents a collection of consumers with various degrees of investment in an ethno-cultural scheme of World Cinema. This coalition of interests might include those with an academic or professional interest either in cinema or in the so-called producing culture. It also encompasses viewers whose consumption of foreign films represents a mixture of autodidacticism and aesthetic pleasure-seeking, gaining them a measure of cosmopolitan cultural capital. Art-house outlets often collocate a Third World ‘exotic’ with European auteur cinema and with the alternative or independent sector of the host nation’s local film culture.6 During the last decade, however, Indian films have escaped this aesthetic ghetto and begun to appear in the popular imagination. Part of the reason for this is that South Asians resident in the West and inhabiting the same metropolises as the old art-house audiences have given popular Indian cinema a commercially viable presence in the new context of multiplex exhibition.7 The subsequent ringing of cash registers has instigated a new affection for Indian films in the Western media. The sporadic, derisory remarks of the past have given way to some ‘talking up’ that has focused upon key figures in the Indian film industry (such as superstar Shah Rukh Khan, former Miss World Aishwarya Rai and director Yash Chopra) who have proved most popular with Indian cinema’s diasporic audiences in the West and who have used this popularity to reposition themselves within the international market.8

25


The making of Bollywood Ashish Rajadhyaksha has described these recent trends and the international rebranding of Indian commercial cinema as a process of ‘Bollywoodisation’.9 While the popular press now presents Indian cinema and Bollywood as effectively synonymous, Rajadhyaksha is at pains to make a distinction between the two.10 Rajadhyaksha makes this distinction for two major reasons. These are, firstly, because the cultural industry surrounding the Bollywood brand extends far beyond the production and consumption of feature films and, secondly, because the high-budget gloss and transnational themes of the major Bollywood films are far from representative of the majority of Indian film production. By Rajadhyaksha’s definition, the Bollywood culture industry does not encompass India’s small art, or parallel, cinema or the regional-language cinemas which constitute the bulk of film production and consumption in the subcontinent. Even as a sector of Hindi cinema, the Bollywood brand appears to exclude the low-budget comedies and vigilante films which constitute the majority of screenings. Instead Bollywood is defined by the high-budget, saccharine, upper middleclass melodrama which represents a tongue-in-cheek repackaging of the masala movie within an affluent, nostalgic and highly exclusive view of Indian culture and society. These productions are consciously transnational and have been increasingly saturated with product placements for global consumer fashions and multinational sponsors.11 So if Bollywood is not the Indian cinema per se, it might be adequately described as the export lager of the Indian cinema, since it is Bollywood productions that dominate India’s film exports, becoming centrally positioned as the trademark Indian film. Indian politicians have recently become keen to emphasise the worldwide popularity of these films and, in particular, their success in key Western markets as ambassadors for India’s growing global ambitions.12 For their part, Indian producers have attempted to consolidate their success in the West by widely promoting the Bollywood brand in a Euro-American market that continues to see itself as the central, hegemonic field of global media culture. Apart from an interest in the box office now being made from Indian films in the West, the newly fashionable status of Indian films amongst Western commentators can also be related to economic shifts in the Indian mediascape itself where Western media concerns are seeking to become major players.13 A further factor at play in the buzz surrounding Bollywood in the West has been the success of a number of directors of Indian origin working within various Western film industries who 26


have produced Indian-themed films which have successfully targeted audiences in the West.14 Despite the obvious differences between these films and mainstream Indian cinema, the films of US-based Mira Nair, Canada-based Deepa Mehta and UK-based Gurinder Chadha have frequently been conflated with Bollywood in the Western media. Both Indian and expatriate directors have benefited from this popular fallacy: mainstream Indian films have been associated, for example, with the success of Nair’s Monsoon Wedding (2001), whilst the ‘colour as culture’ connotations of Bollywood branding have also been used to market the films of non-resident Indian (NRI) directors, such as Chadha’s Bride and Prejudice (2004).

The crossover audience The success of Bollywood and NRI films with niche audiences in the UK has encouraged the staging of events designed to promote Indian films amongst a more mainstream audience. In 2002, the British Film Institute (BFI) organised an extensive showcase of Indian cinema, ImagineAsia, as part of a nationwide Indian Summer festival which also included the use of Bollywood themes in department store merchandise, visual art exhibitions and theatrical productions. This celebration of Indian popular culture under the rubric of multiculturalism was designed to promote Indo-British trade exchanges, emphasise official recognition of Britain’s large South Asian population and to draw profits from providing a context for the consumption of Indian cultural products by the UK’s majority white population. The BFI’s ImagineAsia festival of Indian cinema was considered a success, primarily since it drew almost a third of its audience from outside Britain’s South Asian population.15 ImagineAsia was a hugely successful, all-singing all-dancing masala festival. There hasn’t been anything quite like it before. As one of the bfi’s largest ever events it broke new ground on several fronts: introducing a broader appreciation and mainstreaming of South Asian film cultures to a cross over audience in the UK.16

The term ‘crossover’ deserves some attention because, as Desai has also observed, its use is synonymous with the quest for white audiences for ethnic media artefacts.17 The crossing described by the term is unidirectional, that is from a niche audience to a larger mainstream 27


audience which promises greater exposure and profits. The term is generally not used, for example, to describe the consumption of mainstream media by niche audiences. The crossover audience for both Indian-produced and NRI-directed films is imagined as a desired market based upon a collective notion of culturally literate cosmopolitan members of the majority population willing to extend their consumption of media cultures (and media as culture). Within the context of multiculturalism, this crossover can be defined as the success of a media artefact located in one ethnic culture with a majority audience located in another. This is because, whilst the logic of multiculturalism challenges the idea of a culturally homogeneous national audience, it continues to assume ‘that there are certain audiences that are commensurate with communities and demographic populations’.18 As such, ‘the emphasis on crossover success shifts discussion away from the issues associated with the burden of representation and the relations between cultural producers and black British communities to appealing to white demographic markets’, with Indian films becoming ‘integrated into capitalist expansion through the logic and rhetoric of multiculturalism’.19 Of course, multiculturalism is not only a rhetorical project, it also constructs and naturalises an industry with both internal and external aspects. Within the host nation a range of leisure industries, providing music, textiles, movies, literature, furniture and food facilitates the acquisition, possession and display of products of foreign cultural provenance. The external interests of the multicultural industry facilitate this trade in commodities between the importing and exporting nation, but are also incorporated with other aspects of interstate trade and the movements, in both directions, of financial, military and ideological capital. In the case of cinema, the celebration of the media projects of other cultures is also related to furthering desires to extend economic opportunities for the national media industry in those markets. Western media companies now view India as a potentially lucrative media market and, with Indian production budgets also increasing dramatically, a number of national industries have been keen to court Indian producers and their appetite for offshore production and post-production facilities. The British have despatched industry delegations, government ministers and even Prince Charles to Mumbai in recent years to drum up trade.20 Australia has also been in on the action, with millions of Bollywood dollars entering Australia in the last ten years, leading to the setting-up of the Film, Arts, Media and Entertainment (FAME) chapter of the Australia-India Business Council and trips to India’s film capital by 28


leading Australian politicians, such as Queensland’s then-Premier Peter Beattie in 2004.21

The crossover industry Australian film producer John Winter believes that, despite current high expectations in India, only a small number of Indian movies will actually have the potential to reach audiences in the West beyond the niche ethnic and art-house audiences. According to Winter, a foreignlanguage film will not succeed at the national level in Australia unless it consciously addresses a crossover aesthetic in both plot and style. However, Winter believes that it is possible to make such translations, since: Indian films aren’t that different from Australian/American films in terms of structure, in terms of storytelling. They’re linear, they have the same use of past, present and future that we use as devices. They have the same characterisation in terms of goodies and baddies and conflict and resolution of conflict.22

Winter claims that some elements of the standard Indian feature would require modification in order to cultivate an Australian audience. Winter identifies the minor hurdles to be overcome as adjusting movie length and making the song sequences accessible to a Western viewer. A more serious obstacle is the poor fit in market terms between the audiences already inclined to consume foreign-language films and audiences oriented around the kind of commercial entertainment typified by the Bollywood film: Where they are inaccessible is foreign language for a start, so you’ve got a foreign language film but it is obviously clearly commercial. So we’re used to seeing foreign language films that are designed for…we’ll more likely go for them that are art-house, you know. That collection of the Australian public will go to see an art-house film, they’ll got to see a French film with subtitles, that’s OK, but if it was a totally commercial film, which the Indian ones are, I can see that with subtitles you have a crossing of demographics.23

Despite these difficulties, there have been a number of one-off festivals directed at mainstreaming Indian commercial cinema, such 29


as Bollywood at Bondi (2002) and Bollywood at Cremorne (2003). A more substantial vehicle is the Beginners’ Guide to Bollywood or Bollywood Masala festivals which have toured Australia’s state capitals annually since 2003. All of these events have been directed towards developing a white, urban, crossover audience for Indian films and have been accompanied in the Australian press by the descriptions of Bollywood chic so offensive to Sapna Samant.24 Festival co-director of Bollywood Masala, Marcus Georgiades, stated that the primary aim was ‘to introduce Indian cinema to Australian audiences, who have never seen an Indian film other than Monsoon Wedding and to build the crossover market’.25 The Bollywood Masala festival has each year begun with a ten-day run at Fox Studios Australia. This twenty-nine-hectare site, formerly the Sydney Showground, is a movie production studio in Sydney’s inner city, conjoined with a shopping and entertainment complex. The venue is situated next to Sydney’s famous cricket ground and exemplifies the ethos of multiplex exhibition, although a site of this scale might be better described as a ‘megaplex’.26 Ben Goldsmith and Tom O’Regan describe the Fox Studios site as both a ‘locomotive’ for production and a ‘stargate’, a source of media glamour and a symbolic expression of an international, entrepreneurial city.27 Hoyts, one of the major, nationwide Australian cinema exhibition chains, operates a flagship cinema at Fox Studios known as La Premiere, along with Hoyts Cinema Paris, a smaller four-screen, art-house venue. According to their publicity, Cinema Paris is dedicated to ‘local, national & international art-house through to quality films of a wider appeal’ and ‘has become the new home for International film festivals’. Cinema Paris has therefore hosted festivals of Spanish, Mexican, Serbian, Irish and, most recently, Bollywood films.28 Launched as a Beginners’ Guide to Bollywood at the Cinema Paris in September 2003, the festival was intended to serve as an introduction to Indian films for the Australian mainstream, rather than catering to their existing audience and it was with this in mind that the eleven movies screened in 2003 were drawn from the biggest hits of the last decade.29 Relaunched the following year as the Bollywood Masala festival, it offered metropolitan Australia the major Indian blockbusters of 2004 alongside a couple of art-house features.30 Here, a festival trailer preceded each screening, with a filmed introduction by patron Yash Chopra and advertisements from festival sponsors.31 For the opening night of Bollywood Masala, sari-clad hostesses showered festival-goers with petals as they entered the cinema. The opening film on two screens, Main Hoon Na (2004), was introduced by the Indian High 30


Commissioner in Australia.32 As well as the film screenings, Bollywood Masala also included Q & A sessions with young directors, Rohan Sippy and Nikhil Advani and a ticketed opening-night party which sold itself on the chance to meet the directors. This was held at Arena, an adjacent hospitality bar within the Fox Studios complex and was attended by a mix of local Indian fans and Australian media personnel. Outside the festival schedule, the Cinema Paris is now a regular venue for a small number of Indian films throughout the year. Indian films are also being shown at a select number of Hoyts cinemas in the major cities, making the involvement of the Hoyts chain crucial to mainstreaming Indian films in Australia. According to Mark Chamberlain, national film programmer for Hoyts Cinemas and the man responsible for making Bollywood films accessible to Australians: Bollywood is a trend that’s taking over the whole world and Australia is no exception. On a trip to Birmingham in early 2002, I visited one of the city’s multiplexes. Out of its 12 screens, five were showing Bollywood movies. I remember asking myself if there was any reason why the same couldn’t happen in Australia. After all, we pride ourselves on our multiculturalism.

Figure 2: Indian Film Festival 2004

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Chamberlain, a die-hard fan of Bollywood movies wasted no time and, by mid-2002, Devdas, India’s first movie to be officially selected at Cannes (2002) also became the first-ever Bollywood flick to be screened at Hoyts.33 The story behind the mainstreaming activities of Hoyts is a complex one, arising from their partnership with MG Distribution who supplies the festival features.34 MG Distribution, in turn, has close links with one of India’s premier production houses, Yash Chopra’s Yash Raj Films (2005).35 It was in the context of securing production work that Melbourne-based Black Cat Productions approached director Yash Chopra at the International Indian Film Awards (IIFA) in Malaysia in 2002.36 According to Mitu Lange, co-director of the Bollywood Masala festivals and of MG Distribution, Chopra offered instead the distribution rights for his movies in Australia, New Zealand and Fiji. MG Distribution was the new company that arose from this discussion, seeking to build a market for commercial Indian movies through mainstream Australian exhibitors. Lange describes their nascent audience: Our first release was on 20 December [2002] with two really big films. One was Yash Chopra’s Saathiya. Another was Kaante. We were screening them at Forum Cinema, which is one of the heritage cinemas in Melbourne…It[’]s been really interesting for me to see the different kinds of audiences that we’ve been having…When we started it was just Indian students, and a few families. And when they started knowing the films were all subtitled for sure, then we started getting a lot of Indian students with their Australian spouses and their Australian friends and so on. And after a while we started getting Greek and Italian families… then there was a significant amount from the gay community who came. They bought the CDs and we had a little bar at the Forum and they had scotch with a samosa and they just loved the film.37

Recognising that the mainstream market is limited compared to the number of movies available for release, the strategy of MG Distribution is to ensure that a small number of the ‘best’ Indian movies get a mainstream release at key sites in the main Australian cities. The Bollywood Masala festival is the major publicity flagship for their activities and, according to Sydney’s Sunday Telegraph, has become ‘one of the most popular film events in Australia’.38 Lange claims that in the course of its tour across Australia in 2004–5, the festival ‘recorded an attendance of 40,000-odd people of which 80 percent were non-Indians’.39 With an explicitly crossover mandate, the festival consciously addresses a 32


cosmopolitan, inner-city consumer, sensitive to global fashions and can rely on widespread coverage from mainstream press publications. This promotional drive to create a crossover audience in Australia has, however, to be seen as a qualified success because, while the profile of film festivals in the inner city may be high compared to everyday exhibition practices, such events are only able to access a relatively small component of the nationwide, Australian cinema audience. In an effort both to reduce the level of piracy in the Australian market and to relocate Indian films away from the grocery stores associated with the Indian community and into mainstream outlets, MG Distribution teamed up with another Australian distribution company, Madman Entertainment, in April 2004. Madman Entertainment produces and distributes niche media in playback formats (including Japanese anime, Australian and other independent film, Asian martial arts and sports features). As a joint venture, the two companies launched the Bollywood Masala label to distribute Bollywood titles in the mainstream Australian playback market. Lange announced the new label at the opening of Bollywood Masala 2004 at Cinema Paris, along with a polite plea to festival-goers to stay away from the video pirates. The first two titles on the label, Chalte Chalte (2003) and Armaan (2003), were publicised in the festival programme in terms favourable to a ‘mainstream viewer’ (Shah Rukh Khan was presented as the ‘Indian Tom Cruise’ and Amitabh Bachchan as the ‘Indian Clint Eastwood’) and these and subsequent titles can now be found in the art-house sections of some of Australia’s major rental franchises. Another formal partnership between legitimate Indian film distributors and the mainstream Australian media was established when fifty-one per cent of MG Distribution was acquired by Swish in October 2007, creating Swish MG Distribution, now handling both theatrical and playback distribution in Australia and expanding its operations in NewÂ€Zealand.

Crossing over: a case study In the first place, the ‘Bollywoodisation’ of Indian cinema in Australia clearly underscores the influence of global media fashions in the US and UK upon the Australian market. As part of these trends, Englishlanguage movies such as Moulin Rouge! (2001) or The Guru (2002) have plagiarised (and thus popularised) Bollywood movie stylistics, as have broadcast advertisements in Australia for yoghurt and cars. So, whilst 33


a mainstream audience for Indian movies remained putative during 2003–2005, when the following case study was conducted, the profile of Indian films had undeniably been heightened within the intertextual and transnational media sphere operating across Australian society. As early as 2003, The Australian was confident enough to claim: Indian films make up the most enthusiastically fluorescent, kinetic and kaleidoscopic national cinema anywhere and slowly but surely Australian audiences are succumbing to the charms of these all-singing, all-dancing love stories.40

The veracity of such a proposition rests of course on how the words ‘slowly’ and ‘surely’ are interpreted. In order to explore this extraordinary claim, I conducted interviews with a number of young Australians who showed an interest in Indian films. During these interviews, I raised the question of how likely it seemed to them that a significant crossover audience for Indian films would emerge in Australia. Of these interviewees, the Indian-Australian respondents were in broad agreement, based upon their own perceptions of Anglo-Australians, that there was little chance of Indian films succeeding with a mainstream audience. Priya’s response is simple and direct in this regard: Not Aussies, no…I don’t think that’s going to happen. I mean, no…I think that Indian movies are too different to be something that everyone might want to watch. They’re dealing with different things that you wouldn’t see in normal movies.41

In another response, Asha emphasised the unwillingness of Australians to watch foreign-language films. She believed that Indian films cannot be adequately translated for mainstream consumption in Australia and, at the same time, she also felt that attempts to undertake such a translation would probably alienate the niche audience that may be prepared to watch Indian films: No. Simply the language barrier. You could screen Bootmen, a completely Australian movie in the UK and people would still go and watch it. But you can’t put in an Indian movie, in a different language and expect people to sit, people want to go there and turn their mind off, they don’t want to sit there and read the screen…It wouldn’t work and people who, the ones that wanted to watch it because it was an Indian film, would want Indian accents, the ones who wanted to know what it was all 34


about would just go ‘that’s the cheesiest thing I’ve ever seen’ and walk out of there or enjoy the backseat very much.42

Another Indian-Australian interviewee, Leela, observed that, from her experience, there was simply little chance of mainstream Australians bringing themselves into contact with commercial Indian films in the first place, since they tended to hold negative preconceptions regarding the quality of Indian films. Leela described the audiences she encountered at Indian film screenings as overwhelmingly Asian. However, Leela did think that the commercial fortunes of some art films might be different as they attract a different audience and are judged by different standards from more commercial features: Not a mainstream audience. I don’t think so. Not really. I’m just going on my own personal experience but most of my friends here are Australian. And I’ve tried to get them to come with me, but they’re just not interested. And a few of them make fun of the movies and I think, I don’t think it will really catch on…I don’t see a lot of Australian people wanting to watch them. Like even when they showed the movie, they showed Main Hoon Na, in Wollongong. It was all Indians or Malays or people from the Middle East. There were no others there.43

In contrast to the consensus of an unenthusiastic ‘Aussie’ audience provided by Indian-Australians, my Anglo-Australian interviewees were more hesitant about providing a generic description of this imagined collective. This is perhaps because the implicit positioning of a mainstream Australian audience as a body of white viewers made it imperative for them to consider their own positioning within this imagined community, leading to more qualified descriptions of this audience. I think that’s a really hard question. I think if people are like me, they’ll love it, but I know that, even with raving about a couple of the movies that I’ve seen, you know, the looks that I get from...like ‘what the hype about it?’ I think it has to be seen to be believed. And I don’t know that there’s a great deal of exposure like if people are going to pay to go and see a movie, they want to know that they’re going to enjoy it before they go and see it. And I think there’s still that element of uncertainty, not knowing what’s going to be in an Indian movie to really enjoy, you know. So I think people might psych themselves out before they actually get there. But I think if people were to actually give it a go, 35


IÂ€think it’d definitely be a following in Australia. I’d like to think that there would be anyway. It could go either way.44 It depends on the audience, like I know are a lot of people who are interested in that sort of thing, but you need to appreciate their culture to actually really understand what the film is about…I think Australians are a bit, well, they have no culture or they don’t…well, they’re always after just what’s on at the time. They don’t think about…its action that’s all, really…They’re influenced by other countries like America. Their films appeal mostly here. And, yeah, everyone is focused on American ways and they don’t really…Australia is still developing their own, like, their own sort of culture. So it’s not as diverse as what an Indian culture is. But we’re a young country; so, yeah, we’re influenced by other countries too easily.45

In order to further explore some of the key claims made by these interviewees regarding the potential interest (or lack of it) in Indian films by an Australian audience, I conducted a screening survey with a group of ninety Australians in March 2004.46 Participants were asked to complete a paper questionnaire before, during and after being shown twenty-minute excerpts from four different contemporary Indian films.47 The questionnaire prompted participants to provide short qualitative responses describing their preconceptions, analysis and reaction to the films. Participants were also asked to rate each film clip on a numerical scale. No introduction to Indian cinema was given prior to the exercise. Following the screenings, participants were asked to contribute their overall impressions of Indian films, based upon the screened excerpts and to comment on the suitability of the films for an Australian audience. Given the limited scope and artificial nature of the sample, this body of respondents is not presented here as directly representative of an Australian mass audience. These people are, nonetheless, taken to be members of a wider audience and familiar with the content and social context of the Australian media environment. In terms of their previous knowledge, this group did not prove to be a completely medianaïve community in relation to Indian films. Twenty-four participants indicated that they had previously seen at least one Indian film against sixty-six who claimed to have had no previous exposure. Of those who had seen an Indian film before, the most common context of viewing was the publicly-owned multicultural broadcaster SBS, which occasionally screens Indian films, the majority of which are parallel or art 36


features. This would explain the following statement of expectation by one respondent, who expected to see: ‘Mud bricks, coloured sarongs, a very slow temporal building up of themes and slow, reserved, more lifelike playing-out of the story’. However, the influence of the Bollywood brand could be clearly seen in some other expectations given prior to the screenings as well as the transmission of this notion through the products of Western popular culture that have claimed to be influenced by it: I expect to see cortosans [sic]. Based on what the Moulin rouge based its play on, full of dancing I’ve a vague idea that Indian cinema is often referred to as ‘bollywood’ and that it takes a lot of conventions from western film. Such as the roles of characters e.g., the hero, the mafia boss, the mother, I think I remember some of this from comments in the movie ‘The Guru’. music, singing and dancing, ideas of Bollywood, cultural/national identity emphasised, subtitles, national e.g., religious/cultural themes, use of colour + film techniques e.g., like music clips.

Some respondents, however, displayed a more definite conception of the rudiments of popular Indian cinema in their expectations, as indicated by this example: I expect to see a movie with Indian characters who struggle between class within a romance. I expect also to see some basis of religion and males being the predominant characters.

Overall, Indian cinema was expected to be mainly concerned with religiosity and ethnic colour. For a minority of respondents, their preconceptions of Indian films were clearly influenced by the notion that India was a backward and poverty-stricken country and therefore likely to produce fairly unsophisticated cinema. Examples of these type of responses were ‘Bad films, cheap & tacky, low budget’, ‘not as clearly edited as American films’ and ‘I don’t expect there to be so much technological details in it’. For some other respondents who seemed inclined to see Indian culture in a more positive light, expectations proved to be strikingly similar: Indian films were expected to present the more simple aesthetics of a ‘traditional’ society untainted by modernity and capitalist consumerism. Accordingly, having watched the film clips, the majority of the survey group displayed surprise that 37


Indian films were so convincingly ‘modern’, where modernity was conflated with Western culture and, in particular, with Hollywood cinema. Although a few respondents were scornful of the films as ‘cheesy’, the majority of the group were pleasantly surprised to find that Indian films were not too dissimilar to Hollywood films and therefore more accessible than they had expected them to be. Here are some representative responses: There was a lot more variety than I expected—a lot more modern, my impression before this on Indian film was that it was far more traditional, and reflective of traditional Indian values. I expected a much more traditional Indian film, in terms of costume, sound + themes. However was much more modern—western influenced than anticipated. I enjoyed watching Indian film much more than anticipated. They’re really entertaining, and I like the romance theme. It reminds me of the type of movies I enjoy—Hollywood-type romantic comedies. They’re beautiful & well-shot which I appreciate in films.

A further finding made by the survey exercise challenges the common wisdom that the biggest obstacle separating Indian films from a Western audience is the proliferation of song and dance sequences. Of the respondents who did describe the Indian films viewed in favourable terms and even some of the more equivocal respondents, it was the musical interludes that seemed to emerge as the most popular element: It’s something different and Indian films seem to be quite entertaining. I also like the high levels of music and dancing. I thought the acting wasn’t too good, plots and story lines were kind of cheesy + fake but I did like the action and suspense and characters in some of the films. I also thought the ‘music video’ parts were interesting.

Sixty-three of the ninety participants expressed an interest in seeing more Indian films in the future. Concluding the exercise with a collective effort to imagine the possibility of a crossover audience in Australia, members of the survey group were asked to provide comments in response to the following question: ‘What do you think it would it take for Indian films to gain a significant audience in Australia?’: 38


give everybody in Australia a head re-adjustment—most Australians probably wouldn’t get past the subtitles. Marketing. Cinemas willing to show it would be a good start. If proven to work somewhere else in world, e.g., US or Britain, Australia would follow lead. a great deal. I don’t think they would get an audience. We are too happily saturated with American products. Our cinema culture is American. I think it would be difficult. Perhaps if they use less imitation of Hollywood and more reliance on cultural differences and reality, they might find an audience that appreciates difference. Less Americanisation in our youth. I work for a cinema and most of our customers are teens or young people. These people are very Americanised so much so that watching foreign films would hardly occur to them. a story everyone can relate to, for instance a story envolving [sic] Indian cultural which is common to Australia. Ultimately though, interesting unique storylines and bright and witty scripts.

In contrast to their own generally favourable response to the screenings, the survey group were overwhelmingly sceptical about mainstream success for Indian films in Australia. There was clear evidence here of the third-person effect, where the description of a wider Australian audience took on notably lumpen overtones. These responses also appeared to bear out some of the findings of Bennett, Emmison and Frow’s Australian Everyday Cultures Survey.48 Bennett et al. found that the natural point of comparison for Australians in this age range commenting on popular culture is overwhelmingly US products, rather than Australian ones. At the same time, however, these responses also indicate that Australians maintain a strong sense of national identification. Taken together, these two points of identification contributed to an interesting feature of these responses to Indian films, where a shifting position was often adopted between a subjective identification with Australian or Western culture.49 This was evidenced by the comparison of Indian films with an Australian aesthetic preference that was in one instance conflated with a larger Western culture and, in another, described in terms of an antagonistic stance towards an American media imperialism. 39


Despite the fact that audience research in this context is almost inevitably market-research in some form, it is not possible, on the basis of the comments presented here, to establish clearly whether Indian films will, or will not, develop a larger audience in Australia. What has been demonstrated here, I think, is a degree of the lack of knowledge of modern Indian culture decried by Sapna Samant as ‘ignorance’. However, these responses also appear to indicate a growing awareness of Indian cinema as a potential choice of entertainment media due to the very promotional activities that have produced Samant’s indignation. Samant, being a director of an art-house festival, would surely also recognise that what we are seeing here is the weakening of the hegemony of the art-house aesthetic over the appreciation of foreignlanguage film culture. As such, the performance of cultural literacy in that arena is now likely to coexist with more populist appropriations of foreign films for the purposes of relatively uninformed ‘eye-candy’ entertainment of the kind pioneered in the 1970s by that other Asian giant, the Hong Kong martial arts movie.50

Conclusion The rebranding of commercial Indian films in the West as postmodern pop art, as exemplified by the trope of Bollywood, is very much part of the continuing cycle of orientalism. From the Western perspective, it is possible to discern a certain cultural ennui couched in this latest commercialisation of liberal multiculturalism as cosmopolitan ethnic chic, whilst in India the imagination on-screen of a transnationallyorientated middle class and its occupation and consumption of the West represents the symbolic counterweight of the orientalist binary.51 It is imperative, therefore, to recognise that any discussion of cultural consumption, which juxtaposes East and West, remains powerfully inflected by the historical exercise of power in the Indo-European encounter. The relative lack of knowledge amongst Australians concerning India also has to be placed in a wider historical context. The separation of India from Australia’s Asian concerns, despite their Commonwealth and sporting connections, has resulted in a large part from the divergent strategies of the two countries during the Cold War. Whilst India has long occupied perhaps the most significant space in the imperial imagination of the British, Australian conceptions of ‘Asia’ have always been fixed upon North and South-East Asian countries. Thus, Indians 40


in Australia are generally referred to as Indians, rather than ‘Asians’ (which is the signifier used in the UK due to its historical role in Asia and its relative lack of migrants from China or Vietnam). As such, in Australia, where the South Asian proportion of the population is much less than it is in the UK, despite showing strong recent growth,52 the consumption side of the engagement with Bollywood has been inspired by the global circulation of fashion trends as opposed to a domestic multicultural agenda. There are changes afoot, however, as migration from the subcontinent to Australia has increased. Australia’s relations with India are also going through a period of re-evaluation, due to India’s considerable success in the global IT industry and the identification of the potential spending power of India’s middle classes, regarded as an emerging market for restless global capital.53 India’s rebranding also results from the desire of the advanced Western countries to find a balance to China’s growing economic clout and, perhaps, an awareness of the significance of India as a major power on the Eastern edge of the Muslim heartlands in the Middle East. As such, a new picture of India is emerging in the pages of English-language news and business glossies, replacing its previous role as spokesman for the traditional societies of the Third World with a new role as a dynamic, modernising and capitalist society, amenable to incorporation into the New World Order. Beyond the geopolitical context, the Bollywood fad can also be seen as the latest manifestation of India’s status as one of the most successful nations in the former Third World to take advantage of the ‘appropriation’ of its cultural produce in Western markets. India has always been one of the heavyweights for multicultural products: from rustic tribal jewellery, oriental fabrics, sixties-style spiritualism, ethnocultural and adventure tourism, new-age music, exotic foodstuffs, ethnographic texts and ‘new literatures’. Popular Indian films have now joined this considerable bankroll as another source of foreign exchange earnings and another form of cultural currency in the ongoing encounter between India and its highly significant Western ‘other’. As such, the machinery of Western appropriation clearly functions with the support of an equally significant machinery in the Indian economy which sells the idea of India abroad. In this particular case, it remains to be seen whether the current flirtation with Bollywood will be just a passing fashion or an ongoing addition to the cultural repertoire of metropolitan Australia. In my final response to Samant, it is worth pointing out that the promise of an off-the-peg experience of authenticity is one of the primary strategies 41


employed in the marketing of multiculturalism (and specifically mediaculturalism). This is, in almost every case, a fallacy convenient to all of those involved. As such, the dusting-off of Indian popular cinema and its new life as the camp, glamorous and low-context Bollywood is typical, rather than atypical, of marketing Asian cultures in Australia. Nonetheless, the wider circulation of Indian films and the spin-off of Bollywood club cultures and Bollywood dance schools emerging in the Australian cities, are helping to make the Bollywood dance routine the acceptable, Western-friendly, face of multiculturalism in Australia at a time when other markers of difference, such as the hejab, have become symbols of conflict and irrational fear for the white majority.54 Enthusiasm for Bollywood is thus one of the more benevolent examples of Western ignorance and should perhaps be encouraged, rather than disparaged, by those located in the internationalist, enlightenment values of the film festival circuit. Indeed, it may be more important than ever to avoid confusing a lack of knowledge with real ignorance.

Notes 1 S Samant, ‘Appropriating Bombay cinema: why the Western world gets Bollywood so wrong’, Metro, Winter 2005, p. 84. 2 ibid., p. 86. 3 P Stahlberg, ‘Brand India: the storyline of a superpower in the making’, Media and Identity in Asia, CD-ROM, Curtin University of Technology, Sarawak, 2006. 4 R Vasudevan (ed.), Making Meaning in Indian Cinema, Oxford University Press, New Delhi, 2000. 5 J Desai, Beyond Bollywood: The Cultural Politics of South Asian Diasporic Film, Routledge, London, 2004, p. 39. 6 For a long time, the art-house audience was the normative taste culture addressed by academic film studies. Interestingly, the turn towards audience studies has been accompanied by a parallel shift towards the products of popular cinema as the object of study. Together, these developments have had the curious effect of making the normative spectator of the previous generation one of the least researched audiences of all. 7 F Kerrigan & Mustafa F Ozbilgin, ‘Art for the masses or art for the few?: ethical issues of film marketing in the UK’, International Journal of Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Marketing, vol. 7, no. 2, 2002, p. 2002. 8 R Dwyer, ‘”Indian values” and the diaspora: Yash Chopra’s films of the 1990s’, West Coast Line, Autumn 2000. 9 A Rajadhyaksha, ‘The “Bollywoodization” of the Indian cinema: cultural nationalism in a global arena’, Inter-Asia Cultural Studies, vol. 4, no. 1, 2003. 10 ibid., p. 28. 11 R Inden, ‘Transnational class, erotic arcadia and commercial utopia in Hindi films’, in C Brosius and M Butcher (eds), Image Journeys: Audio-Visual Media and Cultural Change in India, Sage, New Delhi, 1999; R Kaur, Bollyworld: Popular Indian Cinema Through A Transnational Lens, Sage, New Delhi, 2005. 12 S Swaraj, ‘Keynote address on entertainment, ethnic media and the diasporic identity, Pravasi Bharatiya Divas, New Delhi 2003’, , viewed 23 September 2004.

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13 D McMillin, ‘Localizing the global: television and hybrid programming in India’, International Journal of Cultural Studies, vol. 4, no. 1, 2001; M. Butcher, Transnational Television, Cultural Identity and Change: When Star Came To India, Sage, New Delhi, 2003; D Page & W Crawley, ‘The transnational and the national: changing patterns of influence in the South Asian TV market’, JK Chalaby (ed.), Transnational Television Worldwide: Towards a New Media Order, IB Tauris, London & New York, 2005. 14 Desai, Beyond Bollywood. 15 A White & P Rughani, ImagineAsia Evaluation Report, BFI, London, 2003, , viewed 4 March 2004. 16 ibid., p. 9 17 Desai, Beyond Bollywood, p. 66. 18 ibid., 19 ibid. 20 ‘Prince Charles kicks off Bollywood film’, BBC Online World Edition, 4 November 2003, , viewed 4 November 2003; ‘Bollywood targets UK movie base’, BBC Online World Edition, 9 February 2004, , viewed 9 February 2004; ‘Jowell enticing Bollywood to UK’, BBC Online World Edition, 15 March 2004, , viewed 25 March 2004. 21 ‘Queensland Government attracts Indian film industry to the “Smart State”’, Films and Casting Temple, . viewed 12 March 2004. 22 John Winter, interview 3 July 2003. 23 ibid. 24 See, for example, E Tadros, ‘Get into India’, Sydney Morning Herald, 29 August 2003; S Mahonen, ‘Bollywood set to bowl us over’, Stonnington Leader, 19 November 2003; A Arora & A Moses, ‘Bolly good show’, Sydney Morning Herald, 10 September 2004; AÂ€Arora, ‘Planet Bollywood’, Sunday Telegraph Sunday Magazine, 14 August 2005. 25 ‘Bollywood magic captures down under’, Press Trust of India, 15 September 2003. 26 CR Acland, Screen Traffic: Movies, Multiplexes and Global Culture, Duke University Press, Durham and London. 27 B Goldsmith & T O’Regan, ‘Locomotives and stargates: inner-city studio complexes in Sydney, Melbourne and Toronto’, International Journal of Cultural Policy, vol. 10, no. 1, 2004. 28 Hoyts Cinema Paris, , viewed 29 March 2005. 29 The ten-day roster for the Beginners’ Guide to Bollywood in 2003 included the following titles: AKS (2001), Asoka (2001), Devdas (2002), Dil Se (1998), Dil To Pagalhai (1997), Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge (1995), Fiza (2000), Hero (2003), Khabi Khushi Khabhie Gham (2001), Lagaan (2001), Saathiya (2002). 30 The ten-day roster for Bollywood Masala in 2004 included the following titles: Main Hoon Na (2004), 3 Deewarein (2003), Ab Tak Chappan (2003), Chameli (2004), Chokher Bali (2003), Hum Tum (2004), Khakee (2003), Kal Ho Naa Ho (2003), Kuch Na Kaho (2003), Main Madhuri Dixit Banna Chahti Hoon (2003), Munna Bhai MBBS (2003), Meenaxi: Tale of 3 Cities (2003). 31 Bollywood Masala received sponsorship from a range of Australian concerns: Plan Australia (an overseas child sponsorship scheme), World Movies (a pay-TV foreign and art-house cinema channel), Sharwoods (the international food company), SBS Radio, Australia’s Health Insurance Commission (with a Bollywood-themed advertisement), Australian carrier Qantas (which had recently launched a direct service to India) and tourism operator Intrepid Travel. 32 Global synchronicities came into play here as the Commissioner introduced the film, a hostage drama which centres on terrorists who take over an upper-class Indian college. The tragic events of the high school siege in Beslan in the Russian Federation Republic

43

Bollywood in Australia of North Ossetia had unfolded over the proceeding days, prompting the Commissioner to remind the festival audience that India, like Russia and Australia, was also deeply involved in a ‘war on terror’. 33 A. Arora, ‘Planet Bollywood’, Sunday Telegraph Magazine, 14 August 2005, p. 21. 34 MG Distribution, , viewed 1 April 2005. 35 Yash Raj Films, , viewed 10 February 2005. 36 In an attempt to capitalise on growing press interest abroad, leading figures in the Indian film industry launched the International Indian Film Awards (IIFA) in 2000. The IIFA is an Oscars-style glamour event, designed to promote Indian cinema on the international stage. The first event was held at London’s Millennium Dome in 2000 and subsequently the IIFA have been held in Sun City, South Africa (2001), Genting Highlands, Malaysia (2002), Johannesburg, South Africa (2003), Singapore (2004) and Amsterdam (2005). 37 Mitu Lange, interview October 2003; Akash Arora claimed in 2005 that ‘at The Midnight Shift on Sydney’s Oxford Street, there’s now a popular Bollywood drag show’ (Arora, ‘Planet Bollywood’, p. 21). 38 Arora, ‘Planet Bollywood’, p. 21. 39 Lange in Arora, ‘Planet Bollywood’, p. 22. 40 R Higson, ‘Adding substance to song and dance’, The Australian, 27 August 2003, p. 12. 41 Priya, interview 15 August 2003. 42 Asha, interview 20 August 2003. 43 Leela, interview 10 September 2004. 44 Carly, interview 12 September 2004. 45 David, interview 30 August 2004. 46 Participants in this exercise comprised a body of students at the University of Wollongong enrolled in a number of disciplines, who were taking a subject entitled ‘Film Form and Style’. The survey group comprised largely domestic students, although there were fifteen international exchange students who also took part (mostly US citizens but also including three Koreans and one Japanese). The age range of the group was 18–34, with two thirds of participants aged 19–21. The gender balance of the group was approximately 2.5 females to each male. Only one participating student was of a South Asian background (Tamil). 47 The film clips were taken from Dil Chatha Hai (2001), Supari (2001), Devdas (2002) and Boom (2003). 48 T Bennett, M Emmison & J Frow, Accounting for Tastes: Australian Everyday Cultures, Cambridge University Press, Melbourne, 1999. 49 In the context of discussing popular culture in Australia, Western culture would seem also to be a cipher for Anglophone, rather than European, culture. 50 For an examination of the appropriation of Hong Kong cinema by audiences in India, see S V Srinivas, ‘Hong Kong action film in the Indian B circuit’, InterAsia Cultural Studies, vol. 4, no. 1, 2003. 51 R Kaur, ‘Viewing the West through Bollywood: a celluloid Occident in the making’, Contemporary South Asia, vol. 11, no. 2, 2002. 52 C Voigt-Graf, ‘Indians at home in the Antipodes: migrating with PhDs, bytes or kava in their bags’, in B Parekh, G Singh & S Vertovec (eds), Culture and Economy in the Indian Diaspora, Routledge, London and New York, 2003. 53 L Fernandes, ‘Nationalizing “the global”: media images, cultural politics and the middle class in India’, Media, Culture and Society, vol. 22, 2000; R Dwyer, ‘“Indian values” and the diaspora: Yash Chopra’s films of the 1990s’, West Coast Line, Autumn 2000. 54 This is perhaps ironic, given that the appropriation of Middle Eastern music and dance traditions by Bombay cinema has made a major contribution to Indian film culture.

44

2

Cultural Encounters: The Use and Abuse of Bollywood in Australia Devika Goonewardene

Prologue My introduction to, and awareness of, Bollywood or Hindi cinema in Australia identifiably began with a film festival.1 In 2003, MG Distribution ran its first Indian Film Festival. Billed as an introduction to Bollywood, during the course of two weeks of viewing that began with Kabhi Kushi Kabhie Gham (2001) and ended with Saathiya (2002), I started to become acquainted with the music, stars and conventions of Bollywood cinema. Missing the closing night’s screening of Kal Ho Naa Ho (2003), led to my venturing out, finding and seeing it in a suburban, mainstream cinema. The iconic image of Shah Rukh Khan with tears in his eyes became emblematic of my first encounter with Bollywood. In the course of the last four years Bollywood has become seemingly ubiquitous in early twenty-first century metropolitan Australia. No longer are enthusiasts limited to seeking out the local Indian grocery and video store or keeping an eye out for an occasional showing at independent cinemas or festivals for their fix. Instead, Australian audiences enjoy a steady stream of the latest Bollywood films released 45


in mainstream city and suburban cinemas. Not only does this allow viewers to see the film in its intended form, on a cinema screen, but it also means that those who choose to can avail themselves of a public and communal, rather than a private, viewing experience. As cultural encounters go, newcomers not only come face to face with difference in the form of the film itself, but also in the context of the audience with which they view it. Going to the cinema becomes an occasion upon which to encounter both Australia and India in its multifacetedÂ€glory. Opportunities for furthering the interest do not stop with the films alone. Various aspects of Bollywood have permeated multiple Australian spaces. Bollywood actors, directors, singers and music directors can be seen and heard in person, or through the mediums of national newspapers and broadcast radio and television. Preity Zinta and Saif Ali Khan can be seen filming Salaam Namaste (2005) on the streets of Melbourne or you can watch Shah Rukh Khan shooting Chak De! India (2007) at the State Netball and Hockey Centre in Royal Park.2 Shilpa Shetty’s appearance on Australian breakfast television promoting Life in a...Metro (2007),3 an episode of Dancing with the Stars with a Bollywood component, where the contestants danced to a truncated combination of ‘Nimbooda’ and ‘Dola Re Dola’,4 Nikhil Advani and Rohan Sippy on ABC Radio’s The Deep End and SBS TV’s The Movie Show in November 2004, AR Rahman on ABC Radio’s AM program5 and Asha Bhosle on The Conversation Hour with Jon Faine,6 together with articles on Kabhi Alvida Naa Kehna (2006)7 and Lage Raho Munna Bhai (2006) 8 in the world news sections of The Age (Melbourne), all show that Bollywood is no longer relegated solely to ethnic media spaces and need not be actively sought out to be encountered. The extent to which Bollywood has become unavoidable to different constituencies of Australians in real, physical spaces is best exemplified by a short acknowledgement of some of the events that have taken place in the last few years. In theatres we have seen the Mumbai stage show, The Merchants of Bollywood; in concert halls and stadiums we have heard Asha Bhosle and AR Rahman; we have had exhibitions of Indian poster art at the National Gallery of Victoria and Jonathan Torgovnik’s photographs of Indians’ cinema-going activities at Melbourne’s Immigration Museum. The latter exhibition also hosted a series of short documentaries, called ‘How to Make a Bollywood Movie’, on the various elements that make up a Bollywood film.9 Melbourne’s hosting of the Commonwealth Games in 2006 meant that the city was steeped in myriad forms of cultural introductions 46

Cultural Encounters

to India. As far as Bollywood was concerned, this included Sunidhi Chauhan in free concert and Aishwarya Rai, Rani Mukherjee, Sonu Nigam and Saif Ali Khan’s performance in the closing ceremony. Saif Ali Khan’s appearance on the commemorative stamps marking the occasion captures, in a snapshot, Bollywood’s imprint on the Australian imagination at this particular time. While it is not as simple as it was with the celebration of Bollywood in the UK to claim that ‘brown has become the new black’ in Australia,10 it is none the less clear that something, or indeed, several kinds of ‘something’ are occurring. What precisely that is remains to be seen, but what can be done with it is a preoccupation of this chapter. All the events and occurrences mentioned thus far are public manifestations of Bollywood. On the face of it, they are activities and experiences that are open to all, taking place within the public sphere. One does not have to have any special kind of knowledge of India, its culture and history, to have access to these activities. Indeed the annual film festival, which began as an introduction to Bollywood, has since expanded to encompass Indian cinema more broadly while continuing to provide a point of entry to Australians by having a segment showcasing ‘Australia in Bollywood’. In his review of the first film festival in 2003, Australian film critic Adrian Martin applauded the purpose of the festival, commenting that ‘[a]t last someone has had the nerve to tell the movie-going public that there is something they don’t already know’.11 That this ignorance continues among the wider public is evident from a remark made by the director of the festival, Mitu Bhowmick Lange. Speaking of the 2006 festival, she said that ‘[o]nly when packaged as a festival do these movies reach a larger Australian audience. About seventy per cent of the people attending our festival are non-Indians’.12 The same sort of presumption seemed to operate with the stage show, The Merchants of Bollywood, where the performance I attended ended with a Bollywood dance tutorial for the audience, the assumption being that the audience needed such tutelage. Similar kinds of entry points are not always available or built into all the manifestations of Bollywood in Australia. On the one hand, the National Gallery of Victoria’s Cinema India: The Art of Bollywood exhibition was not just a transplantation of the original exhibition at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, but had an explicit connection to Australia in the form of a special section on Fearless Nadia, the Australian actress who was queen of the Indian stunt films of the 1930s and 1940s.13 On the other hand, Asha Bhosle’s concert with the Kronos Quartet was conducted in Hindi. To be fair to Bhosle, she did ask 47


the audience in what language they preferred her to proceed and the nature and composition of the audience became more than apparent when the call went out for Hindi. The evening was thus conducted in a mixture of Hindi and English as Bhosle kept up an engaging dialogue, between songs, with both the audience (in Hindi) and the Kronos Quartet (in English). That this could be seen as excluding and alienating to non-Hindi-speaking Australians is reflected in The Age’s review of the concert.14 It has also been read as evidence that such cultural occasions and the encounters they entail are specific to the Indian diaspora inÂ€Australia.15 This chapter seeks to examine the sorts of expressions of Bollywood that have materialised on the Australian landscape through the lens of cultural encounter. In speaking of the history of cultural encounters, Shiv Visvanathan has written that they ‘can never be read in single registers’.16 Instead, it is incumbent upon any commentator to map out the possibilities inherent in a cultural encounter and to be upfront in stating one’s own positionality in embarking upon such an enterprise in the first place. This paper has thus far provided, in microcosm, a map of the possibilities that this volume, as a whole, more fully explores. Empirical accounts of cultural encounters with Bollywood in many forms have been sketched out and some inkling given of the different types of participants engaged in each of those cultural encounters. I will be returning to some of these episodes to examine them in greater depth later. From here on I wish to engage in a more focused and delimited examination, from two specific vantages that are very much a product of my own political and academic position as a post-colonial, diasporic South Asian: that of migrant–citizen and teacher of Indian knowledges in the West. The rest of this chapter will be devoted to contextualising and setting up each of these positions and then seeing what possibilities each provides for different understandings and uses of Bollywood as they are manifested in an Australian landscape.17

The diaspora and the Australian everyday Bollywood films have long being acknowledged as a cultural resource for the Indian diaspora located in the West. A nostalgic reminder of a land left behind, it also serves as a means of educating successive generations born outside India about the customs and practices of the homeland. As the work of Vijay Mishra attests, Bollywood cinema occupies different cultural roles in the lives of the old Indian diaspora 48

Cultural Encounters

of nineteenth-century plantation labour compared with that of the post-1960s new Indian diaspora of late modern capital.18 Further bases for differentiation—generational, technological, linguistic, religious, social and cultural—affect both the demands placed on the concept and subject of diaspora and its critical application by cultural theorists. Mishra identifies idealistically positive usages, while Visvanathan indicates more problematic and deficient usages. Similar differentiation, based on the histories and conditions of migrations, also need to be considered when looking at a broader diaspora for whom Bollywood also appeals, that of other South Asians—Pakistanis, Sri Lankans, Bangladeshis and Nepalis. Suketu Mehta provides a most apt answer to the question: Who is a South Asian? Someone who watches Hindi movies. Someone whose being fills up with pleasure when he or she hears ‘Mere sapno ki rani’ or ‘Kuch kuch hota hai’. Here is our national language; here is our common song.19

We need to marry Mehta’s assertion to Javed Akhtar’s characterisation of Hindi cinema to begin to understand its capacity to bring South Asians together. It is worth quoting Akhtar at length on this point: We have many states in this country, all of them are Indian states, but each has its different culture, tradition and style…There is one more state is this country, and that is Hindi cinema. And so Hindi cinema also has its own culture…Hindi cinema’s culture is quite different from Indian culture, but it’s not alien to us, we understand it…As a matter of fact, Hindi cinema is our closest neighbour. It has its own world, its own traditions, its own symbols, its own expressions, its own language, and those who are familiar with it understand it.20

Both Bollywood’s particular and expansive capacities are referred to here, it is of India but not only India, it is its own state, with its own language of song which can be heard all over the subcontinent. One might almost say that it is indicative of a broader Indian civilisation, which overlaps with and is in the service of, but is simultaneously distinctive from and less restrictive than, the culture of the Indian state. The Indian nation is a central preoccupation of Hindi films, yet at the same time it spreads like an umbrella to cover the entire subcontinent, while also embedding itself in South Asian society and, particularly through song, becoming an intrinsic part of South Asian life. 49


As a Sri Lankan-born Australian, I count myself among those who identify Bollywood movies as a way of connecting with an imagined homeland that encompasses not just the nation of Sri Lanka, but the South Asian subcontinent as a whole. For me, Hindi film music, in particular, has held together and created an emotional thread that connects the geographies of Galle, Dhaka and Calcutta. While there is a recognition that Sri Lanka is subsumed within a greater entity, one which can be seen positively as that of South Asia or negatively and reductively as the location of a secondary form of non-resident status,21 Bollywood does, nonetheless, figure in the popular imagination of Sri Lankans both at home and abroad. Examples of its ability to create a sense of community and belonging in Sri Lankans in Australia can be gathered by reading accounts of personal experience in both newspaper articles and academic work utilising ethnography.22 While the Sri Lankan diaspora in Australia is divided by both ethnic difference—the issue of Sinhalese, Tamil and Burgher descent—and class difference, with the separatist politics that has engulfed the homeland bleeding into and making unviable a sense of a culturally homogenous Sri Lankanness, Bollywood can provide a sense of community, ‘comfort and a collective expression of hope’23 where Sri Lankan culture can not. A more complicated rendering of its place in Sri Lanka itself can be garnered from looking at the reception received by Shah Rukh Khan and his Temptations concert entourage in Colombo in December 2004. The extent to which that concert became embroiled in the cultural and political turmoil that is the Sri Lankan domestic situation—resulting in a bomb being thrown at the performers—is a point that is important to note, but unpacking the cultural politics embedded there would take us far from Bollywood in Australia. There is, however, one way in which the Sri Lankan example does serve as a way of appreciating Australia comparatively and demonstrating how Australia is more accommodating of certain kinds of cultural encounter with Bollywood and India. I am referring here to Bollywood concerts and the Hindi film music at the Diwali celebrations in Federation Square in 2006. Although multiculturalism has been an official part of government policy for some time, there was a definite sense under the government of former Prime Minister John Howard of an erosion of support for it in the political culture and institutions of Australia. In a post–September 11 world in particular, the culture wars in Australia have seen various groups and figures—such as the Aborigine, the refugee and, most pointedly, the Muslim—treated with various degrees of derision, fear and suspicion.24 The focus on 50

Cultural Encounters

Australian identity and Australian values in recent months has not only been the concern of politicians and cultural commentators, but also of those who would be put in the position of having to prove their Australianness by passing the newly instated citizenship test. It is within such an environment that one becomes aware of how extraordinary it was to hear ‘Subhan Allah’ (the refrain from the song, ‘Chand Sifarish’ in Fanaa) sung by the crowd gathered in Federation Square to see and hear the performances celebrating Diwali. On the one hand this was far from a political act, it was simply the singing of a song from one of the year’s popular films and it was only one of many songs to feature in the Bollywood section of the musical performance taking place. However, to hear the words that praise Allah out in the open, sung in joy, by a crowd of Australians of all kinds, without having to fear repercussions of any sort, was quite a heady experience. It was a moment in which being inextricably and unabashedly both South Asian and Australian in a public, communal space was not only possible, but it actuallyÂ€occurred. This was not the first time I had had such an experience, where what it was to be Australian crystallised because of, and explicitly through, Bollywood. The first was AR Rahman’s Third Dimension Concert at the Rod Laver Arena on 10 September 2005. Rahman finished a fourhour concert with ‘Vande Mataram’. He was surrounded by unfurled Indian flags and the 9000-strong audience of men, women and children stood and joined him in singing one of India’s most famous national songs. ‘Vande Mataram’ is a salute to the motherland and has quite a chequered history as a political slogan in India. Beginning life as a poem by Bankim Chandra Chatterjee, which he included in his 1881 novel, Anandamath, ‘Vande Mataram’ was used in the nationalist struggle for Indian independence, considered a Hindu communalist cry after 1947 and associated with the sound of bomb blasts in the 1990s.25 Rahman’s version of it was launched to great acclaim in 1997. The song has also had the same variations in meaning when used in Hindi films. An explicitly diasporic appropriation is also evident, as in the use of the song to signal an Indian character’s arrival in London—with the entire song being picturised on London—in Karan Johar’s Kabhi Kushi Kabhie Gham. Like the overtly Muslim example described before, this Hindu example, when performed in front of and adopted by a South Asian and Australian audience, had none of the exclusivist overtones it could have had, nor did it come across as a precursor to violence. On the contrary, the review of this concert that appeared in the mainstream press was titled ‘Exotic Bollywood Wins a New Fan’;26 51


and, somewhat paradoxically, it engendered a keen sense of comfort with, and belonging to, Australia—not India or the subcontinent—in this already existing fan. The more recent presence of not just Bollywood in Australia but also Australian people, landscapes, locations and metropolitan structures in Bollywood movies further illustrates the ways in which Bollywood enables the bridging of the imagined ancestral homeland to the new migrant homeland of Australia. Manu Madan captures exactly what I am trying to convey here in an article published long before the most recent efflorescence of Bollywood in Australia. Madan has the following to say: Bollywood’s interest in Australia has made the diaspora take note of the specifications of their location (city, landscape, culture) and become conscious of both the Australian nuances that inform their identity and the diasporic aspect of their Indian identity.27

Salaam Namaste and Chak De! India both showcase a range of Melbourne localities that are a part of the everyday life of Melburnians. Whether it be studying at La Trobe University, shopping at Southgate or Bourke Street, or meeting at Federation Square, these films show South Asians visibly in these very iconic, yet mundane, Australian spaces. Whilst there has been some merriment over the conflation of distances between locations and inaccuracies like Preity Zinta’s Ambar studying medicine at a university that does not have a Faculty of Medicine, the broader picture is one of South Asians at work and play in a Bollywoodised re-imagining of Melbourne. In much the same way as the TV soap Neighbours functions as an Anglo-Saxon fantasy of the Australian neighbourhood, Salaam Namaste performs a similar imaginative task for the South Asian populace resident in Melbourne, the only exception being that the imagining, through the sensibilities of Hindi cinema, works as an act of translation and incorporation of Australia into an Indian imagination that is accessible to all who give themselves over to the Bollywood movie. For migrants who might feel alienated from Australian metropolitan spaces, the affective charge of Salaam Namaste is such that it provides an opportunity of both seeing and experiencing such spaces anew. Unlike Salaam Namaste, which is intimately caught up in the Australian metropolitan landscape, Chak De! India uses Australia as a backdrop to a story that is very much about the forging of modern team India. A documentary of Greg Chappell coaching the Indian 52

Cultural Encounters

cricket team for the 2007 World Cup, Guru Greg, provides a fascinating Australian parallel to the task faced by Shah Rukh Khan’s Kabir Khan in Chak De! India.28 Guru Greg makes it very clear that the strategy Chappell was unsuccessfully trying to implement with the Indian cricket team is the same that Kabir Khan pursues for the Indian women’s hockey team in Chak De! India: overcoming tradition and cultural hierarchy to fashion a winning team. The crucial difference lies in the relationship of the coach to the team: Chappell’s foreign outsider compared with Khan as the representative of India’s internal other, the figure of the Muslim. Positioning Khan from the beginning as a disgraced traitor, having to contend with a neglected and disparaged sport—women’s hockey—sees Jaideep Sahni’s adaptation of the sports underdog movie into the Indian context circumventing many hurdles. The resulting narrative sees India’s internal other strike victorious blows for Muslims, women and the sport of hockey in India. Using the context of a competitive sport, played between nations, Chak De! India, like Lagaan (2001) before it, uses the form to reflect on broader processes of nationalism and the constitution of Indian selfhood, with Australia, ultimately, being incidental to the process.

From India to the international The Academy Award-nominated Lagaan has been instrumental in bringing a greater international prominence to Bollywood. ‘International’ in this context is very much understood as broadly Western and, more specifically, American, recognition of Hindi cinema. It is more common in the academic literature—whether this be in film or cultural studies—to speak of the spread of Bollywood in terms of globalisation and transnationalism rather than internationalisation, so my choice of ‘international’ requires some explanation. Up till now I have looked at cultural engagement on a very specific and grounded personal level. The shift to looking at cultural engagement on a national level—in sum, the difference between Chak De! India and Salaam Namaste—is brought about not just by these two particular films, but also by another aspect of my own identity as a diasporic South Asian and the way in which the latter is informed by, and explicable through, South Asian cultural studies. While the first part of this paper has been about looking inwards towards Australia through the Hindi film, the second is about looking outwards, to the wider world from Hindi films as they are viewed in Australia. This pedagogical possibility 53


of learning about India through Bollywood, or using Bollywood to teach others about India or India’s relations with other countries, is a position that Visvanathan has identified as one that the children of the diaspora in particular are susceptible to and prone to: orientalism.29 At a very fundamental level, orientalism refers to myriad ways of studying and representing the non-Western world and, since Edward Said’s seminal publication on the subject in Orientalism, the term has become a pejorative one, referring to the manner in which Western protocols of knowledge-production create a ‘positional superiority’ of a moral, cultural and political kind over non-Western peoples and countries.30 This is as applicable to the field of cinema as it is to other forms of cultural representation. One of the marks of the subalternity, or subordination, of Bollywood to Hollywood is in the very naming of the former in terms of the latter. As Shah Rukh Khan wryly commented in Nasreen Munni Kabir’s documentary, The Inner World of Shah Rukh Khan: we are the only surviving film industry to Hollywood and that’s why I don’t like the term Bollywood. If you are the only survivor to Goliath, it is nicer to be called David instead of ‘Boliath’.31

A secondary mark of the lesser status of Bollywood lies in the cultural asymmetry of ignorance32 wherein Bollywood stars have to be described in terms of their Western counterparts to audiences who are unfamiliar with them. Thus the programme for the first Indian film festival in Australia referred to Amitabh Bachchan as India’s Sean Connery and Shah Rukh Khan as India’s Tom Cruise. The only Indian actor who has escaped this form of comparison is Aishwarya Rai and that, ironically, is because she obtained the approbation of Julia Roberts as ‘the most beautiful woman in the world’. The extent to which the second sort of subalternity is slowly being overcome is reflected in America by the appearances of reviews, features and economic analyses of Hindi films in the American press and in magazines like Film Comment and National Geographic. Although the extent of coverage of Bollywood in the Australian media has been described positively in the earlier parts of this paper, as far as critical appreciation of the films and their forms themselves are concerned, we have only progressed a little beyond an early state described by Martin as ‘casual racism’. The entire quote, of which Martin’s incendiary accusation is a part, needs to be shown to see that he identifies an axiomatic criticism, which anyone trying to write of Hindi cinema needs to contend with: 54

Cultural Encounters

[c]ritics who dismiss these films as artificial, too long, too thinly plotted or just plain silly often betray a casually racist insensitivity towards any cultural form that deviates even slightly from the dominant, American norm.33

One way of dealing with this—mentioned previously for performances of Bollywood dance, but also applying to film reviews—is tutelage. A single example that comes to mind is Kylie Boltin’s review of one of the first films to appear in Melbourne’s multiplex cinemas, Saathiya. Boltin provides information that ranges from the contextual and cultural to plot, family connections and gossip in an attempt to account for all the elements and factors which ‘add to the film’s total text for the indigenous crowds’ perception and reading of the film’.34 She demonstrates a point, noted by Mishra, that there is a lot of cultural knowledge of different kinds needed to understand and appreciate the films themselves and what they mean to the audiences who watch them. The recent plethora of critical studies on Bollywood could be used to argue that the sort of situation Martin describes no longer exists in the academic sphere, at least. Such a view is not borne out by reading MK Raghavendra’s entry for Bollywood in The Future of Knowledge & Culture: A Dictionary for the 21st Century, where Bollywood’s disavowal of the realist aesthetic haunts the entire definition provided.35 This could be attributed to the eurocentricity that has been said to pervade film and cultural studies, a eurocentricity that is shared by both Indian and non-Indian critics alike. We have a possible corrective to this in the form of post-colonial studies, which takes the experiences, knowledges and cultures of the colonised as its main point of reference. India, in particular, has been a central archive for post-colonial studies, with the work of a group of historians, known as Subaltern Studies, providing a theoretical linchpin that is so central to the field that, ironically, it has risen to prominence on the basis of the subaltern and subalternity, on the oppressed and the subordinated. Bollywood and Subaltern Studies have visibly come together in a recent spate of films starring Aamir Khan: Lagaan, Mangal Pandey: The Rising (2005) and Rang De Basanti (2006). All three tell particular stories about the past, present and future of the Indian nation and Indian nationalism. At the heart of early Subaltern Studies lies the question of how to understand Indian nationalism, particularly the failure of the Indian nation to come into its own according to the terms of Western historiographical approaches to nationalism.36 To one charged with the task of teaching Subaltern Studies in a post-colonial, 55


international politics context, and continuing in a pedagogical vein that already seems to run within other Australian cultural encounters with Bollywood, I attempted to teach Subaltern Studies to Australian students through reference to Hindi films. Apart from the congruencies already mentioned, a driving imperative was to use a form, that of film, to which students were more receptive and with which they felt more competent than theoretical texts, post-colonial theory, in particular, having a reputation among students for being impenetrably dense. Another was an attempt to take Cynthia Weber’s sense of the everyday pedagogical and her use of American popular films to demystify international relations theory and see if the same could work through Hindi cinema for post-colonial studies.37 Unlike other pedagogical uses of Bollywood,38 it is central to note that I was not teaching either a film studies course or a South Asian cultural studies course. Instead I was teaching politics, particularly international relations, which has acquired an interdisciplinary bag of tricks that includes films and cultural studies but has yet to venture into either Hindi films or South Asian cultural studies, let alone pass judgement on the acceptability or legitimacy of either as sources of the international. The set-up alone should indicate some of the pitfalls to which I was prey and the multiple acts of cross-cultural translation and interdisciplinary engagement that needed to occur to make this exercise work. Cultural competency in understanding the conventions of Hindi cinema, particularly the functions and meanings of song picturisations, is not something that can be taught in a lecture and two tutorials. The development of subaltern consciousness, of turning the colonised into historical and political subject-agents, the failure of the subaltern in the very moment that their resistance comes to active fruition, the victory of the subaltern through mythical intervention, the place of violence in the struggles of the oppressed are all elements of subalternity illustrated in Lagaan, Mangal Pandey: The Rising and Rang De Basanti. The danger that subalternity is associated with impossibility and loss was countered by Hindi film examples of Lage Raho Munna Bhai—where audiences learn of Gandhi and Gandhian solutions along with the chief protagonist, Munna (Sanjay Dutt)—and Swades (2004)—where the place of tradition and modernity was negotiated in the song, ‘Pal Pal Hai Bhari’ and our hero, Mohan (Shah Rukh Khan), speaks of what he might gain, not lose, by going back to India. Finally the title song from Phir Bhi Dhil Hai Hindustani (2000) was used to show that Indians, for all the good and ill that they stereotypically represent, prefer to dream their own dreams instead of taking on those of the dominant global culture. 56

Cultural Encounters

The danger in this inventory of meanings is precisely that they were laid down upon students who were not left to decipher the text for themselves in the first instance. This did not affect students who already had an interest or acquaintance with Hindi cinema, who understood the conventions of the form and already knew how to go about reading them. Such students were able to jump into the fray and engage with the content of the film and the ways in which it represented historical processes—for example, British colonialism in India under the East India Company in Mangal Pandey: The Rising—or the manner in which larger themes and issues which they were studying in the course were handled in light of the theoretical material on each subject. Two examples that students wrote of were the development debates as viewed through Swades and cultural difference and neoliberalism as it is manifested in, and affects, Hindi cinema. At the other end of the spectrum of student responses were those who were willing to subject themselves to the experience of a Bollywood film but not inclined to take it further. These students would report back on the strangeness of the narrative and the difficulties in making sense of the proceedings. An example of the latter is a student who went to see Fanaa (2006) and was too caught up in a sense of aesthetic dissonance to register anything else about the film. It is worth making a few comparative notes on the reception of American popular films and diasporic South Asian films by my students. Reactions to the former were closely tied to the particular arguments being made in relation to each film in course texts.39 Students’ familiarity with the films did help them understand the theories being presented and critiqued in only some instances. A common reaction was the students’ scepticism towards the value of films and cultural studies to the study of international politics. Diasporic South Asian films fared a little better, partly as a consequence of actual screenings of Deepa Mehta’s Earth (1998) in classes, but also due to the heavy focus on the Partition of India and the study of communal violence in the course. Mehta’s Fire (1997) was also a regular source of interest to students and often the subject of intense discussion. Issues of accessibility of understanding did not arise with Mehta’s films in the same way that they did with Hindi films. Ultimately, however, while a great deal remains to be learnt by both teacher and student on the best ways of communicating and apprehending culturally different cinemas like that of Bollywood or the South Asian diaspora, nothing about the experiences I have discussed would lead me to agree with Mitsuhiro Yoshimoto’s view that: 57


[the] fundamental imperialism of the self/Other dichotomy can never be corrected by the hermeneutics of the Other or cross-cultural exchange; on the contrary the latter reinforces the imperialist logic under the guise of liberal humanism, or what Spivak calls ‘neocolonial anticolonialism’.40

On the contrary, I have found, along with Sheila J Nayar, that there is, indeed, much to be said for ‘“righting” such imperialist wrongs’41 through the politics of the classroom. If we accept Sudipta Kaviraj’s view that a ‘central ideological strand’ of popular films of the 1950s ‘was the deployment through stories of the twin principles of political and social equality that we have associated with democracy, 42 then there is a certain satisfaction in trying to rekindle that strand and apply it as a register in a much wider context than originally envisaged.

Conclusion This paper has had two objectives. By picking two specific positions, both of which have arisen from my particular identity as a diasporic South Asian in Australia, I have tried to show productive ways in which Bollywood movies can be engaged with, and function in, Australia. In the first instance, empirical accounts of specific cultural engagements with Bollywood in its different manifestations have been recounted to show how Bollywood can be used to fashion a social and cultural identity that allows a migrant to feel ‘at home’ in an Australian space through that space’s incorporation in Hindi films. This is what Madan has usefully described as the ‘diasporic compulsion to glance back towards the homeland…not out of a desire to return, but [out of ] a desire for acceptance’.43 Madan speaks here of the migrant Indian’s Australianness in the Indian imagination, but the process I have described is more of a reflecting back on what it is to be Australian, a giving content to a multilayered sense of the multicultural Australian self through Bollywood’s representation of Indians in Australian spaces.44 The second objective has been to document how Bollywood in all its manifestations in Australia—from dance and music performances to the cinema and lecture theatres—can and has been used in a way that brings Australians into an Indian imaginary. At a time when cultural, ethnic and religious difference is the object of international and domestic terrorism, there is much to be gained by putting the lessons of post-colonial studies and South Asian cultural studies to work, on 58

Cultural Encounters

the ground, at home and abroad, and Hindi cinema is one means of showing that there is a ground on which we can all meet peaceably. In the midst of the Australian values debate, it was on the steps of the State Netball and Hockey Centre, while watching Shah Rukh Khan and chatting to a fellow Australian, who was convinced that the values of Hindi films were more Australian than the divisive definitions provided by Australian politicians, that I realised that Bollywood had become part of the Australian imaginary, too. Unlike in Sri Lanka, where a bomb was thrown at a Bollywood concert during the song ‘Bole Chudiyan’, picturised in Kabhi Kushi Kabhie Gham as a dream sequence in which a family reconciles, in Australia, we can have ‘Subhan Allah’, ‘Vande Mataram’ and ‘Waltzing Matilda’ all coexisting. And while the final judgement on the uses and abuses of Bollywood in Australia is left to the reader, the lesson I took away from these experiences was that through cultural encounters with Hindi cinema came cultural coexistence in Australia. That is a badge of pride that can be worn by all Australians.45

Notes 1 Bollywood is the common term used to describe the popular cinema of India based in Mumbai (formerly Bombay) and yet it is widely reviled by those in the industry, who generally use the descriptor of Hindi cinema. Both terms will be used throughout this paper, keeping in mind that public discourse in Australia still seems to favour what is seen as the pejorative term. 2 A selection of the press coverage in Australia, including the publicity use made of it by Melbourne and the state of Victoria, can be found at the Bollywood Down Under website at ; and also at the Only Melbourne Guide at , viewed 11 December 2007. 3 Shilpa Shetty was interviewed by Richard Wilkins on Channel 9’s Today show on 3 May 2007. 4 This episode of Channel 7’s Dancing with the Stars was broadcast on 30 October 2007. 5 ABC Online, ‘Indian composer brings Bollywood to Lord of the Rings’, AM, 16 September 2005, a transcript of the programme can be found at , viewed 17 September 2005. 6 Asha Bhosle and Laurie Benson on The Conversation Hour with John Faine, 774 ABC Radio, 14 March 2007. An MP3 copy of this interview can be found at , viewed 11 December 2007. 7 A Dhillon, ‘The new Bollywood: a reel tale of love and adultery’, The Age (Melbourne), 12 August 2006, p. 17. 8 A Dhillon, ‘Carry on Gandhi brings forgotten hero back to life’, The Age (Melbourne), 23 September 2006, p. 19. 9 There were handouts accompanying the screenings, which were short summaries taken from NM Kabir, Bollywood: The Indian Cinema Story, Channel 4 Books, London, 2001. 10 K Aftab, ‘Brown: the new black! Bollywood in Britain’, Critical Quarterly, vol. 44, no. 3, October 2002, pp. 88–98.

59


11 A Martin, ‘Bollywood not just an exotic cliché’, The Age (Melbourne), 20 November 2003, p. A6. 12 A Arora, ‘India beyond Bollywood’, The Australian, 4 October 2006, , viewed 12 October 2006. 13 L Benson, ‘Hunterwali “The woman with the whip”: the Fearless Nadia story’, in DÂ€Patel, C Cains & L Benson, Cinema India: The Art of Bollywood, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, 2007, pp. 22–25. 14 J Nicholas, ‘Bollywood royalty adds spice to song’, The Age (Melbourne), 21 March 2007, , viewed 17 December 2007. 15 A Hassam, ‘Songs and dance and dresses’, Meanjin, vol. 66, no. 2, 2007, p. 60. 16 S Visvanathan, ‘Cultural encounters and the Orient: a study in the politics of knowledge’, Diogenes, vol. 50, no. 4, 2003, p. 69. 17 In this respect I have been particularly influenced by RK Dudrah, Bollywood: Sociology Goes to the Movies, Sage, New Delhi, 2006, see especially pp. 119–124. 18 V Mishra, Bollywood Cinema: Temples of Desire, Routledge, London and New York, 2002, pp. 235–241. 19 S Mehta, Maximum City: Bombay Lost and Found, Viking/Penguin, New Delhi, 2004, p.Â€379. 20 NM Kabir, Talking Films: Conversations on Hindi Cinema with Javed Akhtar, Oxford University Press, New Delhi, paperback edn, 2003, pp. 34–35. 21 In the movie, Pardes (1997), Indian characters who have moved to Sri Lanka have their non-resident Indian (NRI) status jokingly compared unfavourably to that of the hero, Arjun, his antagonist, Rajiv, and the latter’s family, all of whom have moved to the USA, a site of culturally superior non-resident Indianness. 22 A Athique, ‘Watching Indian movies in Australia: media, community and consumption’, South Asian Popular Culture, vol. 3, no. 2, October 2005, pp. 117–133. 23 A Chopra, King of Bollywood: Shah Rukh Khan and the Seductive World of Indian Cinema, Warner Books, New York, 2007, p. 8. 24 For an example of how this has affected Muslim Australians, see G Noble, ‘The discomfort of strangers: racism, incivility and ontological security in a relaxed and comfortable nation’, Journal of Intercultural Studies, vol. 26, no. 1, February–May 2005, pp.Â€107–120. 25 S Chakravorty, ‘If this be the last song’, West Coast Line, nos. 26 and 27, Fall–Winter, 1998–1999, pp. 74–80; and S Bhattacharya, Vande Mataram: The Biography of a Song, Penguin, New Delhi, 2003. 26 J Nicholas, ‘Exotic Bollywood wins a new fan’, The Age (Melbourne), 12 September 2005, p. 16. 27 M Madan, ‘Bollywood down under: imagining new neighbourhoods’, South Asia, vol.Â€23, Special Issue, 2000, p. 29. 28 D Enker, ‘Going in to bat for the subcontinent’, The Age (Melbourne), Green Guide, 22Â€November 2007, p. 8. 29 Visvanathan, ‘Cultural encounters’, pp. 71–72. 30 E Said, Orientalism, Penguin, Harmondsworth, 1991, pp. 7 & 12. 31 The Inner World of Shah Rukh Khan, written and directed by NM Kabir, Channel 4, UK and EROS International, 2005. 32 The notion is Dipesh Chakrabarty’s and the context is the subalternity of Indian literature, culture and history to that of the West, especially that of Indian history to Western historiography, in D Chakrabarty, ‘Post-coloniality and the artifice of history: who speaks for “Indian” pasts?’, Representations, vol. 37, Winter 1992, p. 2. 33 Martin, ‘Bollywood’, p. A6. 34 K Boltin, ‘Saathiya: South Asian cinema otherwise known as “Bollywood”’, Metro Magazine, no. 136, 2002, p. 54.

60

Cultural Encounters

35 MK Raghavendra, ‘Bollywood’ in V Lal & A Nandy (eds), The Future of Knowledge & Culture: A Dictionary for the 21st Century, Penguin/Viking, New Delhi, 2005, pp. 14–19. 36 Chakrabarty, ‘Post-coloniality’, p. 5. 37 C Weber, ‘IR: the resurrection or new frontiers of incorporation’, European Journal of International Relations, vol. 5, no. 4, 1999, pp. 435–450. 38 Two examples: AS Rai, ‘Bollywood through pedagogy of crisis’, Humanscape, vol. X, issue VIII, August 2003, , viewed 28 June 2004; and SJ Nayar, ‘Dis-orientalizing Bollywood: incorporating Indian popular cinema into a survey film course’, New Review of Film and Television Studies, vol. 3, no. 1, May 2005, pp. 59–74. 39 Elaboration on the American examples would take me away from Bollywood; instead, I will say that the main texts used were: Weber, ‘IR’; and T Barkawi, ‘Globalisation, culture, and war: on the popular mediation of “small wars”’, Cultural Critique, vol. 58, Fall 2004, pp. 115–147. 40 M Yoshimoto, ‘The difficulty of being radical: the discipline of film studies and the postcolonial world order’, Boundary 2, vol. 18, no. 3, 1991 p. 257 as cited by Nayar, ‘Dis-orientalizing Bollywood’, p. 69. 41 Nayar, ‘Dis-orientalizing Bollywood’, p. 69. 42 S Kaviraj, ‘The culture of representative democracy’, in NG Jayal (ed.), Democracy in India, Oxford University Press, New Delhi, 2001, p. 233. 43 Madan, ‘Bollywood down under’, pp. 29–30. 44 The view of multiculturalism used here is Ashis Nandy’s: ‘[e]ven the idea of multiculturalism may have to be re-thought. For it should invoke not an inventory of cultures but a multilayered self, constantly in dialogue with others, conceptualised not as distant strangers but as alien fragments of the self.’ A Nandy, ‘Violence and creativity in the late twentieth century: Rabindranath Tagore and the problem of testimony’ in A Nandy, Time Warps: Silent and Evasive Pasts in Indian Politics and Religion, Hurst & Co., London, 2002, pp. 222–223. The application to Australia is mine. 45 G Bhattacharyya, ‘South Asian cultural studies—lessons from back home?’, South Asian Popular Culture, vol. 1, no. 1, 2003, p. 3.

61

3

Salaam Namaste, Melbourne and Cosmopolitanism Andrew Hassam

Australian film, tourism and trade commissions share with their global competitors a desire to attract Bollywood overseas filming. The USA and UK have an overwhelming advantage in attracting Indian filmmakers because of the range of iconic backdrops they can offer, but they do not have control of the market and despite the lure of New York and London, Indian producers have been tempted by other global cities. Toronto, like Sydney, has appeared frequently since the mid 1990s and, more recently, Singapore and Bangkok have both attracted a number of productions. The demand by Indian audiences for fresh locations means that producers are always searching for new settings, such as Budapest in Hum Dil De Chuke Sanam (1999), Greece in Chalte Chalte (2003) and St Petersburg in Lucky: No Time for Love (2005). Salaam Namaste (2005) has been hailed as ‘the first Indian film to be fully shot in Australia’,1 a misleading claim since, while location filming was carried out in Australia, studio filming and post-production took place in India, as they almost invariably do. Nevertheless, Salaam Namaste, like Stanley Kramer’s On the Beach (1959), which made similar use of Melbourne locations, was a significant international production. 63


It was produced by a major India film company, Yash Raj films, it featured two international stars, Preity Zinta and Saif Ali Khan, and it had a reported A$3.3 million budget,2 a large budget for an Indian film. The box office income exceeded that of Dil Chahta Hai, part of which was shot in Sydney and which also starred Preity Zinta. Overall, this was a valuable coup for Melbourne in the global market to provide offshore Bollywood locations. In this chapter, I will use Salaam Namaste to explore how Australian film, tourism and trade commissions have attempted to persuade Indian film-makers to use Australia as a location. A key aspect of pitching Melbourne to Indian producers is the presentation of an image of Melbourne, both visual and conceptual, and federal, state and territory governments have put considerable resources into market research and the creation of a destination ‘brand’ that will attract business investment and visitors. In thinking about Salaam Namaste, therefore, we need to think about what the Indian producers were looking for in choosing a film location and how far the world of Bollywood matches the ‘Brand Melbourne’ that was being pitched to them. In addition, we need to consider not only the image of Australia projected by Bollywood, but also what alternative images are being excluded. One way to attempt this is to look at the characters in the film, who are on the margins of the Bollywood world that the film creates. A Melbourne Indian taxi driver plays a key role in the film’s resolution, and in the second half of this chapter I consider the relationships between Melbourne’s South Asian taxi drivers, the recruitment of Indian international students and the depiction of Melbourne in SalaamÂ€Namaste.

The role of Australian film, tourism and trade commissions in attracting Bollywood productions For Indian producers, the decision to film overseas involves a different range of factors to those facing Australian producers. The difficulties of raising film finance mean that Australian producers can contemplate overseas filming only when a specific location is demanded by the story and when there are no alternatives. The London scenes in Hotel Sorrento (1994) were filmed in Melbourne, and while Australia fights its wars overseas, it makes its war movies at home: South Australia doubled as South Africa in ‘Breaker’ Morant (1979), as Turkey in Gallipoli (1981) and as Palestine in The Lighthorsemen (1987); and Queensland was 64

Salaam Namaste, Melbourne and Cosmopolitanism

substituted for Vietnam in The Odd Angry Shot (1979), Indonesia in Blood Oath (1990) and New Guinea in Kokoda (2006). In contrast, Indian film producers have more opportunity to film overseas. The liberalisation of the Indian economy, irreversible after India accepted assistance from the International Monetary Fund in 1991, made possible the revival of big-budget spectaculars in the 1990s and an increase in overseas filming. In addition, there are financial advantages which help make overseas filming economically attractive, despite the increased travel costs and the need for travel visas and foreign currency; Cynthia Karena records being told by an Indian art director ‘that it was cheaper to shoot a film overseas than in India, as the stars of the film are “captured” on site. Apparently in Mumbai they don’t always turn up if they have something else on’.3 That ‘something else’ might be a TV commercial or another film, and as Anupama Chopra notes: ‘Actors work on more than one film at a time, and cannot be available for three months at a stretch’.4 Once the actors have left India, however, the producer is more able to rely on them working on the production fulltime, with less risk of overruns in schedules and delays in production. Stars can film on location overseas without being mobbed by crowds of fans, as they would be in India, with the associated stoppages and security costs. And location fees, for filming in an airport or hotel, for example, can be lower than in India. So, while filming overseas entails additional costs, there are also production efficiencies and cost savings. Cost savings, however, are not the main reason for filming overseas, especially where the song sequence shot in an exotic location is likely to be the most lavish and expensive part of the film. As the overseas location is seen as a key ingredient in a film’s success, with distributors willing to pay more for a film if an overseas location is used,5 the major question is not so much whether to film overseas as where to film overseas. Because fantasy song sequences break continuity of space, Indian producers can be extremely flexible in deciding where to film them. And because the storyline itself is highly formulaic in its narrative features, if not necessarily in how they are combined, the choice of overseas location for the action is secondary to the storyline itself. It is hard to imagine Gurinder Chadha’s Bhaji on the Beach (1993) not set in England, or Mira Nair’s Mississippi Masala (1992) not shot in the southern USA; but, unlike art-house films made by members of the Indian diaspora, popular Indian cinema rarely engages with specific overseas locales and may be set with equal validity in Australia, Canada or South Africa. The decision about where to film is more likely to result from the potential of the location in terms of the film’s financial 65


success than in terms of its artistic success, and Indian film-makers enjoy the flexibility of shooting in a choice of locations in order to take advantage of market trends.

Film commissions Australian state film commissions, such as Film Victoria and the New South Wales Film and Television Office (NSWFTO), offer cash production incentives to overseas film-makers to persuade them to film in Australia. However, to qualify for the incentives, film companies need to spend a minimum amount in Australia, A$3.5 million in the case of Film Victoria and A$5 million in the case of the NSWFTO, and this is more than Indian productions generally spend, which is in the region of A$1 million.6 Salaam Namaste’s reported budget of A$3.3 million (US$2.5 million) was large by Indian standards,7 but that was still not enough to qualify for state film production incentives. And it was nowhere near the size of spend required to qualify for the Australian Federal Government Location Rebate, for which qualifying productions need to have a minimum Australian expenditure of A$15Â€million. Film Victoria was unable to support Salaam Namaste through its production incentive scheme and instead referred the producers to the state tourism commission, Tourism Victoria.8 The film commissions are able to provide advice and some assistance in scouting locations; and filming in Victoria outside Melbourne, such as on the Great Ocean Road, may qualify overseas productions for support from Film Victoria’s Regional Victoria Film Location Assistance Fund. Understandably, the film commissions put most of their effort into attracting big budget US productions, with budgets ranging from A$30 million to A$100 million or more; Ghost Rider (2007), which filmed in and around Melbourne, had an estimated budget of A$119 million (US$110).9 The commissions are charged with promoting local film production but, compared with US production, Indian production contributes very little to the Australian film industry. Even where the film is set in Australia, as in Salaam Namaste, studio filming and post-production (such as film, sound and digital editing) takes place in India. Indian productions will use local production management and some local technicians, equipment hire, security and catering, but the contribution to the local film industry is modest. On the other hand, even such modest contributions are welcomed by a film industry financially dependent for its existence on overseas film-makers and the film 66


commissions are keen to maintain links with the major Bollywood production companies. However, film commissions are required to maximise returns on their limited resources and, on the whole, they do not view Indian films, or even Bollywood, as a major contributor to the Australian film industry, either now or in the future.

Tourism commissions Yash Chopra, whose son, Aditya Chopra, produced Salaam Namaste for the Chopra family production house, Yash Raj Films, has spoken of the ways in which overseas governments have been approaching Indian film-makers: The tourism departments show you around, recommend good locations, and are very enterprising when it comes to providing infrastructure for the shoot. They help with everything right from cooking and cleaning facilities to arranging for dollies and cranes. If I had to shoot in India, I would have to lug all that heavy equipment when I went location hunting or on a shoot. So shooting abroad works out much easier.10

State tourism commissions see more potential in Indian films than the film commissions and Tourism Victoria contributed A$10,000 to Salaam Namaste because they viewed the film as a way of pushing their ‘brand strengths’ in India. To say that A$10,000 was a modest contribution to a film with a A$3.3 million budget would be an understatement, though Tourism Victoria also provided in-kind assistance with location permits, which for outsiders can be difficult to obtain. Salaam Namaste features many locations in and around Melbourne, such as Federation Square, the Victoria Market and La Trobe University, though in the event the most iconic Melbourne location for the Indian market, the Melbourne Cricket Ground, proved too expensive to use.11 The filmmakers, to whom the cash and in-kind contributions are offered, have already decided to film overseas and the modest assistance provided by Australian tourism commissions can, in this way, make a difference between filming in Melbourne or in, for example, Toronto or Cape Town. Since filming overseas is likely to be the most expensive part of Indian film production, the comparative cost of different locations is not the prime factor in deciding where to shoot 12 and Siddharth Raj Anand, the director of Salaam Namaste, had reportedly been preparing to film in either San Francisco or Vancouver.13 67


Tourism Australia, the Australian federal tourism commission, has reported that ‘Over the decade from 1997 to 2006, the annual average growth rate for visitors from India was 16%’.14 The total for visitors from India in 2006 was 83,783, an increase of twenty-three per cent over 2005.15 The figures, however, are modest when compared with the 308,500 visitors from China in 2006, even if the percentage increase from China was only eight per cent and India is categorised as an emerging market rather than a key market. As a result, there are only limited resources available for promoting Australia as a tourist destination in India, making collaboration with Indian film and television producers a cost-effective way of showcasing Australia.16 Salaam Namaste opens with a sweeping panorama of Melbourne’s CBD overlaid with the caption ‘Melbourne | Australia’ and identification with Melbourne is reinforced here and throughout the film by the refrain on the radio, ‘Good morning Melbourne’. The box office success of Dil Chahta Hai and Salaam Namaste demonstrated how useful Bollywood films could be in promoting Australia in India and among the Indian diaspora in the UK and the USA. In addition, both Dil Chahta Hai and Salaam Namaste have been used by Tourism Australia to showcase Australia in India.17 Melbourne’s success with Salaam Namaste is the kind of success that the South Australian Government will be hoping for with their recent support of Love Story 2050 (2008) which filmed mainly in Adelaide and regional South Australia. The film was apparently planned to be filmed in Scotland, but the production was attracted to South Australia by a reported ‘$150,000 cash grant and a number of incentives such as assistance with road closures’.18 The South Australian Government insisted on Adelaide and other tourist destinations, such as Kangaroo Island, being identified by name within the film19 and a press release by the Premier, Mike Rann, was, not surprisingly, upbeat about the film’s potential to promote South Australia within India: ‘Placement of our state in mainstream entertainment, such as this movie, is a great way of increasing our profile among an increasingly affluent and mobile audience of many millions of people’.20

Australian Trade Commission While Premier Mike Rann is hoping that increasing South Australia’s profile ‘among an increasingly affluent and mobile audience of many millions of people’ will benefit tourism, he will also be hoping that 68


sponsoring Indian film-making will benefit other types of trade with India: ‘South Australia’s relationship with India is increasingly important—trade between us is growing and there is an increasing awareness of Adelaide as an education destination’.21 Tourism is linked to trade, particularly in the case of India, and those Indian middle-class business men and women tempted to travel to Australia for a holiday or to visit family and friends may well return to India with ideas for developing business links with Australia.22 Holidaying in Australia may also lead to their children studying for a postgraduate qualification in an Australian university; or if they already have children studying in Australia, they may visit Australia for a holiday. Both main characters in Salaam Namaste travelled to Australia to study, Ambar (Preity Zinta) as an exchange student and Nick (Saif Ali Khan) to study architecture. India’s strong and growing economy is immensely attractive to Australia in terms of trade. While on a Trade Mission to India in March 2006, Australia’s former Prime Minister, John Howard, made time in a tight schedule to take a photo opportunity with Yash Chopra and to meet some of the cast and crew of Salaam Namaste:

Figure 3: Mr Yash Chopra with former Australian Prime Minister John Howard, 2006. Image courtesy Yash Raj Films Pvt. Ltd.

69


Austrade [Australian Trade Commission] officials in Mumbai—India’s film capital—are working hard to promote Australia as a film location. On a four-day visit to boost trade with India, Prime Minister John Howard met some of the cast and crew of the hit musical [Salaam Namaste]. Despite previously confessing to a soft spot for British crime drama Midsomer Murders, Mr Howard showed himself to be a man of varied tastes, proclaiming he and his wife, Janette, had ‘enjoyed immensely’ a viewing of the movie.23

John Howard was clearly persuaded by Austrade that associating himself with Bollywood was a good way of publicising his presence in India. Austrade officials also play a role in channelling Bollywood production towards Australia; both Dil Chahta Hai and Salaam Namaste acknowledge the assistance of Austrade in their credits. But the presence of Austrade officials demonstrated, not so much an Australian prime minister’s interest in cinema, either Indian or Australian, as an interest in promoting tourism, education and trading links generally between Australia and India.

What images of Australia do film, tourism and trade commissions wish to promote? John Howard would not have agreed to be photographed with Yash Chopra holding a DVD copy of Salaam Namaste if the film had projected a view of Australia with which they were uncomfortable and any discussion of how Australian film, tourism and trade commissions have sought to showcase Australia through Bollywood needs to consider the image of Australia being showcased. Australian government commissions have no control over the ways in which Indian film-makers will project Australian locations, but the commissions need to feel confident that there is an overlap between what the film-makers are looking for and what the commissions regard as their brand strengths, those characteristics that they believe distinguish them from their competitors with regard to India. For example, in contributing $10,000 to Salaam Namaste, Tourism Victoria made sure that the film would feature destinations, such as the Twelve Apostles, likely to appeal to Indian tourists.24

70


Cosmopolitanism An article by Mark Phillips in The Age in 2005 described what the director of Salaam Namaste, Siddarth Anand, was looking for in choosing the overseas location for his film: Anand had been preparing to film Salaam Namaste in San Francisco when he visited Melbourne last year on the recommendation of a friend who had been one of eight up-and-coming directors invited to the Victorian capital for a Bollywood festival. Anand was blown away by the city’s architecture, variety of settings and clear light for filming. ‘They wanted a place that was very multicultural and cosmopolitan,’ says Mitu Bhowmick Lange, an expatriate Indian who is the film’s line producer.25

Judging from its language, the article was probably based on a Tourism Victoria press release. Tourism Victoria consistently promotes Melbourne as cosmopolitan and multicultural, as shown in the Victorian Premier’s preface to the 10 Year Tourism Strategy: ‘Victoria is renowned for its scenic beauty, fascinating multicultural heritage, unique sporting events and enviable cosmopolitan lifestyle’.26 Tourism Victoria houses the Brand Victoria Services Unit, a Victorian State Government initiative launched in March 2006, and, as the Brand Victoria website explains: ‘Brand Victoria’s primary aim is to ensure Victoria’s success in a competitive business environment through consistent and engaging communication of Victoria and Melbourne internationally’.27 Following a feasibility study and consultation with industry, the State Government has introduced common brand values and key messages aimed at attracting to Melbourne and Victoria international students, investors, skilled migrants and tourists. Cosmopolitan and multicultural were identified as key attributes of Melbourne and those who know the city will recognise their validity. Yet, the terms cosmopolitan and multicultural are positive evaluations of the city rather than physical descriptions; they are subjective assessments rather than measurable properties. As Charles Landry warns: ‘The identities of cities being peddled, especially in tourism literature, are at best partial and at worst fictitious, usually only accentuating hypothetical positives rather than reflecting better realities’.28 We need, therefore, to consider to what extent the cosmopolitanism and multiculturalism being marketed by Tourism Victoria are ‘hypothetical positives’ rather than ‘betterÂ€realities’. 71


Cosmopolitanism literally means ‘belonging to many or all parts of the world’ (OED) and, while it can have a neutral meaning when applied to plants that have a worldwide distribution, the concept is given a positive value when contrasted with nationalistic or intellectual narrow-mindedness. The intellectual and social elites in Australia historically have been anxious not to be thought provincial and behind the times, an anxiety born of Australia’s distance from the new ideas and fashions of Britain and Europe, and Tourism Victoria’s idea of cosmopolitanism combines an intellectual openness to outsiders with a high-culture stylishness: ‘Melbourne is a stylish and cosmopolitan city of world-class attractions, unbeatable major events and outstanding hospitality’.29 Melbourne’s cosmopolitanism is descended from the cosmopolitanism of Continental Europe, combining the intellectual openness of an educated, émigré elite with the elegance of an affluent and mobile elite of cities like Paris, Berlin or Rome. Film Victoria, the state’s film commission, follows the brand Victoria guidelines by associating Melbourne’s cosmopolitanism with European stylishness in its publication, FilmMelbourneNow, a booklet aimed at attracting film-makers to Melbourne: ‘Melbourne’s enchanting European-style dining and bustling café scenes are an integral part of the city’s lifestyle. Passionate lovers of cafés, coffee and culture, Melbournians are drawn to hip alleys and lanes that wind through downtown Melbourne’.30 This projection of Melbourne as European depends architecturally on the city’s many fine colonial public buildings, dating from the period of its economic boom in the 1880s, and it is against these that young couples from China nowadays pose for their wedding photographs. In the movie Sangam (1964), Radha (Vyjanthimala) and Sunder (Raj Kapoor) travel to Paris, Rome, Venice and Switzerland for their honeymoon and Tourism Victoria taps into similar aspirations to attract honeymoon couples from Asia to a ‘European’ Melbourne. In addition, Melbourne’s laneways and alleys now accommodate European-style street cafés and bars, where a century ago they accommodated warehouses and workshops. As one visitor noted, they can be compared to the narrow medieval streets of European cities: ‘Melbourne’s alleys are for me like medieval “venelles”, it really reminds me of the small streets around the Grand-Pal[a]ce in Brussels, where I’m from’.31 FilmMelbourneNow speaks of Melbourne’s ‘stately European architecture duplicating London, Boston or Paris’â†œ32 but a superficial similarity between Melbourne and Paris or Brussels collapses fundamental historical differences and Melbourne’s later, nineteenth72


century civic architecture, with its ‘stately’ public buildings, is related more to the British cities of the industrial revolution, like Manchester and Liverpool, than to European cities like Paris or Brussels. Britishness was antithetical to Continental Europe and, as the historian, Graeme Davison, has shown, an appeal to European cosmopolitanism in late nineteenth-century Melbourne was mainly a reaction to the dominant Britishness of Melbourne’s architecture, civic attitudes and way ofÂ€life: Why, some observers asked, had London and Liverpool become the style setters for cities whose sunny climate and freer social relations made them potentially more Italian than British? As Australians had thrown off some of the archaic political traditions of England, could they also throw off some of the stuffiness of its social life in favor of a greater cosmopolitanism?33

Cosmopolitanism today is a global style unrelated to local histories and, as Davison argues, the projection of Melbourne today as a stylish and cosmopolitan European city owes less to Australia’s British history or its Continental migrants than to the high-density requirements of the global city: ‘Neighborhoods that were once “dense” and “overcrowded” now become “compact” and “fine-grained,” their unwelcome “promiscuity” becomes an attractive “sociability,” and their once-threatening “cosmoÂ� politanism” a mature “sophistication”â†œæ¸€å±®’.34 That Melbourne’s laneways are now seen as sophisticated and cosmopolitanism is less the result of Australia’s history than of global trends in lifestyle marketing.

Multiculturalism In its promotional literature, Film Victoria links Melbourne’s cosmopolitan image to multiculturalism: ‘With a population of 3.4 million people descended from a multitude of continents around the globe, Melbourne is alive with cosmopolitan energy that offers up countless experiences and attractions to thrill its visitors’.35 Visitors to Melbourne may indeed notice a diversity of languages, cuisines and faces, a reflection of Australia’s development as a nation of immigrants. Around twenty-nine per cent of Melbourne’s current population of 3.6 million were born overseas: the most numerous countries of birth are England (12.1 per cent), Italy (7.1 per cent), Vietnam (5.6 per cent), China (5.3 per cent), New Zealand (5.1 per cent), Greece (5.0 per cent) 73


and India (4.9 per cent).36 Australia’s definition of ethnicity usually discounts white migrants from Britain, New Zealand and the United States and visitors are most likely to notice Melbourne’s Italian, Greek, Vietnamese, Chinese and Indian communities. Yet, cosmopolitanism and multiculturalism are not the same thing and, while Melbourne’s population may be predominantly ‘descended from a multitude of continents around the globe’ (Film Victoria’s statement omits the Indigenous population), it by no means follows that Melbourne’s ‘cosmopolitan energy’ derives from its diverse ethnic communities. Tourism Victoria locates Melbourne’s ‘cosmopolitan pulse’ in the city centre: ‘Melbourne is set around the shores of Port Phillip Bay. The city itself, laid out in a large rectangle and boasting a lively and cosmopolitan pulse, sits on the northern banks of the Yarra River, about five kilometres from the bay’.37 Yet, as Cosmopolitan Melbourne, a guide for visitors, notes, the energy from ethnic communities is more likely to be found in the suburbs than in the city centre: Many tourists, sadly, miss out on seeing Melbourne’s suburbs. Yet it is in the suburbs where the Melbourne people live, and in suburban neighbourhoods where Melbourne’s cosmopolitan character is most evident. If you don’t visit one of Melbourne’s cosmopolitan suburbs then you are missing out on, literally, a world of experiences.38

On a Saturday morning in Clayton, in the city’s west, for example, visitors might hear shoppers speaking Italian, Vietnamese, Hindi and a number of other South Asian languages, yet Melbourne’s multi-ethnic suburbs, not to mention its Indigenous community, rarely appear in Indian films and to the degree that Melbourne’s city centre is a modern metropolis, its cosmopolitanism did not arrive with migrants from ‘a multitude of continents around the globe’. The Australian anthropologist, Ghassan Hage, has identified an ideological link between cosmopolitanism and multiculturalism in what he refers to as ‘cosmo-multiculturalism’, an appropriation of cultural diversity by a white Eurocentric Australia, which claims, ‘We are cosmopolitan Europeans who have been changed by migration, have become multicultural and are turning to Asia’.39 Hage is intensely suspicious of the rhetoric of multiculturalism and regards praise of Australia’s cultural diversity as a feature of a white elite which, unlike its predecessors in Australia, is a cosmopolitan elite: ‘the cosmopolite is a class figure and a White person, capable of appreciating and consuming “high-culture” commodities and cultures, including “ethnic” culture’.40 By ‘class’, Hage is 74


referring to those who possess cultural capital in addition to money capital: it is ‘a specific cosmopolitan capital accumulated through exposure to a certain “sophisticated internationalism” which gives the cosmopolitans a global consciousness of the field in which they are operating’.41 Hage’s work makes clear that the image offered to Indian filmmakers of Melbourne as cosmopolitan and multicultural is that of a certain elite and that a ‘sophisticated internationalism’, as Hage terms it, is not available to all, despite the claim by Film Melbourne that, ‘Passionate lovers of cafés, coffee and culture, Melbournians are drawn to hip alleys and lanes that wind through downtown Melbourne’.42 The cosmopolitan culture of the hip alleys belongs to those who have the income to enjoy ‘an exciting, modern metropolis, bustling with award-winning restaurants, hip music venues, cool bars and sensational shopping’,43 the same high-end demographic (the AB socio-economic demographic) that Tourism Victoria views as a possible Indian tourist market. Film Victoria evokes Melbourne’s traditional claim to be the cultural capital of Australia as the reason for its style and sophistication, but the culture described is not so much a European high-culture of the arts, despite Melbourne’s galleries and concert halls, as a ‘lifestyle’ culture of conspicuous consumption: ‘Regarded as the cultural capital of Australia, Melbourne is stylish and sophisticated and offers a whole world of food, wine, sports, shopping and nightlife.’â†œ44 Not everyone can attain the cosmopolitan sophistication to enjoy ‘a whole world’.

Salaam Namaste, multiculturalism and international education In Salaam Namaste, Preity Zinta plays Ambar, a medical student studying in Melbourne at La Trobe University; as the film’s English subtitles put it: ‘When she came to Australia for a year for a university exchange program, Ambar fell in love with Melbourne. She decided to stay on and joined medical school’. According to the Indian High Commissioner to Australia at the time, HE Mr Prabhat Prakash Shukla, the film generated such a demand by Indian students wanting to enrol in La Trobe University’s Medical School that the university, which had no Medical School, is now seeking to establish one, a demonstration not only of the power of Bollywood in creating particular images of a country, but also of the desire by Australian universities to attract students from India.45 In 2007, the number of Indian students studying in Australia was 63,604, or fourteen per cent of all international student enrolments in Australia.46 75


According to a report published in 2001, Positioning Australian Education and Training for the Future, a key feature differentiating Australia from the USA and the UK was ‘freedom’ and, in this regard, Australia’s multiculturalism was thought to provide the friendly environment that enabled young overseas students to enjoy the freedom of an Australian lifestyle: Australia also benefits from being perceived as multicultural—a particular advantage for Asian students. One of the strongest elements of Freedom is interacting with other young people. A multicultural community makes this more likely. Only the USA and Canada were seen to be on a par with Australia for this attribute.47

As a result of surveys and focus groups involving the education industry and potential international students, the report identified a number of key brand messages of Australian education and training, including the message: ‘Australia is a multicultural community—you’ll feel at home’. Melbourne’s multiculturalism is represented in Salaam Namaste by the Indian community that provides the on-screen audience for the Hindi Radio Station, ‘Salaam Namaste’. The cross-section of listeners shown at the beginning of the film comprises two male hairdressers, one man stocking a freezer in a 7–Eleven convenience store and four women variously vacuuming the house, at the laundrette and exercising; all belong more or less to the same generation as Ambar and Nick, apparently without parents or grandparents in Australia. There is no interaction with other ethnic communities in Melbourne and the main characters are multicultural in an Indian rather than an Australian sense, coming from Bangalore, the Punjab, Gujarat, Kerala, Bihar and Dhaka. It is true that they all speak Hindi, but this is no more than to say that the film follows the conventions of popular Hindi cinema, with the hero, Nick, belonging to a non-Sikh Punjabi elite. And the name of the radio station, ‘Salaam Namaste’, which combines Muslim and Hindu greetings, makes sense primarily as a symbol of Indian rather than Australian multiculturalism. This lack of engagement with a broader Australian society looks odd from an Australian perspective as one Australian reviewer put it: Apart from a few local actresses who gamely turn themselves into cartoons of crude Aussie sheilas, the film takes place entirely within an Indian expatriate community imagined as sufficient to itself, dispersed throughout the city but linked by the radio station’s broadcasts, and (of course) by a network of taxi drivers.48 76


‘An Indian expatriate community imagined as sufficient to itself ’ is not quite the ‘truly multicultural society’ Australians believe will be attractive to international students from Asia and it questions the claim that Indian film-makers are drawn to Melbourne because of its multiculturalism. In reality, there is no Hindi radio station like ‘Salaam Namaste’ broadcasting across Melbourne, but if there were, then it would, like ‘Salaam Namaste’, be listened to by Melbourne’s South Asian taxi drivers. At the beginning of Salaam Namaste, Ambar, as talk-show host, berates Nick, her interviewee, for being late for the interview, to which Nick responds disparagingly: ‘How does one late start make a difference to a clutch of Indian taxi drivers?’ Among the many things Nick has to learn in the film is that Indian taxi drivers, like Hindi radio stations, sustain a sense of community among the South Asian diaspora and, at the end of the film, it is a Melbourne Indian taxi driver (played by the film’s director, Siddharth Anand) who helps Nick track down Ambar. Migrant Indian taxi drivers have appeared in a number of Bollywood movies in the past decade, such as Aa Ab Laut Chalen (1999), Kitne Door Kitne Paas (2002), Bhagam Bhag (2006), Namastey London (2007) and Ta Ra Rum Pum (2007), but the focus of these films is generally on the lives of the young transnational technocrats whom they drive between airport and city hotel in cities around the globe. In an article on Dilwale Dulhaniya Le Jayenge (1995), which deals with second-generation British Indians, Purnima Mankekar relates the increased representation of the Indian diaspora in Bollywood in the 1990s to the liberalisation of the Indian economy.49 Mankekar argues that the opening up of the economy to multinational investment changed perceptions of non-resident Indians (NRIs), who were now seen as the providers of much-needed foreign investment: ‘only wealthy NRIs with the capital to invest in India were being wooed. Political and economic refugees, migrant laborers, and exiles were completely erased from these representations. The newly discovered, wealthy NRI became the new messiah of liberalization’.50 As Adrian Athique notes, only certain parts of the Indian diaspora are fêted in the Indian business press: ‘It is the young CEOs and rising IT professionals who are the ideal(ised) NRIs here, stirring national pride and deserving cultural citizenship, not the politically marginalized Indians of Fiji or Burma, or the taxi drivers of London or Leeds’.51 Yet in cities with significant South Asian communities, such as New York or Melbourne, it is taxi drivers rather than wealthy NRIs who are the most visible South Asians in the public domain.52 In Victoria, it is 77


estimated that of around 11,000 certified taxi drivers,53 more than 7,000, and possibly as many as 9,000, are from the Indian subcontinent.54 Some explanation of the predominance of South Asian taxi drivers in Victoria can be inferred from a survey carried out in New York by Diditi Mitra who estimated that around sixty per cent of drivers in the New York taxi industry were from South Asia, predominantly from Pakistan, Bangladesh and the Punjab.55 Key factors behind the dominance of the New York taxi industry by migrants from South Asia were: changes in the taxi industry; a drop in the supply of non-migrant workers; an increase in the number of South Asian immigrants with limited skills and limited fluency in English; and the formation of South Asian communities that could find work for friends and family in the industry. An Australia survey by Carmen Voigt-Graf found that, of three different Indian migrant groups surveyed, Punjabis were especially subject to discrimination in the labour market, with one fifth of Punjabi migrants interviewed working as train guards or taxi drivers, despite being tertiary-educated.56 In Salaam Namaste, Jaggu Yadav (Javed Jaffrey) migrates from Bihar to Mumbai, where, not surprisingly to a South Asian audience, ‘Someone suggested going abroad and driving a cab. And so he arrived in Melbourne’. In December 2006, Rajneesh Joga, a student from Hyderabad, died following an assault while working as a part-time taxi driver in Melbourne. According to Melbourne’s Herald Sun, ‘Mr Joga, 27, of Clayton, spent his days studying and nights driving a taxi to pay for his course and send cash home to his mother and sick father’.57 The paper reported that Joga had come to Melbourne in August 2004 to study for a Master of Accountancy and in this he was a typical Indian student in Australia; most are enrolled in masters by coursework programmes, especially IT, Accountancy and Engineering.58 The Indian Voice, a Melbourne-based community newspaper, commented: Indian Voice believes, more than 7,000 (about 85%) taxi drivers in Victoria are from the Indian subcontinent and most of them are overseas students. The irony is that this large influx of workforce is often unrepresented and unheard within the taxi industry, Victorian Government and the wider community. These students often live under a lot of pressure of earning for living and tuition expenses; meeting deadlines of school assignments; living under the constant fear of being deported in case of lack of attendance in the class; being caught by the Immigration Department officials for working more than 20 hours a week; lack of support and of course home sickness.59 78


The article lists the range of pressures placed on international students from India, the chief of which is the need to earn money for food, accommodation and international tuition fees; at Melbourne Institute of Technology, Rajneesh Joga would have been paying around A$7,000 per semester, which is less than the fees charged by higherranking institutions, such as Monash University, which are around A$12,500 per semester.60 According to Gautam Gupta, general secretary of the Federation of Indian Students of Australia, taxi driving is second only to working in a call centre: ‘Number one is the call-centre industry, because Indians do tend to speak English and have work experience back in India…Then there are people who are learning to speak English—for them taxi is the best thing to do. It’s pretty straightforward and easy to get in’.61 Michiel Baas, in his survey of Indian overseas students in Victoria, found students working as taxi drivers, security guards and petrol pump attendants.62 As for the key brand message of Australian education and training that ‘Australia is a multicultural community—you’ll feel at home’, Gautam Gupta noted that, while most members who drove cabs were ‘pretty satisfied’ with their job, they could be subjected to ‘a lot of racist remarks’, particularly if they looked different: ‘if they are Sikhs and wearing turbans, for example, then they are made fun of ’. In Salaam Namaste, Ambar is disowned by her parents for not returning to Bangalore to get married and has to work to pay for her education, but she not only has a job in a radio station, which would be the envy of her fellow Indian students working in call centres and driving taxis, she and Nick also enjoy an affluent lifestyle far exceeding their income, a point which struck the reviewer from Melbourne: don’t look here for the bars and grimy alleyways of Fitzroy and Collingwood—the Melbourne on display here is as shiny as the shirts and beachwear sported by the cast, a sunny paradise where a Hindi radio station operates from plush commercial premises and a financially struggling couple can commute between the inner city and a beach house on the Great Ocean Road.63

Instead of a taxi, Nick drives a hip Smart car, made in Germany by Daimler–Chrysler, and, despite the setback of Ambar’s pregnancy, Nick is clearly on a path leading to ownership of a high-class restaurant, like Buddhadev Gupta (Amitabh Bachchan) in Cheeni Kum (2007). These are not the kinds of migrant lives depicted in earlier Indian films, like Des Pardes (1978), in which rural workers are smuggled into Britain illegally. 79


Even where Bollywood deals with Indians overseas who have to work for a living, they are generally depicted as affluent middle-class NRIs, like Akash Malhotra (Aamir Khan) in Dil Chahta Hai, while those lacking power, such as taxi drivers, inhabit the periphery of the films. There are occasional exceptions, such as Rohan (Akshaye Khanna) in Aa Ab Laut Chalen (1999), whose attempts to get rich quick in the USA are thwarted, and Rajveer ‘RV’ Singh (Saif Ali Khan) in Ta Ra Rum Pum, who turns to taxi driving in New York when sacked as a racing driver. But Rohan and Rajveer are only temporarily down on their luck and such exceptions prove the rule. In Salaam Namaste, those whose lives may not glitter, such as the housewives, the shop-keepers and the taxi drivers who comprise the radio station’s audience, inhabit the periphery of the film and it is not surprising that Australian prime ministers and government trade, tourism and film commissions are comfortable with the Bollywood image of Australia. Yet if a key brand message of Australian education and training is ‘Australia is a multicultural community—you’ll feel at home’, those who promulgate this message are either being economical with the truth or they do not understand the lived realities of multi-ethnic Australia. As Michiel Baas has shown, the majority of Indian students in Victoria are effectively migrants, applying for permanent residency (PR) at the end of their studies to find high-paid employment to pay off their debts, especially in India; many are studying subjects, such as accountancy, for which they have no academic background and no intention of practising, merely for the sake of qualifying for PR.64 For some this is a step on the road to developing business opportunities in Australia, while for others it is to end up in a low-skilled occupation. Baas concludes that the market in international students from India is less about education than about migration: The money the students will make, even as taxi drivers or security guards in a local shopping mall, will always be more than what they saw themselves making in India. In this sense they have got exactly what they wanted. The only thing they needed to do for this was to become a student in Australia, in a field which guarantees they will qualify for PR in the end. Agents (education or immigration agents—it is often unclear which role they play) both in India and Australia, and institutes, colleges and universities are all fully aware of this strategy. A market now exists and a product has been created to fill it that looks like it is about education but is actually about migration.65 80


In July 2006, Sydney’s Sun–Herald reported that more migrants from India were gaining PR than from China, primarily, it seems, ‘due to overseas students successfully applying for permanent residency after graduating from local universities’.66 The report was upbeat about Indian migration and included stories of two exemplary migrants, Rajwant Singh, who established the Punjabi-language newspaper Punjab Express in western Sydney, and restaurateur Satinder Pal Singh Benepal, a former accountant. As absent in this report as they are in Salaam Namaste were the stories of Indian taxi drivers who had recently qualified with a postgraduate qualification in accountancy.

Conclusion Salaam Namaste presents Melbourne as a modern, Western and cosmopolitan city, a representation consistent with Brand Victoria. Both Ambar and Nick enjoy affluent and hip consumer lifestyles, but they are not typical of those who come from the diverse cultures that underpin Melbourne’s claim to being a multicultural city. More typical, particularly of the South Asian population, would be the taxi drivers to whom Ambar broadcasts on the radio station, ‘Salaam Namaste’. For a film audience in India, as for the Bollywood hero or heroine within the films, the Indian taxi driver is both an insider and an outsider. He is an Indian insider (speaking Hindi) and an Australian outsider (part of a migrant community); yet he is also inside Melbourne (familiar with the city) and outside India (an exile from his homeland). In this sense, the taxi driver is more of a cosmopolitan figure than the affluent young heroes of Bollywood who, having flown to Australia, may just as casually fly back home. Carol A Breckenridge et al. define cosmopolitanism to include ‘ways of living at home abroad or abroad at home—ways of inhabiting multiple places at once, of being different beings simultaneously, of seeing the larger picture stereoscopically with the smaller’.67 From this perspective, Indian taxi drivers are as cosmopolitan as their jet-setting Indian passengers and contemporary cosmopolitanism belongs as much to those disappointed by capitalism as to its beneficiaries: ‘Cosmopolitans today are often the victims of modernity, failed by capitalism’s upward mobility, and bereft of those comforts and customs of national belonging. Refugees, peoples of the diaspora, and migrants and exiles represent the spirit of the cosmopolitanÂ€community’.68 81


Non-elite forms of travel are examined as an aspect of vernacular cosmopolitanism by Pnina Werbner, who concludes that cosmopolitanism requires a reflexive way of thinking which is not necessarily either elite or non-elite. On the one hand, there is workingclass cosmopolitanism: in the figure of the expanding cosmopolitan subjectivity of a Pakistani migrant worker on a building site in the Gulf, a simple man who embraces different cultures and who is a member of diverse ethnic groups, but who nevertheless retains his localized rooted identity as aÂ€Sufi.69

On the other hand: members of the jet-setting wealthy Chinese overseas trading diaspora studied by Aithwa Ong, with their multiple passports and multiple homes in different countries, appear to lack the kind of cultural openness and sensitivity normally associated with cosmopolitanism.

The Bollywood hero seems more akin to the jet-setting wealthy Chinese than to the Pakistani migrant building worker and, while a non-Sikh Punjabi hero might accept Muslims or Sikhs as Indian, this Indian multiculturalism serves mainly to reinforce a pan-Indian identity; despite their cosmopolitanism, in the words of the famous refrain from Shree 420 (1955), their heart remains Indian: ‘bhi dil hai hindustani’. In this way, Ambar derides Nikhil for denying his Indian identity by calling himself Nick: ‘I mean, what is this Nick business? Yo. I’m cool. I’m Australian. I’m Nick’. This is not the cosmopolitanism that Breckenridge describes as ‘being different beings simultaneously’ and that, for Werbner, is ‘grounded in an open, experimental, inclusive, normative consciousness of the cultural other’.70 Werbner’s argument opens up the possibility that the Indian migrant taxi driver might in fact be more cosmopolitan than the Indian corporate business executive. Elsewhere, Werbner considers the distinction between the concepts of cosmopolitanism and transnationalism proposed by Hannerz: Ulf Hannerz proposes a set of useful distinctions between cosmopolitans ‘willing to engage with the Other’, locals, ‘representatives of more circumscribed territorial cultures’, and transnationals (Hannerz 1992: 252), frequent travellers (usually occupational) who share ‘structures of meaning carried by social networks’.71 82


Using this, we might distinguish between the cosmopolitanism of the migrant Indian taxi driver and the transnationalism of the Bollywood heroes and heroines. The distinction is not necessarily one of affluence and social class; however, those Hindi-speaking Indians who can afford to be driven by Hindi-speaking Indian taxi drivers are less like to come into contact with people from non-Indian cultures than those Indians who have to travel by public transport or, indeed, the taxi drivers themselves. In Salaam Namaste, Nick’s experience of cultural difference is limited to eating sushi and drinking VB in a hip nightclub, an example of what Craig Calhoun refers to as ‘soft’ cosmopolitanism, ‘a willingness to experience diversity as packaged for consumer tastes’ as opposed to a strong sense of cosmopolitanism, ‘a willingness to enter situations truly without parallels or familiarity’.72 Tourism Victoria similarly equates cosmopolitanism with the transnationalism or soft cosmopolitanism of the frequent traveller, those whose lifestyle can be performed equally and effortlessly in transnational spaces, the international airports, hotels, bars and shopping malls of the global city. Ambar derides this transnational lifestyle when she derides Nick for being ‘cool’, yet her denial of her own transnationalism, as in her craving for Ben & Jerry’s ice cream when pregnant, is made possible by her isolation, most evidently in the cocoon of her radio studio, from anyone who doesn’t speak Hindi. The vernacular or non-elite cosmopolitanism, one in which the traveller embraces different cultures, would seem to be more appropriate to Indian students destined to work in Melbourne as taxi drivers, security guards and petrol pump attendants, struggling to send remittances to family in India while also adjusting to, and assessing the validity of, other cultural values. It is the taxi drivers rather than the frequent travellers who display a ‘cosmopolitan consciousness’, as Werbner puts it, ‘an awareness of the existence and equal validity of other cultures, other values, and other mores’.73 If one wishes to portray Melbourne as cosmopolitan, as the Victoria Government professes, then a cosmopolitanism which depicts social interaction in the suburbs between different diasporic communities is more inclusive and indeed more accurate, than one which depicts either an Indian multiculturalism limited to the cultures of India or hip Indian migrants and expensive Indian restaurants. According to Ulf Hannerz: ‘A more genuine cosmopolitanism entails a certain metacultural position. There is, first of all, a willingness to engage with the Other, an intellectual and aesthetic stance of openness towards divergent cultural experiences’.74 If Australian Government commissions wish to promote 83


Australia within India as genuinely cosmopolitan, then the figure of the Indian student taxi driver living in suburban Clayton would be better suited as a representation of the cosmopolitanism proclaimed by those promoting Australian tourism, trade and education. The heroes of Bollywood films shot in Australia may reflect the lifestyle aspirations of audiences in India and they may showcase Melbourne’s hip city centre, but within Australia it needs to be recognised that Bollywood films set in Australia marginalise the genuine cosmopolitanism found among the non-elite of the Australian suburbs.

Notes 1 M Phillips, ‘Bollywood on Bourke Street,’ The Age (Melbourne), 13 May 2005, Metro p.Â€4. 2 M Moncrief, ‘India flocks to down under movie’, The Age (Melbourne), 14 October 2005, p. 8. 3 C Karena, ‘From Bollywood to Cannes…’, Metro no. 135, p. 238. 4 A Chopra, Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge, British Film Institute, London, 2002, p. 39. 5 AK Tareen, Director, Trade & Investment, India & South Asia, Government of South Australia, interview 27 February 2007. 6 At the time of writing, February 2008, A$1.00 = US$0.92 or Rs37. 7 D Ziffer, ‘Bollywood makes a comeback,’ The Age (Melbourne), 28 September 2006, p.Â€11. 8 Freya Campbell, Marketing Manager Asia, Tourism Victoria, interview 20 December 2006. 9 Budget figures from Box Office Mojo, , viewed 29Â€November 2007. 10 B Jaisinghani, ‘Shooting with a business angle,’ Financial Express (Mumbai), 13 June 2004, , viewed 11Â€June 2005. 11 Freya Campbell, interview. 12 Kingston Anderson, Acting Head, Production Liaison Unit, NSW Film and Television Office, interview 13 November 2006. 13 M Phillips, ‘Bollywood on Bourke Street,’ The Age (Melbourne), 13 May 2005, Metro p. 4; Australian Trade Commission Annual Report 2005–06 p.25 www.austrade.gov.au/ ArticleDocuments/1358/AnnualReport-200506-Part2.pdf.aspx. 14 ‘India: Visitor Profile 2006’, , viewed 29 November 2007. 15 ibid. 16 Maggie White, Regional Manager, South and South East Asia, Tourism Australia, interview 7 December 2006. 17 ibid. 18 ‘Bonanza for tourism,’ Sunday Mail (Adelaide), 24 September 2006, p. 6. 19 AK Tareen, interview. 20 ‘Bollywood comes to South Australia’, , viewed 29 November 2007. 21 ibid. 22 AK Tareen, interview. 23 ‘Aussies lure Bollywood bigwigs in Mumbai,’ , viewed 9 March 2006.

84

Salaam Namaste, Melbourne and Cosmopolitanism 24 Freya Campbell, interview. 25 M Phillips, ‘Bollywood on Bourke Street,’ The Age (Melbourne), 13 May 2005, Metro p.Â€4. 26 10 Year Tourism and Events Industry Strategy, Victorian Government Dept. of Innovation, Industry and Regional Development, Melbourne, 2006, p. 1. 27 Brand Victoria Library, , viewed 29 November 2007. 28 C Landry, The Art of City-Making, Earthscan, London, 2006, pp.163–4. 29 ‘Destinations via Melbourne’, , viewed 29 November 2007. 30 FilmMelbourneNow, Film Victoria, Melbourne, n.d., p. 14. 31 ‘The red thread’, , viewed 29 November 2007. 32 FilmMelbourneNow, p. 17. 33 G Davison, ‘The European city in Australia’, Journal of Urban History, vol. 27, no. 26, 2001, p. 779. 34 ibid. 35 ‘Film Melbourne now—about Melbourne’, , viewed 10 December 2006. 36 Population Diversity in Local Councils in Victoria: 2006 Census, Victorian Multicultural Commission, Melbourne, n.d., p. 33. 37 ‘About Melbourne’, , viewed 22 September 2007. 38 J Collins, L Mondello, J Breheney & T Childs, Cosmopolitan Melbourne: Explore the World in One City, Big Box, Sydney, 2001, p. 2. 39 G Hage, White Nation: Fantasies of White Supremacy in a Multicultural Society, Pluto, Sydney, 1998, p. 201. 40 ibid., p. 201. 41 ibid., pp. 204–5. 42 FilmMelbourneNow, p. 14. 43 ‘Melbourne Lifestyle’, , viewed 22 September 2007. 44 FilmMelbourneNow, p. 8. 45 ‘IndiaConnect, an AsiaLink conference’, Sofitel Hotel, Melbourne, 29 September 2006. 46 ‘2007 Annual International Student Statistics’, , viewed 8 September 2008. 47 Positioning Australian Education and Training for the Future: A report on the findings of Australian Education International’s research into the branding of Australian education and training offshore, Commonwealth of Australia, Canberra, 2001, pp.19, 114. 48 J Wilson, ‘Salaam Namaste’, , viewed 29 November 2007. 49 P Mankekar, ‘Brides who travel: gender, transnationalism, and nationalism in Hindi film’, Positions: East Asia Cultures Critique, vol. 7, no. 3, 1999. 50 ibid., p. 745. 51 A Athique, Non-resident cinema: transnational audiences for Indian films, PhD, Wollongong University, 2005, p. 120. 52 S Maira, ‘Henna and hip hop: the politics of cultural production and the work of cultural studies’, Journal of Asian American Studies, vol. 3, no. 3, 2000, p. 358. 53 Victorian Taxi Association, ‘Driving a taxi’, , viewed 29 November 2007.

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Bollywood in Australia 54 ‘Loss of another precious life,’ Indian Voice, August 2006, http://indianvoice.com.au/ newsarticle649.aspx, 10 December 2006. 55 D Mitra, ‘Driving taxis in New York City: who wants to do it?’, WorkingUSA, vol. 7, no.Â€2, 2003, p. 88. 56 C Voigt-Graf, ‘Indians at home in the Antipodes’, in B. Parekh, G. Singh and S.Â€Vertovec (eds), Culture and Economy in the Indian Diaspora, Routledge, London, 2003, p.Â€157. 57 ‘Rajneesh Joga’, , viewed 29 November 2007. 58 M Baas, ‘Students of migration: Indian overseas students and the question of permanent residency’, People and Place vol. 14, no. 1, 2006, p. 10. 59 ‘Loss of another precious life,’ Indian Voice, August 2006, , viewed 10 December 2006. 60 ‘MIT 2007 international student courses and fees’, , viewed 29 November 2007; ‘Master of Professional Accounting for 2008’, , viewed 29 November 2007. 61 O Hill-Douglas, ‘Can’t live with ‘em…’, The Age (Melbourne), 24 February 2007, p. 7. 62 Baas, ‘Students of migration’, p. 21. 63 Wilson, ‘Salaam Namaste’. 64 Baas, ‘Students of migration’, pp. 11, 17. 65 ibid., p. 22. 66 L Hall, ‘Asian migrants seduced by Australian way of life’, Sun-Herald (Sydney), 30 July 2006, p. 10. 67 C Breckenridge, S Pollock, HK Bhabha & D Chakrabarty, Cosmopolitanisms, Duke University Press, Durham and London, 2002, p. 11. 68 ibid., p. 6. 69 P Werbner, ‘Vernacular cosmopolitanism’, Theory, Culture and Society, vol. 23, nos. 2-3, 2006, pp. 497, 498. 70 ibid., p. 497 71 P Werbner, ‘Global pathways: working class cosmopolitans and the creation of transnational ethnic worlds’, Social Anthropology, vol. 7, no. 1, 1999, p. 17. 72 C Calhoun, ‘The class consciousness of frequent travelers: towards a critique of actual existing cosmopolitanism’, South Atlantic Quarterly, vol. 101, no. 4, 2002, p. 888. 73 Werbner, ‘Vernacular cosmopolitanism’, p. 498. 74 U Hannerz, Cultural Complexity: Studies in the Social Organization of Meaning, Columbia UP, New York, 1992, p. 252.

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4

Chak De! Australia: Bollywood Down Under Makarand Paranjape

Advantage Australia? I would like to begin with a snapshot of two Indians I saw in a tram at the Elizabeth Street terminus in downtown Melbourne just before I first presented this paper.1 Both were young, Punjabi males, smart if not good looking, almost certainly unemployed and recently arrived. Both spoke incessantly on their mobiles, mostly in Punjabi and Hindi. Dressed in brand name T-shirts, jeans, jackets and sneakers, they looked strangely familiar. Puzzled, I wondered why. Suddenly, it struck me that they were recognisable because I had seen them before, but not in real life but in the movies. No, they were not film stars at all, but it was just that their ‘look’ had been fashioned by Bollywood. From their stubble to their sunglasses, they looked like Shah Rukh Khan or Saif Ali Khan. They wore similar clothes, had similar gestures and expressions and even held their cell phones like the Bollywood stars did. What is more they affected an air of confidence and insouciance that was the characteristic of recent films. Sure enough, when they alighted and disappeared into the crowds 87


milling about the Flinders Street station, I saw that their walk mirrored the swagger of BollywoodÂ€stars. More than just the look, their being itself seemed to have been produced by Bombay cinema in the manner in which Stephen Greenblatt has suggested that ‘a stockpile of representations…generate new representations’—‘Images that matter, that merit the term capital, acquire reproductive power, maintaining and multiplying themselves’.2 What the men were doing here was not very clear, but they seemed neither businessmen nor tourists, but more likely, prospectors, young men out to find a life and, in the process, themselves in a foreign land. But what was striking was that their self-esteem or self-validation did not seem to derive from their degrees, skills, or abilities, but instead came from their resemblance to their role models or icons from Bombay cinema—they could not go wrong because, after all, they looked like Shah Rukh Khan or Saif Ali Khan. That made their lives viable; it rendered them presentable or trustworthy to the world at large. I would like to suggest that Bollywood not only produces images, but also produces subjects and subjectivities. In today’s context, the latter are not just defined by regions or nations, but have become transnational. Bollywood gives these Indians an identity and a means to define themselves; almost, it gives them access to a wider world. Their passport may be Indian but their visa is stamped in Bollywood. Diasporic Indians, though they live in countries which are often far away from India, also inhabit a ‘Greater India’ of feelings and emotions, an India of the heart and head, one of whose primary sources is Bollywood. More than anything else it is Bombay cinema that helps to conjure up this Greater India, this imagi-nation, for those who have left for distance shores. I will also suggest that, though the prototypical Bollywood subject is male, Bollywood also deliberately and consciously produces females, not just in the stereotypical and subservient roles of mother, paramour, wife, but as subjects with agency and narrativeÂ€centrality. More recently, Bollywood cinema has begun to penetrate Australia too. A major reason for this is the growing number of Indians and South Asians in this country who are avid fans of Bombay cinema. In the big cities, almost every neighbourhood has an Indian grocery store, which stocks these movies. But what is more, an interest in them has begun to be displayed by non-Indian Australians too. A city like Melbourne, for instance, has at least two theatres that regularly screen Bollywood movies. One of these clearly caters to ethnic Indians and South Asians, but the other also screens art cinema from all over the 88

Chak De! Australia: Bollywood Down Under

world to a niche market of Australians, which of course includes South Asian Australians. An awareness of Bombay cinema, in other words, is growing in the general population as well. But another major factor for the spread of Bollywood in Australia is that this country has become increasingly attractive to movie producers from India as a favoured foreign location for their shoots. The Australian trade and tourism boards have provided attractive incentives to Bollywood producers and crews realising the considerable gains accruing from this. Moreover, Australia is still exotic to Indians, not as familiar as Britain or the United States. Costs for local crews and locations in Australia are also competitive. The excellent infrastructure, transportation, connectivity and also Australian friendliness have all contributed to making it an attractive destination for Bollywood. All these, it would seem, came to head in Chak De! India, one of the biggest hits and money-spinners in 2007. The title of this paper alludes to this film, inverting its title. Chak de! is a colloquial Punjabi expression that means ‘pick it up’, ‘take it away’ or ‘run with it’. In the film, it serves as a rallying cry for the Indian women’s hockey team, which ends up lifting the world championship in Melbourne by defeating

Figure 4: Chak De! India in Australia. Image courtesy Yash Raj Films Pvt. Ltd.

89


the favoured home team. Though it shows the Indian girls beating the Aussies, the film also indirectly acknowledges the advantages of Australia as Bollywood’s preferred overseas location. In this film, Australia is clearly a nation in which sports are sacred. The Australian hockey players are big, strong, confident, team players, embodying the country’s spirit to excel and win at all competitive sports, from cricket to swimming. The international reputation of the Aussies as a sporting nation is both exploited and reinforced in this movie. That the Indian girls win over the Australians is only part of the cinematic logic of Bollywood. The film is, after all, a gendered complement, if not contradiction, of the earlier blockbuster, Lagaan (2001). While Lagaan was about India’s most loved game, cricket, Chak De! is about hockey, which has been meted stepmotherly treatment. In Lagaan, it is the colonial British team that the Indians defeat, while in Chak De! it is the Australians. Most importantly, in Lagaan, the team is all male, even if the ‘manager’ and ‘coach’ are women; in Chak De!, the team is female, while the coach, the most important character in the story, is male. Gender enters Chak De! in a big way time and again. One player’s boyfriend and fiancé is the Vice-Captain of the Indian cricket team. He wants her to give up hockey after marriage and boasts that playing hockey for the country is nothing compared to playing cricket, which is the most glamorous and paying sport in India. After her team wins, she breaks off her engagement telling the Vice-Captain that she would rather be with someone who respected her and her sport. The implication here is that hockey in India gets treated like a female in India, getting very little respect compared to cricket. But just as women in India deserve more respect, so does hockey. The defining moment in the film, in relation to the politics of gender, is when the female team is asked to play the male team to prove that it deserves to be sent to the final in Melbourne. Though they lose, they get a standing ovation from the audience and a raised hockey salute from their male counterparts. The chair of the Hockey Board of India, clearly a male chauvinist, is shamed into conceding their right to play. Other players on the team have issues relating to gender too; the little girl from Haryana proves her worth on the hockey field, earning a reprieve from her parents from her normally manifest destiny, which would be marriage. Another player, who is already married, must struggle with her in-laws and husband to find the time to play, having to leave home to travel for long periods of time. However, Chak De! does share several other features with Lagaan. The teams are similar in that they represent the making of the Indian 90


nation itself. Drawing together diverse elements from different parts of the country, these teams are variants of team India itself. In Lagaan, the struggle is to forge a nation out of an anti-colonial struggle, while Chak De! emphasises what post-colonial India needs to do to win internationally. The shift of the arena from the national to the international is almost seamless, indicating India’s arrival as a global economic player. Similarly, the shift from male to female players suggests that Bollywood has made good the lacuna that Lagaan had left; now, with the female team India getting its due, the picture isÂ€complete.

(Trans)national Bollywood That Bollywood has been the second cinema of the world has been known for a long time, but it is only now that this fact has gained recognition and acceptance. As early as the 1930s, Indian cinema circulated in the Far East. Since the 1950s it has been popular in what used to be known as the Second and Third Worlds, that is, in the Soviet Union, China and other communist countries and in South America, the Caribbean, Africa and Asia, especially where the Indian diaspora resided in large numbers.3 Indeed Bombay cinema has been one of the defining markers of Indian or South Asian identity abroad. At least three notable and evocative inscriptions of this phenomenon are available to us in the works of Ziauddin Sardar, Vijay Mishra and Suketu Mehta.4 Sardar, writing of his experiences of growing up in England, recounts how seeing Hindi movies was a weekly ritual in which his mother and he religiously participated. The title of his essay, ‘Dilip Kumar made me do it’, is itself suggestive of the powerful influence that Hindi cinema exercised on a growing Pakistani boy abroad. The essay clearly brings out the fact that, despite the Partition, it was the experience of Bombay cinema that united the broken hearts and healed or sutured the subcontinental unconscious, at least temporarily; it was in the experience of viewing a Bombay film that the two parts of the subcontinent came together. Similarly the introduction of Vijay Mishra’s study, Bollywood Cinema: Temples of Desire, is a moving celebration of the auratic power of Hindi cinema experienced by an Indian boy growing up in distant Fiji. Seeing your favourite film stars on the ‘silver screen’ was nothing short of a darshan akin to citing your Ishta Devatah (favourite deity). In a more recent reiteration of the fascination that Hindi cinema holds to the 91


overseas Indian, Suketu Mehta writes of how the happiest afternoons of his adolescence were spent singing Hindi film songs and watching Bombay cinema at the Eagle Theatre with his Queens buddies. He calls it ‘travelling back [to India] on music, the cheapest airline’.5 As Mehta puts it, ‘I existed in New York but I lived in India, taking little memory trains’. He goes on to assert that Bollywood is the quintessential identity marker of South Asians abroad: Who is a South Asian? Someone who watches Hindi movies. Someone whose being fills up with pleasure when he or she hears ‘Mere Sapnon ki rani’ or ‘Kuch Kuch Hota Hai’. Here is our national language; here is our common song.6

These accounts of diasporic Indians show how Bollywood serves as a shared idiom or, as Mehta puts it, their defining characteristic. I believe that, prior to the 1990s, however, the content and idiom of Bombay cinema, by and large, reflected, or rather represented, a national consciousness. For diasporic Indians the movie experience was one way of going back, of revisiting, albeit briefly, the homeland that one had left behind. In that sense, watching Hindi movies abroad was a nostalgic trip. But after the 1990s, owing primarily to the purchasing power and imaginative hunger of this very nostalgic diaspora, Bollywood registered a radical shift in both its form and content. As Rachel Dwyer and Divia Patel show so persuasively in Cinema India, the typically recognisable filmy style that characterised Bollywood changed drastically.7 Whether in locations, costumes, promotional material, or the circulation of Bollywood in various media such as print, TV, internet or music videos, the very idiom of Bombay cinema began to change. Simply speaking, Bollywood’s visual culture became more global and cosmopolitan so as to attract audiences in the West. This came about through the use of techniques, which were hitherto identifiable more with Hollywood than with Bollywood. Cinematography, lighting, colour, costumes, set design, the selection and construction of outdoor locations, in fact the very mise-en-scène of Hindi cinema altered significantly to reflect its internationalisation. Regardless of whether the content was Indian, the look and feel of Bollywood became slicker and more contemporary. But perhaps equally significantly the themes, the stories and the content changed too. For the first time, there were movies set mostly abroad, a trend started by a film like Dilwale Dulhaniya Le Jayenge (1995) and that led to its logical conclusion in productions like Kal Ho Naa Ho (2003), Salaam 92


Namaste and Kabhi Alvida Naa Kehna (2006), which take place entirely outside India. It is not as if earlier movies did not deal with the theme of Indians abroad and, of all art mediums in India, it is cinema that is most proactive in engaging with urgent concerns and social issues. Whether Bollywood cinema engages with these issues in a realistic fashion is an entirely different question, but that it does engage and is possibly the first to do so is undisputable. Whether it is communalism or terrorism, social unrest or inequality, homosexuality or women’s rights, Khalistan or Babri masjid, cops or dons, it is Bombay cinema that is often the first to voice concern and depict an issue, even if it does so symbolically, elliptically or, indeed, fantastically. Similarly, the problems of the Indian diaspora were not lost on Bollywood even in the previous decades. The defining film of the earlier Bollywood response to the diaspora was Manoj Kumar’s Purab aur Paschim (1970). This film, as its very name, ‘East and West’, suggests, was devoted primarily to problematising the relationship of the diaspora both to its hostland and homeland. Characteristic of the earlier Bollywood movies, it valorised and exalted Indian values over Western values. The latter were seen as corrupting and deviant, destroying the moral fibre of those who succumbed to them. The return to India had to be accomplished through the re-education of the protagonists who had gone astray and become Westernised. This paradigm, though already introduced in Upkar (1967) by the same director, reached full-blown, even missionary proportions, in Purab aur Paschim. Several films in the following years, including Hare Rama Hare Krishna (1971), Naam (1986), Pardes (1997) and Aa Ab Laut Chalen (1999), followed this paradigm. As is obvious from the list, these films depicted the abandonment of Mother India as a sort of bad faith, which the diasporic Indian could work out and atone for only by returning to India, either literally or symbolically by re-embracing Indian values, often represented by an Indian wife. Leaving India was guilt-inducing; the only absolution for this sin was in undoing the cultural logic of departure. Even the new films of the 1990s, which do not show a validation of Indian values at the expense of the life in the diaspora, are not altogether unaffected by the older India-exaltingÂ€theology. But what changed irrevocably in the 1990s was the fact that the diaspora had become a market to reckon with, a territory for film distribution, whose earnings could supplement, if not rival, box office collections from the entire Indian market. Particularly in North America, Europe and the Gulf, the Indian diaspora had come of age, 93


graduating, as I have said elsewhere, from the status of minors to majors almost overnight; though a minority, they could, with their huge purchasing power, behave like a majority.8 Or, to change metaphors, they have certainly come of class, if not of age. But the net result is similar: when it came to its appreciation of and support for, Bombay cinema, the Indian diaspora spread over five continents and scattered across seventy countries was indeed like a nation of thirty million. Recent films like Kabhi Alvida Naa Kehna have demonstrated that what a film earns abroad can add substantially to what it earns in India or even offset losses on its Indian sales. According to industry sources, Kabhi Alvida Naa Kehna grossed Rs600 million (about US$16 million or A$23.5 million) in its first week, but while interest in it waned in India, it was shown in overÂ€ 1,200 screens worldwide and emerged as the biggest overseas money-maker for a Bollywood film, overtaking the five-year record ofÂ€Kabhi Khushi Kabhie Gham.9 Bollywood, which is primarily a money-making business enterprise, has been quick to recognise this new market and therefore has repackaged itself to appeal to and cash in on it. In the process, it is not only globalising itself but spreading images of India abroad; or to put it in a slightly exaggerated, Bollywood fashion, Indianising the globe in unprecedented ways. This is how Bollywood has been consolidating its position as the second cinema of the world. More recently, it is even making its inroads into the more dominant Hollywood cinema, merging and integrating with its rival as never before. For instance, much of the post-production work of Hollywood is being outsourced to Bollywood these days. Yet, Bollywood has managed to retain its own unique identity and, from being the subaltern second cinema of the world, it is becoming the dominant second cinema of the world—maybe not as dominant as Hollywood, but powerful nonetheless. It is this shift of Bollywood with its ‘going global’ that I propose to develop further with particular reference to Salaam Namaste, which exemplifies the relationship of Bollywood not just to Australia, but to the very city of Melbourne.

Hollywood/Bollywood Like most Bollywood films, Salaam Namaste is alleged to be copy of a Hollywood movie, in this case Nine Months (1995). While there are indeed several similarities, I would argue that it is not merely a copy but an adaptation of some of the elements of the Hollywood film, suited to 94


Bollywood tastes and altered significantly in location and outcome. In fact, one might argue, contrarily, that Salaam Namaste has several elements from an earlier Bombay film, Kya Kehna (2000). The earlier movie, moreover, has the same lead pair, Saif Ali Khan and Preity Zinta and, in the earlier film, too, Zinta plays an unwed mother to be. But by changing the cultural and linguistic context, Bollywood creates ‘original’ parallel texts. Indeed, the relationship between Bollywood and Hollywood is not merely one of originality and imitation, nor one of dominance and subordination, or coloniser and colonised. Instead, what we have is difference and alter-nativity as the defining feature of the relationship between the world’s first and second cinemas. Bombay cinema is neither a duplicate nor a substitute for Hollywood: it is another cinema, to some extent a competitive second global cinema. As Kaur and Sinha put it: One fundamental difference between Hollywood and Bollywood is that the former pushes world cultures towards homogenisation, whereas the latter introduces in those cultures a fragmentary process. Hybrid in its production since its beginnings, the circulating of India’s commercial cinema through the globe has led to the proliferation and fragmentation of its fantasy space, as its narrative and spectacle beget diverse fantasies for diasporic communities and others.10

This is a fine, though debatable point in that it might be unfair to Hollywood and too flattering to Bollywood. But I would agree that a process of diversity, if not fragmentation, is introduced to Indian and subcontinental audiences because Bollywood’s inherent plurality creates and engenders plural fantasies and aspirations. Unlike Hollywood, whose ostensible audience and reach are universal—the West normalises itself as the universal—Bollywood is more modest in its pretensions. Its overt aim is to address subcontinental Indians and diasporic South Asians. That an even wider audience appreciates it is something that Bollywood perhaps does not acknowledge openly. While Hollywood, though appearing to be universal, excludes several sections of the world’s population from participating as equals in its offerings, Bollywood it would seem offers surreptitious enjoyment, even voyeuristic pleasure, to those whom it does not even address directly. This is what makes for its unique fascination even as a style and culture industry to Westerners who may have no use for it as entertainment. Thus, Bollywood is a purveyor in fashions and trends, adopted willingly by its target audience and perhaps periodically by an 95


even wider unintended set of consumers. How else might one explain the following that it enjoys in the most unexpected corners of the world and its incorporation, albeit as kitsch, in unexpected host cultures? Bhangra, kolhapuri chappals, Indian clothes and Indian food—all have become Bollywoodised so that Bollywood stands for much more than cinema, as ‘a conveyor of “Indianness” to diverse audiences… as a means of negotiating both Indianness and its transformations, particularly when representing and being received by diasporic populations’.11 Indeed, Salaam Namaste illustrates this trend by showing, not entirely unrealistically, how an Australian wedding celebration effortlessly breaks into a Bhangra dance number. The circulation of Bollywood music, dance, style and iconography far exceeds its intended and actualÂ€audience.

Nine months in Melbourne Salaam Namaste, an offering of the Yash Chopra production house, is a romantic comedy set entirely in Melbourne. It not only features an Australian, Tania Zaetta, as the second lead actress, but also has more than 450 Australians as extras.12 According to its Melbourne-based line producer, Marcus Georgiades, ‘Every single piece of Melbourne can be seen in this film’.13 Siddharth Anand, its 27-year-old director, gushed, ‘Australia is a country of mind-blowing beauty, but it has rarely been explored by Bollywood directors. I love the beaches and the cafe culture here and the story of my movie fit [sic] hand-in-glove with the beautiful vibe of Melbourne’.14 It is the story of two young, non-resident Indians, Nikhil Arora (Saif Ali Khan) and Ambar Malhotra (Preity Zinta), who experiment with a live-in relationship before finally deciding to get married. Ron (Arshad Warsi) and Lisa (Tania Zaetta), the second couple in the film, serve as the foil. There is a bit of a love triangle, normally a staple in Yash Chopra’s films, but here reduced only to a minor subplot in that Jignesh (Jugal Hansraj), Ambar’s medical school batch mate and partial sponsor, seems to be definitely interested in her while she regards him merely as a friend. But the question that is fundamental to my inquiry is what the setting of the film in Melbourne signifies and what it tells us about changing Bollywood itself. First of all, it is clear that Australia is becoming an increasingly popular venue for Bombay film-makers. This trend is exemplified in movies ranging from Dil Chahta Hai to the latest mega production, 96


Chak De! India. I have already hinted at the material causes for this popularity, but it is the thematic import of Bollywood in Australia that interests me more. In Bombay cinema, Australia seems to stand for a non-American or non-European, but nevertheless advanced, Western, even white, society. The question is why is such a site at all required? First, it seems to me that it reflects a long overdue acknowledgement of the inherent complexity of what constitutes the West to the Indian mind. Bollywood, which has usually resorted to the negative stereotyping and homogenising of the West, has at last begun to show the West in more complex colours. Australia, furthermore, represents a slightly different possibility for an Indian immigrant than, say, the United States or England. These differences may be very slight but are significant. In another 2006 hit, Krrish, the foreign setting is Singapore, which makes one ask why it is not England, USA, or elsewhere in the West. Bollywood has begun to understand and exploit the need to choose different, contrasting locations from India. Not just the West, but also the Middle East and the Far East have come under its purview. Here, it seems that Indo-China, which has been India’s traditional theatre and sphere of cultural influence up to modern times, will also be the place where India’s new emergence into power will be more easily recognised and acknowledged than in the West.

Figure 5: Salaam Namaste in Australia. Image courtesy Yash Raj Films Pvt. Ltd.

97


But to return to Melbourne, we have in Salaam Namaste the idea of the Australian Dream, available to the immigrant as an American Dream is available in films set in North America. These dreams are now extensions of the Indian dream, a part of which is to make it abroad. Even so, the Australian dream, in this case Nikhil’s plan to own his own restaurant, is not just somewhat more modest but also more humanised than, for instance, Sexy Sam’s unexplained but stupendous success on more than one front in the US in Kabhi Alvida Naa Kehna. Unlike some of the films set in the US, Salaam Namaste, it would appear, pays greater attention to the economic factors that underlie emigration. Both Nikhil and Ambar struggle with not just earning money but saving it and planning for the future. One of their prime reasons for sharing an apartment is economic. Later, their quarrels and disagreements are also over money. The economic is thus not conveniently elided or erased in this film. The main purpose of setting the film in Australia is, however, revealed only when we ask why it cannot be set in India. The fact is that mainstream Bollywood audiences in India are still not ready to accept the live-in relationships being endorsed on screen. Even in Salaam Namaste in the end it is marriage and the values of monogamous and legitimate sexuality associated with it, that finally prevails. But the major portion of the film is about the agonies and ecstasies of a live-in relationship, which might have been too bold for mass audiences in India. In other words, setting the film far away from home, in Australia, allows the latter to serve almost as an experimental laboratory for new social and sexual mores. To that extent, rather than being merely escapist, Bollywood is also educative. It is teaching folks back at home how postmodern relationships develop and work themselves out, subtly suggesting that it is OK to live in before marriage. This pedagogical and liberative potential has seldom been recognised or studied. Bollywood is not just a cinema of allurements but also of education. The central problem that the film explores is the tussle between freedom and domesticity. It does this through several gender benders, leading to the possibility of a truly egalitarian relationship in which each partner is not only equal but also independent. This re-gendering of the typical male–female relationship in Bollywood is one of the advantages that come from setting the film in Australia. The overseas Indian male now serves to educate his domestic counterparts about how to become more gender-sensitive. Nikhil, though he is an architect, wants to be a chef and Ambar, who moonlights as a radio jockey (RJ), is studying to be a doctor. Such modifications in conventional career 98


choices are interspersed throughout the film. One reason that Ambar agrees to move in with Nikhil is because the latter is such a good cook. She, on the other hand, not only hates cooking but is also extremely messy, while he is a neatness freak. Towards the latter part of the film, a very pregnant Ambar does, perhaps for the first time on Indian cinema, a song and dance number, thereby making pregnancy cool and sexy rather than taboo, as is usually the case in unmarried heroines in Bollywood. Similarly, the birthing sequence in the movie, though farcical, is meant to normalise and humanise what in Bollywood would never be shown openly on screen. The film also takes a stand on the abortion debate, coming down firmly in favour of retaining the baby even if the choice of the woman to abort it is recognised. The battle of the sexes between Nikhil and Ambar is resolved in the latter’s favour only after she becomes pregnant and graduates from being a lover to a mother. True to Bollywood conventions, motherhood is supreme. A woman as a romantic lover can only come second and Ambar’s decision to keep her baby puts her at a moral advantage over Nikhil who finds himself forced to choose between descending to brutality or rising to the occasion by becoming a responsible partner and father. In the end, responsibility trumps freedom and the Me Generation must finally turn to the ‘us generation’. To that extent, the long reach of traditional Indian values extends even to distant Australia. Indeed, Ambar acknowledges that, in escaping to Australia and dumping her parents, she sets herself up for the kind of suffering that she has to undergo. One of the added conveniences of locating the movie in Australia is the absence of family and elders who, in India, would have made Ambar’s and Nikhil’s experiment impossible in the first place. Though set overseas, the film at least peripherally addresses questions of ethnic and linguistic diversities that are typical of modern India. It shows characters from different parts of India and South Asia, with different regional accents, mother tongues, even food habits, but interacting with one another and forming a cohesive subculture abroad. Ambar’s boss is supposed to be a Malayali, while Nikhil’s is a Bangladeshi; the landlord from whom they rent their house is a Bihari. Nikhil and Ambar of course are Punjabi Hindus, which for long has served as Bollywood’s idea of the national norm, though it might be added that their names suggest they are from two different castes. As in many other Bollywood films set overseas, Salaam Namaste does not show a fully-fledged engagement with the host culture; native Australians, whether Aboriginal or white are marginal to the film. Nikhil’s Indian friend does marry an Australian girl but she remains a 99


minor character. The cultural and social traumas of diasporians abroad are conveniently avoided in the film. The marriage scene, in which both Nikhil and Ron meet their partners, is a fully integrated and multicultural event, where issues of racism are ignored. One cannot expect a better endorsement of Australian multiculturalism. Indeed, at least for Australians, the film is by and large the best possible free advertisement, not just of Australianness but of a specific location—Melbourne. In terms of actual revenue generation and tourist dollars, a single film like Salaam Namaste has probably done more for Melbourne than all the advertisements put out by the Melbourne tourist board. The allure of Bollywood is irresistible: to see their favourite stars cavorting against the backdrop of the shining steel and glass towers of the central business district of Melbourne or on the banks of the sparkling blue waters of the Yarra, which in real life can be rather muddy, makes for the best possible pitch for travel-worthy Indians to visit Australia or to discover themselves in this alluring overseas destination. Bollywood eroticises whichever location it chooses, thereby creating a desire for these exotic lands in the minds of wanderlust-ful and now well-to-do Indian audiences. The earlier trend of shooting abroad, to give Indians who cannot travel a taste of foreign lands, has now changed into an invitation for those who can afford it to visit. So the function of the foreign location has changed with globalisation. It is no longer an image of an unattainable desire, but is now somewhere that a middle-class Indian, at least, may choose to visit. The possession of the foreign is no longer just a fantasy but a possibility. This does not mean, on the other hand, that allegiance to India and to Indian values can be completely jettisoned in the film. A part of Nikhil’s education is his acceptance of his name, which he wants shortened to Nick. When the film opens, Nikhil’s hatred of his name suggests that, despite making a living by cooking Indian food abroad, he still wants to dissociate from his roots. The taste of India not only serves Nikhil but is also spreading across the world. The prerequisite for Ambar’s acceptance of Nikhil is the latter’s acceptance of his own name and along with it his entire cultural identity. Similarly, Ambar’s self-willed rebellion and breaking away from her family is criticised in the movie and is acknowledged by herself as one of the causes of her sorrow. In the end, traditional family values triumph over the carefree and exciting romance of a live-in relationship. The latter is seen as a preparation for the former. The protagonists fall in love because domesticity, even of the live-in variety, is seen as so attractive. It becomes untenable and intolerable when Ambar’s accidental pregnancy 100


foregrounds issues of responsibility versus freedom. It is withÂ€ Nikhil’s acceptance of a modified definition of love as entailing responsibility and not just freedom that the conflict is resolved. Carpe diem, which was the motto of youth, seems to be replaced by a concern for the morrow, not just for the lovers but for their progeny as well. One of the fascinating aspects of the film is that both Ambar’s and Nikhil’s conversions are affected by a ‘movie’. It is only when Ambar sees the live sonograph of her as yet unborn child that she begins to relate to it as a living being. Her latent motherly feelings are aroused and she determines to keep the child. In the case of Nikhil, too, it is only after he watches the ultrasound in the doctor’s office that he is converted. This episode has been lifted from Nine Months, where Samuel Faulkner (Hugh Grant) changes his mind after watching a video of the ultrasound and both films are unwittingly self-reflexive, celebrating the power of the cinematic medium, not in Technicolor, maybe, but ‘celluloid’ nevertheless. Similarly it is not entirely accidental that Ambar works as an RJ in a South Asian radio station, Salaam Namaste, which can be regarded as a metaphor for Bollywood itself, cementing ties between diasporians and intervening in their lives in unexpected and decisive ways. Nikhil and Ambar meet on the radio show and are united in the end because of it. Bollywood, with its audio extensions and subsidiaries, is thus a part of a larger interwoven cultural unit, which helps define South Asian identities abroad. Despite its reach and ambition, Bollywood remains the cinema of either a large subcontinent or of a smaller subculture in the diaspora. The homeland–hostland relationship, as mediated through the diaspora, is not utterly devoid of tensions, ambivalences and compromises, but these are not dealt with adequately. Unlike diaspora literature, which is often about the traumas of exile and dislocation, Bollywood shows its protagonists in what may be called ‘additive exile’, comfortably at home abroad. In Salaam Namaste, too, the hyper-assimilation of the Crocodile-Dundee-like landlord (Javed Jaffrey) is dealt with by simple parody. The tensions in the marriage of Ron and Lisa arise not out of their different cultures but seem to be rather superficial, personalityrelated issues. White Australia is simply a neutral background when it is not positively welcoming as in the wedding scene at the beginning. Black Australians are hardly shown at all and, when they are, they are not marked as the Aborigines exiled out of Dreamtime in their own land, but as happy coloureds in a free and fair society. Salaam Namaste is, after all, a comedy. In the end Nikhil gets his girl and presumably will go on to open his restaurant. He and Ambar, with 101


their Australian-born twins, will be less and less Indian with the passage of time. Ron, his buddy, has already gone halfway towards assimilation with his white Australian wife, as indeed has the Bihari landlord, with his not too intellectually keen partner. Indian values, however exalted, may be harder to carry into the next generation. Mere linguistic or geographical hybridity may not be sufficient to deal with problems as complex as these. Bollywood may, for all we know, come up with yet another idiom to grapple with what is to come. But as far as this film is concerned, there is no return to India, but rather an incorporation of a usable and transferable India to a brave new world in the antipodes.

Conclusion Salaam Namaste is one of the many new Bollywood mega-hits set entirely overseas. This growing trend shows that the global Indian is a reality, both as audience and as the subject of the film. In a sense, Bollywood succeeded where the Indian government has failed; it extended the cultural citizenship of India to overseas Indians long before the Indian government issued its Peoples of Indian Origin card to all its diasporic children. Bollywood becomes the imagi-nation, where Indians of different nationalities and locations come together as one nation: Greater India, if you will. Salaam Namaste, set entirely in Melbourne, may be the first Hindi film to concern itself with Indian Australians, as distinct from Indian expatriates, as in Dil Chahta Hai. However, there is not much in it by way of relating to the host country and Australia becomes the setting where an Indian couple experiment with living together before marriage, returning to the more established social institution of marriage in the end. Yet, this experiment allows them to explore new dimensions of what it means both to be Indians and expatriates. Bollywood thus educates its Indian (and overseas) audiences on what being Indian means in a globalised world. It means pursuing your dreams, but also retaining essential values. Rather than nursing a wounded psyche, the newly arrived, transnational Indian is comfortable both at home and abroad. With the cultural citizenship of Greater India conferred upon him by Bollywood, he is able to cross national and geographical borders with ease, without feeling alienated or excluded. That the ground reality is very far from this rosy picture is a different matter. What is important for our purposes is the Bollywood promise that another world is possible.

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Notes 1 At the workshop ‘Transnational dialogues on Bollywood: Australian perspectives’, Monash University Law Chambers, 30 November 2006, Melbourne. 2 S Greenblatt, Marvellous Possessions: The Wonder of the New World, New York, Oxford University Press, 1991, p. 6. 3 R Kaur & A.J Sinha, Bollyworld: Popular Indian Cinema through a Transnational Lens, New Delhi, Sage Publications, 2005, pp. 20–21. 4 Z Sardar, ‘Dilip Kumar made me do it’, in A Nandy, (ed.), The Secret Politics of Our Desires: Innocence, Culpability and Indian Popular Cinema, New Delhi, Oxford University Press, 1998; V Mishra, Bombay Cinema: Temples of Desire, London, Routledge, 2002; SÂ€Mehta, Maximum City: Bombay Lost and Found, New Delhi, Viking, 2004. 5 Mehta, Maximum City, p. 9. 6 ibid., p. 379. 7 R Dwyer & D Patel, Cinema India: the Visual Culture of Hindi Film, New Delhi, Oxford University Press, 2002. 8 M Paranjape (ed.), In Diaspora: Theories, Histories, Texts, New Delhi, Indialog, 2001. 9 ‘Kabhi Alvida Naa Kehna’, , viewed 9 March 2008. 10 Kaur & Sinha, Bollyworld, p. 15. 11 ibid., p. 16. 12 A Arora, ‘From Mumbai to Melbourne’, Sydney Morning Herald 2Â€SeptemberÂ€2005, , viewed 7 March 2008. 13 ibid. 14 ibid.

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5

Cook Cook Hota Hai: Indian Cinema, Kitchen Culture and Diaspora1 Srilata Ravi

The resounding popularity of Siddharth Anand’s Salaam Namaste (2005) has now established Australia, together with the UK and the USA, as an important diasporic backdrop to the weaving of Bollywood dreams. From Aditya Chopra’s Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge (DDLJ) (1995) to RÂ€Balki’s more recent Cheeni Kum (2007), Indian cinema has represented the UK as a privileged space of diasporic desire. The success of Nikhil Advani’s Kal Ho Naa Ho (2003), set entirely in New York, endorsed the importance of the Indo-American diaspora on Bombay’s silver screen. By comparing Bollywood’s treatment of Australia with its treatment of the UK and the USA, this essay will locate Australia as diasporic space within the larger context of globalised space in Bollywood cinema, focusing especially on the kitchen film genre in its reading of a revised ‘gastropoetics’ of Bollywood transnationalism.

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Bollywood and the Indian diaspora Jenny Sharpe rightly points out that DDLJ is a ‘watershed in Bombay cinema’s depiction of non-resident Indians (NRIs) as its leading characters are British-born Indians’.2 Traditionally, NRIs have been portrayed negatively in Indian cinema, either as villains or as blundering nouveau riche characters. It was during the 1990s that Bollywood, in its bid to attract the rapidly expanding overseas Indian cinema audience, began to use diaspora for its central location and theme. Indian cinema’s new focus did much to restore the much-damaged NRI respectability. The pravasi bharatiya (diasporic Indian) genre3 valorises the authentic Indianness of the modern diasporic subject by transposing the cosmopolitan desires of an Indian middle class onto the silver screen. With their main focus being on overseas Indians ‘coming home’, films like DDLJ have reinforced the sense that Indianness cannot be tainted by highlighting the nationalist claim to authentic Indian values. In the wake of the success in the film of Raj (Shah Rukh Khan), NRIs and expatriate Indians have steadily replaced local heroes as principal characters in several Bollywood blockbusters. Set and shot overseas, but laced heavily with Indian values, these films have owed their success to their double objective: to serve a globalised Indian audience as well as to seduce a fast-growing, urbanised Indian middle class in the subcontinent.4 The diaspora–homeland nostalgic divide, encapsulated so convincingly in DDLJ in the father-in-law–prospective son-in-law dynamics between Amrish Puri and Shah Rukh Khan, has become the unerring formula for these films. The film’s success both at home and abroad has relied on the fact that the focus on diasporic families did not alter the moral values conveyed by Indian cinema, but merely transposed an ideal Indian family on to a foreign location. As Vijay Mishra points out, in representing the perennial values that a diaspora should aspire towards and desire, Bombay cinema ends up replicating its own form.5 Bollywood’s emphasis on representing overseas Indian communities is intricately linked to India’s economic liberalisation. Priya Jaikumar states that films depicting NRIs cleverly manipulate stylistic and thematic content to ‘accommodate norms that are upheld as Indian along with lifestyles of excessive consumerism, which have been hitherto associated with the industrial West’.6 The diasporic hero in Indian cinema reflects the aspirations of his urban Indian counterpart and his ‘hybridity’ is acceptable as long he is faithful to his essential Indianness, which is ‘equated with devotion to family, hospitality, loyalty to friends, modesty 106

Cook Cook Hota Hai: Indian Cinema, Kitchen Culture and Diaspora

amid extreme wealth, piety and an adherence to rules of patriarchy and monogamy’.7 Such conventions, however, are fast evolving. Tejaswini Ganti argues that Indian films today face the challenge of an audience that watches MTV and a privatised marketplace, where Indian films have to compete with international youth programs.8 Under pressure from the demands of a young audience that desires compatibility between the need for conspicuous consumption dictated by a globalised entertainment industry and the need for a consensus on core Indian values, the concept of a well-defined Bollywood Indianness based on diasporic impurity and homeland purity seems to be undergoing renegotiation in more recent films. As noted earlier, Indian values reinforced in films such as DDLJ, Pardes (1997) and Hum Dil De Chuke Sanam (1999), set in diasporic communities, are based on a primordial West–India divide that structures the diaspora–homeland narrative.9 This essay argues that the ‘believable fantasies’â†œ10 of the 1990s are now giving way to the ‘fantastic realities’ of a transnational era where, according to Buddhadev Gupta (Amitabh Bachchan) in Ramji Londonwaley (2005), ‘everything is possible’ (sab kuch mumkin hai). As opposed to a visible and palpable diaspora–homeland dichotomy based on emotional, cultural and geographical oppositions, these new films blur the distinction between here and there, the traditional and the modern, India and the West. In effect, they foreground a new politics of Indianness that is mobile and not tied to geographies of home. Their emphasis is less on authenticity and more on ubiquity; the new-age Indian can be ‘Indian’ anywhere in the world—in New York, London, Melbourne, Sydney, Bombay, Bihar or Chennai—and Indianness is shaped by varying economicallymotivated social practices. The Bollywood NRI, whose scope of action (economic and cultural) was limited to overseas locations, is now replaced by more mobile transnationals: computer engineers on contract in Sydney, medical interns on short-term visits in Melbourne, scientists on deputation in Houston, or businessmen travelling between Bombay and Zürich. Whether in glamorous international roles or in more localised professions, what these global Indians have in common are general affluence and success overseas, comfortable adaptation to a Western lifestyle and mobile connectivity to a modern India. In the last few years, Australia has emerged in Indian cinema as a significant backdrop to the dramatisation of the unending cultural and financial opportunities that such transnational contexts provide. Hindi movies, such as Salaam Namaste and Heyy Babyy (2007), as well as Tamil films like Nala Damayanthi (2003) and Unnale Unnale (2007), 107


have freely floating Indian transnationals as their principal protagonists. While Unnale Unnale showcases the growing contribution of Indianborn software engineers to the Australian economy, the three playboys turned caring fathers in Heyy Babyy represent new age Indians who live, love and consume in Sydney as they would in Bombay. This study will focus on a specific group of transnationals, the professional cooks. Amongst the various NRI types projected by Indian cinema, the male chef or professional cook is an interesting category that permits us to explore the representation of Indianness in popular culture. I specifically examine the kitchen film genre to show how the politics and aesthetics of culinary and catering cultures in Australian–Indian diaspora films represent culturally mobile Indian identities.

Cooks and kitchen culture in Bollywood cinema Before we look more closely at films with a diasporic setting, it is essential to look at the politics of kitchen culture in Bollywood films in general. Arguably, food as ‘both highly condensed social fact and a marvellously plastic kind of collective representation with the capacity to mobilize strong emotions’11 is as much a focus of social and moral thought in Indian cinema as it is in real life. Bawarchi (1972) placed the producer of this social fact at the centre stage by introducing Bollywood’s first glamorous superstar, Rajesh Khanna, in the unglamorous role of cook or bawarchi in a joint family. As the prime agent responsible for the production and consumption of food and, more importantly as the one who organised its social transactions within domestic space at home, Rajesh Khanna, in the role of Raghu the cook, managed to achieve harmony and happiness in what was clearly a dysfunctional domestic space. Within Indian cinema’s conventions of sex, morality and marriage of the 1970s, Rajesh Khanna’s role had to be created in an unromantic light. He was not a sensitive lover nor a social rebel but the ultimate cook–philosopher who represented the core Indian values of family duties, kinship bonds and love of nation, which far outweighed love, romance and other individualistic desires. Indian cinema has taken a very long time to re-portray the superstar as celluloid cook since Bawarchi. What is of interest in this study is that this re-portrayal is generated on Bollywood’s overseas canvas. Food production and consumption are important signifiers of difference in diasporic communities. Paroma Roy points out that migrants and expatriates maintain their ties to their places of origin 108


through their ‘preservation and participation in traditional customs and rituals of consumption’.12 She adds that in the spaces of diaspora, national and moral dramas are enacted through the act of consumption. What Roy terms parables of authenticity and home are narrated through such acts and in the process idioms of purity and pollution are created, reproduced and circulated both in the private and public places where food is prepared and consumed. In S Shankar’s Jeans (1998), the friendship between the Indian family owners of a restaurant in Los Angeles and the visitors from South India is based on their promise to provide the tourists with authentic Indian cuisine. The restaurant and, by extension, the family home of the American South Indians become the space of pure and unpolluted Indian traditions where the diasporic Indian and the homeland Indian can live together harmoniously. In the more recent kitchen films under consideration here, we notice that a rigid definition of authenticity (culinary or otherwise) undergoes constant renegotiation. The kitchen space, through its management of private and public food circuits, is depicted as the complex transnational site where the Indian subject (migrant or subcontinental) can enact his ‘mobile Indianness’ outside frameworks of cultural exclusion, marginalisation and subordination. This space in the films under examination is the domain of the male protagonist, both in the private space of the home and the public space of the restaurant. By focusing on the domestic and commercial kitchens, the essay lays emphasis on the production of food in the diaspora as an idiom for a renewed Indianness, which does not lay emphasis on any fixed notion of authenticity but functions within a more mobile framework of transnational circuits that facilitate the movement of capital, commodity and people. As Crang, Dwyer and Jackson argue, consumption, commodity and capital circuits bring to light the fact that diasporic spaces are multiply inhabited and showcase complex networks and flows.13 Ramji ke pas hai sab cheez ke liye masala (‘Ramji has the spices for everything’) is the chorus line of the title song of Ramji Londonwaley. The cook, who, like Ramji (Madhavan), has the masala (recipe or solution) for everything, has come to epitomise the perfect cinematic transnational, cooking and circulating recipes for cultural mobility for the benefit of transnational Indians. Saif Ali Khan as the suave Nikhil Arora, the architect-turnedchef in Melbourne in Salaam Namaste, frames this study as the model cook in the diaspora. An analysis of Nikhil Arora will be followed by an examination of the roles of Madhavan as an unsophisticated cook in Nala Damayanthi, set in Australia, and Ramji Londonwaley, set 109


in London. The comparison exposes the subtle cultural politics of vernacular cinema and permits a more nuanced understanding of the nationalist politics of global Indian cinema using the kitchen genre as a case study. A third section will compare Salaam Namaste with the more recent Cheeni Kum, where Amitabh Bachchan in his role as the sixty-four-year-old Buddhadev Gupta, owner and head chef of ‘Spice 6’ in London, provides a new dimension to culinary politics in the Indian diaspora.

Salaam Namaste: Sex, urban chic and the transnational cook Salaam Namaste’s DVD cover describes Ambar, a radio jockey (Preity Zinta), and Nikhil, a chef (Saif Ali Khan), as ‘young’, ‘cool’ and ‘independent’, ‘[s]urrounded by quirky friends, bosses and landlords but far away from home’. Nikhil is sent to Australia to pursue a degree in architecture so that he can join his father’s construction business. He completes his studies to please his parents but, to fulfil his personal desires, becomes the head chef of a Melbourne restaurant named ‘Nick of Time’ (Nikhil insists on his given name being Anglicised to Nick). Ambar’s family is from Bangalore and, having arrived in Melbourne on a student exchange programme, Ambar decides to stay on and start medical school to escape family pressure to marry and settle down. To pay for her living expenses she works at the local radio station for Indian listeners, where she has become a very successful radio host. Ambar and Nick meet at a beach wedding and fall in love after some initial sparring. They move in together but decide to remain pure sexually. Finally, they succumb to temptation and Ambar falls pregnant. Nick is not ready for emotional commitment and wants Ambar to have an abortion, but Ambar decides to go ahead and have the child. The film transforms into a serious relationship story and, in the end, Nick comes around and accepts fatherhood and family responsibilities. Both Nick and Ambar come from middle-class homes in India and have no problem settling into Australian society. Visas and finances, two major obstacles to geographical mobility, do not seem to pose any problems to these young people. Using a freeze-frame and voiceover technique, the film foregrounds the diverse range of Indians that find themselves friends and colleagues in Melbourne. Nick and Ambar are surrounded by sons of affluent Indian businessmen, enterprising South Asians, like the Bangladeshi owner of ‘Nick of Time’, rich and quirky homeowners and other successful Indian professionals in 110


Melbourne. Except for major Melbourne landmarks, buildings and roadways and the sporadic appearance of white Australians, the story could have been set anywhere in India. As the principal narrative framework is not constructed around the emotional tension generated by the diaspora–homeland divide, Melbourne becomes a pretext to stage the taboo theme of moving in together before marriage. At the same time, the situation is grounded in reality. In the last five to ten years, a fast-growing urban middle class has acquired sufficient money power to finance their children’s education overseas. Indian banks have also increased the number of study loans to students who wish to study in universities abroad. Economic liberalisation has created golden opportunities for students wishing to travel and the banks have been quick to see these young people as future NRI investors in India. Furthermore, the demand for qualified IT professionals in countries like Australia has seen an influx of young Indians who are often quite prepared to relocate on short-term contracts. India’s decision to grant Overseas Indian certificates (dual citizenship) to its citizens living abroad has also greatly eased the mobility not only of capital and goods but also of people.14 Thus in a digital era where geographical distances have all but disappeared, ‘back home’ has become not so far as to generate any form of sentimental nostalgia in the hearts of privileged transnationals like Ambar and Nick. It is not Nick but the voiceover that tells us that Nick, as a child growing up in India, preferred to help in the kitchen rather than play cricket and the narrative does not dwell on the drama of intergenerational conflicts, a theme pivotal to earlier diaspora narratives. Nick’s kitchen in his restaurant is a transnational space that accommodates multiple values and personalities as it does multiple cuisines. As the restaurant’s name, as well as his own implies, this space is not ethnically determined. As head chef, Nick shuns the image of commoditised nostalgia (ghar ka khana or home-made food) by emphasising uniqueness and sophistication of service. In Nick’s restaurant, where the target clientele is cosmopolitan, Nick’s cuisine becomes an idiom for transnational consumption and his service a form of ‘corporate’ seduction. He explains to an assistant that a dish has to be ‘made glamorous’ and should be dressed like a mistress when served in a restaurant to make it attractive to the clients. The authenticity factor in this narrative is not related to ethnicised consumption practices but to production and service of food in a transnational space where culinary politics are based on customer satisfaction. Nick tells his assistants: ‘We are not in India now, please namak kum [less salt]’. 111


On the other hand, the traditional nargez kebab, Nick’s signature dish, is a metaphor of sexual desire. It is during a radio interview with Ambar and in the middle of a sentence stringing together the ingredients for nargez kebab that he declares his love for her. Consumption of home food as an idiom of purity and authenticity is replaced in this narrative by food as an idiom of desire. But even this image becomes destabilised as the film progresses. Nick, as the perfectionist chef in his kitchen space at home, is helpless as take-away pizzas and ice cream cloud his culinary canvas. Nick’s desire for Ambar wanes when he realises that she is expecting a baby and, as the two lovers battle to keep their relationship alive, Ambar’s craving, vomiting and other unpleasant symptoms associated with pregnancy dominate the story’s gastropoetics, which shifts very rapidly from the refined to the coarse. The plot endorses what Indian cinema used to consider impure, premarital sex, and the narrative can no longer sustain the consumption of authentic flavours as a parable of purity. By focusing on relationship issues against a backdrop of a migrant community of friends instead of a homeland family, issues of chastity and modesty become secondary to more universal issues of responsibility and commitment. Like Nick’s background, Ambar’s family history of rebellion is also related through the use of freeze-frame and voiceover technique. A cinematic reaffirmation of core values of Indian womanhood is thus avoided, as Ambar takes the decision to have her baby out of wedlock without consulting her family. Nick’s eventual reconciliation with his fatherhood also occurs outside conventional family melodrama. The authentic Indian identity was represented in the diaspora films of the 1990s by religious rites, elaborate weddings, the presence of large extended families, respect for parental authority, endorsed norms of female chastity and intense love for the homeland. These are all subjected to renegotiation in Salaam Namaste. Devoid of family melodrama and spectacular ceremonies, Salaam Namaste presents Indian identity as culturally mobile rather than culturally hybrid. The Bollywood story of Nick and Ambar, young transnational professionals in Melbourne, reflects the dilemmas and aspirations of privileged, urban, middle-class youth in contemporary India. Therefore, despite the film’s bold storyline, the film enjoyed immense popularity both in India and abroad. By placing the narrative outside the rigid parameters of a diaspora–home nexus, the film foregrounds mobility and circulation of cultural, economic and human capital instead of freezing Indianness in time and space. Nick and Ambar belong to the growing number of young Indians who, through their financial and professional success 112


abroad, participate in global systems that connect to India. Nick’s transnational kitchen is a metaphor of the de-territorialised networks in which these transnational protagonists negotiate cultural practices.

Ramji Londonwaley and Nala Damayanthi: gastropolitics of transnational investments Sanjay Damia’s Ramji Londonwaley is the Hindi remake of Mouli’s Tamil film Nala Damayanthi. The original is set in Australia and stages the (mis)adventures of an unsophisticated Palakkad Brahmin cook from a small village in Kerala. Ramji (Madhavan) arrives in Melbourne to work as a private vegetarian cook to make some money to pay for his sister’s wedding dowry.15 The Hindi remake tells the story of a Bihari simpleton (Madhavan is also in the lead role in the Hindi version) who travels to London from the small village of Tikapur for similar reasons. The employer is dead by the time Ramji Ramnarayan Tiwari reaches London and, as in the original where the Palakkad cook finds himself without a job in the alien surroundings of Melbourne, the Bihari Ramji loses his passport, is rescued by a young diasporic Indian couple and gains their trust through his sensitive reaction to their handicapped child. In both films, the couple employ Ramji illegally as head chef in their restaurant. With very little knowledge of English and Western values, both Ramji in Melbourne, who speaks a recognisable Palakkad dialect, and Ramji in London, who speaks a Bihari dialect, are ‘illiterate cooks’ who embark on a cross-cultural voyage, sharing recipes, battling language barriers and becoming involved in immigration hassles. Both Ramjis have to resort to marrying a woman with citizenship in order to obtain a permit to continue to work. In both versions, Ramji’s guileless mannerisms and unfamiliarity with modern, urban practices leads to comic situations. At the same time, his disarming demeanour and candid honesty wins him friends in the diasporic Indian community. On the surface, the storyline in Ramji Londonwaley does not deviate from the Tamil original, Nala Damayanthi. The bumbling Palakkad Brahmin cook is replaced by a Bihari villager, Melbourne is replaced by London and the plot, centring around the binaries of sophisticated/ uneducated and home/away, remains much the same. In both films, the comedy is based on the fish out of water syndrome and the narrative tension stems from the inflexible nature of immigration laws. A closer reading, however, shows that Nala Damayanthi, set in Australia and 113


catering to a Tamil-speaking audience, manages the mix of diasporic, national and regional politics quite differently. The city of Melbourne, which welcomes the uneducated Brahmin cook from Palakkad, is represented as a complex location where discourses of South-Asianness, Indianness and Tamilness intersect. The Tamil language is not only spoken by Tamils from the Southern Indian province of Tamil Nadu but also by Tamils from Sri Lanka. At the same time, the term ‘Tamil’ is also an ethnic signifier and refers to Dravidian culture that is said to pre-date Aryan Sanskrit culture in India. Furthermore, the ‘Palakkad Brahmin’ category invokes caste conventions that are specific to Tamil cinema and to regional politics in Tamil Nadu. This juxtaposition between Indianness and Tamilness is best expressed when the Tamilspeaking Australian immigration officer asks Ramji about Damayanthi, the Australian of Indian descent he has paid to marry him in order to obtain a residence visa: ‘Have you ever thought how a “foreigner” like Damayanthi can adapt to Indian culture?’ (The word Indian or Indiyan is also used in Tamil.) Ramji replies: ‘What she [Damayanthi] did by taking the money paid to her for pretending to be my wife and giving it to my sister in India could have only been accomplished by a girl from my village irrespective of her place of birth’. Ramji’s response in Nala Damayanthi clearly reiterates his regional affiliation and not his nationalist sentiment. While the original uses a South Asian diasporic location in Australia that exposes the subtle politics of regional versus national allegiances within diasporic communities, the Bollywood remake glosses over such complexities to promote a global Indian identity based on a pan-Indianness. The ending in the Hindi remake displays a more homogenised version of Indianness and, as Ramji is being deported from the UK, the press and the organisers of the ‘A Dish with a Difference’ contest arrive on his doorstep to inform him that his recipe has won him £50,000 and a job as a head chef with the sponsoring company. Seeing Ramji’s unfortunate predicament, the sponsors contact highlevel consular authorities in order to regularise his situation and he now has the opportunity for a legitimate and more permanent relocation to London. However, Ramji refuses, deciding instead to invest his competition winnings in Bihar. His departure is not an indictment of the lack of hospitality offered by the foreign community, nor is there an overwhelming desire on his part to express his nationalist sentiments through his return. He does, however, say that to remain in the UK would be selfish and greedy since he had travelled to London to solve a problem, not to settle. By remaining in the UK he would become an 114


adhura insan (incomplete human being), whereas by expressing his desire, first, to invest in a restaurant in his village to benefit his friends and relatives and then to open an English school for the village kids, Ramji stresses the importance of cultural mobility (through the use of Hindi as a transnational language) over nationalist sentiment. Ramji, despite his lack of formal education and training, showcases the culturally mobile Indian who travels to London to gain financial resources for local investment. Samira, the British woman of Indian descent he paid to marry him, joins him in Bihar and this leaves open the possibilities of further trips between London, where Samira’s grandmother still lives, and India. This drawn-out explanation for Ramji’s departure is absent in Nala Damayanthi, which privileges Tamil mobility over a more panIndian identity. The ending of the Tamil film reinforces Tamilness as a global identity that overrides caste and nation, and the appearance of Kamal Haasan as himself endorses the film’s Tamilness through cinematic intertextuality and real-life crossover.16 Despite its regional focus, Nala Damayanthi, like the Hindi remake, showcases the fact that the new-age Indian is not geo-culturally confined. Settlement, relocation and permanent change are no longer in the social vocabulary of the Indian transnational, who is in a privileged position of choosing to be a tourist, an expatriate or a resident in any geographical location. Both Ramjis who, despite being illiterate cooks, unlike their more suave and educated counterparts in Salaam Namaste and Cheeni Kum, are nonetheless capable of participating in the transnational flows of talent and capital. Their culinary skills are not confined geographically and the world becomes their kitchen where they can perfect their recipes of Indianness. Ramji, the Bhajarngbali Bhakt (devotee of Hanuman) in Ramji Londonwaley, like Ramji the Tamil Brahmin in Nala Damayanthi, can recognise the Christian God and is capable of combining his rural Indianness with Western values for economic survival. These Bollywood cooks are examples of the growing number of Indians who, through their confident adoption of an ecumenical Hinduism and rationalised, multicultural incorporation, participate in a new definition of the Indian of the twenty-first century. Amitabh Bachchan as himself, the superstar, makes a surprise appearance in Ramji Londonwaley at the opening of Ramji’s restaurant in Bihar (as Kamal Haasan had done in Kerala at the end of Nala Damayanthi). Responding to a delighted and stunned Ramji, he says that if people the world over could pay to see him on screen, he was entitled to come all the way to see the cook behind the world-famous gajar ka halwa dish, thus publicly endorsing villager Ramji’s transnational status. 115


Cheeni Kum: A May to December romance in a transnational kitchen Cheeni Kum, like Salaam Namaste, is a relationship film that announces a new trend in Bollywood cinema. If the professional cook and his girlfriend have to deal with issues of premarital sex in Salaam Namaste, the owner-chef of ‘Spice 6’ in Cheeni Kum has to grapple with questions of marriage and family when, at the age of sixty-four, he falls in love for the first time with a girl less than half his age. Instead of Melbourne as the cosmopolitan backdrop, a classy restaurant in London becomes the prime location for challenging age conventions in a conjugal relationship. The hero, Buddhadev Gupta (Amitabh Bachchan), is an arrogant and egoistic chef-cum-owner of London’s top Indian restaurant ‘Spice 6’. A confirmed bachelor, he lives with his mother (Zohra Sehgal). The only other members of his isolated circle outside his kitchen are terminally-ill Sexy (Swini Khara), his precocious nine-year-old neighbour and confidante, and her father. Thirty-four-year-old beautiful and independent Nina Verma (Tabu) visits Buddhadev’s restaurant when she is in London. The two fall in love and decide to get married, but Buddhadev has first to convince his future father-in-law, Om Prakash Verma (Paresh Rawal) of his suitability. Mr Verma who is six years younger than his prospective son-in-law is outraged and will not allow the marriage to take place. Everything about this film is unconventional and it breaks from the formulaic diaspora-based Bollywood films of the 1990s. As in Salaam Namaste, the geographical location of the protagonist is less important than the professional space, which he dominates, the restaurant kitchen. Buddha’s identity is defined by this transnational site, which is filled with professional cooks from India and waiters of different ethnic groups from London. The grey tones of the kitchen and its ambience of discipline, speed and calculated accuracy reflect the personality of the perfectionist and arrogant chef, who manages his kitchen in the manner of a military general. Like Nick in Salaam Namaste, Buddha is scornful of the shoddy commoditisation of Indian food. His opening words in the film express his disapproval for Indian cuisine cheaply packaged in restaurants with walls plastered with elephants and pictures of the Taj Mahal. Nostalgic sentiments and cultural authenticity do not determine the production and consumption of food inside ‘Spice 6’ or elsewhere in the film. Like ‘Nick of Time’ in Salaam Namaste, the name of the restaurant in Cheeni Kum, ‘Spice 6’, does not allude directly to any form of Indianness. Even if in the 116


opening scenes he establishes his restaurant as ‘not any okay okay place’ but London’s finest Indian restaurant, his definition does not allude to any particular idea of authentic consumption. Both Nick and Buddha are culinary artists in a global arena, concerned primarily with production and service, with cooking as an art form: ‘We are the world’s greatest artists’, Buddha exclaims. In his kitchen, which is a commercial space of multiculture (cooks, waiters and other employees come from different cultural backgrounds, as do his clients), Buddha clearly negotiates his own position as a culturally mobile Indian in order to succeed within the competitive marketplace of contemporary fine dining. Buddha’s signature dish is Zafrani Hyderabadi Pulao. When a female customer sends the dish back to kitchen claiming it is too sweet, it initiates a sparring encounter between an arrogant chef and a stubborn customer, which develops into an unusual love story. Commonly known as Zarda, Zafrani Pulao is a festive delicacy of north India. It is a luscious dish belonging to the Nawabi delicacies of India and it is prepared on the occasion of marriages and regional festivals. In the film its significance is primarily confined to its form and not to its cultural associations. Confronting his dissatisfied customer, Nina, a visibly angry Buddha asks her if she is really unable to taste the ‘flavour of India’ in the dish and the audience is quick to pick up the sarcasm that coats the chef ’s words. What irks the pompous head chef is the technical inaccuracy that was detected in his kitchen and not the thought that he may have betrayed his origins by serving inauthentic Indian cuisine rather than the ‘flavour of India’. As in Salaam Namaste, large families, social and religious rituals and conventional drama are missing in this narrative. Buddha lives alone with his mother and shares a very unconventional relationship with her. In Bollywood mother–son relationships, consumption of food prepared by the mother is a metaphor for the acceptance and return of maternal affection and for adherence to parental authority. In Cheeni Kum, Buddha’s mother spends her time watching television and goading her sixty-four-year-old son to go to the gym. Buddha, on the other hand, returns home from the restaurant each day to endure his mother’s austere, prison-style meals. Any show of affection between them is understated and their verbal exchanges are always sarcastic. As in Salaam Namaste, food as a parable of longing in diasporic communities is rejected and, instead, the film’s gastropoetics foregrounds the commercial value of ethnic food and deliberately elides its emotional value. Alternative images of feasting and fasting shape this kitchen narrative. The metaphorical feasting takes place in London in Buddha’s narrative 117


of desire for the younger and spicy Nina (Tangde Kebab, as he calls her). Buddha (Ghas Poos, as Nina calls him) specialises in gourmet meat dishes, but, in being a vegetarian, he represents the film’s ideological emphasis on food as commodity culture rather than consumption as nostalgia. In the second half of the film, when Buddha travels to Delhi to meet Mr Verma, his outraged future father-in-law is not impressed by Buddha or by his culinary talents. Refusing to accept him as his daughter’s groom, he decides to fast until his daughter gives up the idea of marrying Buddha. Fasting as an idiom of alienation and anxiety is transformed into a comedy show at home: Mr Verma makes a public spectacle of his hunger strike as his stubborn daughter and other curious friends and passers-by look on. The fasting parent in white, stretched on a charpoy on the terrace and surrounded by anxious relatives, is comically reminiscent of Gandhian hunger strikes. Outside his transnational kitchen environment, Buddha in Delhi has no other identity but that of a frustrated lover. He makes a vain attempt to cook a meal for Nina’s father; believing that Mr Verma is a true Gandhian, he prepares a vegetarian meal only to discover that fifty-eight-yearold Mr Verma is not yet old enough to give up the delights of spicy meat dishes. This scene mocks a commodified Gandhism, but it also subverts core values of Indian womanhood—conventionally, and to show respect and adherence to family hierarchy, it is the woman who cooks to please her in-laws. Both Salaam Namaste and Cheeni Kum redefine the conventions of diasporic identities. In what can be interpreted as a revised version of Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge, sixty-four-year-old Buddha, the ‘bravehearted’, who has come to take his bride from India, subverts the Indian tradition that determines Raj and Simran’s family drama in DDLJ. Instead, Buddha draws on the motif of jealousy between two old men lusting for life. Sexy, Buddha’s young neighbour, succumbs to her illness while Nina and Buddha are in India, but the film ends on a happy note with Mr Verma finally accepting Buddha for his son-in law. As in Salaam Namaste, the ethnically neutral value of commitment between man and woman constitutes the pivotal trope; and in both films, the kitchen is a metaphor for de-territorialised networks, where mobile identities can be negotiated. In a narrative that shifts away from the conventional diaspora– homeland opposition to a more fluid image of the British-Indian community, the transnational space of the kitchen anchors the link between culturally mobile Indians: Buddha, other British-Indians, the restaurant’s Indian employees and tourists like Nina visiting London. 118


As in Salaam Namaste, the diaspora as an ethnically determined, fixed, private space is never present in the film and perhaps the death of Sexy symbolises this absence. At the end of the film there are two more such movements: we see the self-professed Gandhian idealist Mr Verma enjoying a meal with his son-in-law’s family in ‘Spice 6’; and, at the same time, we learn that one of the waiters has gone to India with his pregnant bride. London and Delhi in Cheeni Kum, like Melbourne and Bangalore in Salaam Namaste, are separated geographically; but emotional, cultural and historical gaps between these places have no significance in these stories, which transgress age, distance and sexual taboos in a spicy manner.

Conclusion The Indian cook abroad in the films studied here is not a cinematic pretext to undermine Western values or to re-emphasise traditional Indianness. The recipe for the sugar-free gajar ka halwa for which Ramji wins the international recipe contest in London is a metaphor for the new ‘authentic’ Indianness—embodied in the culturally mobile Indian cook who refuses to be trapped within simplified frameworks of multiculturalism and for whom the transnational kitchen is a bridge to the greater world of opportunities. As owners of small businesses with financial and cultural interests in multiple locations, Nick, Buddha and both the Ramjis are prime examples of a new breed of entrepreneurs who contribute to the efficient circulation of talent, capital and revenues in a transnational world. A range of actors inhabits their transnational kitchens: professionals, students, tourists, permanent residents and illegal immigrants, whose varying, economically-motivated social practices shape their identities.17

Notes 1 The title for this essay is inspired by the title of a review of the film Cheeni Kum: K Mohamed, ‘Cook cook hota hai’, Hindustan Times, 25 May 2007, , viewed 12 December 2007. 2 J Sharpe, ‘Gender, nation and globalization in Monsoon Wedding and Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge’, Meridians: Feminisms, Race, Transnationalisms, vol. 6, no. 1, 2005, p. 65. 3 Pravasi Bharatiya is the official term used since 2003 by the new Ministry of Overseas Indian Affairs to designate the Indian diasporic subject. Pravasi Bharitiya Divas is celebrated in January every year to coincide with the anniversary of the return of the

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4

5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14

15

16

17

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first Pravasi Bharatiya, Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi. A number of outstanding nonresident Indians are honoured for their contribution to the globalised domains of science, business and culture. V Lal & A Nandy (eds), Fingerprinting Popular Culture: The Mythic and Iconic in Indian Cinema, OUP, Delhi, 2006, pp. xxi–xxvii; T Ganti, Bollywood: A Guidebook to Popular Hindi Cinema, London, Routledge, 2004, p. 65. V Mishra, Bollywood: Temples of Desire, London, Routledge, 2002, p. 268. P Jaikumar, World Literature Today, vol. 77, no. 3/4, 2003, p. 3. Jaikumar, ‘Bollywood Spectaculars,’ p. 4. See also Mishra, Bollywood, p. 260; Sharpe, ‘Gender, nation and globalization’, p. 68. Ganti, Bollywood, p. 39. Mishra, Bollywood, p. 258. Sharpe, ‘Gender, nation and globalization’, p. 62. A Appadurai, ‘Gastro-politics in Hindu South Asia’, American Ethnologist, vol. 8, 1981, p.Â€494. P Roy, ‘Reading communities and culinary communities: the gastropoetics of the South Asian diaspora’, Positions, vol. 10, no. 2, 2002, p. 472. P Crang, C Dwyer & P Jackson, ‘Transnationalism and the spaces of commodity culture,’ Progress in Human Geography, vol. 27, no. 4, 2003, pp. 438–456. J Dickinson & AJ Bailey, ‘(Re)membering diaspora: uneven geographies of Indian dual citizenship’, Political Geography, vol. 26, no. 7, 2007, pp. 757–774. The article shows how the Dual Citizenship legislation of 2003 has impacted on the construction of diaspora membership. See S Ravi, ‘Tamil identity and diasporic desire in a Kollywood comedy: Nala Damayanti (2003)’, South Asian Popular Culture, vol. 6, no. 1, 2008, pp. 45–56, for a detailed analysis of the film Nala Damayanthi. The Tamil version is much more complex in its depiction of Indianness, since the film brings into play the multiple layers of meaning that Tamil identity presupposes within and outside an Indian framework. The appearance of Kamal Haasan (who is also known as Kamal Hassan) in Nala Damayanthi as the low-caste Chandiyar is a very political ploy. This image, which projects Tamilness (embodied in the persona of the actor who has appeared in all three roles as Brahmin, low-caste Chandiyar and Sri Lankan Tamil) as all-inclusive—caste, class or nation—is orchestrated to be the last image in the viewer’s mind. See Crang, Dwyer & Jackson, ‘Transnationalism’, p. 451: ‘Cultural discourses and stylizations of identity are a central part of what is being produced, circulated and consumed, but always through specific material forms and through variable, economically motivated social practices’.

6

Rangla Punjab in Canberra, Yamla Jatt Folk Night in Sydney, Oorja Nights in Melbourne1 Anjali Gera Roy

To confirm if Bhangra, British-born Punjabi music, had indeed become a part of global pop, I decided to investigate if it had percolated ‘down under’, carefully selecting a white Australian male as a normative sample for testing the reception of Panjabi MC’s 2004 chartbusting number, ‘Beware of the Boys’.2 Though my respondent could neither name the singer nor the album, the young IT assistant’s nods, smiles and sways provided me with visible cues of recognition, even before he finally admitted that he had heard it somewhere. He might have heard it being played at any of the music stores in which, as I was told a month later by reliable sources, it had been the ‘flavour of the season’.3 Two years later, in November 2006, I found myself wandering into a Subway outlet opposite Federation Square in downtown Melbourne, guided by Jazzy B’s 2006 hit ‘ jinne mera dil lutiya’ (the one who stole my heart).4 ‘Who likes Jazzy B?’, I accosted the Indian-looking assistant adding extra spice to my vegetable sandwich. ‘Everyone!’, chorused the three young university graduates of all complexions serving at the counter. Yet there appeared to be no trace of Bhangra’s presence in Australia, let alone an invasion. This was surprising, considering that the 121


Punjabi diaspora is one of the earliest Indian diasporas in Australia and that some Bhangra genres resemble and are even believed to be derived from pathania, a ring dance of the Afghans, another pioneer community in Australia. My survey revealed that Bhangra, a Punjabi harvest ritual, does serve as the most important ethnocultural signifier of Punjabi identity in Australia as in other places of Punjabi migration and settlement, but had begun to cross over only recently through Bollywood.5 While Bhangra’s global flows to Australia, enabled through visiting UK Bhangra stars, amount only to a trickle and are confined largely to Punjabis, they have been lately intensified through Bhangra’s naturalisation as Bollywood song and dance. In addition, Bhangra’s inclusion in two significant national Australian events is a telling reflection on the tokenism marking Australian multiculturalism’s recognition of the cultural practices of Indian ethnic groups.6 Through deconstructing three qualitative interviews I conducted with Australian Bhangra practitioners during my visit to Canberra, Sydney and Melbourne in autumn 2004 and my own observations at the Durga Puja celebrations in Canberra and the Diwali Melas in Sydney and Canberra during the same period, I will examine different aspects of Bhangra’s globalisation and the communitas Punjabi dance constructs in places of migration in relation to the ‘liminal’ and ‘liminoid’ as defined by Victor Turner, highlighting Bollywood’s role in expanding Bhangra’s traditional communities.7 Building on van Gennep’s idea of liminal activities as ‘anti-structure’, Turner opposed them to the ‘structure’ of normal cultural operations.8 But it was Brian SuttonSmith who had viewed the play in liminal activities as subversive and suggested that the ‘disorderly’ quality of liminal activities involved more than ‘letting off steam’ from ‘an overdose of order’ because we ‘have something to learn through being disorderly’.9 Accepting Milton Singer’s position that performance remained a ‘culturally conservative activity of performance in tribal and agrarian societies’, Turner defined ‘liminal’ as activities in which conventional structure may be challenged but is ultimately reaffirmed.10 As such forms of cultural affirmation were not possible in modern industrialised societies, Turner proposed the category of ‘liminoid’ to describe activities devoted to play, sport or art, all outside the ‘regular’ cultural activity of work or business and held that liminoid activities were much more likely to be subversive and to provide a site for social and cultural resistance. Though Turner’s opposition between the liminal and liminoid continues to be much debated, other theorists have proposed divisions that echo Turner’s own. Clifford Geertz, for instance, distinguished between ‘deep play’ and 122

Rangla Punjab in Canberra

‘shallow play’ and argued that only performances engaging participants in deep play are likely to raise real concerns about the fundamental ideas and codes of the culture. Bruce Kapferer, however, believed that participants in ‘deep play’ are too deeply involved in the activity for reflection to take place, which is more likely to occur in the distanced experience of ‘shallow play’. The notion of cultural performance itself appears to be contested, with some theorists viewing performance as reinforcing cultural givens and others looking at it as at least potentially subversive of these givens. Through comparing Devinder Singh Dharia’s performance of ‘liminality’ in traditional Bhangra performance and the ‘liminoid’ play of the Bhangra and Bollywood Nights organised by DJs Amar and Richi Madan, this essay proposes to look at the relationship between cultural performance and communitas. Making a distinction between the idea ‘of society as a structured, differentiated and often hierarchical system of politico-legal-economic positions with many types of evaluation’ and ‘of society as an unstructured or rudimentarily structured and relatively undifferentiated comitatus, community, or even communion of equal individuals who submit together to the general authority of ritual elders,’ Turner uses the Latin term communitas to distinguish the second modality of social relationship from an ‘area of common living’.11 Though Bhangra is now understood as British Asian music, its origins lie in a Punjabi harvest dance, dating back to Alexander’s invasion of India, which has been repeatedly appropriated in the re-enactment of Punjabi cultural memory, particularly after the Partition of the Punjab in 1947.12 Bhangra’s modernisation in the 1980s by Gurdas Mann facilitated its crossover from the regional folk space to the popular cultural field and its co-option in Bollywood after the unprecedented success of Bhangrapop singer Daler Mehndi a decade later. As a result, the contemporary Bhangrascape comprises a wide range of Bhangra mutants, from traditional, pure and folk to modern, hybrid and popular. Among Bhangra’s many mutants, Bollywood Bhangra, a new Bhangra genre produced in Bollywood, has played a significant role in enabling Bhangra’s crossover from regional folk music to national and now global, popular music, though Bollywood’s global flows often intersect with Bhangra flows from Britain. Although the history of Bhangra in Bollywood dates back to the 1950s, when the Bhangra team prepared by the legendary dhol player Bhanna Ram Sunami for the First Republic Day Parade was invited to perform the Bhangra number in the film Naya Daur (1957), Bhangra 123


was naturalised as Bollywood dance only in the late nineties through Daler Mehndi’s Bollywood invasion. Daler Mehndi’s hit number ‘na na na re’ in Amitabh Bachchan’s comeback vehicle Mrityudaata (1997) has naturalised Bhangra as a Bollywood song and dance formula. A Bhangra number is a ‘must-have’ in every Bollywood blockbuster today with the Big B, as Bachchan is affectionately known, himself gutsily performing the Bhangra in all his films that followed, including Major Saab (1998), Kabhi Khushi Kabhie Gham (2001), Baghban (2003), Veer-Zaara (2004) and the recent Kabhi Alvida Naa Kehna (2006). The younger Bollywood heart-throbs, the Khans, the Kapoors and the Khannas, not to mention Amitabh Bachchan’s son, Abhishek, also perform the Bhangra beside the Big B or with each other opposite their female leads. Finally, Bhangra is inserted as an ‘item number’, usually performed by nubile Bollywood starlets. Bollywood’s Bhangra turn might be attributed to its discovery in the Punjabi harvest dance of an earthy, folk grammar for expressing pleasure, combining song with dance; it can be easily transported from a traditional to a modern setting and may be used to enact filial and romantic love as well as seduction. Bhangra’s acquisition of the status of the signifier of different forms of pleasure—communal conviviality, family bonding, mating dance and unbridled sexuality—in the Bollywood sonic idiom facilitates its incursion into the national celebratory idiom. Punjabi speakers view Bollywood’s cannibalisation of the Punjabi harvest rite as a de-sacralising act that exposes intimate Punjabi spaces to the global voyeur’s pornographic gaze. They have objected strongly to Bollywood Bhangra’s dissolution of Punjabi gender, generic and contextual boundaries, to the superimposition of a Bollywoodstyle choreography on the folk dance’s improvised, spontaneous movements and, in particular, to the isolation of sexuality from Punjabi hedonism and its mapping on the Punjabi female body. Bhangra’s Bollywoodisation could be viewed as an act of desecration perpetrated by the reduction of the Punjabi harvest ritual to a box-office formula. The violence of disembedding Bhangra from its specific location in Punjabi family celebrations, of mixing various Bhangra genres into a typical Bollywood-style dance and song routine and of converting a participatory rite to a gigantic screen spectacle cannot be denied. But what interests me is the complex dialogue between Bhangra texts and contexts in which the Bollywood formula is given a new twist. This involves several levels of co-option. Bollywood co-opts Punjabi festive music as Bollywood celebratory music, which is reappropriated by its audience as traditional, celebratory dance in family and ritualistic settings 124


or as ‘new Asian dance music’ in youth-culture spaces. Bollywood Bhangra, as celebratory music, leads to a reinvention of the Indian traditional corpus through the cross-fertilisation of various traditions in Bollywood’s eclectic, amalgamating space. This happens because Bollywood, as popular culture, bridges the gap between classical and folk on the Indian cultural space and, despite the objections and reservations of its detractors, constructs an Indian subject, weaving diverse Indian ethnicities into a whole. For this reason, Bhangra’s naturalisation as Bollywood ritual nationalises it into an Indian ritual. Not only do the Bhangra texts circulating globally today display a wide, thematic, stylistic and generic variation, but also their contexts and the communitas in which they are made to perform, diverge greatly. While Punjabi speakers would be able to associate new hybrid mutants with ritual functions or contexts only through a wide stretch of the imagination, Bhangra mutants of all varieties are appropriated by dissimilar groups in the performance of communitas. If Bhangra performed in Punjabi family and ritual contexts epitomises Singer’s view of liminal as a ‘culturally conservative’ activity, the liminoid play of Bhangra in youth cultures, carnivalesque grounds on which cultural difference may be acknowledged, if not bridged, offers infinite possibilities for subversion and resistance. Bhangra has long served as a ‘liminal’ activity for the renewal of Punjabi memory for almost a century of Punjabi migration to Australia. With Bhangra’s naturalisation as Bollywood dance, it has also acquired a pivotal role, both in nonPunjabi liminal activities and the liminoid activities of global youth. In addition to performing punjabiyat or Punjabi identity as a liminal activity, Bhangra now simultaneously produces Indian or South Asian as well as youth identities through its liminal and liminoid play. While the shallow play of Bhangra performed in un-Punjabi settings, such as parties and clubs, might seem sacrilegious to the Punjabi community, the conscious performance of Punjabi, Indian or South Asian identities in ‘sinful’ settings like nightclubs offers greater scope for cultural reflection than the liminal reaffirmation of cultural identity in family functions, weddings and traditional festivals. In what follows, the liminal performance of ‘pure’ Bhangra by Dharia will be contrasted with the Bhangra and Bollywood Nights, hosted by the Bhangra DJs Amar and Richi at clubs and youth events to explore the relation between nachna tapna (‘dancing and jumping’) and cultural identity.13 While the liminoid play of Bollywood-inspired Bhangra performance might appear to be a travesty of traditional ritual performance, the social centrality it possesses in the production of Asian 125


youth cultures in Australia compels an examination into the meanings of ritual, identity and community. Devinder Singh Dharia has had the unique honour of performing when ‘the Olympic torch did the Bhangra’ at the Sydney Olympics in 2000.14 Founding the Punjabi Sangeet Centre in Sydney in 1992 was a key milestone on a long journey for this practitioner of traditional Bhangra from a small town in the Punjab. But his journey, like that of many other Sikh migrants, particularly those in Woolgoolga, Griffith and other ‘Punjabi villages’ in Australia, has also been a journey inwards to Punjabi and Punjabi speakers. Though Dharia does make a commendable attempt at dialogue with other ethnicities in multicultural Australia, he is handicapped by his limited command over the English language. But he was willing to talk to me in between preparing his troupe for their performance that evening at the Diwali Mela in Sydney. The interview was conducted in Punjabi. Whenever my halting Punjabi failed me, I turned to Dharia’s teenage son, who sat through the interview, to interpret my questions and comments to his father. The most astounding discovery I made in the course of the conversation was that Dharia, the shagird or disciple of a Bhangra legend, Ustad Lal Chand Yamla Jatt, practises traditional Bhangra genres and his sole passion is to popularise traditional Bhangra among Punjabis as well as other communities in Australia because ‘traditional Bhangra has always played a major part in the life of the people and forms an integral part of the fabric of the society’.15 Though the Punjabi Sangeet Centre claims to include both traditional and modern dance steps in its classes, the performance that evening included intricate steps from pure Bhangra genres such as jhummar, in addition to the naturalised sialkoti, performed to the accompaniment of minimalist lyrics or bolis.16 But what interested me even more was Dharia’s intuitive recognition of the centrality of the expressive form in the performance of community in Australia as reflected in the vision statement of his academy. The Punjabi Sangeet Centre defines itself as ‘an organisation dedicated to cultural understanding and mentorship for youths through a common thread: Bhangra’.17 While the performance of community and identity has been recognised as the function of dance, the Punjabi Sangeet Centre defines its vision primarily and explicitly in relation to this function: ‘Through one person at a time, we want to bring a sense of belonging, through the education of commonality and help individuals, [to] continue moving forward without losing ties to their pasts and their heritage. In short, Punjabi Sangeet Centre would 126


like to bring the Bhangra back to Sydney’.18 Dharia’s mission—to use dance to create a sense of place—transcends the conservative view of performance’s role in culture to approximate to Dorson’s ‘contextual approach’ as the emphasis has shifted from the text to its function as a performative act.19 But his desire ‘to bring a sense of belonging’ also incorporates the development of a community spirit or consciousness, communitas, which the Dutch scholar Johann Huizinga defined in the 1930s as the basic feature of play in performance.20 Yet Dharia’s strengthening of cultural assumptions through the ludic display of communal values locates him in Turner’s ‘liminality’ and Geertz’s ‘deep play’, which seemed to be promoted by the semi-official sponsors of the Mela, Bharatiya Vidya Bhavan and other Indian cultural organisations. While an element of play and anti-structure was definitely visible in the break from the everyday structures of normal work operations in the language, dress, behaviour and activities of the revellers at the Diwali Mela, it did not constitute a subversion of structure. While there were definite signs of ‘letting off steam’ from an ‘overdose of order’ in the way visitors to the Mela greeted and shouted at each other in Indian languages, ate with their fingers and gossiped with friends, the chaos was carefully structured through the organisation of the stalls, the programme and even behaviour, to affirm the traditional Indian family spirit. The chaos of the Indian fair was carefully regulated through the demarcation of stalls from the performance and congregation area. The stadium grounds were left vacant to accommodate the estimated 25,000strong crowd and the steps from the entrance led to the improvised stage. The effigy of the demon king, Ravana, which would be burnt in the evening, loomed larger than life in the background. The cultural performance was squeezed between the ritual Diwali chants to the goddess of wealth in the morning and the symbolic burning of evil in the evening. The activities in the Mela were premised on the belief that ‘disorderly’ activity would provide an opportunity, particularly to the second-generation youth, to learn more about India. As youth performed Indian culture in fairly acceptable imitations of Bollywood musicals, one began to wonder if this was indeed the ‘new culture’ Brian Sutton-Smith was speaking about. Both ‘liminal and liminoid situations’ might ‘have proved to be the seedbeds of cultural creativity’, as Sutton-Smith had maintained.21 Dharia and the organisers appeared to conform more closely to Milton Singer’s notion of performance as a culturally conservative activity where conventional structure, despite being challenged, is ultimately reaffirmed. The dances performed at the Mela, mainly 127


Bollywood inspired, included a cross-section of Indian dance genres ranging from Bhangra and giddha to kathak and bharatnatyam. The performance by Dharia’s troupe, which included his young son, struck a truly professional note as much through the all-male cast and steps as by the confidence exuded by the performers. Dharia himself did not perform the event not being ‘big’ enough but displayed visible pride in showcasing a pure example of tradition in the Bollywood-infested dance space. The teenage boys in his troupe assured me that they actually preferred performing traditional genres to the wild steps that go by the name of Bhangra in clubs. If Dharia’s aspiration was to bind the youth to tradition and their past, he seemed to have succeeded, particularly in respect of this set of youth. But there was another square tucked behind the food stalls, where a DJ with a turntable was shouting at visitors to join in the dancing. It was not long before the square filled up, mainly with students and youth, whose mixed steps would certainly not have met with Dharia’s approval. But the improvised Bhangra in this space demonstrated the true spirit of play offering truly subversive possibilities. Liminal performance in the official cultural programme might have inverted order but it did not subvert it. The taste of the liminoid could be experienced in the free play behind and beyond the scenes as youth of all ethnic affiliations danced to the latest Bhangra numbers, copying the moves of Punjabi youth away from parental surveillance. Even if one agreed with Dharia’s conservative view of performance as affirmative of community ties and tradition, his notion of community is problematic. Why should Punjabi dance be deemed to be crucial to the performance of Indian tradition? Would other Punjabi ethnicities agree to the naturalisation of Punjabi dance as Indian? The inclusion of Bhangra performance in Durga Puja and Diwali Mela at Canberra would confirm a North Indian, or even an East Indian, constituency for Bhangra. But would South Indian ethnicities be equally willing to accept Bhangra as a definitive Indian culture?â†œ22 The composition of the visitors to the Diwali Mela itself was a clear indication of the scope and range of the community that Bhangra maps. The Mela was dominated by Punjabi speakers, not only from Sydney but also other Australian cities and rural Punjabi settlements and had a sprinkling of speakers of Hindi and other North Indian languages. East and South Indians were conspicuously absent, the Bengalis probably due to the large Durga Puja festival a fortnight before and South Indians because they had organised a similar Mela a week before. Surprise entrants in the community were Pakistani nationals, who had wandered in as much to listen to familiar Punjabi, as to buy Punjabi music and 128


taste Punjabi food and gore, or whites, accompanying Indian friends. A young Pakistani couple, originally from Mirpur and some North Eastern students in Punjabi outfits vouched that they loved dancing to Bhangra. A Hindi-speaking teenager contemptuously attributed his knowledge of Bhangra mainly to Zee TV that his parents viewed. The rest of the visitors I chose at random turned out to be international students, mainly Punjabi, but also others and young Punjabi professionals who had migrated from theÂ€Punjab. In the Diwali Mela in Canberra the following week, my experience was not very different, though the smaller Indian community in Canberra showed a larger mix of Punjabis with others. As in Sydney, a Bhangra performance was staged as part of the official programme by young Gujarati students, which could at best be described as amateur. I had watched the same couples perform the Bhangra at the Durga Puja evening a few weeks before. The Mela grounds in Canberra were too small too allow free play as at the Sydney stadium and, as well as Canberra’s Indian residents, students from various universities participated. Once again, the surprising presence of gore (white) guests was matched by the absence of the South Indian community. The highlight of Diwali 2004 was that Diwali would be celebrated in the federal Parliament with a Bhangra performance by a visiting folk group, called Rangla Punjab, from the Punjabi heartland.23 No one I knew in Canberra seemed to have been aware of this group prior to this performance. I was given a report from the Diwali Mela at Melbourne from Australia’s leading Bhangra DJ, Richi Madan, who had played at the Diwali Mela at the race course, attended by 1,000 people that year.24 Richi informed me that the crowd there, too, had been overwhelmingly Punjabi, consisting mainly of students from the Punjab. Perhaps this was the reason Richi had failed to excite the crowd with Hindi music that he had played for the first two to three hours. As he switched over to Punjabi in the last hour and a half, the crowd, he reported, wentÂ€berserk. Australia, not having produced an Australian Bhangra artist, depends on touring UK and Indian Bhangra artists for its dose of Bhangra. To turn to the liminoid and fully-fledged play of the sort witnessed behind the scenes at the Melas, I must move to Bhangra Nights in Melbourne as reported by my two other respondents and Bhangra practitioners. Both DJ Amar and DJ Richi Madan have won singular honours in the Bhangra universe, with Amar having performed at the Womadelaide the year before and Richi having DJ’ed with Panjabi MC in Sydney and Melbourne during the UK Bhangra celebrity’s Australian tour. Though 129


both DJs have plans to cut original albums in the future, Australian youth have to be content with Bhangra DJs for the moment.25 Thus, Bhangra’s flows to Australia are mainly those channelled from the UK and India and echo the cultural politics of their sources. The UK-directed flow of Bhangra is reflected in the life stories of the two Bhangra DJs: Born and brought up in London, Richi is a pioneer of the Australian Indian and Bollywood dance scene. He organised the first ever Bollywood and Bhangra club nights in Melbourne in 1999 and 1993 respectively. He has DJ’ed across Australia and overseas, including with MTV Europe award-winner Panjabi MC and on local and national radio (including Radio National, Triple R, PBS and Kiss FM). Apart from DJ’ing and MC’ing, he plays a groovy drum called the ‘dhol’ (widely featured in Bollywood and Bhangra tracks) and is the music editor for the national newspaper Indian Voice.26

Figure 6: Australian DJ Richi Madan’s dance mix Bollywood Summer 2008

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The entry on DJ Richi can serve as an introduction to Bhangra’s play in the liminoid activities of the Australian club scene, to which Richi has made a significant contribution: Richi has been DJ’ing and MC’ing for over twelve years at a wide range of venues and events, including major outdoor festivals, weddings, birthdays, dinner dances and club nights. He has played at several dance nights, including ‘Hot & Spicy’, ‘Love 2 dance’ and ‘One nation under a groove’. He is currently the resident DJ at two Melbourne club nights, ‘Club Bollywood’ and ‘Bhangra Vibes’. In 2005, Richi was invited to perform at the annual Globe to Globe World Music Festival at Namatjira Park, Clayton. He also arranged and participated in a Bollywood item for the Commonwealth Games 2006 Cultural Festival media launch. Richi has amazing energy and loves using the microphone to get the crowd going crazy! He prides himself on his reputation for being professional, listening to his clients and putting one hundred per cent into his performances to make each gig a memorable experience. [His] music styles [are] Top 40 dance, R&B, 70s, 80s, 90s, 60s rock & roll, Bollywood and Bhangra.

In contrast to Dharia, both Amar and DJ Richi are recent immigrants from the UK and have an urban professional background. Amar DJs between practising full-time as a medical practitioner, while Richi has decided to switch over completely to DJ’ing after working as a lawyer and IT expert at IBM. Both have an unambiguously Sikh background, though one wears the symbols of his religion more visibly than the other. Both address a similar community, Punjabi and Indian and are equally willing to open to the larger community. But Amar, who was born in Hyderabad and grew up in Japan and the UK before moving to Australia, is less rooted in Punjabi culture and punjabiyat (Punjabi identity) compared to the other Sikh. By their own admissions, Richi learnt Punjabi only when he got into Bhangra at the age of fifteen. ‘Bhangra was my link to my culture’, Richi admitted. Amar, who spoke Hindi when he lived in Hyderabad, learnt to speak Punjabi after moving to Australia, largely because of his mixing with UK Sikhs. Yet both appeared to be equally engaged in the construction of community and identity in Australia and discovered in dance the perfect instrument for performing this function. The two young men represent a different kind of Indian, or Punjabi subject—urban, professional and cosmopolitan—in whom dance becomes a means of reconnecting with roots. But Bhangra, in performing its function of communitas, closes 131


the gap between the three practitioners, though the communities they address do not always intersect. The absence of an indigenously produced album, however, does not diminish Bhangra’s role in identity construction and performance. My interviews with Amar and Richi revealed that both participated to a certain extent in the affirmation of tradition in liminality in the same way as Dharia did. But they also crossed over into the liminoid while performing in a different context. While these boundaries are defined by the music mixed, the context draws the line between liminality and liminoid, ‘deep play’ and ‘shallow play’. What impressed me most about the young men was their ability to move between the two zones with absolute ease and their exploitation of the subversive aspects of the liminoid, even as they participated in the affirmation of the existing order. Both Amar and Richi are called to DJ at family weddings and community functions and both have been instrumental in starting Indian nights for youth in the cities they have lived in. And both hoped to launch their own albums and bands in the next couple of years. It appears that Bhangra has always been part of the Punjabi wedding circuit in Australia as elsewhere and the two DJs are often invited to play at Punjabi weddings, private functions and birthday parties, not only in Melbourne but also among the Punjabi communities based in Woolgoolga and Griffith. According to DJ Amar, the preference at these gatherings is clearly for pendu bhangra, or Bhangra from the villages of the Punjab, which is considered more like ‘the real thing’ to them. As people like to sing along on these occasions, the choice of lyrics is as crucial as that of the artists and is mainly pendu or rural (read Punjabi) artists like Gurdas Mann and Kuldip Manak.27 Their observations were corroborated by the questionnaire I had distributed to the Punjabi community in Canberra and the respondents included, among their choices, names of Punjabi artists across the border and those who sang before Partition. The preference of the older generation for pre-Partition legends was in sharp contrast to the thickening of religious boundaries in the UK where Muslim Punjabis reportedly do not frequent Bhangra Nights, except for those by Pakistani Bhangra practitioners. The most interesting discovery I made, which was later corroborated by a Hindu priest, was that Bhangra is not restricted to Punjabi weddings but is now performed at all Indian weddings, including Gujarati and Hindustani. Madan’s views on Bhangra’s ubiquity in Indian functions in Australia were corroborated by Dr Jayant Bapat in Melbourne, who conceded that Bhangra had crossed over to other Indian community celebrations, even weddings: ‘After I am through with the wedding rituals, Richi 132


takes over’, the priest noted with great amusement.28 Therefore, even in the liminal space, communitas appears to have at once expanded and narrowed down to include and exclude non-Punjabi speakers. Bhangra Nights or Bollywood Nights, organised by the youth in nightclubs, constitute the liminoid zone, which becomes the site for youth to subvert the existing order and to explore different structures that may develop into real alternatives to the status quo. Yet Indian youth subculture shares with parental culture maps of meaning as it draws on certain features of parental culture in shaping its difference. The definition of youth subculture as the space where the tensions in the parental culture are played out and resolved could be applied here. The personal journeys of Amar and Richi, which trace a pattern of separation, transition and reincorporation, might well be representative of those of Indian youth turning to Bhangra or Indian popular music. Indian youth, neither fluent with Indian languages nor with Indian music, began by distancing themselves from parental language and culture and identified with kale or blacks by listening to R&B and hip-hop. Similarly, migrant students had not listened to Indian popular music back home in India. The history of Indian youth in India and Australia turning to Bhangra and Bollywood music must be traced back both to the birth of Asian Kool in Britain, which Rupa Huq has documented in great detail,29 and the perception of Bollywood as equally Kool. Asian Kool directly impacts Punjabi migrants from the UK, like Amar and Richi, who have personally charted the journey from embarrassment to pride in ethnic culture. Richi traces the return to roots to the racial tension in Britain. Even though youth in other sites and neighbourhoods might not have experienced that tension personally, the return to roots movement through music in Britain appears to have kicked off similar movements elsewhere. The two texts that, according to Richi, mark this transition are the two Ds, the release of Dilwale Dulhaniya Le Jayenge (1995) and Daler Mehndi’s albums. ‘The same people who wouldn’t be seen dancing to Indian music would now jump on the floor’, says Richi, tracing the impact of Asian and Bolly Kool in the changing perception of Indian music in Australia. The liminoid activity of the Indian Nights marks a site where conventional structure is no longer honoured. The subversion of the given structure occurs first of all through the choice of music. ‘I wouldn’t play pendu music at such parties’, the DJs remonstrated. Pendu, or rustic, music is the kind that Dharia represents and is the first choice of the Woolgoolga and Griffith elders, where Richi and Amar are often called to DJ. Surprisingly, they included in the category of pendu artists those 133


such as Gurdas Mann and others who are classified as modern in India. Bhangra had to be disengaged from its folksy origins to appeal to the youth brought up on a staple diet of R&B. The story of Bhangra’s hybridisation with ‘black’ sounds is too long and well-documented to merit repetition here. But it is clear that youth subcultures, while drawing on parental cultures, would not have them in the unadulterated form that Dharia and cultural organisations like Bharatiya Vidya Bhavan propose to popularise. Both Amar and Richi attempt to reproduce in the Australian city the success of Bhangra DJs in the UK by mixing traditional folksy tunes with Western rhythms. But Indian youth subculture is prevented from becoming the poor copy of Asian youth subcultures in Britain due to the Bollywood-directed flows from the Indian subcontinent, which interfere with the flows from the UK. The Australian story is slightly more complicated than in India or Britain because of the co-presence of UK Punjabis with Indian migrants. As against the Punjabi preferences of UK Punjabis, Indian migrants and students prefer Hindi and Bollywood remixes. Amar and Richi have to address both youth communities by balancing Punjabi with Bollywood Bhangra and Hindi remixes. In both groups, however, youth differentiates itself from the older generation by indicating a choice for music and activities derived from, but different from, those of the parents’ generation. Amar and Richi bridge the gap through the remix, Punjabi or Hindi, which provides ample room for the play that the liminoid requires. Unlike ‘the deep play’ of Dharia’s performance with a self-conscious concern about the fundamental ideas and codes of culture, ‘the shallow play’ that Bhangra Nights or Indian Nights engage in is a distanced experience that enables cultural self-reflection. The remix involves a retrospective look at tradition, melodramatic and romanticised, in which the performer parodies traditional Bhangra or Bollywood moves with a playful intent. Parody and irony, which prevent self-absorption, while enabling a reconstruction of tradition, are those modes of subversion by means of which existing order is restored. The trick is to invert tradition by representing it in a new form to make it ‘Kool’. The remix, which appropriates the artistic input of pendu artists as well as Bollywood Bhangra in constructing a cultural product that is neither this nor that, epitomises the form of cultural creativity that might emerge from liminoid activity. Along with the product, the method of production is equally important. Viewed from a purely traditional perspective, remixed DJ music is nothing but a form of plagiarism scarcely meriting the status of artistic creativity. But DJs, following the example of UK-based Bally Sagoo, have provided a new definition to creativity and originality through the production of 134


music by scratching, sampling, splicing and varying the speeds. Whether such electronically engineered music can be conceded the status of art or not has been decided by the youth who flock to hear it. The performance itself is another area where the liminoid play is much in evidence and the DJ’s creativity is crucial. Once again, the process of splicing, cutting, sampling and scratching pre-recorded texts produces a new product, which changes its character with every performance. Sensitivity to the mood of the audience, their choices and the occasion helps Richi and Amar to decide what they would play, in what particular mix and in what order. ‘The art lies’, Richi educated me, ‘in what kind of songs are going to make the audience go crazy’. In this context bringing pre-recorded music would be a gross mistake and improvisation the key to a successful performance. Richi likes to play a song and then decide what to play next and what to mix with it using his sense of the audience. After DJ’ing for years, both Richi and Amar have learnt to predict the preferences of the audience. They wouldn’t dream of playing pendu music in nightclubs, just as they wouldn’t play Bollywood remixes to UK Indians or to Woolgoolga elders. To understand their Australian audience, they have to keep in touch with musical trends as much in the UK as in India. UK music flows directly to the Punjab and the Punjabi diasporas, whereas Indian communities in Australia would hear only what is popular in India, that is, mainly Bollywood music and UK music routed through India. Musical creativity in this context becomes a matter of mixing and presenting different musical strands in the right combination. The play resides in running an old Kuldip Manak song with Destiny’s Child and Eminem, playing ‘Everybody Say Shava Shava’ (Kabhi Khushi Kabhi Gham) backwards and at a different speed or making an abrupt switch to Bally Sagoo’s remix of Malkit Singh’s ‘gur nalon ishq mitha’ and create on the turntable a new cultural product. Two years later, in 2006, Richi had a different story to tell me. More non-Punjabi fans, particularly gore (or whites), had developed a taste for Bhangra, thanks to its inclusion in crossover films like Bend it Like Beckham (2002), Monsoon Wedding (2001), Bride and Prejudice (2004) and Bollywood/Hollywood (2002), as well as in Bollywood hits like Kal Ho Naa Ho (2003), Kabhi Alvida Naa Kehna (2006) and VeerZaara (2004). Richi informed me that, though his guests might not be able to name the artist or the album, he had repeat requests for Bhangra numbers from particular films at the Bollywood theme parties that had grown very popular among gore in the two years since I had visited. One particular incident that took even the seasoned Bhangra DJ by surprise was when the Bhangra band Dhol Foundation performed 135


at the All Star Percussion Gala at Sidney Myer Music Bowl as part of the cultural programme of the 2006 Melbourne Commonwealth Games. ‘The crowd had been clapping when the African percussion groups had performed, but when Dhol Foundation came on stage, the Percussion Gala exploded into life with scores of people surging to the front to put their hands in the air Bhangra-style’, Richi recalled. ‘My first thought was they were apne bande or our own people who often respond like this to the dhol beat but, as they came closer I realised that they were all gore’, said Richi. It seemed clear that Bhangra had crossed over in Australia, independent of Bollywood as well as by riding on Bollywood’s growing popularity. It would appear that Bhangra is addressing three distinct communities in Australia: Punjabis (from UK, Australia and India), Indians (immigrants and students) and gore with varying degrees of involvement. In the case of Punjabi youth, there seems to be no ambiguity regarding their relation to Bhangra and the dance fulfils a conscious attempt to connect with roots. For the Indian community, Punjabi music and dance, along with Hindi remixes and Bollywood music, embodies the nostalgia for the homeland, where even kitsch becomes the signifier of a lost community. The third group points to a different kind of community—of other Australian ethnicities that Dharia attempted to reach out to, specifically gore. Richi reported that gore constitute thirty per cent of the crowd at his Indian Nights, even if they are alternative types, as Amar corrected me. They often strayed upstairs from the R&B music playing on the ground floor in Next Blue in the true New Brunswick tradition. Richi is often asked to play at private gora parties, where the demand is, surprisingly, for traditional music or music popularised by diaspora film. In each case, however, performing Bhangra, with different degrees of competence and involvement, provides an opportunity for play, which transforms tradition to win a unique space for youth in Australia. The astute jat, Dharia, was the first to perceive in the non-verbal language of dance possibilities for cultural dialogue and the negotiation of space for Indian ethnicities in Australian multiculturalism.

Notes 1 Oorja Nights, conceived by Ashish Goswami and described as Melbourne’s latesthappening Indian Dance Nights, is organised the second and fourth Friday of every month at Next Blue and has been running to packed houses since it started in October 2005. Apart from regulars, mainly international Indian students, it also had the visiting Indian, Pakistani and Sri Lankan cricket teams shaking a leg in 2004. Yamla Jatt is one

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of the most respected and renowned practitioners of Bhangra and Rangla Punjab is a folk dance troupe from the Punjab that performed at the Diwali celebrations in Canberra in November 2004. Panjabi MC (also known as Rajinder Rai) had success with ‘Mundiaan ton Bach ke Raheen’, which was on top of the UK charts in 2002 and won a number of awards, including the prestigious Dance Award 2003, MTV Europe Music Award 2003 and World Music 2004. The vocals are by Labh Janjua, at the time an obscure singer from a small village in the Punjab. It was used as a title song in the Bollywood film Boom (2003) and was rapped on by Jay Z in Beware of the Boys (2004). The record charted number ten in most countries and was number one in Italy. Although Panjabi MC’s remix is not considered ‘authentic’ traditional Bhangra, it is Panjabi MC’s track that has globalised Punjabi folk dance. Rai himself concedes that his is not mainstream Bhangra: ‘I’ve always been doing my sound but it’s never been part of the Bhangra industry or anything directly. People aren’t really associating me with the mainstream Bhangra or anything ‘cause they’ve always said “P’s stuff is not keeping the true roots and we wanna keep it raw, traditional”’ (‘Panjabi MC finds inspiration in Bhangra’, CNN.com, 11 September 2003, , viewed 17 March 2008). Richi Madan informed me that it was the hot favourite in all record stores that season. Jazzy B is a Canada-born Punjabi singer, who dabbles in both traditional and modern Bhangra genres and is a youth icon in the Punjab. His songs have also been used in Bollywood films. He danced with Amisha Patel in the item number ‘chak de Punjabi’ in the film Teesri Aankh (2006). Meena Abdullah’s Cry of the Peacock mentions how her father and his friends sang Punjabi qawwalis to keep their cultural memories alive. Recent visits include: Rishi Rich Project at The Metro on 22 April 2006, featuring Rishi Rich, Juggy D, Veronica and Jay Sean; DJ Sanj (also known as J-Nas) and Stereo Nation in early August 2006; Charindaa’s ‘Festival of Indian Music’ from 25 to 27Â€August in Melbourne, featuring Colonial Cousins; Stereo Nation in Melbourne at The Metro in September 2006; and Dr Zeus performing on 15 September 2006 at The Metro. Turner derived his categories from Arnold van Gennep’s work, especially his 1908 classic Rites de Passage. M Carlson, Performance: A Critical Introduction, Routledge, London, 2004, p. 18. ibid., p. 19. ibid. ibid., p. 80. G Schreffler, ‘“It’s Our Culture”: Standardizing Punjabi Jhummar Dance’, Paper delivered at the 50th National Conference of the Society for Ethnomusicology in Atlanta, Georgia, 19 November 2005, , viewed on 15 June 2008. It must be kept in mind that both Amar and Richi play in liminal as well as liminoid spaces by DJ’ing at traditional Punjabi and non-Punjabi weddings and functions as well as music festivals, clubs and parties. Andy Brien reported: ‘It was Bhangra time for the Olympic torch in New South Wales on Wednesday. The Sikh community at Woolgoolga, north of Sydney, put out their special emblems and dressed in their best attire for the Olympic torch to change hands outside their temple on Thursday. The temple is the centre for 2,400 Sikhs in the area. Mainly with farmers originally from the Punjab, it has the highest concentration of Sikhs in Australia. Priest Majit Singh said the Sikh community was as happy as anybody else to enter into the Olympic spirit. Meanwhile, it seems not everyone in Australia is into the Olympic spirit’ (A O’Brien, ‘Olympic torch does the Bhangra’, Tribune (Chandigarh) online edition, 27 August 2000, , viewed 17 March 2008).

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Bollywood in Australia 15 Devinder Singh Dharia founded the Punjabi Sangeet Centre, based in Sydney in 1992. It is involved in local community service and aims to expand cultural awareness by holding youth conferences and activities. Interviews were conducted with Devinder Singh Dharia in October 2004 in Sydney. 16 Jhummar and sialkoti are different forms of Bhangra. Sialkoti, or dance of Sialkot, is performed in a counter-clockwise circle with one leg in the air imitating the characteristic posture of the Hindu god Nataraja. Jhummar, or jungle dance of the Jhang-Sial, has a very tribal sounding beat—sixteen beats on the drum per cycle that is believed to date back to the Aryans. 17 ‘Our Mission’, Punjabi Sangeet Centre, , viewed 11 February 2008. 18 ibid. 19 R M Dorson (ed.), ‘Concepts of Folklore and Folklore Studies,’ Folklore and Folklife, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1972. 20 Johann Huizinga, Carlson, Performance, pp. 19–20. 21 Carlson, Performance, p. 19. 22 A couple of days before my meeting with Dharia, the anthropologist, Kalpana Ram, reported to me that Tamil youth do not particularly identify with Bhangra, though they might frequent Bhangra Nights because they see it primarily as a ‘Punj [Punjabi] thing’. 23 ‘The Bharatiya Vidya Bhavan Australia, in cooperation with the Indian Council for Cultural Relations (Ministry of External Affairs, India), The High Commission of India for Australia and The Consulate General of India, Sydney hosted a unique festival of vibrant folk dances from the heart of Punjab India, including those from pre-Partition regions, at the Hills Centre of Performing Arts on Sunday 7 November 2004. The festival of culture, music and dances performed by the world- renowned Rangla Punjab (Colourful Punjab) was proclaimed as a great delight to the senses. The music and dance concert with over fourteen artists from the folk cultures around the various country regions of Punjab in fact celebrated the spirit of multiculturalism and the vibrancy of the Indian community in Australia. Rangla Punjab performed some items out of their treasure of Punjab culture at the Olympic Park Tennis Centre for the Gujarati Diwali Mela on 6 November 2004 in front of nearly 2000 people. Bhavan Australia, the High Commission of India and the Consulate General of India Sydney are hosting a similar festival at Monash University, Melbourne on 10 November 2004 and an abridged version at the federal Parliament on 13 November 2004’. ‘Bhangra Performance, Sydney 7 Nov 2004, Melbourne 10 Nov 2004’, <www.bhavanaustralia.org/bhangra%20report.htm>, viewed on 15 December 2006. 24 Interviews were conducted with DJs Amar and Richi in November 2004 in Melbourne and again with Richi in November 2006 in Melbourne. 25 Rishi Rich has released his first ever original song “Diwali aayi hai” worldwide on iTunes in October 2009. It’s a mellow Bollywood style groove, the first ever song in this genre by an Australian artist. 26 ‘DJ Richi—Bollywood’, Music Theatre Australia One Stop Entertainment, , viewed 17 March 2004. 27 Kuldip Manak and Gurdas Mann are singing legends of the Punjab. While Manak is a hereditary performer from the mirasi caste and practises traditional Bhangra, Mann is considered the pioneer of Bhangrapop in India. 28 Dr Jayant Bapat, a visiting faculty at Monash University, who also officiates as a priest at Hindu weddings, tells me: ‘Whenever I go to perform a wedding, I find Richi Madan there. After I have performed the ceremony, Richi Madan takes over’ (private conversation, November 2004, Melbourne). 29 R Huq, Beyond Subculture: Pop, Youth and Identity in a Post-colonial World, Routledge, London, 2006.

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7

Sweet Dreams are Made of This: Bollywood and Transnational South Asians in Australia Devleena Ghosh

About ten years ago I wrote an article that examined the domestic cultures of young Indo-Fijians who had migrated to Sydney after the coups in Fiji. At that time, I remarked that many of the parents of my interlocutors identified the viewing of Hindi films as essential to feeling Indian. Ninety per cent of my informants watched at least one Hindi film per week, usually at the weekend and as a family practice. Most families had large electronic collections of Indian films and episodes of the Ramayana and Mahabharata, legal or pirated, and Hindi film music and song formed by far the largest category of popular music in the Indo-Fijian community. TV and DVD viewing appeared to offer powerful representations of both Indian and Australian culture for the Indo-Fijian community and the DVD player seems to have been appropriated by many parents as a means of recreating cultural traditions, though their efforts appeared to be both subverted and diverted by young people.1 Regular family gatherings took place around the television set, where the episodic structure of the narrative of the films, with their endless digressions, detours and plots within plots, enabled the weaving of conversation around them. The successive 139


modes of song, dance, action and emotion provided breaks, enabling the discussion of and gossip about the film. The viewing of these films was usually accompanied by a vociferous airing of views and intense debates on tradition and modernity. For example, one of my informants, while acknowledging some of the ‘unrealistic’ aspects of Hindi films, approved of them because of their moral certitude. She said: ‘In Hindi films, you know what is right and what is wrong. There is justice, there is morality. It is good for young people to see that goodness wins in the end’. When I suggested that this might be unrealistic, she was irritated: ‘Are the things you see in Hollywood films realistic? Bruce Willis always wins even if he fights a hundred villains; James Bond always escapes from any prison. Is it better to watch this rather than something, which has some moral basis?’ However, Indian cultural ‘traditions’ were just as likely to be to be challenged and subverted by TV- and film-viewing experiences. This informant’s daughter, for example, found the images of India portrayed in the films unattractive, unrealistic and patriarchal. She was embarrassed because her peer group lampooned Hindi films as ‘absurd’, comparing them to university subjects like ‘Creation of the Third World 101’ and felt herself alienated from the sense of Indianness and the India represented in the films. When she brought friends home, she said, she would always turn off Hindi film music or a Hindi movie playing in the background. She was studying an undergraduate film subject and was embarrassed by the contrast between European art films, such as those she saw at film festivals and the simplistic nature of Hindi film. There was also some sense that things depicted in the films, especially poverty, corruption and patriarchal values, might function to confirm dominant, racist discourses about the Indo-Fijian community in Australia. She said: My mother keeps saying I should watch Hindi films so that I am more aware of my heritage. But I am glad I am from Fiji and I have nothing to do with the kind of country they show in the films. They are silly, absurd. So simplistic. All that dancing and singing and throwing of flowers. Why don’t they just pash and get over it? And the humour is so crude. It’s vulgar. Can you imagine how my Anglo friends diss Hindi films? They are ridiculous. I try to avoid watching the videos my mother brings home every week.2

How different the diasporic world seems in 2008. Bollywood is now a sign of Indian soft power. Baz Luhrmann paid homage to 140

Sweet Dreams are Made of This

Bollywood in Moulin Rouge! (2001), Hindi films shot in Melbourne are blockbusters in India, Brett Lee, the Australian cricketer, sings with Asha Bhonsle, the legendary playback singer and Kylie Minogue is reported to be the highest paid overseas star in Bollywood.3 Bollywood films shot in Australia are used to promote Australian tourism and educational opportunities, both within India and the Indian diaspora. Hindi hits are routinely released in cinemas across Melbourne, Sydney, Perth and Brisbane and potential viewers informed by email or SMS. Bollywood dance and music classes are burgeoning, as are parties with Bollywood themes, so much so that there are specialised shops that make a living selling the accoutrements for Bollywood parties. The closing ceremony of the Commonwealth games in 2006 in Melbourne featured one of Bollywood’s megastars, Aishwarya Rai, along with a troupe of Indian dancers. According to Debjany Ganguli,4 when the former Prime Minister, John Howard, visited India in 2006, he spent most of his six-hour halt in Mumbai at a Bollywood film studio—the famous Yash Raj Films precinct—and Lachlan Murdoch has invested millions in a talent search and management company, Percept Talent Management, associated with the Bollywood industry. It is now common knowledge in the West that India’s thriving film industry produces more than 1,000 feature films annually and is the world’s largest producer of cinema. These films are screened in over 13,000 cinemas in the country. The distinctive visual style of the Hindi film synthesises so-called traditional Eastern cultures and mythologised, exotic and decadent Western cultures, drawing on Hollywood genres and Indian cultural forms to create a distinctive product, which is a powerful instrument of cultural identity.5 It combines successive modes of spectacle, action and emotion in a manner, which facilitates crosscultural understanding.6 The audience for mainstream Indian films is comprised not only of Indians in their home country but also diasporic viewers in large parts of the Middle East and South-East Asia, the UK, USA and Europe. India has one of the fastest growing diasporic communities in the world and ‘any study of Bollywood must address the role of this cultural form in the lives of the people of the Indian diaspora’.7 South Asian migrant communities overseas now form a crucial part of the global audience for Bollywood films. They usually have strong ties to their places of origin and their aesthetics and concerns increasingly inform the themes and style of Hindi cinema. The currency of Bollywood owes a great deal to new technologies, such as DVDs and internet piracy, as well as to the partial success of multicultural policies in many Western countries that 141


have made South Asian cultural products more acceptable. However, perhaps the most important reason for the global proliferation of Indian cinema is that South Asians, especially middle- to upper-class, qualified professionals, are migrating to all continents. In Australia, mainstream cinemas, such as Hoyts and Greater Union, screen Bollywood features, while seventy per cent of the people attending Bollywood film festivals are non-Indians.8 Dissanayake and Gokulsing argue that Hindi cinema was important in building nationhood and was a means by which the Indian self, the Indian family and the historically shaped patterns of behaviour and belief systems adapted to modernity.9 In fact, one of the dominant themes of Hindi films, as mentioned above, is the assumed clash between tradition and modernity in Indian society. With the massive changes brought about by modernisation, Hindi films constitute collective fantasies that perform the psychological function of producing a sense of security by valorising the picture of a world in which the family and dharma are both safe and paramount.10 This is particularly salient in the mobile and globalised world of the South Asian overseas communities and the Asian cultural renaissance in Britain and North America has rejuvenated diasporic tastes. Film soundtracks are remixed with Bhangra beats and RnB, DnB and house music palettes. For example, Gurinder Chadha’s Bride and Prejudice (2004), starring Aishwarya Rai, celebrates traditional Bollywood conventions of song and dance, within a familiar WesternÂ€narrative. In the 1990s, the Hindi film industry recognised the importance of overseas audiences for Bollywood films; however, most blockbusters like Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge (1995) and Hum Aapke Hain Koun...! (1994) validated links to conservative Indian traditions and family values, for both domestic and diasporic viewers. But the emergence of the diasporic audience meant that the staple of Bollywood narrative tradition, the upright and secular Indian citizen, occasionally had to be interpellated by a pan-Indian identity, though traditional Indian values were still considered seminal.11 This Indian identity has become increasingly transnational in outlook and the non-resident Indian (NRI) is no longer the Westernised outsider without tradition or culture who needs to be re-educated into being a so-called real Indian; rather s/he is the progressive, forward-looking, wealthy and adventurelovingÂ€protagonist. How does Bollywood culture construct and contradict diasporic understandings of Indian identity? When young people in Australia watch Bollywood films set in cities like Melbourne, they participate 142


in an interesting paradox: these films represent Bollywood’s construction of immigrants, rather than the reality that young South Asians experience in Australia, yet they are one of the few cinematic representations of South Asian immigrants available in the wider society. These films engage with their immigrant viewers in a kind of mutual ‘diasporic fantasy’,12 where Indianness is validated by the cultural and social liberties of a Westernised world. In Salaam Namaste (2005), the heroine gets pregnant before marriage and decides to keep her child and become a single mother, a decision that would be difficult, if not impossible, in an Indian context. As Mishra points out, the ‘images that are reconstructed across the international divide…[create their] own version of the Diaspora itself ’.13 If discourses of displacement relocate and reconfigure markers of identity through the gendered and sexualised politics of transnationality, then the politics of location also inform the diasporic viewer’s negotiation of gender, racialisation and identification. This makes the reception of Hindi film in South Asian migrant communities both complex and ambivalent. Though the concept of migrancy has been crucial to the building of national narratives, local alliances and globalised geopolitics, it is still a contested and overdetermined idea. It is assumed that immigrants who relocate permanently acquire a collective identity and special preferential social relationships within their own communities in their adoptive homelands. The assumption that race, religion, language or ethnicity is essential to any migrant group delegitimises the complex web of social, economic and cultural reasons behind migration. Thus migrant communities learn early to define themselves via the tropes of loss, alienation and nostalgia rather than validating hope, mobility and adventure. Rather than assuming that migrant communities are derivative of the communities from which they originated, recent studies have posited home as a fluid concept and multi-layered site, impossible to locate in one place, complicated by the connections between adoptive and original home. Such scholarship has highlighted corporeality, affect, experience and imagination in the making of communities, noting that homes are created by and through the migrant imaginary in temporal flux and the context of hybridity and liminality.14 As Isabel Hofmeyr points out, the key claim of such transnational approaches is their ‘central concern with movements, flows and circulation, not simply as a theme or motif but as an analytic set of methods which defines the endeavor itself ’.15 Thus, a concern with transnationalism would imply the understanding that ‘historical 143


processes are made in different places but that they are constructed in the movement between places, sites and regions’.16 In the same piece, Wendy Kozol notes that: Immigration histories, for instance, examine how circular migration, kin networks, and communications technologies reconfigure the concept of the border as a stable marker of national identity. Such considerations in turn have opened up historical inquiries into the complex and often conflicted identifications that diasporic communities have with ideals of ‘citizenship’ and of ‘home’.17

The concept of transnationalism has also been usefully deployed to highlight the processes by which ‘immigrants forge and sustain multi-standard social relations that link together their societies of origin and settlement’.18 The definition can extend to include other diasporic communities of the same origin and developments in information and communication technology mean that migrant communities can strengthen their links across the world via, for example, television sub-channels such as Lashkara (Punjabi), Gurjari (Gujarati) and Bangla (Bengali), to name just a few. Other ways in which these transnational networks are maintained are through cultural events, such as musical and theatrical performances and religious festivals. Studies of transnationalism in the context of immigrants usually neatly set up the topics of engagement: memory, nostalgia and cultural loss, associating them so organically with immigrants, attaching them so fatefully to their daily discernments, that, as Yao Souchou says, writing about the ‘nostalgic immigrants’ becomes ‘enchanting’, because their experience corresponds closely with the sense of loss and irresolvable contradiction in the conditions of modernity.19 Since national belonging is not a singular or exclusionary experience or a function of direct or unmediated experience, it is crucial to unpick the factors that inform everyday life and disrupt the concept of Indianness, through ordinary narratives of dislocation and renewal. How does the translocation of migrancy subvert the site of homeland for young South Asians in Sydney20 and what role do Bollywood films play in the movements and processes through which emotion, temporality and spatiality are inscribed, both corporeally and affectively, mirroring the formation and re-formation of allegiance and identity? This discussion focuses on these key transformations by examining two performance projects, Suburban Masala: From Mumbai to Marrickville (2002) and [email protected] (2003), which involved over twenty-five 144


young people of South Asian descent and performed to sell-out houses in Sydney. According to a review by Keith Gallasch, India@oz had: a tremendous sense of pride, fun and celebration, embodied as it was in the spectacle and melodrama of Bollywood, that miracle of the hybrid arts and focused on being young and Indian-Australian…The younger women gather in a song of defiance, one of their number on sax, the bodies say pop, the gesturing hands say traditional Indian dance.21

Besides, dance, rap, installations and story-telling, the project also included little dramas: parents struggling to understand sons who only speak hip-hop; a ‘This is Your Wife’ parody, ‘putting the “arranged” back into the arranged marriage’; a Bollywood star and his lover. Another reviewer in the Sydney Morning Herald wrote: The Indian lads did their rhymes in Aussie accents, the dancing mixed classical Indian with contemporary breaking and some of the best text pieces dealt with generational differences. One of the lessons of this show was the way cultural intermingling can result in new forms and genres that are unexpected and are often more than the sum of their component influences.22

The fluidity of a ‘South Asian’ identity for the participants in these projects is illustrated by the fact that their families originated from the global gamut of the South Asian diaspora: not only from India but also from Fiji, Malaysia, South Africa, Dubai, Singapore and Bangladesh. For them, the reality and the imaginative projections of home, like a palimpsest, were inscribed with layer upon layer of personal, national, social and cultural issues that had to be constantly renegotiated with their historical and national selves. The way they ‘constructed’ themselves shaped the imagining of their history.23 Immigrants from South Asia are now in the top ten categories of immigrants in Australia. In Sydney, various little subcontinental patches are marked out in Eastlakes (Bangladeshi), Liverpool (Fiji Indian), Harris Park (Indian) and so on. The various clones of the first North Indian Diner, with sobriquets such as North Indian Aroma, North Indian Flavour, Indian Home Diner, run by Bangladeshis or Pakistanis, as well as spice and video shops are now familiar sights in various Sydney suburbs. There are also community events such as the annual Mohammed Rafi music night and other cultural shows. Indian student associations in the universities in the Sydney area also 145


hold cultural nights and performances, which are so popular that the list of participants have to audition for the opportunity to perform on those nights and there are long queues for entry. Many of the performances are strongly influenced by Bollywood movies, especially in the dance and music. In fact, Hindi movies provide a vital link to culture, tradition, language and histories. The children of these firstgeneration, South Asian immigrants were raised without Indian friends, Bharatanatyam dance classes, Karnatic music recitals, Hindu temple societies or Hindi films and precisely because of this upbringing, they are acutely conscious of the relationship between diasporas, ethnicity and the nation-state. This second-generation youth has created a new popular culture, based on dance parties and music mixes, a club culture which is both part of Sydney and of transnational South Asian public culture. Like the term desi in the USA, they use curry as one of the terms to identify collectively young people of subcontinental descent. The first nightclub in the city, catering specially for the needs of the Indians, was located on Liverpool’s Northumberland Street. Other such clubs also opened and some shut rapidly, amongst them Ghungroo in Leichardt, Ashique in Ashfield and Purple Haze in Newtown. All these clubs targeted the Indian diaspora and Hindi music, Bhangra or Bollywood, was the main attraction. In August 2002, Bar Broadway celebrated ten years of Masala Mix on 2SER-FM by holding a ‘Bend it like Bhangra’ evening. It was advertised as ‘Bent Bhangra. Bollywood breaks. Raag fusion’ and featured DJs Akaash and Sam with live dance and percussion performances by Phuse, Avijeet and Tandaur. It was hugelyÂ€successful.

This is your wife: love and marriage In this section, I engage with the gendered responses to Bollywood gender roles from the participants in the Suburban Masala and India@ oz.sangam projects, who discussed Bollywood films, stars, dances and music avidly and modelled their performances on favourite stars. Baz Luhrmann’s Bollywood-inspired Moulin Rouge! was enthusiastically analysed with derogatory remarks on Nicole Kidman’s singing abilities and most were thrilled by the cross-cultural success of the film Monsoon Wedding (2001). Women, especially, mentioned feeling split while watching Bollywood or ‘beyond Bollywood’ cinema, stepping gingerly in an in-between space of multiple attachments: 146


Katy: I think I am a culturally split personality. Sometimes I watched it [Monsoon Wedding] with Indian eyes, at times with Aussie eyes. With my Indian eyes, I felt there was no acting going on. Mona: It’s culturally up-to-date, I mean those crazy cell phone interruptions. Katy: And the way they mix Hindi and English, just like V-TV and MTV. Mona: And all those people from abroad, you know the idiot from Australia (laughs). And the guy thinking he’s going to get a virgin (laughs).

Many of my interlocutors expressed amazement and incredulity at the father in Monsoon Wedding severing ties with the old family friend who molested his niece. The reviewer on the website Hot Ashes comments that the storyline in Monsoon Wedding is: nothing short of brilliant and courageous. To have a girl have a fling before her wedding and a father stand beside her unmarried daughter who was molested by a family friend, this film is obviously made for an international audience but somehow it doesn’t loose [sic] its Indian touch. It captures the formula of a Punjabi wedding video and holds it throughout the movie.24

The crucial input of Bollywood films in the construction of Indianness was highlighted in this exchange: Mona: With so many people taking on role models from film, maybe this will change our culture of always believing older people, you know people with respect and status. Katy: Maybe it shows how people can act in a similar case, you know be brave, stand up to the child molester, change their behaviour (laughs). Is this wishful thinking?

Most of the young women I spoke to were aware of the contradictions and paradoxes that made up their lives and the ambiguous liminal space they inhabited. One woman reinforced Katy’s comment about ‘a culturally split personality’, one for their Indian elders and one for 147


public spaces away from parental scrutiny and parents might approve of Bollywood dance parties as long as their daughters didn’t go with boyfriends: Jothi: I think they like us to go because it keeps us hanging out with Indians; I mean they know that stuff goes on, drinking and stupid things but they think, this probably happens everywhere so better it is at Bollywood parties. Priya: It’s like schizophrenia; we literally switch. Jothi and I wear our party clothes underneath the daggy stuff and change in the car, into halters, midriff-showing things, mini skirts and so on.

Along with the hybrid popular culture of the diaspora exists a parallel transnational circuit of ‘authentic’ Indian cultural productions from the subcontinent, which serve to reify the image of India in the West as a land of spirituality, ‘good values’ and unchanging traditions. In this context, discussions of spouses and marriage were based on intensely private experiences as well as on understanding of family expectations. Most of the young women participants in these projects were adamant that they did not want to marry to disoblige their families. At the same time, the Bollywood heroes they preferred were the caring, new-age ones, such as Aman (Shah Rukh Khan) from Kal Ho Naa Ho (2003) rather than the more aggressive Salman Khan (in fact, all the women were extremely disapproving of his alleged violence towards his thengirlfriend, Aishwarya Rai). The films young women most connected with were ones where the heroes were practical and sensible and able to reach a compromise with their girlfriends, who were educated, employed but understanding of Indian family values. The participants in the projects displayed significant emotional energy in their comments on marriage and family, perhaps pointing to subconscious fears and resentments about male-dominated family arrangements as well as genuine viewing pleasure. Their criticism of overt masculine heroes, such as Salman Khan, was made in the context of the ideal of Indian womanhood portrayed in the films. These young women occupied multiple positions as viewers, enjoying the traditional and idealised constructions of femininity portrayed in Bollywood, in the context of gendered nationalist discourses, at the same time as insisting that women should not be self-sacrificing, pure, docile and submissive labourers in the domestic sphere but public citizens, worthy of work, love and respect. In these conversations, young South Asians were indicating a dichotomy between ‘real’ Indian culture 148


and one that ‘panders to the West’, based on definitions filtered through the socialisation of immigrant parents. Their evocation of traditional Indian femininity employed a kind of strategic essentialism that shored up an unstable set of cultural identifications within the predicament of migrancy. A poster to the website Hot Ashes wrote: As a second generation indian growing up in Australia i don’t hold too many ‘traditional’ values. I have my own bachelorette pad, have tried and tested many men and given a hot guy with abs to kill for, a one night stand is entirely within reason. But then i am getting that nagging feeling at the back of my mind that its time to settle down. Now my parents may have a heart attack if i even mention ‘arranged marriage’ to them. Yet life is not a Bollywood movie and after all my bad luck with men and not so great judgement after falling in love and enjoying wild romances with incredible highs and lows, all resulting in disaster with men not calling, disappearing from my life or finding out that they are even married—this age old tradition seems kinda not such a bad idea? 25

A consistent and haunting figure in these conversations is the single young woman or man as anomaly, as threat and object of uneasy reflections about the nature of cultural boundaries. If identity is ‘processual’ and ‘articulated’, with no authentic shape but subject to a series of adaptations, changes and borrowing, it then becomes clear that Bollywood provides a way for young South Asian women to make choices about the elements of Indianness they choose or to discard others.26 These contradictions in the reception of Bollywood film stereotypes refuse a homogeneous and superficial reading of South Asian women’s engagement with the representation of gender roles in Hindi cinema. Rather, their responses are inflected by personal and collective histories, at the interface of shifting and unstable frames of femininity that simultaneously transgress and submit to both tradition and modernity.

Chapatti with everything: Bollywood dance parties On the twelfth day of Christmas, my true love gave to me…Twelve cricket ball tamperers, Eleven syllable names, Ten-minute yoga, Nine telemarketers, Eight Bollywood films, 7-Eleven workers, Six IT graduates, Five Indian games, Four Hare Krishnas, Three butter chickens, Two nosy in-laws and a totally insufficient dowry.27 149


The youth culture of second-generation, South Asian Australians is a terrain where notions of authenticity, legitimacy, tradition and culture are being hotly contested because such notions convey specific messages of cultural difference. What constitutes the ‘authentic’, ethnic subject and subcultural codes of belonging and exclusion are constructed in different and parallel social spaces, through different tropes: home, university, Indian, Australian, migrant, curry. These debates draw on transnational imaginings of India and also work within local contexts of nationalism and race and class and gender hierarchies. In this context, Bombay cinema functions as a genealogy as well as a transaction of affect and films provide a variety of emotional ‘packages’ for their diverse consumers. Hindi film thus constitutes both a political and moral economy of a different kind in migrant communities. The impact that expectations of first-generation migrants have of their children has been extensively documented in scholarly work and fiction. Multimedia work such as Boymongoose’s 12 Days of Christmasâ†œæ¸€å±®28 display, the creation of new spaces and cultural forms on the edges of the mass market to contest both local and traditional notions of identity, at the same time engaging with the complex challenge of reconciling their parents’ cultural narratives with own experiences and realities. Boymongoose is the lead singer of an Indian boy band who, according to his website, ‘specialises in comedic remakes of all the classic Christmas Carols…[and]…takes aim at Insufficient Dowries, Internet Dating, Bollywood Hunks, Corrupt Child Sports Stars and Angels with amazing I.T. skills’.29 The layered irony of the Boymongoose creation has a self-deprecating satire that both owns and pokes fun at Australian and South Asian icons. For example, in an affectionate pastiche of Carols by Candlelight, an Indian Elvis with a Peter Sellers-Indian accent finds that the tenth day of Christmas has brought a serene white bearded sage promoting ‘ten-minute yoga’, who exhorts his audience to ‘think the lotus, feel the lotus, drive the lotus’ and speeds off in a flash car. Similarly, the eighth day of Christmas offers eight Bollywood films with the Brylcreemed hero dancing around a tree singing, ‘I didn’t eat the baby, the dingo ate the baby’. At the same time, many young South Asians who come to Australia as full fee-paying students are acutely aware of the gap between the world they inhabit in cities like Melbourne and Sydney and the one represented in Salaam Namaste and Singh is Kinng (2008). South Asian students find it increasingly hard to get part-time work to finance their studies and are the victims of attacks. Two taxi drivers in Melbourne have been murdered and one-third of the victims of robberies in the west of the city have been of South 150


Asian descent. The approach of the police to the increasing violence towards young South Asians has been a tacit ‘blame the victim’ policy, as seen in the advice of the police to Indian international students not to speak loudly in their own language or to display expensive items like iPods when they are out in public, especially at night.30 However, the very stereotypes of Bollywood films or South Asian culture—the Boymongoose parodies of the traditional family, work and migration, motifs of dowry, in-laws, telemarketers, 7-Eleven workers— coupled with more familiar images—Bollywood, ball-tampering cricket teams and Hare Krishnas—show that most second-generation youth are still influenced by their parents and retain the supposedly Asian values of respect for age and authority and filial piety. They, however, have to negotiate between several worlds and world-views to create a space of autonomy for themselves. This space of autonomy is also a way to negotiate a variety of popular cultures, where the temporal dialectics between tradition and modernity within the context of contemporaneity reveal the dual spectres of the loss of culture and tradition as well as the contamination of the present. The affective power of Bollywood film is similar to that of a translucent watermark on paper. During the performance of [email protected], one of the participants recounted his runaway journey from the Punjab to Bombay when he was sixteen. He wanted to be a film star and even made the supreme sacrifice for a Sikh, cutting his hair. He was in Australia on a tourist visa, which he had overstayed, but he still wanted to act—to be a star. And when the performance was being created, all this young man wanted to do was to be Shah Rukh Khan. It was the only way he knew of being a successful and glamorous adult. And one of the spaces where he could perform his Bollywood-ness was at danceÂ€parties. At the same time as Indo-chic and remix music reshapes the notion of cool, the phenomenon of Bollywood parties fits in with the larger structure of clubbing in Sydney. Though not ethnically or racially segregated, the majority of attendees are of South Asian origin and a DJ (mostly of subcontinental origin) who can spin the right music is essential. Information about the parties circulates through word of mouth, internet mailing lists, websites such as Hot Ashes and flyers distributed at events, shops, clubs and so on. There is a distinctively hybrid style to these parties, such as wearing Indian-style noserings or bindis with Western clothing and dancing Bhangra moves to club remixes. This hybrid style has been labelled ‘Indo-chic’ and demonstrates the ways in which consumption is used to negotiate ideas of ethnic authenticity, cultural ownership and race. Events have 151


names such as ‘Bollywood Nights Masti’ and are mainly advertised via blogs and text. Indian accoutrements, such as dupattas, bindis, jingling bangles and loose salwar-type pants are de rigueur. The music usually fuses the insistent beat of Bhangra-type Bollywood music with somewhat bland Western pop tracks and there are as many goras (white or Anglo) as curries (South Asians) present. The walls of the venue are covered with images and video clips displaying flashes of national heroes, Bollywood stars and India’s wildlife on a never-ending loop. There are images of famous Bollywood dances incorporating the Taj Mahal and scenes of Indian streets from Hindi films, such as the classic song, ‘Yeh hai Bombay meri jaan’ (‘This is Bombay, my love’) from CID (1956). Amitabh Bachchan keeps popping up. The most enthusiastic dancers are usually young South Asian men, performing extremely athletic versions of Bhangra moves for each other. There are few mixed couples dancing—it is mostly girls with girls and boys with boys. Performances from schools teaching Bollywood dance, such as the Mango Dance Studio, form a regular feature. In Australia, these parties and this remix music have become a recognised part of broader popular culture. At the same time, the mainstreaming of Indian-style nose-rings, bindis, henna and so on is a hotly debated issue because of the way in which consumption is used to negotiate ideas of ethnic authenticity, cultural ownership and race, a kind of new orientalisation of India. Earthbrownkid, a medical student who also moonlights as a DJ in the Masala Mix and Bar Broadway’s Bollywood nights, puts it this way: Our parents have a fundamentally different way of looking at things to anglo parents, not so much because of culture, but more so because of their life experiences—as middle class ppl [people] fleeing deteriorating situations...i think the way we act is just intrinsically different...white kids have protests, block roads, dress like they are from the 3rd world etc...and cool, cos that represents what they are thinking...but there are hardly any coloured ppl [people] who get caught up in that scene and i think that is cos that just doesn’t represent the way we do things...we are more likely to be a lot more low key about it and find an orphanage in india and send our 9-5 money that way without any publicity.31

In talking about the South Asian American film Masala (1991), Jigna Desai writes, ‘Camp and post-colonial diasporic mimicry become strategies to contest racial, gendered, sexual and class politics within the film. Therefore, camp can possibly be harnessed to analyse 152


ironic performances of gendered national and racial identities that are connected to a diasporic politics of home and identity’.32 This implies that ethnic youth subculture may ostensibly accommodate itself to the dominant racial and class framework, but its ironic mimicry of the utopian excess of the Bollywood film genre both contains and subverts the ambiguities of second-generation experience. The performance of Bollywood chic, accepted in both Indian and Australian cultural contexts, as part of lived experience and daily practice, is not the manifestation of the free play of a hybrid identity, but rather a creative response to the demand for coherence and stability within specific racial and cultural contexts; a means to negotiate the predicaments in which they find themselves.

‘Resurrect the Artist’ Freedom of Oz, Sri Lankan child is born rest of his life ‘tween two countries he’ll be torn Far as culture goes, its only natural I explain my plateau and also what defines my name what’s it all mean to be Sri Lankan-Australian, searches streets and libraries, still no Talisman, that I aint no faker, decision maker try many styles, I’m known as a risk takes. Way I see it I’m a multicultural hero. Personify the product of a chemical reaction, all races combined into a complex fraction. Journey of one’s mind, the result defraction. Despite complexity, still me chillin’ ‘n’ maxin’. but its only effect is ya culture’s neglect the truth hurts, but runnin’s worse so converse with the universe.33

Second-generation, South Asian youth culture is a prickly area as first-generation immigrants often find the use of clothing, dialect and musical bricolage, adopted by their children, confronting, even though the meanings attached to these are largely redefined. For example, the selective adoption of bits of sound from Bollywood and Indian music to mix with hip-hop and rap create markers of ethnicity and material status in a multi-ethnic, capitalist society. Paradoxically, this 153


reinterpretation of South Asian musical and dance tradition through the rituals of Western popular culture deals with the demands of both their parents and the society in which they live to perform some ‘authentic’ ethnic identity in a world in which representation is one of the most contested resources. As young South Asians in Australia inhabit the public spaces of the urban landscape, issues of nostalgia, cultural change and ethnic difference give way to issues of temporality and cultural innovation. The actual trajectories and experiences of South Asians living in Australia is a terrain of messy anomaly, where those in between threaten the orders of things. This becomes clear in a recent discussion of the hugely successful Bollywood take-off Slumdog Millionaire (2008). In a focus group, young people passionately debated the film and its impact on foreign and domestic audiences and it became clear that, while they were aware of the homage that Slumdog paid to Bollywood, they were also alive to the contradictions in that a ‘pornography of poverty’, as one young woman called it, should be the film to win all the Western accolades rather than a film more critical of colonialism such as Lagaan (2001) or Rang De Basanti (2006). As a young choreographer said: My family in Bombay lives very near Dharavi. I go there a lot to buy leather stuff and other things. My uncle worked with PUCL [People’s Union of Civil Liberties] and he said that Dharavi is commercial activity, about 80%. Mostly it produces most of the idlis and poppadoms in Bombay.

This young man was trying to communicate his unease at the depiction of Indian slums such as Dharavi as the nadir of society where all is dark and unbearable by pointing to the fact that most Dharavi residents engage in normal and legal business activities rather than in cinematic gangster behaviour. He was objecting to the notion of the Indian slum as an apocalyptic vision of hell where child mutilation, prostitution and terrorism hold sway rather than the space of normalcy that poor people, uprooted from different parts of India by dams, deforestation or communal riots, inhabit. Another young woman added that if this were a Bollywood film with its particular fantastical style of production and direction, no one would have taken it seriously. But they objected to the fact that the gritty, realistic style of Slumdog meant that their non-South Asian peers treated the picture of Bombay as real, like a documentary. All the participants in the discussion were absolutely clear that they didn’t care an iota about the film damaging 154


India’s reputation; rather they were concerned that Western cinema, by the very realism of its depiction, represented an India which unsettled their own cultural boundaries and meaning-making. One of the participants in the project, the medical student known as Earthbrownkid who moonlighted as a DJ, passionately argued that young people had to resurrect the artist: in my opinion politicking is played out. the 21st century is hyperreality. the real politics today is the politics of cool. what is cool is what is powerful. politicians don’t define this. advertisers do. media, that is where the power lies. multinational corporations are the new governments and the only way they can [be] touched is through mass public sentiment. if you want to influence the public you need to be in their faces. go into politics, comb your hair, make lots of speeches, no one is listening. wake up, turn on your tv, open your window. graffiti to fashion models to cd covers to mainstream soaps, the ubiquitous, its like Bollywood, its everywhere. that is where it is at. resurrect the artist.34

This conversation highlights the fundamental predicament of postcolonial and immigrant existence: that subjectivity and time are not givens, neither ossified in tradition nor solely political projects. The fissures in the past and present create sites of creative and innovative production, as well as spectres that haunt the very project of nationalism or identity. For these young people, this past is not a different country, nor is it available to logic; it is experienced corporeally and affectively. This bodily and emotional experience of the past and tradition enables young migrants to deploy these understandings in their everyday life and to plan for tomorrow.

Conclusion: sweet dreams are made of this Projects such as Suburban Masala and [email protected] occupy spaces that do not encompass a territorial or bounded sense of cultural difference but are rather a refusal of those terms. My interlocutors do not talk about clashes of culture but a kind of intercultural experience, not just ‘in between’ but something entirely new. The conceptual geometry of their position is one of a roving culture, not bumping up against boundaries but living out the very interstices they represent, actively creating meaning. To some extent, their readings of the Bollywood romantic genre with its nationalistic pride and heteronormativity, 155


based on their own life-worlds, work against the texts of the films and empower them to negotiate different interpretations of their own narratives. The difference between the representation in India of the NRI as the fortunate and wealthy adventurer, bearing gifts when s/ he returns and remittances when s/he does not and the reality of the South Asian migrant experience in Australia radically transfigures the concept of ‘Australian’, subverting and shaping the way in which a mainstream Australian youth identity is constructed in the public sphere. Much of this subversion is an unsettling of the Pollyanna-ish fantasy of gender liberation in films like Salaam Namaste, allowing for different counterpolitics and interventions in the liminal spaces of migrancy. These blurred boundaries and radical re-enchantments of both the past and the present reveal the always contingent, contested nature of subjectivity, not one that is floating aimlessly in a postmodern moment. Rather, it is grounded in the contemporary subjectivity of these young citizens, a thousand plateaus, subjectivities felt and experienced through the body, through historical landscapes, through domestic spaces and, through performance, as well as through the much more difficult realm of the imaginary, of the impact of ideals and the weight of history.

Notes 1 M Gillespie, Television, Ethnicity and Cultural Change, Routledge, London, 1995. 2 ibid., where young Sikh informants in Southall, London, say very similar things about Hindi popular film. 3 ‘Kylie is B’wood’s Highest Paid Foreign Celeb’, Times of India, 15 March 2009, , viewed 27 March 2009. 4 D Ganguly, ‘Review of Curators Divia Patel, Rebecca Bower and Christine Sumner’s Cinema India—The Art of Bollywood, Powerhouse Museum’, History Australia, vol. 5.1, 2008, p. 17.1. 5 W Dissanayake, ‘Cultural Identity and Asian Cinema’, in W. Dissanayake (ed.), Cinema and Cultural Identity, University Press of America, Maryland, 1988. 6 R Thomas, ‘Indian Cinema: Pleasures and Popularity’, Screen 26.3–4, 1985, pp. 116-31; V. Mishra, ‘Towards a Theoretical Critique of Bombay Cinema’, Screen 26.3–4, 1985, pp.Â€133–49. 7 V Mishra, Bollywood Cinema: Temples of Desire, Routledge, London, 2002, p. 235. 8 A Arora, ‘India beyond Bollywood’, The Australian, 4 October 2006, p. 10. 9 W Dissanayake & KM Gokulsing, Indian Popular Cinema: A Narrative of Cultural Change, Orient Longman, Hyderabad, 1998. 10 ibid. 11 R Dwyer & D Patel, Cinema India: The Visual Culture of Hindi Film, Reaktion Books, London, 2002, pp. 216–17. 12 Mishra, Bollywood Cinema, p. 250. 13 ibid., pp. 237–47, passim. 14 BK Axel, The Nation’s Tortured Body, Duke University Press, Durham, 2002; I. Chambers, Migrancy Culture Identity, Routledge, London, 1994.

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Sweet Dreams are Made of This 15 CA Bayly, Sven Beckert, Matthew Connelly, Isabel Hofmeyr, Wendy Kozol & Patricia Seed, ‘AHR Conversation: On Transnational History’, American Historical Review, 111.5, 2006, pp. 1441–64, p. 1444. 16 ibid., p. 1444. 17 ibid., p. 1445. 18 L Basch, NG Schiller & CS Blanc, Nations Unbound: Transnational Projects, Post-colonial Predicaments and Deterritorialized Nation-states, Langhorne, PA, Gordon and Breach, 1994, p. 4. 19 Yao Souchou, personal letter, 2004. 20 By ‘South Asian’, I mean people who identify as being from India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Nepal and Sri Lanka, whether they migrated from the South Asian region proper or from other countries such as Fiji, Mauritius, Malaysia, Singapore, Africa or the Middle East. Sometimes I use ‘Indian’ as an unsatisfactory adjective where ‘South Asian’ sounds too awkward. 21 K Gallasch, ‘Across Great Divides’, RealTime Arts-Magazine, 58, 2003, , viewed 27 March 2009. 22 S Dunne, ‘Rip Rapping, Hop Hipping that we can All Enjoy’, Sydney Morning Herald, 6Â€October 2003, p. 15. 23 See, for example, M Das Gupta, ‘What is Indian About You? A Gendered, Transnational Approach to Ethnicity’, Gender & Society, vol. 11.5, 1997, pp. 572–96. 24 A Nand, ‘Independent Indian Women?’, Hot Ashes 2001, , viewed 5 December 2002. 25 FlowerSky, ‘Entering my late 20s and considering the “arranged xxxx—Oo did i just say that??’, online posting, Hot Ashes 04:12 20 January 2008 viewed 23 January 2009. 26 S Hall, ‘On Postmodernism and Articulation: An Interview with Stuart Hall’, Journal of Communication Inquiry, 10.2, 1986, pp. 45–60. 27 Boymongoose, ‘12 Days of Christmas’, , viewed 28Â€March 2009. 28 ibid. 29 Boymongoose, , viewed 28 March 2009. 30 ‘Don’t Talk Loudly, Indian Students Warned’, ninemsn, 19 February 2009, , viewed 28 March 2009. 31 da library G [aka Earthbrownkid], ‘Re: what does asian mean?’, online posting, Hot Ashes 12:07 1 August 2003 , viewed 23 January 2009. 32 J Desai, Beyond Bollywood: The Cultural Politics of South Asian Diasporic Film, London, Routledge, 2004, p. 107. 33 Curry Puffs, [email protected]. 34 Interview, July 2002.

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8

Orbits of Desire: Bollywood as Creative Industry in Australia Debjani Ganguly

In 2006, a weekend edition of The Sydney Morning Herald featured an op-ed piece by columnist Louise Williams entitled, ‘Soft and Sexy: the Image of the Next Superpowers’.1 Her central argument, based on Harvard Professor Joseph Nye’s book, Soft Power: The Means to Success in World Politics, was that the measure of influence of emerging global superpowers, India and China, ought also to be located in their ‘creative’ and ‘cultural’ contributions to global public spheres. There was too much focus on their military might and growing economic muscle. But these were not what constituted their ‘allure’ to the world at large. As she put it, ‘Soft Power can’t be built on wealth alone. Saudi Arabia is rich but not alluring for example’. Where India was concerned, Williams confidently picked Bollywood as the nation’s prime conduit to soft global power in the twenty-first century. We were also given a telling example. When the Taliban fell in Afghanistan in 2001, the Indian foreign minister went to visit the beleaguered nation. He, however, did not carry a planeload of food aid or arms; instead, he brought Bollywood films and Indian music to the entertainmentstarved Afghan people. 159


Piquant instances of Bollywood’s global influence abound. One can recount yet another in the furore generated by the British television show, Celebrity Big Brother, in May 2007 when a Bollywood star, Shilpa Shetty, was subjected to racial slurs by her housemates. The event became global news and even took up a few minutes of British parliamentary time. The outcry was so powerful, and not just among the subcontinental diaspora, that the offending housemates were booted out, endorsements to the show were threatened and Shilpa went on to win the competition. Without doubt, it was her Bollywood credentials that came to her aid and made this event newsworthy enough for the BBC to devote substantial broadcasting time and a special interview with the ‘gracious’ and ‘forgiving’ actress. Shilpa has since gone on to receive an honorary doctorate from Leeds Metropolitan University, an honour she shares with the indomitable star of Bollywood, Amitabh Bachchan! My last instance of Bollywood’s global impact is a more direct example of creative influence. I refer here to Andrew Lloyd Webber and AR Rahman’s Bollywood-inspired musical, Bombay Dreams. The show opened to rave reviews at London’s West End in 2002, with the Sunday Express (London) reportedly calling it the ‘best Britishoriginated musical since The Phantom of the Opera’.2 The musical was also enthusiastically received in Broadway in 2004, with one reviewer describing it as the ‘most satisfying musical of the Broadway season’.3 Bollywood, thus, currently appears comfortably ensconced both as a favourite vernacular in global entertainment circuits and also as an aesthetic marker of Indianness in the popular imagination.4 This essay seeks to account for Bollywood’s current global ‘allure’, not in terms of a feminised metaphoricity—Williams’ ‘soft’ and ‘sexy’—but in terms of its translation into the ‘hard’ and ‘masculine’ world of wealth, industry and commerce. The burden of my argument is to demonstrate that, in the last two decades, the fulcrum of Bollywood’s global power has shifted from the transnational impact of popular Bombay films to lucrative zones of extra-cinematic visuality. These zones are marked by an array of new creative and culture industries that have spun off from Bollywood’s base in film-making and are now found across the globe. They include live dance and musical spectacles, fashion, food, tourism, art exhibitions, aerobic fitness centres, dance classes, music albums, television productions and an array of other digital and web-based modalities of entertainment. This transformation has generated new global consumers, distinct from the film-going audience that is still constituted primarily of the Indian diaspora. 160

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The industry’s phenomenal digital expertise in animation and special effects, all available at half the cost to that in the US, has, in recent years, made it attractive enough for Hollywood to outsource its production and post-production work to the studios of Mumbai. According to a report in the Financial Times in 2006, Walt Disney, Nickelodeon, Cartoon Network and Sony Entertainment had all availed of Bollywood industry’s hightech expertise in the previous two years; so much so that this creative outsourcing was then worth US$285 million, according to Nasscom, the Indian information technology association. Nasscom estimated that this figure would grow to almost a billion dollars by 2009.5 The noted film scholar, Ashish Rajadhyaksha, rightly observes: The cinema has in recent years seen a massive makeover through the infusion of new kinds of capital and new industries that have grouped together under the term ‘Bollywood’. Bollywood…can be validly seen as an industry that is not so much about the cinema as an evocation of cinema for the purposes of creating a slew of new culture industries including fashion, music, consumption, tourism, advertising, television and the internet—industries that, as it were, reproduce the cinema outside the movie theatre.6

What is the historical import of this distinction that Rajadhyaksha makes between popular Bombay ‘cinema’ as such and its ‘reproduction’ outside the domain of film-making? How does this distinction transform the ways in which we now conceptualise and calibrate the ‘transnational’ impact of this successful Indian export? What is chosen from the lexicon and iconography of Bollywood as translatable into the late modern capitalist economy? How are these choices made? I seek to address these concerns in two ways. Firstly, I delve briefly into the genealogy of the term ‘Bollywood’ and historically trace its transformation from a label denoting popular Bombay cinema to a signifier of a global culture industry of which films are only a small part. Secondly, I illustrate this shift by focusing on the recent history of Bollywood as creative industry in Australia. I use a few case studies for the purpose.

Bollywood and globalisation In 2005, the Oxford English Dictionary for the first time had an entry under the word ‘Bollywood’: ‘name of the Indian popular film industry based in Bombay. Origins 1970s. Blend of Bombay and Hollywood’. This matter161


of-fact, denotative uptake on the term gives no hint of its complex and much-debated genealogy and usage. Many noted Bollywood film stars, such as Ajay Devgan, have gone on record to express their disapproval of the term,7 seeing in it a derogatory derivativeness not warranted by the popular film form’s deeply Indian origins in the epics, the Parsi theatre, indigenous folk traditions, lithographs and calendar art.8 Some scholars see in it a mark of the dominance of the predominantly Anglophone urban middle class on representations of Indian cultural phenomena to the world. It is very typical, they argue, on the part of Indian elites to use ‘Western’ frames of reference to measure and market their own cultural productions. Madhav Prasad, for instance, traces the genealogy of the term to the English language press in India, especially in Anglophile Calcutta, that goes much further back than the 1970s and 1980s—the period commonly attributed to the term’s origins. He refers to a telegraphic communication received in 1932 by an American engineer, Wilford Deming, from a film team in Calcutta, which read: ‘Tollywood sends best wishes happy new year to Lubill film doing wonderfully records broken’.9 Writing about it in American Cinematographer, Deming explains the use of ‘Tollywood’: In passing it might be explained that our Calcutta studio was located in the suburb of Tollygunge…Tolly being a proper name and Gunge meaning locality. After studying the advantages of Hollygunge, we decided on Tollywood. There being two studios at present in that locality, and several more projected, the name seems appropriate.10

Prasad’s argument is that the English press in Calcutta picked up this usage at the time and transferred it to the English language press in Bombay. Hence, from Tollywood we get Bollywood. Used half in mocking jest by the English-speaking journalists of elite, urban presses, the term has also circulated for a long time in film trade journals. Ashish Rajadhyaksha proffers another origin myth by tracing its ‘jokey’, ‘selfdeprecating’ use in the 1970s by the trade journal Screen and its special page ‘Bollywood Beats’.11 Notwithstanding their differing origin stories, it is significant that both scholars situate the currency of the term within an Anglophonic, urban Indian context in post-independent India. And they’re right. It is hard to imagine the average film-going audience from Bhatinda or Bareilly using the term to describe their experience of this popular, pan-Indian film genre.12 The emergence of ‘Bollywood’ in the cultural vocabulary of the Indian nation can be politically linked to what Prasad calls the ‘structural 162

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bilingualism’ of the Indian state,13 that is, the nomination of English and Hindi/Urdu as meta-languages to act as a bridge between potential communication gaps occasioned by the nation’s multiple regional tongues. What is interesting about the arguments mentioned above is that the connotative force of the term ‘Bollywood’ is actually framed by the ideological coordinates of English rather than Hindi/Urdu, notwithstanding the latter’s role as the language of the popular Bombay film. This has interesting implications for the way we historically situate its use in the context of globalisation. If, three decades ago, the term circulated as both a sign of Anglophone India’s engagement with and deprecating distance from Bombay-produced musical melodramas, since the 1990s the term has brought onstage the late capitalist, Indian diaspora, predominantly from the Anglophone West (UK, US and now Australia), as not only its new subject and consumer, but also its producer. A few examples will suffice to illustrate this point. One is the stupendous success of films through the late nineties and into the new millennium featuring the yuppie, non-resident Indian (NRI) as the hero; the protagonist is unequivocally projected as the new role model for the aspirational middle class: successful and globalised professionally, yet Indian at heart. The film star, Shah Rukh Khan, with his array of successes such as Dilwale Dulhaniya Le Jayenge (1995), Pardes (1997), Kabhi Khushi Kabhie Gham (2001) and Kabhi Alvida Naa Kehna (2006), embodies this face of India’s globalised modernity.14 My second example is recent investments by Indian Silicon Valley professionals in film production and related merchandise distribution. Derek Bose, in his book with the apposite title, Brand Bollywood, names three such entrepreneurs who have led the way with films such as Shaadi.com (2001), Padmashree Laloo Prasad Yadav (2005) and My Bollywood Bride (2006).15 A third instance is a report in Newsweek that India’s movie exports multiplied twenty-five times from the late 1980s to 2000.16 This shift of the Bombay entertainment industry to affluent diasporic imaginaries and enclaves is critically linked to the Indian nation-state’s transition in the late 1980s, from an earlier era of decolonisation and nation-making, via a mixed-and-closed economy to a new age of economic liberalisation and entry into global financial circuits. In fact, the use of the term ‘Bollywood’ in this new phase specifically marks the shift from popular Hindi films as a post-colonial form (aimed at defining the nation and national values) to a transnational form responding to a new global consumer community. There are also a few origin stories to account for the term’s currency in this globalised phase. 163


One narrative attributes it to the ethnic programming in Britain’s Channel 4,17 while another seeks a source in the late modern Indian diasporic writer’s fascination with the medium.18 Salman Rushdie’s novels, especially Midnight’s Children, The Satanic Verses and The Moor’s Last Sigh, are abundant with tropes, themes and story lines from the Bollywood genre. His multi-hyphenated description of the genre—as an ‘epico-mythico-tragico-comico-supersexy, high masala art’—is nowÂ€legendary.19 Film scholarship reflects these new transnational shifts in interesting ways. A volume published in 2005 was called Bollyworld,20 a neologism coined by the editors to mark the industry’s f luid and mobile constituencies across the globe and its evocation of multiple ‘Indias’ in the world. For me the neologism also captures the capaciousness of Bollywood’s circulation in overlapping registers: as popular film melodrama made in Hindi from Bombay, dance and musical spectacles, material culture, creative industry, shared cultural idiom among Indian diaspora and, finally, as a global signifier of India’s economic coming of age in late modernity. This last is particularly significant, for Bollywood in such a reading is seen as less a ‘national’ idiom articulating post-colonial aspirations, than a globalised idiom with currency in late capitalism. It is not incidental, therefore, that, while previous scholarship focused on the power of the films themselves to articulate nationalist and diasporic desires,21 one of the most recent works in the field, Bose’s Brand Bollywood, focuses instead on Bollywood’s deft operation at the intersection of multiple other media, with film-makers of the current generation spreading out their chances of returns by diversifying their distribution networks through television, radio, home video technologies, music technology, internet, gaming, animation and mobile phones. These developments, more than the transnational circulation of the actual films themselves, have expanded Bollywood’s ambit to traverse new orbits of desire and consumption in diverse visual and material forms. Bose’s analysis does not cover other ancillary industries spawned by Bollywood such as fashion, food, fitness centres and even tourism. The consumer base of these industries is not limited to the subcontinental diaspora. In fact, they are expressly aimed at the non-Indian populace in the advanced capitalist world. Consequently, they allow us to map Bollywood’s intercultural impact in ways different from the explanatory matrix of diaspora, nostalgia and national belonging. India, in these ancillary codings of Bollywood, operates less as a site of loss and desire for identification, than as a site of alternative aesthetic and cultural 164

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pleasure for global publics. This is what I set out to illustrate in the second half of this essay, which focuses on Australia’s engagement withÂ€Bollywood.

Bollywood in Australia Where Australian public culture and economy are concerned, Bollywood is a recent entrant and gained visibility no earlier than the turn of the millennium. Of course, as with other parts of the advanced capitalist world, the Indian diaspora in Australia has long constituted an audience for popular Bombay films, but this has been restricted to home-viewing and availability of pirated prints in Indian grocery stores.22 My focus is not on this constituency but on the larger impact of Bollywood as culture industry in the contemporary Australian public sphere. Bollywood films now regularly use Australian locations for their shooting. These films are known to have been used by federal and state government departments of film, education and tourism to promote Australia within India and among the Indian diaspora. Bollywood films are now released in major cinemas across Australian cities. Bollywood dance and music classes proliferate. Iconography from Bollywood appears in food and fashion outlets. In 2005, the Sydney Opera House

Figure 7: Mannequin outside a Bollywood fashion outlet in Melbourne

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featured two major Bollywood-influenced performances as part of its programme, under its ‘In the Studio’ banner. These included a choreographed item by Georgina Naidu called ‘Yellow Feather’ and another Lebanese-Indian musical collaboration, ‘Beirut to Bombay Nights’.23 When the Mumbai-produced musical extravaganza, ‘The Merchants of Bollywood’, toured Australia in 2006, it ran to full houses in all the major cities. Even in Canberra—which, with a population of just over 300,000, can otherwise scarcely boast of show sell-outs—its eponymous theatre had to extend the show by two extra nights to accommodate the public demand. In 2006, the closing ceremony of the Commonwealth Games in Melbourne featured an extravagant dance number by one of Bollywood’s top heroines, Aishwariya Rai, in effect, giving a foretaste of what Delhi/India will offer when the Commonwealth Games are held there in 2010. This sudden visibility of India’s most successful cultural export to date has not gone unnoticed by Australia’s political, economic and cultural establishments. When former Prime Minister, John Howard, visited India in 2006, he spent most of his six-hour halt in Mumbai at a Bollywood film studio (Yash Raj Films). In 2007, Lachlan Murdoch, the now estranged scion of the Murdoch empire, made a ‘significant investment’ in a talent search and management company, Percept Talent Management, for the Bollywood industry.24 In the same year, two major national cultural institutions, the National Gallery of Victoria (NGV) and the Powerhouse Museum, featured six-month-long exhibitions on Bollywood poster art from the 1930s to the present. Entitled Cinema India: The Art of Bollywood, this travelling exhibition mainly worked with imported material from London’s Victoria and Albert Museum. But the curators of the Australian venues, Carol Cains and Laurie Benson at the NGV and Christine Sumner and Rebecca Bower at the Powerhouse, added other dimensions to the exhibition—costumes, photographic displays, film props, dance-and-music sequences—that brought to the fore Bollywood’s links with Australia. Posters from films shot on location in Australia or with plots based in Australia— Salaam Namaste (2005), Chak De! India (2007), Heyy Babyy (2007), Dil Chahta Hai (2001)—were prominently displayed along with costumes worn by Melbourne actress, Tania Zaetta and Preity Zinta in Salaam Namaste. The exhibition also had another display section, unusual even for the average Bollywood buff and completely unexpected for the Australian viewer. Called ‘Fearless Nadia’, the display featured posters of films starring an Indian stunt actress of Western Australian origin, Mary Ann Evans, who challenged feminine stereotypes in the 1930s 166

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and 40s by performing amazing acrobatic feats to punish bad men on screen.25 Both exhibitions were complemented by a full calendar of events, featuring dance and musical nights, fashion shows, food fests, film screenings and talks by Indian film and cultural historians. The Australian public—from all walks of life and ethnicities—appeared to participate most enthusiastically in this cultural extravaganza. To reprise my argument at the end of the previous section, this mode of Australian public engagement with Bollywood as an alternative site of cultural and aesthetic enjoyment—alternative to Western mainstream popular culture—is what accounts for the success of creative enterprises that have sprung from it. The circulation of extra-cinematic Bollywood products such as fashion, food, fitness or dance schools—operating as they do in complex realms of identification and engagement—create new consumers and spectators no longer confined to the Indian diasporic realm. The success of these products also demonstrates that what is genuinely translatable from the repertoire of Bollywood for global consumption is not its affects (nostalgia, loss of home, Indian values) but its aesthetics. The two case studies I now go on to consider are interesting illustrations of the way the aesthetic repertoire of Bollywood gets disembedded from the realm of the Indian diaspora to circulate in uncanny ways. Further, the idiolect or particular language of the Bollywood vernacular is seen in new ways as this process of abstraction and disembedding extends across the globe. The two cases, both drawn from the Australian capital, Canberra, are: Bollywood Dimensions, Canberra’s first dance and fitness school run by Anshu Srivastava; and Project Samosa, an intercultural youth film project conceived by Australian National University (ANU) New Media students, the key coordinator of which was a Thai student, Lucas Li.

Case study one: Bollywood Dimensions Established in 2001, Anshu Srivastava’s Bollywood Dimensions is Canberra’s first Bollywood dance and fitness school and the school cannily exploits both the Australian obsession with physical fitness and training and the ACT government’s annual promotion of Canberra’s multicultural talents. Anshu Srivastava, a classical dancer from Lucknow who trained in the Bharatanatyam and Kathak styles, set up this school to ‘teach’ Bollywood dance to multiple groups of students from varied racial and ethnic backgrounds. Her profile also indicates that she trained for two years in 167


the Bollywood style at the Bollywood Fusion School of Performing Arts New Delhi and for one year in Jazz Ballet at the ACT School of Dance.26 Bollywood dance, in contemporary parlance, is a fusion of sensuous and athletic/acrobatic movements danced to music from Bollywood films. The movements, gestures and expressions are a blend of classical and folk styles from the subcontinent and of global disco and rap styles. The school’s website is particular about marketing this dance form as both a fun and fitness regime: This style of dance has evolved from the Indian Bollywood movie industry. The moves done in these dances were originally taken from different Indian classical dances and folk dances either to indicate a certain mood or a certain part of India. As the movie industry grew and western influences reached the choreographers of Bollywood they developed a unique style: an ‘east goes west’ mixture. This style is recognised all over the world today…It’s great fun, it’s exciting and combines various styles of dance. This lively form of dance encourages movement of all parts of the body giving it a good workout.27

The range of services provided by the school is impressive: • • • • • • •

School, studio, classes Dance training and education Entertainment shows, performances and productions Choreographers and private tutors Multicultural community events and festivals Organisation of dance and beauty contests Party planning and event management

In the eight years since the school was set up, it has given an impressive array of performances at all India-related events in Canberra, from celebrations of major Hindu festivals—Sivaratri, Janmastami, Navaratri, Diwali—to multicultural dance extravaganzas. Anshu’s troupe has also performed for various charity shows. Furthermore, they have had invitations from dance clubs in Kingston and Manuka, two trendy and cosmopolitan suburbs in Canberra. But they have taken care to distinguish themselves from night club dancers or ‘bar dancers’ in Mumbai—a cultural phenomenon explored with as much sensitivity as insouciance by Suketu Mehta in his memoirs of Mumbai, Maximum City.28 In March 2007, as part of the annual ACT Multicultural Festival, the troupe put up its most ambitious performance to date, a dance 168

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and musical extravaganza, ‘Enter My Heart’. The ACT Department of Multicultural Affairs generously funded the production.29 The interesting detail to note here is that the Department chose to sponsor this production over many other ‘Indian’ cultural events proposed by the various regional Indian associations featuring classical and folk artists from India. Much to their chagrin, many of these regional associations were told there was no money available that year to support the artists they wished to bring.30 This was a radical shift from the ACT government’s previous practice. Bollywood, in the eyes of the Australian political and cultural establishment, now appears to epitomise an all-encompassing ‘Indian’ performative modality in a First-World, multicultural society, as also a placeholder for Indian cultural diversity in late modernity. What about the Indian diasporic entrepreneur’s own traction with Bollywood? Vijay Mishra, in his influential book, Bollywood Cinema: Temples of Desire, has argued that a ‘multicultural critical internationalism’ is not part of the diaspora’s engagement with Bollywood, that the cultural intervention of Bollywood keeps ‘both the non-negotiable primacy of homeland and a unified response to it intact’.31 This thesis may continue to be valid where diasporic consumption of popular Bombay cinema is concerned, but it is hard to sustain in the context of creative industries. The diasporic entrepreneur, through her engagement with Bollywood, is more interested in exploiting the ‘multicultural’ space of her adopted country than in keeping ‘intact’ her primal connection with her homeland. This leads me to my next point. An enterprise such as Bollywood Dimensions also problematises cultural readings that regard, or are tempted to regard, this dance school phenomenon as just another outlet for ‘Indian’ ethnic expression amidst the varied cultural repertoire of Australia. There are two facts that substantiate this point. Firstly, the student and client base of this dance and entertainment services enterprise is culturally varied and those from the subcontinental diaspora are actually very few.32 In other words, if Bollywood films are predominantly for the Indian diaspora, Bollywood culture industries outside India are primarily for consumption by the non-Indian publics. Secondly, Bollywood Dimensions, in articulating its vision, makes no reference to its subcontinental connections. None of its six mission statements explicitly contains a wish to ‘promote Indian culture in Australia’: •

It is INNOVATIVE: The school is unique. The focus of the school is to identify, groom and train Bollywood Dance aspirants in the 169


•

• •

• •

multicultural landscape of ACT. The school embraces the theme of ‘Dance with a Purpose’ and passionately conveys the message of compassion, friendship and understanding to the ACT and its surrounding regions It contributes towards GOOD HEALTH AND WELL BEING: dancing plays a role in reconciling us with ourselves and others. Caring for the body contributes to personal stability and selfconfidence, the driving forces behind integration into society. It is changing the FACE OF FITNESS, providing colour, culture and fun to fitness training It helps make you a MODEL CITIZEN: control over body and mind, sound aesthetic and moral sense, providing your opportunities to share your talents It helps raise FUNDS FOR HUMANITARIAN CAUSES: Red Cross, Tsunami, Child Abuse, breast cancer etc It brings the ACT COMMUNITY TOGETHER.33

It is also interesting that the proprietor does not name a single Indian body or association in her list of ‘affiliates’. There are only two named affiliates: •

•

AusDance—the Australian Dance Council, a professional dance advocacy organisation for dancers, choreographers, directors and educators The Australian Choreographic Centre

These facts persuade me to argue that, in their engagement with the Bollywood creative industries, the diasporic entrepreneur is not so much invested in informing a narrow ethnicity or creating a sense of communal solidarity that asserts the primacy of the homeland. Rather he or she seeks to connect with sites of international capital that reproduce hybridised Bollywood aesthetic artefacts for global consumption. In doing so, such entrepreneurs do not shrink back, as we have just seen from the mission statement above, from invoking the rhetoric of ‘critical internationalism’ that seeks connectivity with other cultures. The discourse of ‘hybridity’ and ‘multiculturalism’ does indeed become the handmaiden of late–modern, globalised capital. Bollywood creative industries around the globe have been very successful in banking in the visual and material repertoire of Bombay cinema to generate new cultural products disembedded from any emotive investment in an idea of India as homeland. The diasporic Indian consumer of this disembedded, Bollywoodised industry may, of course, continue 170

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to ‘read’ a lost India in its products. As Mishra puts it, ‘The reproduced artifact in diaspora has its own authenticity, its own aura—not in terms of monetised value but in terms of authentic emotional capital’.34 What about the clients/consumers of this industry who have no affective investment in Bollywood as a site of lost homeland, but who nevertheless covet its products? What does Bollywood mean to them? What are the conditions that enable this abstraction of Bollywood into an available cultural and aesthetic repertoire for global consumption? These are questions that frame my next case study, a Bollywoodinspired intercultural youth film.

Case study two: Project Samosa The brainchild of six film and media students from the ANU in 2005, Project Samosa is a short musical comedy in the Bollywood genre shot on locale in Canberra. It contains all the features of a stock Bollywood production: a youthful love story, sensuous dance and music numbers, visual spectacles, villains and vamps, fight scenes and a climax in which the bad guys are vanquished and the hero wins his beloved. In a version of Bollywood Dimensions meets Project Samosa, Anshu Srivastava was the chief choreographer in the film and also supplied many of its dancers. My narrative on Project Samosa is based not on the final product, but on the experience of the people and details of processes involved in its production. Due to a few post-production problems, the film has not yet been released for public viewing. There have been other examples of Bollywood kitsch deployed to make cinema outside India. So far, all of these attempts have been made by diasporic Indians. In the Australian context, Manas Ray has analysed films made by Fiji Indians in Brisbane using Bollywood themes, motif and music35; while Vijay Mishra has studied in quite some detail a Canadian Bollywood film called Masala, by Srinivas Krishna.36 The film project discussed here, however, is not a diasporic Indian production (though some Indian students were involved in its making). It was conceived by a team consisting of a Thai-Australian, Lucas Yuwaganit Li (chief coordinator), a Malaysian Chinese, Heng Yip Chan (co-director), an Iranian, Amin Palangi (cinematographer), two AngloCeltic Australians, Nathan Chardon (co-director) and Max Wheeler (editor), and one Indian, Rishi Gulati (music director). What motivated such a culturally mixed group to opt for the Bollywood genre rather than a range of other popular film forms? How 171


Figure 8: Project Samosa production team: Lucas Yuwaganit Li (chief coordinator), Heng Yip Chan (co-director), Amin Palangi (cinematographer)

did they go about their production? Some early conversations with the production team elicited the following answers.37 They wanted to create something in an entertainment mode they could all relate to; something that communicated across cultures, that was marketable and that used the multiple skills that the students had acquired in the New Media course at ANU. Each of them also expressed his keen aspiration to have a career in films. As with other uncanny encounters with Bollywood outside India in the most unlikely places, these responses from a very multicultural production team left me astonished and pleased at the same time: astonished at the extent of the impact of Bombay cinema outside the Indian enclaves and pleased at Bollywood’s assertive presence in a ferociously competitive, global cultural market. The estimated budget of Project Samosa was a modest A$10,000. The team applied for funding to various sources and, eventually, ANU provided a third of the required amount. Other sponsors, ranging from individuals to grocery stores, contributed a little and the Foundation of Young Australians financed the rest. In early 2005, the team put out a call to Canberra youth on the website of the ANU to participate in the film-making process: 172

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We need make up artists, choreographers, wardrobe assistants, grips and other support crew…we can tell you that the film is fast, funny and visually stunning. Essentially the film is a Bollywood dance festival captured up close. The plot centres on a determined and talented girl fighting her way through various locations around Canberra to take back her man from the alluringly evil villainess and her underlings. The characters are fairly open as we are looking for actors to inject their own personalities into the role. The film is meant to be Bollywood in style, so acting ability is not the highest priority, but main and support roles must still be convincing in their part. With the exception of a narrator there is no dialogue in this film and we are looking mainly for dancers to fill in roles.38

The response was very enthusiastic. Many aspiring students were screen-tested for the lead roles of hero, heroine, the villain and the vamp. Ankur, a student from India, was finally chosen to play the male lead and Taleatha, a Chinese-Australian, played the female lead. The film itself is formally and aesthetically hybrid and fused in every sense of the term. The dance styles combine salsa, tango and the classic Bollywood movements such as a sensuous swaying of hips and drill-like, athletic gestures. The storyline consists of a romance between not an Indian male and a white Australian girl, but between an Indian male and a mixed-race, Chinese-Australian female. The female co-star is attired not in smart Western casuals but in classic Bollywood fashion that includes lehengas and kurtas. The film has no dialogues, but only a narrative voice-over in English. It also does not have an original music score in Hindi and its song and dance sequences are based on hit Bollywood numbers in Hindi. Many key Canberra locales were used as sites for the shooting—the ANU campus, Floriade (the spring festival of flowers), Lake Burley Griffin, the Japanese Garden at Lennox Park and Reconciliation Park. The male lead Ankur Jain went back to India after completing his studies and has not seen even previews of the film. While I am not in a position to comment authoritatively on the film as final product (I saw only a few clips on Lucas’s computer), there are a number of details about its conception and production, including motivations of the key players that provide further insights into the phenomenon of Bollywood and its globalisation. As my interviews with the makers of Project Samosa revealed, Bollywood dance and music, including MTV-style remixes, are currently very much part of youth cultures in Australia, irrespective of the ethnic background of consumers. The products of Bollywood circulate successfully as 173


Figure 9: Project Samosa: dance shoot at Reconciliation Park, Canberra

both Indian and global and are seen as quite ‘chic’ even among Indian diasporic teenagers and young adults who would even a decade ago have gone to great lengths to distance themselves from the ‘tackiness’ of films their parents and grandparents watched on home videos. Even more interesting was the answer I got from the makers of Project Samosa about why they chose to make a ‘Bollywood’ film as their first attempt at film-making. They said it was the only genre of popular film that was not intimidating, that could accommodate a diversity of cultural idioms, that was a genuine hybrid, a truly elastic form that could lend itself to endless improvisation no matter which part of the world one locates it in. The Hollywood genre, they felt, was too firmly delineated and ‘dominating’, too ‘Western’, not cosmopolitan and inclusive enough; all felt that Hollywood did not make space for newcomers. It appears, then, that Bollywood in its manifold abstractions has emerged as the new global vernacular—malleable, mobile, a roving visual and material signifier of global entertainment. How long this will last is anyone’s guess in this age of increasing superfluity of knowledge, culture and goods, or what Victor Buchli has called the ‘crushing ephemerality of late capitalism’.39 If we believe the advocates of India’s soft global power in the twenty-first century, Bollywood as global creative and 174

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culture industry is here to stay just a little longer before inevitably vanishing into a ‘tragic lightness’â†œ40 that is the fate of consumed products in late modernity.

Notes 1 L Williams, ‘Soft and sexy: the image of the next superpowers’, Sydney Morning Herald, 14–16 October 2006, Spectrum pp. 28–9. 2 ‘Bombay Dreams’, , viewed 3Â€May 2008. 3 M Murray, ‘Bombay Dreams’, , viewed 3 May 2008. 4 I use the term ‘vernacular’ to suggest that, in spite of its global impact, Bollywood is still seen as an exotic other in mainstream Western popular culture. In terms of impact, it also comes far behind Hollywood-influenced American popular entertainment forms. 5 A Jain, ‘Hollywood films look to India for their action’, Financial Times, 6 March 2006, , viewed 29 July 2008. 6 A Rajadhyaksha, ‘Visuality and visual art: speculating on a link’, in C Sambrani (ed.), Edge of Desire: Recent Art in India, New York, Asia Society and Perth, Art Gallery of Western Australia, 2005, p. 162 (emphasis in original). 7 M Prasad, ‘This thing called Bollywood’, Seminar, no. 525, 2003, , viewed 5 May 2008. 8 V Mishra, Bollywood Cinema: Temples of Desire, Routledge, London, 2002, chapter 1. 9 Prasad, ‘This thing called Bollywood’. 10 ibid. 11 Ashish Rajadhyaksha, ‘The “Bollywoodization” of Indian cinema’, Inter-Asia Cultural Studies, vol. 4, no. 1, 2003, pp. 25–39, p. 29. 12 Bhatinda and Bareilly are names of regional and non-metropolitan towns in the States of Punjab and Uttar Pradesh respectively. 13 Prasad, ‘This thing called Bollywood’. 14 S Deshpande, ‘The consumable hero of globalised India’, in R Kaur & AJ Sinha (eds), Bollyworld: Popular Indian Cinema through a Transnational Lens, Sage, New Delhi, 2005, pp.Â€186–203. 15 D Bose, Brand Bollywood: A New Global Entertainment Order, Sage, New Delhi, 2006. 16 Rajadhyaksha, ‘The “Bollywoodization” of Indian cinema’, p. 26. 17 NM Kabir, Bollywood: The Indian Cinema Story, Channel 4 Books, London, 2001. 18 Rajadhyaksha, ‘The “Bollywoodization” of Indian cinema’, pp. 29–30. 19 The Moor’s Last Sigh, Vintage, London, 1994, pp. 148–9. 20 Bollyworld: Popular Indian Cinema through a Transnational Lens, R Kaur & AJ Sinha (eds), Sage, New Delhi, 2005. 21 S Chakravarty, National Identity in Indian Popular Cinema, 1947–1987, University of Texas Press, Austin, 1993; Mishra, Bollywood Cinema. 22 M Madan, ‘Bollywood down under: imagining new neighbourhoods’, South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies, vol. 23, no. 1, pp. 21–30. 23 P Bhatti, ‘Yellow Feather’, Hot Ashes, , viewed 29 July 2008; Media Release: Beirut to Bombay Nights, Sydney Opera House, 23 August 2005, , viewed 29 July 2008. 24 L Murray, ‘Lachlan Takes a Shine to Bollywood’, Sydney Morning Herald, 11 May 2006, p.Â€17.

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Bollywood in Australia 25 L Benson, ‘Hunterwali “The Woman with the Whip”: The Fearless Nadia Story’, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, 2007, 22–5. 26 Bollywood Dimensions, , viewed 20 May 2008. 27 ibid. 28 S Mehta, Maximum City, Alfred Knopf, New York, 2004. 29 Anshu Srivastava, interview 19 October 2006. 30 Presidents of Bengali Cultural Association, Marathi Cultural Association and South Indian Fine Arts Society, interviews October 2006 – December 2006. 31 Mishra, Bollywood Cinema, p. 243. 32 Anshu Srivastava, interview 19 October 2006. 33 Bollywood Dimensions. 34 Mishra, Bollywood Cinema, p. 242. 35 Rajadhyaksha, ‘The “Bollywoodization” of Indian cinema’, p. 34. 36 Mishra, Bollywood Cinema, pp. 241–4. 37 Lucas Li, Heng Chan & Max Wheeler, interviews November 2006. 38 Copy provided by the Project Samosa production team. 39 V Buchli (ed.) ‘Introduction’, Material Culture Reader, Oxford, Berg, 2002, p. 15. 40 G Lipovetsky, cited in Buchli, ‘Introduction’, p. 15.

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9

Interview with AK Tareen, Senior Trade Commissioner—India, Government of South Australia, 27 February 2007

AH: What is your role in Chennai in terms of attracting film production to South Australia (SA)? AKT: As SA’s Senior Trade Commissioner in India, my primary responsibility is to promote bilateral ties between SA and India, with a strong focus on expansion of our trade, investment and migration activities. As Indians are very passionate about their films (Bollywood) and cricket, I use these two media as tools for achieving our objectives. Bollywood is the largest film industry in the world and every year they produce around 1,000 films in various Indian languages. And it is estimated that, on average, about 20 million people watch films every day in cinema halls across India. Then, Bollywood movies are popular even outside India in countries such as UK, USA, Middle East, SouthEast Asia and so on, which have a large Indian population. So we are talking about a medium that has a huge reach! In terms of using films to promote a country or region, we are not the first to do so. For nearly two decades, a number of countries such 177


as Switzerland, Mauritius, Singapore, Malaysia, New Zealand, UK and some states in Australia have been wooing Indian film-makers with attractive incentives. The returns for these countries are high in terms of their exposure to potential Indian travellers. In most instances the number of Indian tourists has seen a significant jump as a result of these films. In Australia, so far most of the film shoots have happened around Sydney, Melbourne and the Gold Coast and SA has been largely neglected. Therefore, I started off with meeting the key influential producers both in Mumbai and Chennai and making presentations on SA locales, cost benefits and production facilities. I also organised a number of networking events with top Bollywood personalities to create awareness about SA. A SA film festival that I organised two years ago in Chennai, Mumbai and Bangalore was a huge hit. The advantage I enjoy is that SA is almost a virgin territory for Bollywood, which is always on the look out for new locales. These initiatives were followed by reconnaissance visits that my colleagues in film and tourism in Adelaide were involved in facilitating. When things progress, we assist with locations manager, equipment, visas, incentives and so on. AH: Do you see it mainly as tourism? The visual images obviously have an immediate impact, but how does it work in terms of trade and business links more generally? How does it make people conscious of SA or Australia generally? AKT: Though the immediate impact is on tourism, I think the benefits extend far and beyond in terms of building brand equity of the state. It includes education, migration and business, as well. Let’s look at the profile of these tourists. These tourists generally tend to be young to middle-aged people and most of them tend to be business persons who are having their own businesses or working for large businesses. Obviously the primary purpose of the visit to Australia would be tourism, but over the stay—the average stay is about ten days to two weeks—they get a better appreciation of what Australia is and has to offer in terms of a good living and education, as well as business opportunities. In the case of students who study as undergraduates or postgraduates at Australian universities, the two to three years they spend is good enough time to build strong bonds with local friends and they tend to extend it through employment and business. Visiting parents and relatives is another great opportunity to expose Australia. 178

Interview with AK Tareen

So, the benefits are manifold and basically for them it’s Australia first and then they think about states. AH: How do you manage to talk to them before they go? Are these people you are already talking to? AKT: I’ve been in India for over fourteen years as the Australian government representative and by now almost everyone knows me in the market. I was involved with the very first Indian film shoot to happen in Australia, which was a Tamil film called Indian (1996). So, be it business, education, migration, tourism or sports, they make it a point to give me a call to seek advice or assistance. Even in cases where I cannot provide direct assistance, I help them by putting them in touch with my colleagues in chambers, Indian government and other consulates whom I work very closely with. So, they find me a one-stop shop and feel free to discuss all their requirements. Similarly, I also get referrals from the agencies I have mentioned above. AH: So you think that seeing a film with Australia, or Adelaide, in it would make people think, I’ll go there for a holiday and then they think, OK, let’s find out about the business opportunities; they would come to you somewhere between watching the film and coming to Australia. That is an ideal scenario for you in terms of the film, presumably, it is stimulating people’s interest in coming to Australia and that stimulates them coming to you to talk about business. AKT: Absolutely. Yes. It both reinforces the brand with people who already know a bit about Australia as well as creates new brand [awareness] amongst the rest. The brand recall is even stronger when the audience sees it in relation to their favourite star on the locales of Australia. You will be surprised to know the kind of fan following some of the Bollywood stars have in India and around the world. AH: There is also an education market that you are involved with and do you think that these films have an effect on the education market? AKT: [The] education services [sector] has grown to be an important component of our bilateral trade with India. Our universities are wellrecognised and regarded by Indian students who, until a few years ago, were primarily considering USA and UK. Australia is amongst top 3 foreign destinations for Indian students going abroad for higher 179


education. The share of Indian students in SA is growing like never before. This is a result of the higher awareness of SA as a brand in India, aside from the strategic work undertaken by our universities. Films definitely help with positioning SA as an excellent place to live, study and then graduate to take up a job and immigrate if one wishes to. Therefore, there can be multiple outcomes such as increased tourists, business, investment and migration by attracting students. AH: I know you have been involved with the filming of Love Story 2050 (2008) in Adelaide and SA. Do you have any prior examples of films shot in Australia that you have been involved with? AKT: We are very happy with our involvement with Love Story 2050, which is one of the largest Bollywood film shoot ever in Australia. They have shot the entire first half of the film in SA using a vast range of our attractive locales. The movie released in about 650 cinemas worldwide and audiences have hugely appreciated the SA locales. Even post-production work of this futuristic film was outsourced to an Adelaide based company. I am delighted to say that I was involved with the first ever Indian film to be shot in Australia about twelve years ago. The film is Indian, a Tamil film dubbed into Hindi later on as Hindustani. Producers are

Figure 10: Love Story 2050 being filmed in the streets of Adelaide, 2006

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always looking for novelties—something unique, something different they can show the audience. In the movie Indian, they could show the koalas and kangaroos perhaps for the first time to the Indian audience. The hero and heroine of the movie playing around with kangaroos and dancing with them became a super hit. They always expect from me some assistance with locales, local assistance, cost benefits, logistics, production facilities and visas. AH: Were there any more films after that? AKT: Indian opened the f loodgates and there have been many Bollywood shoots since then—I think around fifty to sixty. Some of the more popular ones include Dil Chahta Hai (2001) and Salaam Namaste (2005). A number of South Indian language films have also [been] shot there. I was involved with a couple more Tamil films such as Nala Damayanthi (2003) and Aalavandhan (2001), in Hindi it was called Abhay, starring Kamal Haasan where we assisted with post-production work, sophisticated camera equipment and even the stunt director of the film was an Australian. So starting from locales, we have moved up the value curve to sell our technology and other services. AH: There has been a more recent Tamil film shoot in Melbourne, Thiruttu Payale (2006). AKT: Thiruttu Payale, yes, another movie with which I was closely involved, in fact I travelled with the director. The credit title of the movie shows my name. But let me go back a step. The reason why Indians want to film overseas, whether it fits in the storyline or not, is that it enhances the image of the film, due to which they can attract a better remuneration from the distributor. Indian audiences like to see their favourite hero and heroine dancing in exotic locations, even if the story did not demand the actors to go overseas. Even if the story line of the movie is set in a rural background, the director shoots some overseas shots that are shown as dream sequences in the film! They could have the hero and heroine sleeping in a hut in a village; they are still dreaming of dancing on top of Sydney Harbour Bridge, still in line with the storyline. This helps the producer command a premium from the distributor of the film. So going back to Thiruttu Payale, they knew that a lot of countries were attracting films to their countries by offering attractive incentives and approached me for an offer. 181


AH: How do these things happen? Do you have any way of going out and trying to find these, or do they just come through you because you are in the right kind of place at the right time? AKT: As I said earlier, I’ve been here for over fourteen years as the Australian Government representative and by now almost everyone knows me in the market. In addition, I also interact closely with top Bollywood production houses to market SA due to the tremendous benefits that accrue from the shooting. AH: I am just wondering how you get incentives for them when they are not spending enough for film commission incentives to kick in. I have spoken to people in Tourism Australia and Tourism Victoria and they have been telling me there are things they can do, they can help out with getting location approvals and things like that. What kind of incentives would there be for Thiruttu Payale, why did they chooseÂ€Melbourne? AKT: I do not know the details of film projects with other states. But Love Story 2050 has spent over A$1 million in SA on shooting alone and further on post-production work. They became eligible for grants under our scheme. AH: I have been told that it helps to have somebody of Indian origin because there is a cultural difference in the way business is done and there needs to be someone to mediate between the way in which business is done in Australia and an Indian style of business. I wonder whether having someone of Indian origin in a location to mediate is a large factor or just an incidental factor. AKT: To start with, I think people of Indian origin may have an edge as they do understand the culture and the way Indian films get produced. But, I guess, at the end of the day what wins the deal is the competitiveness of the person. AH: What did they make of Adelaide? What were they looking for in terms of the city? AKT: One important thing here, which we negotiated, was that every locale in SA would be shown by its name. For example, when the hero of the film relocates he says, I am going to Adelaide. It’s not just 182


placement of Adelaide, but it is a very positive placement of Adelaide, SA. And from there they show Kangaroo Island, dancing, all that stuff and people know it’s SA, it’s Kangaroo Island and it’s a one-hour flight from Adelaide. That kind of positioning. The other alternative we had perhaps was I could make a documentary on SA and try and take it to people and say watch my documentary on SA, it would be a very difficult thing to get to even a fraction of the audience that we will be targeting now. In this case, the thing about doing it in film, we are not telling him how to make a film, he knows how to make a film, what we are doing is we are piggy-back riding on the film-maker to showcase our appeals to his audience. The attractive thing about SA is, within about an hour or two’s drive you have beautiful beaches, you can go to the cities, you can go to the mountains, you have the vineyards, you have the desert and you have the Flinders Ranges. That’s what the film-makers look for, they want varied locations, at low cost and in a short time, that’s what SA can offer. AH: One of the things people tell me is that certain locations can become overused and that audiences think that we have seen this image, we have seen this place before and that Australia could just be a bit of a fashion that lasts for a few years and disappears. Other people say that the Indian audience and film industry is just too large and you can’t really saturate it with a location and that Australia will be able to bring in film-makers for much longer; that maybe the budgets are getting bigger and the whole thing is developing. Having had that big production to Adelaide and SA, do you think that there is likely to be another one coming along or do you think that will be it and people will go off and film in Bangkok and elsewhere and not come to SAÂ€again? AKT: I think the answer is somewhere in between, because one of the reasons these people and many more are looking at SA, is because it is almost a virgin territory. These locales have not been shown to an Indian audience before. Considering we have a large number and varied types of locales that may suit a number of requirements, I think it will be a long time before the Indian producers have had a chance to film on each of our locales! For example, we have the Adelaide city, the hills, vineyards, salt lake and beautiful red sands and white sand beaches that very well suit a romantic song and dance film. Similarly, we have the rugged Flinders Ranges, the outback and others to suit a typical Bollywood action film. 183

Filmography

Aa Ab Laut Chalen (Rishi Kapoor, 1999; Hindi) Aalavandhan (Suresh Krishna [Krissna], 2001; Tamil; Hindi title Abhay) Aap Mujhe Achche Lagne Lage (Vikram Bhatt, 2002; Hindi) Armaan (Honey Irani, 2003; Hindi) Bachna Ae Haseeno (Siddharth Anand, 2008; Hindi) Baghban (Ravi Chopra, 2003; Hindi) Bawarchi (Hrishikesh Mukherjee, 1972; Hindi) Bend it Like Beckham (Gurinder Chadha, 2002; English) Bhagam Bhag (Priyadarshan, 2006; Hindi) Bhaji on the Beach (Gurinder Chadha, 1993; English) Bobby (Raj Kapoor, 1973; Hindi) Bollywood/Hollywood (Deepa Mehta, 2002; Hindi) Bride and Prejudice (Gurinder Chadha, 2004; English) Chak De! India (Shimit Amin, 2007; Hindi) Chalte Chalte (Aziz Mirza, 2003; Hindi) Cheeni Kum (R Balki, 2007; Hindi) C.I.D. (Raj Khosla, 1956; Hindi) Company (Ram Gopal Varma, 2002; Hindi) Daud (Ram Gopal Varma, 1997; Hindi) 185

Filmography

Deewane (Harry Baweja, 2000; Hindi) Des Pardes (Dev Anand, 1978; Hindi) Devdas (Sanjay Leela Bhansali, 2002; Hindi) Dhoom 2 (Sanjay Gadhvi, 2006; Hindi) Dil Chahta Hai (Farhan Akhtar, 2001; Hindi) Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge (Aditya Chopra, 1995; Hindi) Earth (Deepa Mehta, 1998; Hindi) Faasle (Yash Chopra, 1985; Hindi) Fanaa (Kunal Kohli, 2006; Hindi) Fire (Deepa Mehta, 1996; Hindi) Ghost Rider (Mark Steven Johnson, 2007; English) The Guru (Daisy von Scherler Mayer, 2002; English) Hare Rama Hare Krishna (Dev Anand,1971; Hindi) Heyy Babyy (Sajid Khan, 2007; Hindi) Hum Aapke Hain Koun...! (Sooraj R Barjatya, 1994; Hindi) Hum Dil De Chuke Sanam (Sanjay Leela Bhansali, 1999; Hindi) Indian (S Shankar, 1996; Tamil; Hindi title Hindustani) Janasheen (Feroz Khan, 2003; Hindi) Jeans (S Shankar, 1998; Tamil) Kaathalar Thinam/Kadalar Dhinam (Kadhir, 1999; Tamil) Kabhi Alvida Naa Kehna (Karan Johar, 2006; Hindi) Kabhi Khushi Kabhie Gham (Karan Johar, 2001; Hindi) Kal Ho Naa Ho (Nikhil Advani, 2003; Hindi) Khuda Gawah (Mukul Anand, 1992; Hindi) Kitne Door Kitne Paas (Mehul Kumar, 2002; Hindi) Koi Aap Sa (Partho Mitra, 2005; Hindi) Krrish (Rakesh Roshan, 2006; Hindi) Kuch Kuch Hota Hai (Karan Johar, 1998; Hindi) Kya Kehna (Kundan Shah, 2000; Hindi) Lagaan (Ashutosh Gowariker, 2001; Hindi) Lage Raho Munna Bhai (Rajkumar Hirani, 2006; Hindi) Life in a...Metro (Anurag Basu, 2007; Hindi) Love in Tokyo (Pramod Chakravorty, 1966; Hindi) Love Story 2050 (Harry Baweja, 2008; Hindi) 186

Filmography

Lucky: No Time for Love (Radhika Rao & Vinay Sapru, 2005; Hindi) Maaya Kannaadi (Saran [Cheran], 2007; Tamil) Main Aur Mrs Khanna (Prem Soni, 2009; Hindi) Main Hoon Na (Farah Khan, 2004; Hindi) Major Saab (Tinnu Anand, 1998; Hindi) Mangal Pandey: The Rising (Ketan Mehta, 2005; Hindi) Masala (Srinivas Krishna, 1991; English) Mississippi Masala (Mira Nair, 1992; English) Monsoon Wedding (Mira Nair, 2001; Hindi) Moulin Rouge! (Baz Luhrman, 2001; English) Mrityudaata (Mehul Kumar, 1997; Hindi) My Bollywood Bride (Rajeev Virani, 2006; Hindi) Naam (Mahesh Bhatt, 1986; Hindi) Nala Damayanthi (Mouli, 2003; Tamil) Namastey London (Vipul Shah, 2007; Hindi) Naya Daur (BR Chopra, 1957; Hindi) Nine Months (Chris Columbus, 1995); English On the Beach (Stanley Kramer, 1959; English) Padmashree Laloo Prasad Yadav (Mahesh Manjrekar, 2005; Hindi) Pardes (Subhash Ghai, 1997; Hindi) Phir Bhi Dhil Hai Hindustani (Aziz Mirza, 2000; Hindi) Poi (K Balachander, 2006; Tamil) Pokkiri (Prabhu Deva, 2007; Tamil) Prem Aggan (Feroz Khan, 1998; Hindi) Purab Aur Paschim (Manoj Kumar, 1970; Hindi) Ramji Londonwaley (Sanjay Dayma, 2005; Hindi) Ram Lakhan (Subhash Ghai, 1989; Hindi) Rang De Basanti (Rakesh Omprakash Mehra, 2006; Hindi) Rangeela (Ram Gopal Varma, 1995; Hindi) Saathiya (Shaad Ali, 2002; Hindi) Salaam Namaste (Siddharth Anand, 2005; Hindi) Sangam (Raj Kapoor, 1964; Hindi) Satya (Ram Gopal Varma, 1998; Hindi) Shaadi.com (Krishna DK & Raj Nidimoru, 2001; Hindi) 187

Filmography

Sholay (Ramesh Sippy, 1975; Hindi) Shree 420 (Raj Kapoor, 1955; Hindi) Singh is Kinng (Anees Bazmee, 2008; Hindi) Slumdog Millionaire (Danny Boyle, 2008; English/Hindi) Soldier (Abbas-Mustan, 1998; Hindi Swades: We, the People (Ashutosh Gowariker, 2004; Hindi) Ta Ra Rum Pum (Siddarth Anand, 2007; Hindi) Thiruttu Payale (Susi Ganesh [Gangesan], 2006; Tamil) Unnale Unnale (Jeeva, 2007; Tamil) Upkar (Manoj Kumar, 1967; Hindi) Veer–Zaara (Yash Chopra, 2004; Hindi) Victory (Ajit Pal Mangat, 2008; Hindi) Zanjeer (Prakash Mehra, 1973; Hindi)

188

IMAGE CREDITS

Figure 1: Publicity still for Unnale Unnale, Oscar Films Pvt. Ltd. Figure 2: Image and permission to reproduce obtained from copyright holder, Swish MG Distribution. Figures 3, 4 and 5: Images and permission to reproduce obtained from copyright holder, Yash Raj Films Pvt. Ltd. Figure 6: Image and permission to reproduce obtained from copyright holder, Richi Madan. Figure 7: Image and permission to reproduce obtained from copyright holder, Andrew Hassam. Figures 8 and 9: Images and permission to reproduce obtained from copyright holder, Lucas Li. Figure 10: Image and permission to reproduce obtained from copyright holder, Deb Narayan Bandyopadhyay.

189

NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

Adrian Athique is Lecturer in Media and Communications at the University of Essex. Adrian’s current research interests include the social practice (and malpractice) of film exhibition in South Asia, unofficial networks of media distribution and the transnational reception of Indian and Australian media— all of these are part of a wider interest in cultural sociology, geography and history. Debjani Ganguly is Head of the Humanities Research Centre at the Research School of Humanities, Australian National University. She is a literary and cultural historian and her recent publications include Caste, Colonialism and Counter-Modernity (2005), Edward Said: The Legacy of a Public Intellectual (co-editor, 2007), Rethinking Gandhi and Nonviolent Relationality: Global Perspectives (co-editor, 2007) and Pigments of the Imagination ( Journal of Intercultural Studies, co-editor special issue, 2007). Devleena Ghosh teaches in the Social Inquiry programme and is a member of the Trans/forming Cultures Research Centre for Communication and Culture at University of Technology Sydney. Her publications include Colonialism and Modernity (2007), Cultures of Trade: Indian OceanÂ€Exchanges (2007), Water, Borders and Sovereignty in Asia and Oceania (2008) and Women in Asia: Shadowlines (2008).

190


Devika Goonewardene wrote the essay contained in this volume while working towards a PhD at the University of Melbourne on post-colonial and South Asian applications to international relations. She tutored in International Relations (of various kinds) at Monash and Melbourne Universities, and Hindi cinema informed both her doctoral research and her pedagogical practices. It was with immense sadness that we learnt of the passing of Devika while this volume was in press. Her enthusiasm and acumen are much missed. Andrew Hassam is an Honorary Fellow in the Faculty of Arts, University of Wollongong. His books include Sailing to Australia (1994) and Through Australian Eyes (2000); and he is currently completing a book on the creation of the Whingeing Pom stereotype. Recent articles have appeared in Meanjin (2007), International Journal of Diversity in Organisations, Communities and Nations (2008) and Studies in South Asian Film and Media (2009) and he is on the editorial boards of the Australian Humanities Review and History Compass. Makarand Paranjape is Professor of English at the Centre for English Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi. A widely published critic, poet and novelist, he has over twenty-five books and 100 academic papers to his credit. He was founding-editor of Evam: Forum on Indian Representations and is the Principal Investigator of a project on Science and Spirituality in Modern India. He is currently working on a volume tentatively entitled ‘Sacred Australia’. Srilata Ravi is Associate Professor in European Languages and Studies (School of Humanities) at the University of Western Australia. Her research interests are in Francophone Studies, Diaspora and Migration Studies and Indian Ocean Studies. Her publications include Rainbow Colors: Literary Ethnotopographies of Mauritius (2007), Asia in Europe, Europe in Asia (2004, co-edited with Beng Lan Goh and Mario Rutten) and L’Inde dans le genre romanesque français depuis 1947 (1997). Anjali Gera Roy is Professor in the Department of Humanities of Social Sciences at the Indian Institute of Technology Kharagpur. She has published several essays on post-colonial literatures and theory, translated short fiction from Hindi and authored a book on African fiction. Her new book is on Bhangra’s global flows. Her present research interests include popular culture and diaspora studies, especially Bhangra and Bollywood. She has been awarded an Indo-Canadian research grant to investigate Bollywood’s transnational flows.

191


AK Tareen is the Government of South Australia’s Senior Trade Commissioner to India. He has been advising Australian government and businesses on trade and investment matters for over thirteen years now and he was instrumental in forging the sister state agreement between Tamil Nadu and South Australia. He also played a key role in attracting the biggest Bollywood movie yet shot in Australia to South Australia, Love Story 2050, by designing an innovative incentives package.

192

Bollywood in Australia: Transnationalism & Cultural Production

Cultural History in Australia

Cultural History in Australia

A Higher Authority: Indigenous Transnationalism and Australia

Untimely Bollywood

The Field of Cultural Production

The Media and Cultural Production

The Field of Cultural Production

Beyond Bollywood: The Cultural Politics of South Asian Diasporic Film

Beyond Bollywood: the cultural politics of South Asian diasporic film

Bollywood: A History

Oil & Gas Production in Nontechnical Language

Production Studies: Cultural Studies of Media Industries

Australia

Australia

Cultural Industries and the Production of Culture

Australia

Traversing Transnationalism: The Horizons of Literary and Cultural Studies

Biggles In Australia

Language in Australia

Social Cohesion in Australia

American Angler in Australia

An Angel in Australia

The Jews in Australia

The Greeks in Australia

Hypnosis in Australia

Same and Other: Negotiating African Identitity in Cultural Production

Ungrounded Empires: The Cultural Politics of Modern Chinese Transnationalism

Biggles in Australia

The English in Australia

Inequality in Australia

Bollywood in Australia: Transnationalism & Cultural Production

Cultural History in Australia

Cultural History in Australia

A Higher Authority: Indigenous Transnationalism and Australia

Untimely Bollywood

The Field of Cultural Production

The Media and Cultural Production

The Field of Cultural Production

Beyond Bollywood: The Cultural Politics of South Asian Diasporic Film

Beyond Bollywood: the cultural politics of South Asian diasporic film

Bollywood: A History

Oil & Gas Production in Nontechnical Language

Production Studies: Cultural Studies of Media Industries

Australia

Australia

Cultural Industries and the Production of Culture

Australia

Traversing Transnationalism: The Horizons of Literary and Cultural Studies

Biggles In Australia

Language in Australia

Social Cohesion in Australia

American Angler in Australia

An Angel in Australia

The Jews in Australia

The Greeks in Australia

Hypnosis in Australia

Same and Other: Negotiating African Identitity in Cultural Production

Ungrounded Empires: The Cultural Politics of Modern Chinese Transnationalism

Biggles in Australia

The English in Australia

Inequality in Australia

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