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Bollywood Travels: Culture, diaspora and border crossings in popular Hindi cinema

In a recent study, Theorizing World Cinema (2012), Rajinder Dudrah and his co-authors Lucia Nagib and Chris Perriam set out a coherent defence for the term transnationalism as a critical approach to contemporary world cinemas. In their introduction, Dudrah et al specified certain principles and criteria that needed to be followed to make this approach one of value — the most significant of which was the recognition of ‘cinema as a polycentric phenomenon, with peaks of creation in different places and periods’ (xxii) whose differences (as national artefacts) are as significant as their interconnectedness. As such, world cinemas require a polycentric approach in which debates around questions of the national, transnational, diasporic nature of these cinemas must be addressed (xxvi). Dudrah’s own study, presently under review in this article, takes forward this approach as he considers the globalization of Bollywood cinema. The popularity, worldwide, of this cinema is, he argues quite rightly, the effect of a relationship between the homeland and its diaspora. This is not a new phenomenon, as Dudrah makes clear; Hindi cinema has been in dialogue with processes of globalization since at least the 1950s. As a globalized phenomenon, Bollywood cinema is inevitably transnational. But what precisely does that mean and what are the implications? These are some of the questions that this book addresses with consummate clarity. The concept of ‘Travel’ in the book title is a first indicator as to how transnationalism is to be understood. Bollywood is a cinema that travels, one that is distributed internationally; but it is also a cinema whose culture carries across borders, speaks to the diaspora across the world, is in dialogue with other cultures, hence the significance of the second key term in the title, ‘Border Crossings’. For, in its difference and interconnectedness, Bollywood mediates between its own political culture and that of others. It also pays attention to border crossings of socio-cultural representation and as such touches upon questions of gender and sexuality. Dudrah takes readings of a selection of recent films to illustrate these issues. Using key case studies, he reveals the circuits of movement and the representational tensions implicit in a cinema that has at its core the crossing of socioand political-cultural borders. The various chapters locate the films under review within some of the major issues that India is currently facing: the ongoing India-Pakistan troubles and efforts at peace and reconciliation; globalization and its effects; and queer sexualities, a new departure in terms in of representation, revealing a more open society than heretofore. Defining Bollywood as a global cinematic and socio-cultural phenomenon with a particular kind of audiovisual aesthetics and a certain set of ideologies (nationalism, communalism, religion, gender, sexuality), Dudrah shows how, on the one hand, they are rooted in and routed through the homeland-diaspora relationship; and, on the other hand, how this cinema commodifies culture, thereby doing some of its ideological work. As an approach, this has entailed not just investigating the medium of contemporary Hindi film,