Indian Mobilities in the West, 1900–1947: Gender, Performance, Embodiment (original) (raw)

2011, South Asian Diaspora

An essay by Walter Armbrust in this volume analyses the subterranean ways in which Hindi films continue to be watched and have a presence in Egypt despite the apparent disdain that marks the average reception to Bollywood in that country. It ends with a little vignette of a young Egyptian woman telling, with half-suppressed excitement, about the prospect of the state television's treat before Ramadan: a Hindi film broadcast every evening of the month. This palpable enthusiasm for Hindi films and the hold which they have on the imaginations of Indians, diasporic communities abroad and the peoples of several nations in Asia and north Africa and to some extent recently Europe and the USA, fed through the global circuits of production, distribution and consumption, form the tone and the substance of this book. An excellent introduction by the editors Sangita Gopal and Sujata Moorti maps not only the history of song and dance against the larger history of the Hindi film industry in Bombay, but also attempts a succinct overview of the serious academic work on Bollywood that has emerged in the last couple of decades. The editors refer to Ashis Nandy's contention that Indian 'public life is shaped by the idiom and melodrama of the commercial cinema' and Partha Chatterjee's observation that the Hindi film songs, 'cut through all the language barriers in India to engage in lively communication with the nation where more than twenty languages are spoken and scores of dialect exist'. The editors enable interesting perspectives on Bollywood's implicit connection with the nation, its engagement with modernity and cosmopolitanism, the trajectory of the global travels of Hindi film music through its history, the diasporic presence of filmgit and the increasing commodification of Bollywood in recent times given the technologies and circuits of globalization. More care, however, should have been taken with the translation of the film titles: for instance, 'Awaara' surely cannot be translated as 'The Innocent'; even a cursory understanding of the plot unfolding the character of the protagonist would show that the word connotes 'profligate' or 'vagabond'. The essays included in this volume are divided into three sections. The first, 'Home Terrains' comprises of essays on the production, distribution and consumption of Hindi film song and dance in India. Anna Morcom's 'Tapping the Mass Market' is a superb essay, and offers an incisive account of the mediation of technology and the market in the circulation of the film song. The essay enables an informed view of how changing technologies and delivery formats are capitalized upon by the market and bring about changes in the cultural product such as the filmgit making it commercially autonomous. The essay by Nilanjana Bhattacharjya and Monika Mehta titled 'From Bombay to Bollywood' traces the power of emerging technologies and the anxieties of the