Bollywood Engages Indian-American Academics Francis C. Assisi

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Naturally, leading the pack of Bollywood scholars in America are young South Asians who are interested in their own popular culture. They claim that since Indian films have become hip, this sudden attention seems to open up a space for Indian diasporic cinema as a whole. More importantly, as Indians in the diaspora know, films are significant to the ways migrant communities imagine themselves.

South Asians know for sure that the sense of belonging that the Indian cinema or Bollywood films provide - the sheer sense of security and shared joy, the commonality of experience despite the geographical separation of so many thousands of miles - is second to none. That’s because Bollywood is one of the things that bind Indians, never mind where they live. In fact Bollywood is often conceived as providing the idiom of not only Indian, but also South Asian, and diasporic identity in the 21st century.

While Indian cinemas have been well known internationally for over fifty years, it is more recently that Bollywood has become a global cinema, often positioning itself against the hegemony of Hollywood. Now, as a national and global cinema, Bollywood is ubiquitous from the Gulf States, North America and East Africa, to Southeast Asia Europe and Australia.

It is this re-territorialisation of Bollywood that raises questions regarding its consumption and reception.

JIGNA DESAI

Why else would an M.I.T. astrophysics alumni, Jigna Desai, do research in Indian cinema? An assistant professor in the Department of Women's Studies at the University of Minnesota, Desai considers herself a "1.5-generation South Asian.” Which means she was born in Gujarat, but migrated as a toddler, with her parents, to New Jersey.

While earning her bachelor's degree in astrophysics at M.I.T., she says, she realized that "teaching physics wouldn't get at the social justice issues that were important to me." So instead of a physics lab, she opted for the University of Minnesota, where she could get a minor in feminist studies while she earned her doctorate in English.

Desai recalls: "I was a freshman when I saw the film My Beautiful Launderette. It sparked my interest in questions of nationhood, citizenship, migration, and integration, and led to my dissertation on South Asian cinema."

To get a handle on Desai's research interests, one would have to stretch far enough to include her ever-broadening search for transnational links among ethnicity, class, gender, culture, politics, and post-colonialism and then view these links through the prism of her South-Asian-turned-Minnesotan perspective. "I'm always looking at the transnational framework," she says, "and trying to find the connections between what's happening here and what's happening there. That has meant continually erasing my own ignorance."

Professor Desai's book Beyond Bollywood: The Cultural Politics of South Asian Diasporic Film (Routledge, January 2004) focuses on the emergence and formation of a South Asian diasporic cinema by examining films made by Indians who have emigrated to Canada, Great Britain, and the United States, as well as films produced in India. The book analyzes the complex relationships between diaspora and nation in the current moment of globalization.

To Desai, who thinks of her work as an exploration of "brown skins and silver screens," cinema offers a unique opportunity to indulge her passion for finding links. Bombay's version of Hollywood becomes her vehicle to explore the South Asian piece of the puzzle. "I'm always finding new connections to Asia in my work," says Desai. "To see brown skin in a way that isn't stereotyped is rewarding, but so is seeing things like how stories of feminism travel in these films and how they become popular with non-South Asian women and how they tell their own stories.

"These films also are wrapped up in being enticing to youth," she says. "How are South Asian young people watching them? Are they nostalgic for a place of real culture and real belonging? They're aware of trying to create a construct of race that fits them, because they realize that to be Indian is not ever to be fully American. The diasporic question is, how do you be Indian and live abroad? Films are significant to the ways migrant communities imagine themselves."

Desai is keenly aware that films of India and the Indian diaspora are becoming more popular at a time when U.S.-South Asian relationships are being tested politically. "In the films we can learn about a culture at the same time that there are hate crimes being directed at this culture, at the same time that there is a crackdown on immigration," she says.

September 11 "politicized South Asians in ways those in the upper class hadn't considered," says Desai. "For the first time, many actually became aware that they were brown-skinned. The upper class was surprised that they had to be careful. For them, it's been a matter of slowly creating awareness. People now have been moved to ask, 'How do we fit into this construct of race?'"

In another project, Desai is looking at Bollywood cinema to find out how it models and shapes cultural identity for second generation South Asian college students. How is their cultural identity formed? What is at the center? What role does cinema play in this? A Multicultural Research Grant Award from UMN funds the project.

Desai's courses include an honors course on South Asians in America; an intro-level class called Politics of Sex, which explores the links among sexuality, gender, and colonialism; and a graduate class in postcolonial studies. Passionate about teaching, Desai says she especially loves that "lightbulb moment," when her students really connect with an idea.

With students, Desai tries to encourage active learning. She says, “They role-play, debate, make films, create projects that help them define what their position is. I'm so proud of my students. I love to hear where they go."

Now, as a tenure-track professor in the Department of Women's Studies, Desai teaches courses on Third World Women, Asian American women's cultural studies, and diasporic feminisms. Her colleagues acknowledge that Desai is part of a unique initiative to create an Asian American Studies program at the University of Minnesota. She was invited this year to join the McArthur Social Justice program. She has also worked with a variety of activist organizations on issues such as sexual identity/ sexuality (Queer Nation, ACT-UP, LABIA, etc), race/ ethnicity, and peace (anti-Gulf War, etc).

TEJASWINI GANTI

Tejaswini Ganti is another Indian American scholar who has been conducting research about the Bombay film industry since 1996. As a visual anthropologist, Tejaswini Ganti is interested in film, photography, and video’s potential for cultural representation as well as being the site of cultural practice.

Her work explores the issues and tensions that emerge around commercial cultural production in a postcolonial setting like India. Rather than analyzing films, she focuses on the film industry itself, specifically the social world of its members and their filmmaking practices. Ganti's interest is in how the production of Hindi cinema is implicated in the imagining of the nation, the objectification of culture, and the construction of modernity in contemporary India.

At Connecticut College, Ganti teaches the following courses: Foundations of Social and Cultural Anthropology; Methods in Social and Cultural Anthropology; Anthropology of Mass Media; Ethnology of South Asia

Ganti's work is part of the growing anthropological literature about media forms and practices that seeks to demystify the mass media and identify the diverse cultural, social, and historical contexts of media production, circulation, and consumption. She has completed a book titled, Bollywood: A Guidebook to Popular Hindi Cinema (Routledge 2004) which introduces popular Hindi cinema and the Bombay film industry and its production practices to readers who wish to understand the form, history, and socio-cultural context of this filmmaking tradition.

Her second book project (Duke University Press, forthcoming) is based more directly on her dissertation, “Casting Culture: The Social Life of Hindi Film Production in Contemporary India.” It examines the social organization of the Bombay film industry as well as the political economy and aesthetic framework of film production to reveal how a market-driven activity such as Hindi filmmaking is invested with cultural meaning. It explores how the mass media produce a type of social identity, by focusing on how Bombay filmmakers’ relationships to the larger world is constituted and mediated by their experiences of film production.

Ganti's lifelong interest in Hindi cinema blossomed into an academic interest during the initial phase of her graduate study at the University of Pennsylvania where she worked as an editorial assistant at the Center for Transnational Cultural Studies and its journal, Public Culture. She was able to solidify her interests and research agenda at the Program in Culture and Media at New York University with its combination of courses in anthropological and film theory as well as film and video production.

The production courses helped Ganti realize that an analysis of media must be attuned to the specificity of the particular form and its process of production. During her fieldwork, having a basic knowledge of film production provided a basis for understanding conversations and discussions about the technical aspects of filmmaking that took place daily on film sets. Ganti was also able to work as an assistant on two films by different directors, which allowed her to gain deeper insights into the workings of the film industry. Her theoretical understanding of media has also been enhanced by her own experience in documentary production, having produced a video documentary, "Gimme Somethin’ To Dance To!" It explores how bhangra, which originated as a folk genre from Punjab, is utilized by the South Asian immigrant community in the U.S. to construct and assert a specific diasporic cultural identity

For Ganti's next research project, she plans to examine the increasingly transnational nature of the Bombay film industry by focusing on how the industry manifests itself in North America through production, distribution, exhibition, and ancillary activities like stage shows and award ceremonies. Ganti is interested in exploring how the growing significance of overseas markets and the increasing links between Bombay filmmakers and diasporic entrepreneurs are affecting production practices and imaginings of the audience within the industry.

OTHER ACADEMIC RESEARCHERS

Other scholars involved in examining facets of Bollywood include the following:

Monika Mehta is a Chancellor's Postdoctoral Fellow at University of California at Berkeley, affiliated with Film Studies and Comparative Literature. She received her Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from the University of Minnesota. At Berkeley, she is working on her book project, "Selections: Cutting, Classifying, and Certifying in Bombay Cinema," which focuses on censorship of sex in Bombay cinema. She is also doing research on her next project, which examines how globalization reconfigures the relations amongst the Indian State, Indian diasporic communities, and Bombay cinema.

Nitin Govil is Assistant Professor of Sociology and Media Studies at the University of Virginia. He joined the department in Fall 2003 and has completed his doctoral work in film and media studies at New York University. Govil is the co-author of Global Hollywood and is completing a study The Indian Film Industry, with Ranjani Mazumdar, under contract at British Film Institute.

Priya Joshi is Associate Professor of English at the University of California, Berkeley. She received her Ph.D. with distinction in English and Comparative Literature from Columbia University in 1995. Joshi is currently at work on a book-length project entitled Crime and Punishment: Nationalism and Public Fantasy in Bollywood Cinema in which she studies popular Hindi film and the fabrication of national identities in postcolonial India. Joshi's research and teaching interests include imperialism and its legacies, narrative and postcolonial theory, history of the book, the modern novel, popular Hindi film, and nationalism.

Raman Johal, at the University of Guelph in Ontario, Canada, is completing a dissertation entitled "From Bollywood to Bharat: Identity and Ethnic Revival in the Youth of Diasporic India." He explains: “By locating the imagined nation in Indian cinema, my PhD dissertation will posit the notion of a double-imaginary from which second-generation youth of the diaspora construct their identities and the way in which this is implicated in their understanding of authentic desi."

Finally, consider this: Jigna Desai, Rajinder Dudrah (University of Manchester), and Amit Rai (Florida State University) are planning a special issue of South Asian Popular Culture for 2005 dedicated to analyzing Bollywood and what it means to different audiences world-wide. Several scholars are expected to explore the diverse issues associated with audience consumption and reception of Bollywood films. They will analyze Bollywood’s role in forming audiences, identity formations, national or diasporic discourses, along with a broad range of methodological and disciplinary approaches. While the theme is on the broad topic of Bollywood and its audiences, there will be papers on the significant roles that Bollywood and its attendant cultural products and practices (e.g., magazines, television shows, variety shows, web sites, music and dance clubs) play economically and culturally for many audiences in South Asia and abroad.

francisassisi@hotmail.com