Paper short abstract:

In a global media world acts of appropriating and managing cultural-cum-aesthetic knowledge/products are becoming ever more complex. Focusing on the consumption of Bollywood Cinema, and investigating its popularity among Jewish Indian immigrants in Israel, the paper raises questions about the politics of consumption and the embodied performance of identity.

Paper long abstract:

Research on Bollywood Cinema's increasingly global presence and its worldwide consumption and celebration among minority diasporic audiences such as the Bene Israel, the largest Indian Jewish community now mainly settled in Israel, identifies the genre as a significant cultural domain for the articulation of diasporic 'Indian' identity and its constitution. Indeed, consuming South Asian popular culture in the form of Bollywood cinema has helped to sustain a link with India, and this despite it being predicated on fantasy and modified by contingent realities (Kaur & Sinha, 2005:19).

The paper argues that while written texts and powerful political speeches are crucial for memory and its transmission, other, often neglected media also play a vital role in shaping diasporic identity, sometimes in tension with religious or nationalist convictions (e.g. in the case of Judaism). I suggest that the force of South Asian aesthetics produces diaspora identity and community through its potential to evoke shared emotions and a sense of place and subjectivity, as mediated by the qualities of objects, styles or etiquette, among diasporic communities who may otherwise be divided by religion, language, nationality or even hostility. Furthermore, as the increasing visibility of NRIs (non-Resident Indians) in Bollywood films shows, Bollywood Cinema is a significant force in mediating ongoing and new dialogues between India and her diaspora(s). Indeed, Bollywood films offer spaces in which a widely shared South Asian aesthetics is celebrated, challenging thereby also the senses in which 'Indianness' may be claimed by various local diasporic communities.