Bollywood Down Under: Fiji Indian

Cultural History and Popular

Assertion
Manas Ray
• Ray’s article begins by referring to Kay Rasool’s
film, ‘Temple on the Hill’ that explores the
diasporic lives of Punjabi-Australian
communities in rural Australia and part. its
negotiation between Punjabi traditions and
Australian lifestyle
• The film, Ray argues, is a classic re-enactment
of Orientalist representations of Indian
women in part
• He further cites Gillespie’s influential
ethnographic work-Television, Ethnicity and
Cultural Change (1995) on the Punjabi
community in Southall which examines one
family’s viewing and consumption of Hindi
epics on cable TV-Mahabarata
• Focuses on the ways in which diasporic media
shapes diasporic identity
• Gillespie is criticised for not problematising
anthropological understanding of culture and
her findings are considered as predictable in
terms of differences across generations and
gender in taste and consumption patterns.
• Following Zizek, Ray posits that Gillespie
reproduces the assumptions of
multiculturalism regarding ethnic minorities,
emerging from the universalist perspective
that is afforded by majority dominant
position, that is, their cultures remain static
and self-enclosed.
• Gillespie ignores the ways in which Indian
film-Bollywood-is enmeshed into the politics
of Indian nationhood.
• Gillespie deals with Indian film as a set of
aesthetic characteristics but ignores the
significance of diasporic cinema that
developed in the 1980s and its significance in
shaping South Asian diasporic identity maps
• She casts Indian cinema as exotic cultural
goods and disregards the cultural politics of
their production, circulation and consumption
• In the context of research on the consumption
of Indian cinema by diapsoric populations,
paper looks into the ramifications on Fiji
Indian imagined community as mediated by
Indian-sourced popular media
• It is generally accepted that Bollywood cinema
plays an important role in the lives of Indian
diapsoric populations
• Paper engages with the significance of Bollywood
in the lives of Fiji Indians-displaced initially
through colonialism as part of the indenture
movement and eventually through migration to
Australia- through the dynamics of the colonial
and postcolonial histories of community
• For indentured populations in Fiji in 1930s,
Hindi films most significant vector is
imagination of motherland
• Fiji Indian community in Australia-highest
rates of consumption of Bollywood and has
built its cultural environment around the
cultural practices of Bollywood
• Cultural trajectory of Fiji-Indian community is
parallel to shifts in the history of Bollywood itself
• Memory of earlier folk practices of Indian Fiji
community during colonialism also basis of Hindi
popular cinema
• It is this very popular cinema that came to
constitute the cultural platform for the
construction of Fiji Indian community in Australia
• Ray argues that it is the specific historical
conditions of existence of the diaspora that
enables the understanding of its cultural life.
• While diasporic theory that looks at South Asians
as a collective is helpful, it is also important to
look at their specific conditions of dispersion and
settlement
• And consumption of diasporic media has to be
understood in the context of its specific politics of
production and dissemination
• In the case of Bollywood, it is the locus of
contending forms of Indianness, following
Rajadyaksha and Willeman
• Indian identity is inevitably fragmented
• Different communities position themselves in
different ways vis-a-vis Indianness and those
differences may partly be explained by
language, religion, region and this positioning
is most significant in postcolonial spaces
• The consumption patterns of Hindi movies
within the community is segmented; for
instance the Bengalis are not part. actively
involved in the viewing of Bollywood and Ray
demostrates as per his initial argument that
this may be explained by the part. ways in
which Bengalis came into contact with British
colonisers and their post-enlightenment
epistemologies
• The Bengali community’s relation to India is
shaped by its past history as a prosperous
educated class in colonial India and the its
consequent exclusion from decisionary powers
after independence characterised by a sense of
exclusion
• Bengalis have re-created their Indianness in terms
of a high culture of the past; transnational
diasporic Bengali culture has regrouped around a
selective glorified pre-independence Bengali
culture
• The Fiji Indian community at large, however,
depends on India, part. Indian films as cultural
resources which can be in the form of video,
media, cinema, nightclub music or fashion
• In this sense, unlike the Bengalis, for whom
consumption of Hindi films remains a very
private activity, for the rest of the community,
it is very much a public practice
• Although, Fiji Indian Australians share with
Punjabi British community, the public
engagement with Bollywood, for FI, India is a
wholly imagined entity with which they have had
little contact
• Furthermore, this community has its origins in
low classes and as a social group, has maintained
some of the prejudices attached to caste
mentality and religious sectarianism, which
differentiates them from Indians and Punjabi
British comm.
• There is a class cleavge between Fiji Indians of
indenture background and Indian
professionals gen. Coming from upper classes
within the Indian diasporic comm. In India and
are othered
• For Fiji Indians, the imagination is largely
mediated by film and thereby is highly
romanticised
• Folk traditions characterise Indian Fiji
cultural/religious practices handed down across
generations and originating from remote Indian
villages and those practices were maintained
through viewing of films
• The folk practices that the films reinforced
provided the narratives, visual repertoire, moral
climate and emotional sustenance to come to
terms with their oppression during colonisation
• Ray characterises the consumption of Bollywood
by the Fiji Indian community as ‘post’colonial
because it involves going beyond nostalgia-in ther
form of post-Zee Bollywood as distinct from
Western cultural productions whereas for the
Bengalis, it is post ‘colonial’ –different empases-
since current identity constructions are shaped
through specific readings of the past- with
respect to practices of the cultures they left
behind
• Public sphericules: shared public space in
Australia is one characterised by a different
trajectories that criss-cross by virtue of the
dynamics of the market
• Ray argues that the different ethnic
communities in Australia all are engaged in a
re-imagination and engagement of ‘roots’
• As India faded in the memory of Fiji Indians, it
was film that filled in the gap made up of
visual, sonic, and dramatic repertoires
• Bollywood has reciprocated to its diasporic
communities need for an imaginary by placing
them at the very heart of its new artistic
project
• Bollywood has filled in some of the void left by
displacement and provided a means to resist
white cultural hegemony
• ‘Indianness’ is at once sutured by the petits recits
of vernacular Fiji Indian practices and global
Bollywood mass culture that construct Indo-Fijian
Australiam identity
• Post-Zee Bollywood constitutes a legitimate
modern alternative to the West in the cultural
imaginary it offers
• The genealogy of the last century is central to
understanding of the Fiji Indian community’s
imagination of its Indian identity in Australia
today
• Unlike mainland India, Fiji was governed by
British common Law with no separate laws for
different religious communities
• For indentured populations everywhere,
including in Fiji, part of the political struggle
involved maintaining the ‘motherland’ in the
colony through social, cultural and religious
performances
• Post-indenture, the community came to be
fragmented between North and South Indians,
between Muslims and Hindus
• The Indian community continued to ward
threats from local Western and indigenous
communities by hanging on to folk traditions
of North India which also set the foundations
for the long-standing fondness for Hindi
popular cinema amongst Fiji Indians
• FI community fashioned diasporic hybrid
cultures charactrised by syncretic practices
• Social identities were shaped through tension
between vernacular practices and the colonial
racial and economic categorisation as ‘coolies’
• One of the key narrative and cultural matrices
of Bollywood was romance shaped by the
fusion of love, desire and sensuality of Radha-
Krishna trope
• The Indian community, though fragmented,
continued to partake in the shared Bollywood
buffs community coalesced around their yearning
for roots
• Bollywood simplified Indian cultural traditions for
a population that had little access to ‘culture’ as
such and was largely uneducated
• Bollywood’s suspension of disbelief allowed for
an almost seamless continuity between the
ambivalent realities of Fiji and the multi-coloured
spectacle of film
• As the Muslim community re-imagined itself
as more Muslim and less Indian through its
transnational links, Bollywood conitnued to
remain the cultural platform which they
shared with other Indian groups
• The viewing subject of Bollywood not the
individual of Western film theory but member
of a ‘narrative community’
• The telling of stories brings into immediate
play some strong conventions invoking a
narrative community…To some extent, all such
communities, from the stable to the emergent,
use narrative as a technique of staying
together, redrawing their boundaries or
reinforcing them (Kaviraj, 1992:33)
• Commercial success of Bollywood lies in its ability
to make the diverse South Asian
communitiesrelate to and recognise themselves
within the narratives it circulates
• Discourses of liminality-marginality-that generally
serve to understand diasporic identities, is
unhelpful in understanding the diaspora’s ability
to recreate its cultures in various locations and
through different displacements