Diasporic nostalgia in Indian cinema
Faculty Advisor
Date
2024
Keywords
Bollywood cinema, homeland, diasporic nostalgia
Abstract (summary)
The notion of home is often romanticized using the discourse of nostalgic sentimentalism, and narratives that glorify the cultural distinctiveness of regions get highlighted in visual media. The desire to revisit the homeland through imagination is a prominent theme in Indian cinema, which is unique in its stylistic narrative approaches to capture the syncretism of the Indian diaspora. This study analyses Bollywood cinema to understand how it propagates the cultural text of India through nostalgia. The global reception of Indian film stars like Shah Rukh Khan—who, for example, has been cited as the embodiment of the Bollywood romantic hero—invoked a diasporic emotional appeal toward India through blockbuster films like Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge (1995). Since Indians are known for their ubiquitous presence all around the world, their stories interact with distinct cultural elements, ideological positions, and contradictory customs associated with the lands they live in. This chapter argues that diasporic nostalgia is not always about the desire to return to a homeland or the revival of an idealized cultural past. Nostalgia promulgates a discourse of cultural integration through which subjects negotiate their contemporary modern identities with historical, cultural, and ritualistic elements of the homeland. The emergence of Shah Rukh Khan in the 1990s Bollywood cinema can be observed as an icon of the new cosmopolitan hero whose existence shows how nostalgia is used as a tool to bring back conservative cultural values, nationalist sentiments, family dynamics, and individual freedom to a globalized arena of India’s post-neoliberal times.
Publication Information
Raj, S. J., & Suresh, A. K. (2025). Diasporic nostalgia in Indian cinema. In T. Becker & D. Trigg (Eds.), The Routledge handbook of nostalgia. Routledge.
DOI
Notes
Item Type
Book Chapter
Language
Rights
All Rights Reserved