ABSTRACT

Sung by the pop British musical group Cornershop, the lyrics of “Brimful of Asha” evoke not only the complexities of Bollywood cinema but also the complicated politics of diaspora and diasporic cultural production and spectatorship1. Singing

“everyone needs a bosom for a pillow, and mine’s on the 45,” the group narrativizes the playback singer Asha Bhosle’s evocation and embodiment of the homeland to nostalgic diasporic listeners. Suggesting that films and film music construct and satisfy structures of feeling identified as nostalgia for the homeland, the lyrics affirm that “dreams” of home, comfort, and belonging are kept alive by the musical recordings of film musicians and singers such as Asha Bhosle and Lata Mangeshkar. These female singers are personified in the Hindi film song industry as maternal figures of the absent motherland, not only as fleshy bodies but also as cultural commodities of exchange. In most discourses of diaspora, nostalgia, longing, and loss are central themes that define diasporic subjectivity and identities. Moreover, displacement from an original homeland, also a defining feature, is seen to produce these effects. In the previous chapter, I examined how these original homelands are constructed and imagined through political exile. In this chapter, I pursue this line of inquiry, further deconstructing the (imagined) relationship between diaspora and homeland, in this case, tackling the idea of homeland as a given point of origin and as an original and consequently, diaspora as a copy rather than as a citation.