ABSTRACT
Any study of Bombay Cinema must finally address the role of this cultural form in the lives of the peoples of the Indian diaspora. Although much younger than the other two major diasporas of color (the African and the Chinese), the Indian diaspora is one of the fastest growing diasporic communities in the world. It is conservatively estimated at 11 million—Europe 1.5 million (1.3 million in Great Britain), Africa 2 million (1 million in South Africa, six hundred thousand in Mauritius), Asia (excluding Sri Lankan Tamils) 2 million (1.2 milllion in Malaysia), Middle East 1.4 million (largely semipermanent guest workers), Latin America and the Caribbean 1 million (mainly in Trinidad, Guyana, and Surinam), North America 2 million (including VS HI permit holders largely in the American computer sector), the Pacific five hundred thousand (three hundred and fifty thousand in Fiji) (Anderson 1994, modified)—and it is a very complex diaspora with deep roots in many nation-states. A corrective to the generalist theories of the Indian diaspora must be immediately made at this point: the Indian diaspora has grown out of two quite distinct moments in the history of capital. The first moment (of classic capitalism) produced the movement of indentured labor to the colonies (South Africa, Fiji, Trinidad, Guyana, etc.) for the production of sugar, rubber, and tin for the growing British and European markets. I have called this the old Indian diaspora of plantation labor (Mishra 1996b). The second moment (of late modern capital) is largely a post-1960s phenomenon distinguished by the movement of economic migrants (but also refugees) into the metropolitan centers of the former empire as well as the New World and Australia. As Patricia Uberoi (1998: 307-308) has observed, the shift in the kind of migrants that constitute the recent diaspora—generally referred to as NRIs (nonresident Indians) and largely seen as upwardly mobile—has radically reconfigured Indian readings of the diaspora and redefined as well cultural forms that see this diaspora as one of their important recipients. This Indian diaspora—the diaspora of late capital—is very different from the traditional nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century diaspora of classic capital, which was primarily working class and connected to plantation culture. The diaspora of late capital has now become an important market of popular cinema as well as a site for its production. The old diaspora broke off contact with India which, subsequently, existed for it as a pure imaginary space of epic plenitude (the exemplary text here is V. S. Naipaul's seminal novel, A House for Mr. Biswas). The new is the complex and often internally fissured communities of Indians primarily in the United States, Canada, Britain, and Australia who have had unbroken contact with the homeland. For many the space occupied by the new diaspora—the space of the West—is also the desired space of wealth and luxury that gets endorsed, in a displaced form, by Indian cinema itself. In reality, however, the dreams of wealth are often tempered in the new diasporas by the rise of a neoracism even as the nation-state redefines itself through an idealized project of multiculturalism (Balibar and Wallerstein 1991). While in the old diaspora of racialized communities (the terms of reference in them are always "multiracial" and not "multicultural"), race was a pre-given category of ethnic classification to be politically sorted out (the demand for racialized constituencies against a common roll in Fiji for instance), in the new diaspora race and ethnicity are linked to questions of justice, self-empowerment, representation, equal opportunity, and definitions of citizenry. The differences between V. S. Naipaul's West Indian novels (where the diasporas are relatively exclusive social formations) and the novels and films of Hanif Kureishi, Gurinder Chadha, and Srinivas Krishna (where the diaspora is keyed into the social imaginary of the larger nation) may be explained with reference to the politics and history of the old and new Indian diasporas.
