ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the notion that the Indies emerge from an interstitial space between India's pedagogical master narrative of purportedly unifying historical traditions and values and the modern daily performative which ruptures the authority of the pedagogical by introducing the in-between. It argues that the Indies, sitting in this middle space, negotiate India's idiosyncratically mixed milieu of archaic religiosity and postmodern hyperreality. The chapter focuses on the Indies as interstitial, mimetic yet polemical interrogators of India's own current liminal transition from tradition to modernity; in other words, the nation's negotiation of double time and the Indies interpretation of it. It could be argued that the Indies exercise mostly fluid and subtle but sometimes overt and subversive strategies to interrogate the dominant national narrative and Bollywood's linear representation of it. The chapter argues that several new Indies, such as Dhobi Ghat, render marginalised ghosts as both virtual and real presences, in films and in the national narrative.
