Browsing by Author "Mishra, Vijay"

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Open Access
Bollywood Cinema: A Critical Genealogy
(Te Herenga Waka—Victoria University of Wellington, 2006) Mishra, Vijay
“Bollywood” has finally made it to the Oxford English Dictionary. The 2005 edition defines it as: “a name for the Indian popular film industry, based in Bombay. Origin 1970s. Blend of Bombay and Hollywood.” The incorporation of the word in the OED acknowledges the strength of a film industry which, with the coming of sound in 1931, has produced some 9,000 films. (This must not be confused with the output of Indian cinema generally, which would be four times more). What is less evident from the OED definition is the way in which the word has acquired its current meaning and has displaced its earlier descriptors (Bombay Cinema, Indian Popular Cinema, Hindi Cinema), functioning, perhaps even horrifyingly, as an “empty signifier” (Prasad) that may be variously used for a reading of popular Indian cinema. The triumph of the term (over the others) is nothing less than spectacular and indicates, furthermore, the growing global sweep of this cinema not just as cinema qua cinema but as cinema qua social effects and national cultural coding. Although Indian film producers in particular, and pockets of Indian spectators generally, continue to feel uneasy with it (the vernacular press came around to using “Bollywood” only reluctantly), its ascendancy has been such that Bombay Dreams (the Andrew Lloyd Weber musical) and the homegrown Merchants of Bollywood both become signifiers of a cultural logic which transcends cinema and is a global marker of Indian modernity. As the Melbourne (March 2006) closing ceremony of the Commonwealth Games showed, Bollywood will be the cultural practice through which Indian national culture will be projected when the games are held in Delhi in 2010. International games (the Olympics, World Cup Soccer, Asian Games, Commonwealth Games, and so on) are often expressions of a nation’s own emerging modernity. For India that modernity, in the realm of culture, is increasingly being interpellated by Bollywood.
Open Access
The diasporic imaginary and the Indian diaspora
(Te Herenga Waka—Victoria University of Wellington, 2005) Mishra, Vijay
“All diasporas are unhappy, but every diaspora is unhappy in its own way” (Mishra 1996: 189). Diasporas refer to people who do not feel comfortable with their non-hyphenated identities as indicated on their passports. Diasporas are people who would want to explore the meaning of the hyphen, but perhaps not press the hyphen too far for fear that this would lead to massive communal schizophrenia. They are precariously lodged within an episteme of real or imagined displacements, self-imposed sense of exile; they are haunted by spectres, by ghosts arising from within that encourage irredentist or separatist movements. Diasporas are both celebrated (by late/post modernity) and maligned (by early modernity). But we need to be a little cautious, a little wary of either position. Celebrating diasporas as the exemplary condition of late modernity – diasporas as highly democratic communities for whom domination and territoriality are not the preconditions of “nationhood” – is a not uncommon refrain. In the late modern celebratory argument on behalf of diasporas, diasporic communities are said to occupy a border zone where the most vibrant kinds of interactions take place and where ethnicity and nation are kept separate. In this argument, diasporas are fluid, ideal, social formations happy to live wherever there is an international airport and stand for a longer, much admired, historical process.