Bollywood Down Under:
Fiji Indian Cultural History
and Popular Assertion
Manas Ray
Previously, I used to encourage my children to see documentaries on India. I do no more. These people can’t show even Taj Mahal without showing beggars, a few lepers, flies and all that. They can’t resist that temptation. Instead, our children should watch Australian documentaries. Things about this land, the trees, insects, snakes, all different kinds of bird. If you have to live here, you must know the land well. Plus, they are growing kids too, you know what I mean? They have their needs, their desires. You must try and understand this. So for entertainment, you have Hindi films. The songs, the dance, the stories, glamour—all those things that they can talk about with their other Indian friends.
My friend, India—like all our countries—can only go down and down but Hindi films will prosper. Such is the logic. So don’t worry about entertainment. It will always be there, no matter where you live. You may call these films fantasy but it is a better way of knowing, I mean seeing, India than these documentaries. (Fiji Indian taxi driver, Brisbane, 1997)
Kay Rasool’s film, Temple on the Hill (1997), is a short documentary on the banana-growing Punjabi community of Woolgoolga in northern New South Wales. The film is about continuity in the face of change: while the older generation harp on the former, the younger people perform the difficult negotiation between the demands of a traditional, rigid order and the attractions of the liberal, individualised West (“We stick to our culture but the mind travels”). Encased in the performance of Sikh religious rituals, the film stacks up the evident values of Punjabi life for no one to miss: deep attachment to the preachings of the Holy saint, Guru Gavind Singh (“who forms our identity”); allegiance to the family profession (boys return to work in the plantation after completing their university degrees); abiding respect and care for elders; photomarriage (“the parents have to say yes first”); the imported desi bride quietly performing the domestic chores (“we wanted a girl who will do all the housework”); assertion of strong familial ties (“my brothers will do anything for me, I will do anything for them”); and so on. Men play billiards or maybe display the new video camera which is “so light” as women milk the cows or look after the children. Breaking this seamless pattern is the girl who felt “more and more uncomfortable with being an Indian” and “just wished I could be an Australian”. Glimpses of her preferred Australian life lead to a wholesale change in the visual milieu: swimming in the house pool with her daughter and white husband, the Australian lunch of salad, sausage and roasted meat (in place of pooris and hot bhajis), her sleek performance as a saleswoman in a department store. The other figure to rupture the settled patriarchal order is the son who takes to Christianity and becomes a passionate evangelist, drawn by the attraction of Christian universalism which he contrasts with the hypocrisy of Sikh religious practice. A Hindi movie of song and dance provides solace to the lonely mother. What is remarkable about the film is that, in around 25 minutes, it manages to encapsulate a whole portfolio of accepted Orientalist “knowledge”.
Marie Gillespie’s influential Television, Ethnicity and Cultural Change (1995) is a comprehensive study of the Punjabi community of west London. A media sociology of Punjabis living in one particular suburb, Southall—and sharing more or less the same history, cultural profile, media habits and class location—the work has been praised widely for its meticulous ethnology and has been influential in the rise of academic interest in the media of diasporic Indian communities (as only befits one of the largest diasporas in the world).
The differences between Gillespie’s book and Rashool’s film are apparent. The working class suburb of west London, where more than 65 000 migrants (1995: 33) jostle for space, is a far cry from the sprawling green of a remote Australian plantation settlement. In economic terms, too, they are studies in contrast: while the Punjabis of Woolgoolga have it good, the Southall Punjabis continue to struggle. However, in spite of the manifest differences, the picture that emerges of the cultural life in the struggling Punjabi ghetto in London bears real similarities to the time-wrapped, banana-cultivating Punjabis in obscure Woolgoolga. Both constructions draw on an essentialised understanding of an oriental community. John Hutnyk (1996) points to this in his review of Gillespie:
There is not, in this book, any disruption of an ethnographic project that requires particular, not global, essentialized, although hybrid, traditional, although translated, ethnic categories to proceed . . . she never leaves go of a notion of culture, which though it changes, is still an unexamined hold-all category doing work for time-honoured anthropological simplicities. (1996: 420–21)
Gillespie’s (1995) ethnography produces reasonably predictable results: the parental regime of social control, suspicion and adherence to a homeland culture of unquestioned obedience and religious devotion; the vicious networks of rumour and gossip aimed at constant surveillance of girls’ chastity (1995: 25–27, 153–57); young people’s preoccupation with style and fashion endorsing Western images; the gendered pattern of viewing (boys prefer science fiction, science programs, documentaries, news and crime series; girls prefer watching pop and quiz programs, cartoons and children’s TV and, of course, soaps); girls who (along with the older generation) mostly love Hindi movies while a majority of boys find them not to their taste (1995: 77). What is so specifically Punjabi—or for that matter Indian—about these findings? Gillespie will often throw up more questions than she answers. For instance, if boys are generally condescending about Indian traditions and Hindi films’ unrealistic modes, how could the whole family group (boys as well as girls) watch so intently B.R. Chopra’s televisual melodrama, Mahabharata?
Gillespie asserts that identity as ‘not an essence but a positioning’, but she rarely makes use of Appadurai’s (1990) insight that she quotes programmatically:
The Hindu diaspora has been exploited by various “interests” both within and outside India to create a complicated network of finances and religious identifications, in which the problem of cultural reproduction for Hindus abroad has become tied to the politics of Hindu fundamentalism at home. (Appadurai, 1990: 302, quoted in Gillespie, 1995: 20)
Instead, what we have is a replay of classic ethnographic persuasion in a new form: she respectfully watches the Dhanis watch the teleserial, Mahabharata, as an authentic moment of Indian devotion. Gillespie’s book is professedly about the “cultural routes of diaspora” (1995: 6). But what is privileged is her attention to the values “rooted in the subcontinent” (1995: 46), to which the youth are attached even as they try to “maximise their chance of acceptance” in British society (1995: 5). Gillespie’s mutual stress on the irreducible difference of migrant cultures and evolving trajectories of assimilation is in a way the crux of contemporary Western multiculturalism: “it ‘respects’ the Other’s identity, conceiving the Other as a self-enclosed ‘authentic’ community towards which he, the multiculturalist, maintains a distance rendered possible by his privileged universal position” (Zizek, 1997: 44). The extent of the similarities between a painstaking work of academic ethnography and a film (Temple on the Hill) made by a young graduate point to the well-established order of knowledge about migrants from which both draw.
For all of her meticulous research into the kinds of audiovisual media watched by the Punjabis in London, Gillespie makes little or no attempt to link diasporic media use with the life of media back in India. I consider this significant, given the intimate relation Indian film and television have had with the politics of Indian nationhood. As a result, Gillespie’s readings of film/video as a means of recreating cultural traditions suffer from a degree of aestheticisation. The account that she provides of Hindi films (1995: 78) would be applicable to Bollywood of any decade after the emergence of the “social” as a super-genre (see below, “From the Ramayan to Bollywood”). So she misses the potential of post-liberalisation Bollywood from the late 1980s to frame a new diasporic cultural identity for Indian youth. Gillespie (1995) draws on the Habermasian notion of “an enlightened public sphere of communications” (1995: 15), which in her scheme of things fits well with the notion of “postcolonial space” defined as a “pluralistic conception of nationality and perhaps beyond that to its transcendence” (1995: 8). The burden of racism is placed on the nation-state which constructs its internal ethnic “others”—its “racial minorities” (1995: 14). This gives her a reason to ignore the realities of the imbrication of nation-states with the contemporary movements of global capital (both economic and cultural); instead, she places hope on the traffic between “the local and the global that nevertheless transcends the national” (1995: 6). As part of her distrust of the category nation-state, she refuses any consideration of the political background from which Hindi movies emanate and the fact that this cinema is inalienably attached to the politics of the Indian nation-state. Such depoliticised understanding of Indian films inevitably gives them the look of self-enclosed, exotic cultural artefacts whose consumption in the Western world by the Indian diaspora Gillespie makes the centrepiece of her careful ethnography.
Different Diasporic Indias
This chapter examines the process of imagining into existence of a sense of community by Fiji Indians in Australia through the use of Indian-sourced popular media. The sway of Indian filmdom on Indians—wherever they live—is widely accepted. The chapter attempts to take a fresh look at this understanding by tracking the history of this twice-displaced community from the days of indenture through the phase of independent subsistence farming in Fiji to their present life in Australia. I seek to explain the significance of Bollywood in the lives of Fiji Indians in terms of the dynamics of colonial and postcolonial histories of this community as it manifests itself in a particular Western cultural setting, namely Australia.
The reason for focusing on the Fiji Indian community is primarily because of its close attachment to Hindi movies. Since the time Hindi movies reached Fiji in the late 1930s (Anon, 1956), they have remained the most important source for the “imagination” of the motherland. Of all the Indian diasporas in Australia, the Fiji Indian community is not only the highest consumer of Hindi videos (going by the estimates provided by various video parlours in Sydney and Brisbane); it is perhaps the only diasporic community in Australia that has been able to rapidly construct a whole cultural environment around Bollywood. Interestingly enough, the cultural trajectory of the Fiji Indians in a way parallels shifts in the history of Bollywood itself—from construction in the early days of indenture of a cultural community based on reminiscences of folk cultural practices that would pave the way to Hindi popular cinema which again in its current, post-liberalisation manifestation would offer the young Fiji Indians a chance to construct their own cultural platform in Australia.
The chapter addresses two theoretical issues central to understanding diasporic media. First, I argue that the different postcolonial diasporas are not “splinters” in a transnational world, ready to rearticulate their identity on the lines of extra-territoriality or nomadism; on the contrary, it is the historical subjectivity of a diaspora which holds the key to its cultural life. At one level, there is a need to club the different (postcolonial) diasporas together as those which are not parties to what Partha Chatterjee (1995: 11) calls the “original historical contract” that gave birth to the Western nation-states. At another level, it is also important to recognise the different historical trajectories of these diasporas. Hence the alienation that postcolonial people face in the multicultural West is multilayered; citings of the more visible signs of racism do not register its historical depth. The case of the Fiji Indians will amply demonstrate this. Second, diasporic media needs to be seen in the context of the politics of its production and dissemination. This is particularly so with Bollywood, which from its inception has situated itself in the locus of contending definitions of “Indianness” (Rajadhyaksha and Willeman, 1995: 10).
By no means does this chapter seek to analyse the media use of the “Indian” diaspora seen as one monolithic whole. In fact, it is the globality of such a concept that needs be contested and read as a sign of ahistoricity and ethnocentrism that so often underwrites the perception of postcolonial societies. This is not to deny that the different Indian diasporas do deploy their notions of “India” as the broad symbolic horizon for constructing their respective identities. Neither is it to underestimate the crucial role that such pan-“Indianness” (largely derived from Orientalist discourse about India) played in imagining a nation into existence during the course of struggle against colonial rule and continues to do so long after the Raj. It is, however, to highlight the fact that for Indians (both inside India and outside) such “Indianness”—like any other identity concept—is always already fissured. As a matter of positioning and not essence, this “Indianness” varies with different communities, is used at times for contradictory purposes, and quite often gives rise to unintended consequences. It may be argued that the different empirical factors like language, region or religion do not by themselves hold the key to cultural difference. It is how communities position themselves in postcolonial space that underpins the cultural lives of different Indian diasporas and sets the course for possible futures.
The different ways that different Indian diasporas frame their identities and cultural lives is remarkable. If the Fiji Indian community is the highest consumer of Hindi films, for the Indian Bengalis, Indian-sourced film and video is not only a private affair; in many cases, it is of little interest and even active disparagement. At one level it may seem that this is a function of class, since the Indian Bengali diaspora in Australia, as elsewhere, is composed of professionals. But class cannot be a major cause, because South Asian diasporas in Australia are more or less of the same class composition, given the history of Australian immigration laws and the entry system it uses to select its migrants.
It is again a case of historicising the question by addressing Bengal’s specific encounter with the British regime and the systems of knowledge of post-enlightenment Europe. In its bid to imagine otherwise than the modular Western (Chatterjee, 1993: Ch. 1), cultural nationalism in Bengal had made the self the locus of a complex and difficult elaboration from the middle of last century onwards that led to an enormous growth in every department of the Bengali cultural sphere. The basis of the bradralok (the educated, Hindu Bengali gentry) was neither trade nor industry, but land. Very early on, Bengal’s commerce and industry were dominated by either the colonialists or the traders and capitalists from western India. As a result, the bradralok concentrated in education, hoping to achieve through education what was denied through the economy (Chatterjee, 1997: 11). The process was accentuated with the introduction in 1885 of legislation limiting zamindari powers. This made the collection of dues more difficult, and rentier incomes began the long process of decline, both in real and absolute terms (Chatterji, 1994: 9).
The project of modernity that the Bengali bradralok had framed for itself faced its real challenge after independence with the civic disarray caused by Bengal’s stagnant economy and the change in the constellation of political forces. Subaltern classes, empowered by electoral democracy, now staked their claims to enter the political institutions of modernity, originally framed to keep them out. It is from this Bengal that the bradralok flees, either to the relatively prosperous parts of India or, if possible, abroad—to the affluent West, taking with them the dream of a nation that they were once so passionate about and the cultural baggage which had expressed that dream.
The Indian Bengali community’s relation to their home country is marked by a past which is lost and a present which is a lack. Community members justify their rupture from the motherland by attempting to become “better” Bengalis: revoking a past when Bengal’s “today” was India’s “tomorrow” is what frames Indian Bengali diasporic cultural life. This has meant framing their cultural lives around the high culture of the past, which has become a fossilised “taste culture”. There is a surprising similarity between the menu of Bengali cultural programs in Brisbane or Sydney and that of such places like New York, Toronto or London, where their number is vastly greater. Ironically, the cultural products once deeply rooted in the soil and having organic links to the independence movement and to early post-independence hardship and hope have now come to form an imaginative global geography, lacing together Bengalis in such diverse places as Philadelphia, Boston, London, Dusseldorf, Dubai or Sydney. In a diasporic context, the project of Bengali modernity has been emptied of all political significance, save its impossibility.
If the Indian Bengali community is locked in the past, the twice-displaced Fiji Indian community looks outside, to India, for its cultural sustenance. For the Fiji Indians in Australia, Hindi films mean a whole way of life. Movie theatres that regularly run Hindi films, film music nights, a number of bands that specialise in Hindi film music, nightclubs, design shops offering the latest of Bollywood, film magazines—all of these mean that Bollywood for Fiji Indians is by no means restricted to consuming videos in the seclusion of the home. In this sense, the Fiji Indians of Australia bear a degree of resemblance to Gillespie’s Punjabis of Southall. However, the differences between these two communities are crucial. India, properly speaking, is for the Fiji Indians a wholly imagined entity about which they know very little and have experienced even less. The fact that they were drawn mainly from the lower castes has also helped them to largely free themselves as a social group from the shackles of the caste mentality or religious sectarianism in the course of the last hundred years in Fiji. This is in sharp contrast to the mainland Indians and also to the Southall Punjabis.
Migration to Australia from mainland India has mostly been of the professional category. The social composition of India being what it is, this also means that the Indian representation in Australia is largely from the upper castes, many of whom are unwilling to give up their historical memory of unquestioned superiority vis-à-vis the lower castes. “Going out” at times also means going back in time. As far as the Fiji Indians are concerned, the romantic construction of India (and Indians)—derived most significantly from the movies—faced in Australia for the first time the rude shock of caste discrimination through their interactions with “compatriot” Indians. This has resulted in a change of focus of cultural antagonism—from the native Fijians, the mainland Indians now constitute the community’s “other”.
The pervasive dominance of Hindi film culture amongst diasporic Fiji Indians is complicated by the continued presence of folk traditions like Ramayan katha (i.e. the recitation and enactment from the Hindu epic, the Ramayan), or bhajan (devotional songs) that they had carried with them from the villages of India a century or more back. The Ramayan, in its simplified version of Tulsi Das’s Ramcharitmanas, functioned as a binding force in the fissiparous environment of indenture. It provided a nostalgic identification with motherland and also acted as a vehicle to relativise worldly realities by means of transcendental promises. This chapter shows that, while the rural traditions in their present manifestations are thoroughly imbricated by Hindi filmdom, historically they have provided—in terms of narrative, iconography and emotional and moral ambience—the ideal ground for the overwhelming popularity of Hindi cinema amongst Fiji Indians.
The size of diasporic Indian groupings found in a country like Australia rarely reaches “critical mass”. My research shows that the cultural implications of numerical strength of a particular grouping depend on the specificity of its diasporic postcolonial subjectivity. The identity politics of the Fiji Indian community in Australia is more a postcolonial practice, while that of the Indian Bengali community, their higher professional profile notwithstanding, is distinctly postcolonial. Being postcolonial means being beyond or outside nostalgia, while a postcolonial cultural politics is essentially an act of re-routing one’s identity through the past.1 For the former, the size of the community plays a vital role. Fiji Indians living in Sydney (upper estimates put the figure at about 40 000) have been able to form in the course of the last ten years a whole cultural ecology around Hindi popular filmdom. This has then been transmitted to other cities—for instance, Brisbane, where their presence is much thinner (around 7000). The crucial importance of this process lies in the fact that the second-generation Fiji Indians now have a cultural platform that, though not counter-hegemonic, is markedly different from the host culture. The chapter examines the role “post-Zee” Bollywood (the era since television was substantially deregulated) and the current trend of remixes of earlier songs to new beats play in this form of identity construction. As a contrast to this, the emphasis of the first-generation (postcolonial) Indian Bengali diaspora on aestheticised cultural forms of the past offers the second generation very little in terms of a home-country popular youth culture with which they can identify.
In an era of the global spread of corporate capital and great demographic shifts, one of the key projects of political modernity is faced with serious crisis: instead of the “nationalisation of the ethnic” that Western nation-states banked their hopes on, we now face the opposite scenario: “the ethnicisation of the nation”. The yearning for “roots”, as it is called, has become a common phenomenon for both the majoritarian white community and the different diasporas in different ways. As a result, the notion of shared public space is increasingly challenged by a different ordering of space, namely a criss-cross of different primordias tied together by the universal function of the market—what we, in this book, are calling public sphericules. For the Fiji Indians, if it was legislated racial discrimination that compelled them to leave Fiji, in Australia they find themselves in the middle of a new entanglement of different, contesting imaginings of “roots”. One of the results of this process is that Bollywood is taking on a new significance in their lives. Historically, the bond between them and India has been one of imagination. With time, as memory of “roots”—the real India—was fading away, film took over the responsibility of constructing an empty, many-coloured space through its never-ending web of images, songs, “dialogues” and stars. In the new political context of Australia, this empty space would be shorn of even the pretence of a referent—it is space unto itself, a pure space. Bollywood reciprocates this gesture by placing the diasporic imaginaire at the very heart of its new aesthetics.
Demography of Fiji Indians in Australia
The Fiji Islands were declared a British colony in 1874 when a group of indigenous “chiefs” signed a Deed of Cession with the British. Five years later, the first Indian indentured labourers arrived in the coolie ships from India, the labour for the sugar plantations and other enterprises that would make the new colony pay without exposing the indigenous population to the harmful consequences of an industrial economy (Kelly, 1991; Jayawardena, 1980). By the end of indenture in 1919, a total of 60 965 Indians had come to Fiji as indentured labourers (see Mishra, 1979; Lal, 1983). They called themselves girmitiyas (from the English word “agreement”, a reference to the labour contract). The British called them “coolies”, as did the indigenous Fijians (the word has an interesting twist, since the word for dog in Fijian language is similar: kuli). The plan had been for the Indians to be “extracted” (in keeping with much of colonial practice, the recruitment of indentured labourers from India was a peculiar combination of legal protocols and fraud—see Lal, 1992) as “a working population and nothing more” (Scarr, 1980: 88, in Kelly, 1991: 181). Once indenture ended—five years per contract, but mostly extended for another five years—many of them did actually return to India, but mostly they stayed on as subsistence farmers. By 1986, the Indian population was in the majority in Fiji (348 704 as against 329 305 ethnic Fijians) (Lal, 1992: 337) and the country’s economy was based on Indian management and labour.
The tables were turned in the 1987 coup when the military (manned exclusively by the Fijians) took charge of the country. Fiji became an independent state in 1970 and, until 1987, the Alliance Party held power. In the 1987 elections, the Alliance Party was defeated and the new government was widely perceived as de facto Fiji Indian rule. This caused wide-scale racial violence. Later that year, Colonel Sitiveni Ligamamada Rambuka of the Fiji Military Forces led two coups and captured political power. This led to an exodus of Fiji Indians from Fiji. The destinations were primarily Canada, Australia and New Zealand. The exodus has brought about a crucial reversal in Fiji’s population ratio: from 51 per cent in 1986, Fiji Indians now constitute around 45 per cent of the population. This, more than any other factor, has cooled down the polity and a new constitution aimed at restoring constitutional rights of the Indians in Fiji is in the process of being enacted.
Australia’s Fiji Indian population increased several times between 1987 and 1990. A large majority of the exodus settled in Sydney, which is now one of the major centres outside Fiji, along with Vancouver and Auckland. Immigration of this group has fallen off in the early 1990s, with the overall reduction in intake; however, their numbers still make Fiji Indians the largest Pacific group in the nation excluding the predominantly European-ancestry New Zealanders. Moreover, it seems that there are significant numbers of Fiji-born who are overstayers, so the official Census data probably understate the size of the community. The 1996 Census put Fiji-born population living in Sydney at 21 029 while those in Melbourne numbered 5542 and in Brisbane 4671. The community estimates of Fiji Indians living in Sydney vary between 25 000 and 45 000. Most of the entries to Australia have been via the points system. During those years, there were innumerable applications from asylum-seekers. The Hawke Labor government was, however, reluctant to take the diplomatic risk of souring relations with a neighbouring country and refused to consider the post-coup Fiji Indians as refugees. Instead, the criteria for immigration on the points system and family reunion scheme were relaxed. Also, amnesty was granted in 1989 to those who had come on temporary visas and overstayed. Since the early 1990s, Australian immigration laws for Fiji Indians have been tightened again and now they are treated equally with applicants from other countries. Canada has followed a comparatively relaxed immigration policy both before and after the coup. One of the consequences of the different criteria of immigration followed by these two countries is that the Australian Fiji Indians have a higher presence of professionals compared with their counterparts in Canada.
Fiji Indians’ demographic profile in Sydney is described by The Atlas of the Australian People (1991 Census, updated 1993):
The recency of arrival of the bulk of the Fiji-born population is reflected in their age structure, which is predominantly concentrated in the young working age groups. Almost three-quarters are aged between 15 and 49 years compared with half of the Australia-born group. It is interesting that women predominate in these groups as well as in the Fiji-born population overall. Only a very small proportion have any difficulty speaking English due to the fact that much of the education in Fiji is in English. The recency of movement has meant that much of it has been subject to selectivity based on education and skills. Hence the population of Fijians with higher education is greater than for the Australia-born (16.4 with 12.7 per cent), although the proportion with other post-school qualifications is slightly less.
The high education profile of the Fiji-born is not fully borne out in their socioeconomic status. Despite having higher proportions than the Australia-born in the highest education categories, they are underrepresented in the managerial/administrative occupation category and substantially overrepresented in blue-collar jobs. On the other hand, they have a similar proportion of workers in the professional/paraprofessional categories, reflecting the large numbers of nurses and doctors who moved to Australia, especially following the first military coup in Fiji. The proportion of the Fiji-born who own or are purchasing their own home (43.8 per cent) is lower than that for the Australia-born (71.3 per cent), although this may be less a function of their socioeconomic status than the relative recency of their arrival and the youthfulness of their age structure. (Atlas, 1993: 52)
Media and Identity Politics
Of all the Indian diasporas in Australia, Fiji Indians have the deepest attachment to Bollywood. In Fiji, Hindi films (and later videos) have traditionally been the primary source of entertainment for Fiji Indians and a prime locus of their cultural life. The process was aided by the Fijian government’s reticence about television until recently. Television was viewed as an “economically unviable” apparatus of social pollution. Fiji’s emergence as a major tourist destination was one of the reasons why the policy had to be changed (Stewart, 1993). But Hindi film culture has always been of greater significance for diasporic Fiji Indians. The attachment to Hindi films is not restricted to private consumption of Bollywood films and videos, but constitutes a broad cultural ecology. Bollywood provides them with a sense of continuity with the past as well as the possibility of a different (though by no means counter-hegemonic) cultural platform vis-à-vis the host white culture.
The folk traditions of Ramayan katha and bhajan and their relation to Hindi cinema, as an example of the “little” and “great” traditions (local, quotidian practices of cultural Hinduism and Islam on the one hand and the quasi-globalising mass culture of Bollywood on the other),2 may no longer be overlapping and reinforcing in today’s urban Fiji, but in the new diasporic context of Australia the little traditions have regained their role of retaining identity and also function as a moral regime for the second generation.
The role of such media in the identity politics of diasporic Fiji Indians needs to be understood in the context of, first, the changes that Bollywood has undergone since the Indian economy was liberalised in the early 1990s and, second, the tension between the Fiji Indians and mainland Indians in their new diasporic location. Bollywood, in its contemporary manifestation, offers Indian diasporic youth a platform for organising their cultural life which is “acceptable” to the West and at the same time retains a measure of difference. The widely held notion that, for Indians, no matter where they live, India largely derives from its movies (Rajadhyaksha and Willeman, 1995: 10) holds a special significance for Fiji Indians for whom India is largely an imagined entity (“mother” but not “home”, as a number of my respondents have pointed out). For Fiji Indian youth in Australia, the relation between Bollywood and India is even more an imaginary one. This might suggest that reception takes place in an historical vacuum, but young Fiji Indians, more than any other Indian group in Australia, are keen on appropriating Hindi popular films to fashion a cultural identity that is their own.
Be it in the special meaning that Bollywood has for this community or the reinvigoration of folk traditions inherited from India; be it in their friction with mainland Indians or their bid to re-imagine an entity called “India” (from which they were once “extracted” and to which they do not harbour any illusion of return but nonetheless continually seek recourse to as an imagined nodal point of identity); be it in their relatively Westernised values or in the emphasis placed on tradition—the cultural life of Fiji Indians in their current Western locations is inalienably linked to their genealogy of the last hundred years—the contingent history of the Plantation Raj and after. In what follows, I will not so much embrace celebration of the ontological condition of the diasporic imagination but the formation of the historical subjectivity of a twice-displaced community.
Indenture and Beyond
The caste and cultural heritage of the indentured Indian labourers were varied. The first wave went from Hararibagh and Chotanagpur areas of Madhya Pradesh. Once that area was depleted, the route moved northwards to Bihar—mainly the Chappra, Saharanpur and Gaya districts. But by the time extraction for Fiji began, Bihar had also started drying up, since it was providing labourers for the coal mines of the province, the tea estates of Assam and, principally, for the jute mills and port of Calcutta and the railways. The eastern parts of Uttar Pradesh became the main suppliers of indentured labourers, which constituted about 75 per cent of those who left for Fiji from northern India. This was followed by Bihar (10 per cent), Madhya Pradesh (6 per cent) and Punjab (2 per cent). North Indian representation in Fiji constituted around 300 castes (mostly agrarian, with Brahmin cultivators constituting around 10 per cent) from 200 villages. The Muslim presence was 13 per cent (Lal, 1983). Though, as North Indians, they all spoke Hindi, the dialects varied widely from one region to another. The difference in dialect is particularly important in this case, since the overwhelming majority of those who went to Fiji as indentured labourers were unlettered people. The lingua franca that developed amongst Fiji Indians (known as Fiji Hindi) reflects many different dialects, with occasional European and Fijian words. From the standpoint of ethnic identity, the important point is that the Fiji Indian population retained Hindi, which has not always been the case with other indentured diasporas (see Jayawardena, 1980).
South India came into the picture only after 1903. However, even as latecomers, the total number of South Indians going to Fiji between 1904 and 1917 was 14 536, constituting 23.8 per cent of the Indian population when the indenture period was over. The reason for such bulk migration was the different system under which they went—the Kangani system—where the village-head corralled his village people and took them to the colony. In their new destination, the South Indians were moved around and scattered in different plantations and as such they had to adjust to the lingua franca. This was a matter of great effort on their part, since the languages of the South emanate from the Dravidian family of languages and are entirely different from Hindi which is part of the Indo-European group of languages.
The indentured labourers were entitled to return to India, but there was the widely held and well-grounded fear that in India they would have faced social ostracisation, since by then many of them had married across caste and regional lines. In the post-indenture period, Indians worked mostly as independent farmers on leased land for different sugar companies owned in Australia and Britain. Their economic condition gradually improved and the hardship of back-breaking routine work also eased. Personal ties with India, even as they dwindled, never ceased entirely. As late as the 1950s, the remittance economy was still—albeit marginally—at work. In terms of a more political and public cultural realm, the traffic from India increased with the rising tide of nationalist movement, with religious missionaries and political leaders visiting Fiji. The news of exploitation of Indian labourers and especially of sexual harassment of Indian women by European males caused major flare-ups in India and provided inspiration to India’s independence movement (Kelly, 1991). It has been argued that it was the movement against indenture in Fiji (with the active support of the Indian National Congress) that brought an end to the system worldwide in 1917 (Lal, 1985, 1992).
The Gujaritis first came in large number in the 1920s and 1930s as shopkeepers, moneylenders, artisans, sonars (goldsmiths) and in numerous other trades and services. There were occupational as well as residential differentiations. Mostly they lived in urban areas with little social interaction with the rest of the Indian community. While the Gujratis could speak Fiji Hindi, they were careful about retaining their own language and for a long time there was virtually no intermarriage. The extent of separation diminished over time; however, their occupational difference was compounded by cultural difference and a residual sense of superiority because they did not come as indentured labourers.
Unlike mainland India, Fiji was governed by British Common Law with no room for separate laws for different religious communities. Fiji Indians, much like their ethnic Fijian counterparts, were products of a deeply Western background in terms of education, social organisation and legal system. Yet Fijians and Indians were kept separate; every aspect of life—be it work, education, residence, or sport—was racially segregated. As late as 1960, there was little social interaction; each harboured deep prejudices about the other. Sharing of political power since independence in 1970 has predictably brought the two communities closer at a formal level, but this itself contributed new dimensions of complexities to the tradition of segregation and prejudice (Norton, 1990: Chs 6 and 7).
The root cause of indenture lies in the dislocation of village life in India following British conquest and administrative reorganisation (Jayawardena, 1980: 431). Since the poorer section of the rural population were the worst victims of the colonial system, recruitment came almost entirely from them; even the Brahmins amongst them were cultivators. Caste hierarchy broke down considerably in the depots of Calcutta and then in the confinement of the ship which took no less than three months to reach Fiji. It was not possible to maintain the commissarial and other taboos in the new environment. In the plantation economy, they were forced to work in coordinated labour units in close proximity and rewarded not on the basis of social status but on that of individual initiative and endeavour. Even after indenture was over, people did not have the right to choose their place of dwelling. The pattern of the Indian nucleated village simply did not exist.
However, this did not mean that for Fiji Indians the social system of Indian villages, which reinforces compliance with accepted rituals, gave way to the impersonality of a secular order. This could not have happened, given the built-in conditions of inequality of a plantation regime. For the indentured population, re-creating “motherland” in its social, cultural and religious manifestations became part of their wider political struggle.
Jayawardena (1980) observes that the complete proletarianisation of Indians in Guyana meant near total loss of home traditions while the Fiji Indians could maintain cultural traditions because of isolated subsistence farming post-indenture (1980: 436). With time, the population become more scattered and professions diversified. This re-emphasised the need to preserve their culture and religion in order to provide support and solidarity among themselves. Interestingly, very few Fiji Indians embraced Christianity. By the time the Christian missionaries began to take an interest in the Indian community, the Indians had already started to reconstitute out of the fragments of their ancestral culture and fashion a new moral universe. The process was helped by visiting religious figures from India. The Hindu reform movement, Arya Samaj, formed in India late last century, had representation in Fiji as early as 1915 while the more orthodox Sanatani Dharma had numerous mandalis (local gatherings) throughout the areas of Indian settlement in Fiji (Lal, 1996).
However, as Indians settled down to post-indenture social and economic order, identity-differentiation occurred. The principal divide was between the North and South Indians. South Indians tried to rediscover their own cultural identity, firstly through another reformist Hindu organisation, Rama Krishna Mission, and then through their own cultural organisation, Sangam, in 1942. Today Sangam is one of the most globalised of cultural fora for South Indian Tamils.
The other divides are of the Hindus and the Muslims and of the Gujratis and the rest of the Indian community. It needs to be emphasised, however, that even though boundaries were maintained cautiously, acrimonies were mostly avoided. The primary reason for this is that, for all these different fragments of the Fiji Indian population, the main sources of cultural threat and political antagonism were the Europeans and the ethnic Fijians. Culturally and morally, what kept providing sustenance to the Fiji Indian community as a whole were the folk traditions of North India, and particularly the ancient epic Ramayan (or better, the popular version composed by Tulsi Das in the sixteenth century, Ramcharitmanas). This epic—along with other cultural expressions of the bhakti movement—not only provided the cultural and moral fodder to the community; in the very process of doing so, it also paved the way for the overwhelming popularity of Hindi popular cinema amongst Fiji Indians.
From the Ramayan to Bollywood
The cultural diet of Indians in Fiji right from the beginning of indenture was profusely imbued with elements of the bhakti (devotion) movement, the popular social and aesthetic movement that spread across India from the twelfth century onwards (Embree, 1988: Ch. 12). It is through the prism of bhakti that they imagined their “motherland” and embraced the popularity of Hindi commercial cinema.
Beyond the narrow sense as a form of worship, bhakti set the paradigm for popular creative expression almost singularly from the twelfth to the eighteenth centuries, and later in combination with other currents of thought. The songs were composed in the vernacular, using quotidian metaphors. They advocated struggle against Brahminism and upheld the sacrosanct nature of every human relationship. Mostly a gesture against authoritarian rule, it was spearheaded by the subaltern classes. The movement was a confluence of many traditions and was not a particularly radical movement, at times showing an uncanny ability to suppress other emergent trends. While the transcendent is to be read in the everyday, it is figured in such a way that it has a levelling influence on all social and cultural divides of mundane existence. Tulsi Das’s Ramcharitmanas formed the centrepiece of bhakti tradition and became the unchallenged cultural meta-text of Hinduism. In the course of time, Gandhi was to privilege Ramcharitmanas to frame a semiotics of cultural politics against colonial rule, as for different and opposed ends was the Rastriya Sawangsevak Sangha (RSS—the martial arm of the currently ruling Bharatiya Janata Party). Throughout the nationalist movement, the Ramayan would function as one of the primary sites of investment for various kinds of rewritings for different cultural and political ends (see Lutgendorf, 1995; Barucha, 1994).
Unlike India (as Chatterjee, 1993 discusses in detail), in indenture Fiji there was no class of gentry to put through a nationalist sieve the various cultural forms that emerged in the encounter with colonial modernity and selectively adopt and combine the reconstituted elements of the supposedly indigenous tradition. In the absence of any philosophical tradition, what prevailed at the beginning were the reminiscences of numerous local cultural traditions of the villages of India. The north Indian village cultural expressions are compact, complex and part of a living tradition. The girmitiyas simplified those traditions they remembered—the dances, the songs, the religious rituals, the sports, the games, the riddles. But most of them disappeared with time, since there was no institutional support which could nourish those traditions (Lal, 1992).
The traditions of village India that survived were basically derived from bhakti—the devotional songs (bhajans) of such composers as Kabir, Mira and Sur Das. But over and above anything else, what inspired their imagination was Tulsi’s Ramcharitmanas. Very early on, reciting, singing and enactment of the Ramayan was revived amongst the Indians of Fiji. This bound together a cultural community to brave the chains of bondage in the fissiparous environment of plantation capitalism where everyone was an individual unit of production and daily existence was measured by work hours.
The Fiji Indians never accepted the status of racially and culturally doomed proletariat and went to great lengths to fashion new hybrid diasporic realities. During the indenture period and the early days of post-indenture, both Hindus and Muslims participated in the major ritual festivals like Holi, the riotous Hindu ritual of reversals, and the Tazia, the Shi’a Islamic Moharram re-enactment of the martyrdom of Husain and Hassan. Both also participated in Ram Lilas, the dramatic re-enactments of the Ramayan narrative, which in indenture days was told as a tale of Ram’s exile, climaxing with the burning of the giant effigy of Ravan symbolising destruction of evil in the world. In these rituals (which were also to be dynamically appropriated into the Bollywood universe), the Indians found their social identity in relation to gods outside of, and in tension with, their colonial racist and economic definitions as “coolies”.
The Ramayan was shorn of deeper philosophical meanings. Its primary function was to serve emotional satisfaction and not individual spiritual enlightenment. As mentioned before, the majority of North Indians in Fiji came from the Ayodha region of India, the homeland of the Ramayan. The reasons for an overwhelming emotional identification with the epic are directly related to the predicament of an indentured diaspora. The central god character, Ram, was banished for fourteen years. For Fiji Indians, it was for at least five years. Ram’s banishment was no fault of his; similarly, it was not the fault of the Indians that they were extracted from their homeland and subjected to inhuman physical labour in this remote island (Lal, 1998). The triumphant ending of all ordeals provided a kind of moral strength to withstand the brutalities of indenture. If Ram could survive for fourteen years, surely the Fiji Indians could do so for five years. The Ramayan thus was used to heal the wounds of indenture and provide a cultural and moral texture in the new settlement. A strong emotional identification to the Ramayan and other expressions of the bhakti movement—a constrained cultural environment, continued degradation at the hands of the racist white regime, a disdain for the culture of the ethnic Fijians, a less hard-pressed post-indenture life and, finally, a deep-rooted need of a dynamic, discursive site for the imaginative reconstruction of motherland—were all factors which, together, ensured the popularity of Hindi films once they started reaching the shores of Fiji. This was because Hindi film deployed the Ramayan extensively, providing the right pragmatics for “continual mythification” of home.
Of cardinal influence on Hindi cinema right from its inception have been the two epics—the Ramayan and the Mahabharata. Apart from providing moral succour, they were also magnificent sources for narrative tropes and cinematic spectacle. Films based on them initiated from the earliest days of cinema a different mode of spectatorship—devout villagers coming to the cities in their bullock carts to have a darsan (devotional sight) of Lord Ram on the screen (Chakravarty, 1993: 35–36). Madhav Prasad (1998) explains the darsanic gaze in the following way:
Contrary to the voyeuristic relation, in the darsanic relation the object gives itself to be seen and in so doing, confers a privilege upon the spectator. The object of the darsanic gaze is a superior, a divine figure or a king who presents himself as a spectacle of dazzling splendour to his subjects. (1998: 75–76; see also Rajadhyaksha, 1987; Vasudevan, 1993)
Thus a thoroughly Western technology of representation was deployed to generate an altogether different gaze—one that will not be found in the visual codes of Hollywood melodramas but is deeply ingrained in Indian religious modes. With time, Bollywood increased its repertoire of different modes of address but the darsanic gaze remained one of the most important moments in its relations with spectators.
Most of the films made during the silent period were mythological and devotional. In the course of time, the predominance of the mythological receded as other genres like the social, historical, comic or fantasy began increasing in popularity. Derné (1995: 195) notes the decline in the number of mythologicals statistically: in 1923, 70 per cent of the films made belonged to this genre; in 1935, it was 22 per cent; and by 1970, it had dropped to 5 per cent. But with the decline of studio production and the rise of independent producers, all these genres gave way to a super-genre called the “social”. By the end of the 1960s, this transition was complete. However, it did not mean that all these genres (including the mythological) simply disappeared; rather, they were subsumed within the “social”. The genealogy of “the all-inclusive Hindi film”, which came to have a variety show look, is contemporaneously called the masala film (Prasad, 1998: 48).
Even during the days of the mythologicals, religion was never an offensive presence. Producers were cautious not to annoy the sensibilities of other religions, due to strict censorship regulations. Partly due to the prevailing censorship norms and partly because Hindi films cater to a multi-religious market, religious motifs are seldom absent but subtle (Derne, 1995). A Hindu way of life constitutes the broad environment for moral elaboration while narrative strategies draw very often—even if allusively—from the two epics. Prasad (1998) has shown that, at its most stable, the social genre included a version of the romance narrative, a comedy track, an average of six songs, as well as a range of familiar character types; the masala aesthetic served as a handy catch-all, an emotional and cultural “map” of the diversity of Indian spectators.
The epics helped Bollywood to fuse the history of the nation and the history of the family. In the Indian narrative tradition, family history is not strictly demarcated from social history. The most obvious examples are these two epics, which are popularly believed to have a historical basis. In the Mahabharata, the battle between the Kauravas and the Pandavas, two branches of the same family, engages vast social, political and cosmic forces, all of which are then sought to be compressed within a single philosophical framework; in the Ramayan, Ram’s relationship with Sita is largely determined by his obligation to his family and, more importantly, his social dharma. Of the two epics, the Ramayan is again privileged because of its elaborations of the familial self and the focus on the duties and sufferings of sati—the chaste wife. Also to be taken into account is the fact that, in North India, the Ramayan’s popularity far exceeds that of the Mahabharata. The usual character stereotypes of Hindi films—the suffering but faithful wife (Sita) who is also a loving and somewhat indulgent sister-in-law; the courageous, dutiful and detached husband (Ram); the faithful brother (Lakshman); and the vengeful, evil villain (Ravan)—are mostly drawn from the Ramayan. Bollywood would experiment with these role models, bring in other stereotypes (like that of the frolicsome Krishna of the Radha-Krishna bhakti motif; or that of dosti—the friendship between two adult males which will be posited against heterosexual love for creating emotionally charged moments in the narrative). But never would Bollywood transgress the moral limits of the Ramayan.
What this effectively means is an inscription of the epics into the discourse of the nation through Hindi cinema. Partha Chatterjee (1984) has argued that Gandhian ideology led to the political appropriation of the subaltern classes by a bourgeoisie aspiring for hegemony in the new nation-state. Hindi cinema situated itself in this hegemony and aided the historical possibility for the appropriation of the masses into the evolving political structures of the Indian state. This explains its popularity across class lines and ability to reconcile within its narrative scope the contradictory aspects of social order.
Vijay Mishra (1985, 1992) points to the mythic underlying drives structuring the epics, but the role of music and romance is just as important. Music functions to transform the epic narratives by foregrounding a romantic repertoire. Romance is absolutely crucial for Bollywood—it is defined by romance. Here Bollywood draws more from the Radha–Krishna trope (of love, desire and erotica) of bhakti than it does from the epics (see below, “Intercommunal Discord and Cultural Assertion”). Bollywood, operating within the moral and social limits of the epics, extends its narrative scope by negotiating with other folk and emerging popular traditions.
Hindi cinema established its traffic to Fiji in the late 1930s. By then the period of indenture was over, the Indian community as independent cultivators had lost the solidarity that characterised life on “the lines” of indenture, and linguistic and religious identities were differentiating. Hindi cinema’s primary impact in Fiji was to bond through meta-narratives with which all the different groups of Fiji Indians could identify. In this cinema, the Fiji Indians found the most lively expression of their yearning for roots and bid to reconstruct an imagined homeland culture in alien surroundings—at once simplified, quotidian and concrete but with a long tradition. And since in Hindi films nation is imagined in familial terms, the physical distance between mainland India and Fiji did not interrupt this “work of imagination”. Evidently the folk traditions borrowed from the villages of India did not get in the way of Hindi cinema’s popularity; to the contrary, by simplifying these traditions in a remote island with very little scope for other kinds of cultural traffic, the folk culture actually prepared the way for the unprecedented popularity of this quasi-globalising mass culture.
As Fiji started urbanising, the local Indian village cultures began to recede in influence, at least in the public cultural spaces of the cities. Once in place, Bollywood created its own public and psychic platform for people to interact. (My numerous respondents have narrated how, as boys or girls, they used to gather around the movie halls long before showtime.) The gossip columns, the 24-hour Hindi radio service, the occasional visits of singers and stars from the then Bombay—all this went into constituting the culture of a community which harboured no illusion of return but, for reasons of identity and cultural makeup, yearned for a romanticised version of India that Bollywood amply provided. The genealogy of unprecedented popularity of the mass cultural tradition of Bollywood in Fiji thus lies in the diasporic rediscovery of “little” traditions that the girmitiyas brought with them and preserved for over a century.
The platform that Bollywood provides has much to do with its particular mode of enunciation:
Repeat viewing is . . . a common part of the everyday parlance of film appreciation in Bombay, where people will often tell each other that they have seen a film 10 to 15 times. While it is not always clear that these numerical claims are exactly accurate, they indicate an aesthetic in which repeat viewing is a sign of the committed connoisseur. (Appadurai, 1998)
The typical Bollywood film is not a psychologically integrated unit, but a loose compound of various elements—like action, love, song and dance, dialogue, crime, devotion, special effects and so on. What keeps these disparate elements together is the star system, with its retinue of reviews, magazines, interviews, blow-ups, television shows, ads, publicity materials, gossip columns, enormous billboards dotting the urban landscapes, displaying the stars in larger than life proportions, autobiographies and fan club hagiographies. Rajadhyaksha and Willeman (1995: 10) call this “the distinctive ‘insiderism’ of a buddy culture of speech and body-language”.
Satellite television, with its plethora of programs on Bollywood (mostly, though not exclusively, of song and dance sequences), has made this “insiderism” very much a part of daily living. With the availability of cheap audiocassettes and recorders, the cult of music has spread rapidly—even to the remotest corners of India. The role of music in Bollywood—where almost all the films have at least half a dozen songs by well-known “playback” singers—is absolutely central. These songs have several important features. Written frequently by authors who were Urdu language poets and often migrants to Mumbai from the North, these songs still have roots in certain popular forms of North Indian poetry, notably ghazal, which have highly developed and aestheticised verbal forms. Appadurai describes how these songs form a big part of the acoustic ecology of everyday life in cities and small towns. They are a crucial part of the repertoire of street singers who take the place of the “star” duets in the films. All these feed into the social space of the auditorium:
Anyone who has been to a popular Hindi film knows that a large amount of the leadership in any given audience signals its authority by indicating its command of both songs and script, largely by cheering when a certain “hit” song or song-and-dance sequence is about to begin, by singing along on occasion, and by expressing various bodily signs of pleasure when key songs arrive. This anticipatory pleasure and mnemonic command, which is part of the folk aesthetics of cinema, is closely tied to the collective and interactive nature of film going and cannot be separated from two other elements of popular reception, dialogue and stars. (Appadurai, 1998; see also Srinivas, 1996)
While the very different historical trajectory of indenture and post-indenture paved the way for Bollywood, once in place in Fiji, Bollywood did not need “the particular conditions of the experiment”—that is, similarity to the cultural, economic and political conditions of India. The cult of Bollywood that the Fiji Indians reproduced in Fiji is not a case of mimicry, since repetition is inscribed in the very mode of being of Bollywood. If Bollywood is made the mainstay of cultural life (which to a very large extent is the case with Fiji Indians), it will of necessity repeat its entire cultural ecology—its “insiderism”. This insiderism constructs a sense of mythological nationhood with very tenuous links with the actual geography of a nation. Hence living in the realities of Fiji and participating in the life of Bollywood is not a case of split existence, since such a split is postulated on a divide between the real and the imagined, something that Bollywood disavows.
Fiji Indian Cultural Ecology in Australia
Despite the recency of their arrival in Australia, and the structural deficits they face in employment, the Fiji Indians have re-established themselves with a cultural dynamism that is out of all proportion to their numbers and which can be sourced to their embrace of the cultural repertoire proffered by Bollywood. The very strong concentration of the population in Sydney makes it necessary to focus this discussion there.
In Sydney, the professional Fiji Indians are scattered all over the city while those in blue-collar jobs tend to concentrate in one or two regions. In the immediate years after the coup, they concentrated in the Campsie region of Sydney. Latterly, Liverpool—and to some extent Bankstown—are the two suburbs to where a majority of the working-class Fiji Indians have moved. Liverpool, with a number of big Indo-Fijian grocery shops, a couple of garment houses, one movie hall and a night club, is fast emerging as the centre of Indo-Fijian cultural life. In 1998, there were four cinemas that ran Hindi films on weekends in Sydney, with one of them in Fairfield looking at moving to daily screenings. However, the number of movie halls is becoming a less reliable indicator of the popularity of Hindi film culture in its diasporic context since few recent Bollywood blockbusters reach the cinemas outside India due to large-scale pirating.3
There are three nightclubs in Sydney catering to Indian film culture. Ashiki started in 1994, followed the next year by the Ambassador Lounge in Fairfield. However, both of these are rented places that operate only on weekends. Their capacity is also restricted to less than 200 people. The first large centre dedicated to Indian entertainment, inaugurated in 1997, is the Bollywood Reception Centre. It is jointly owned by a Punjabi and an Indo-Fijian. It has a capacity of nearly a thousand. These entertainment centres, as well as the Indian garment houses, cater primarily to Fiji Indians. Compared with the mainland Indians, who generally show little interest in Bollywood-centred nightlife, the Pakistanis are relatively more visible. However, even they have a marginal presence. The public life of Bollywood in Sydney—mostly an Fiji Indian affair—is a matter of billing film stars and playback singers, organising film-music nights and beauty contests, with establishments like fashion-shops offering the latest designs from films, production of local music videos, and setting up music schools where young people are trained in film songs.
Beauty contests are organised two or three times a year. Unlike London, where the participants come from the United Kingdom, Western Europe, North America and South Asia, those in Sydney are restricted either to Australia or at best to Australia, New Zealand and Fiji. There are a number of bands specialising in Hindi film music in Sydney, of which two are particularly well known. These are His Master’s Orchestra and the Saraswani Orchestra. These bands perform around Australia and also in New Zealand and Fiji. While all the bands are owned and managed by Fiji Indians, there are a number of mainland Indian singers and musicians. However, they identify themselves for professional reasons with the Fiji Indian community. One such singer has brought out several CDs in India. These are mostly popular Hindi movie songs and a couple of ghazals (light classical North Indian music that had its roots in the Mughal courts). It is not unknown for well-known artists to have appeared on the popular commercial television network in India, Zee TV.
There are also a few Fiji Indian DJs and a number of karaoke singers. One of the DJs, DJ Akash, has several CDs of Bollywood remixes to his credit. He works in close consultation with DJ Bali Sagu, a second-generation Indo-Britisher, who initiated the trend of remixes of old Bollywood music scores with his album, Bollywood Flashbacks, in 1994. Sagu’s album was an instant hit and a trendsetter, especially among young diasporic Indians. A Londoner brought up in a black locality, Sagu made creative use of his exposure to Afro-Caribbean and Western rock and pop music to set the Bollywood hit numbers of the past to new kinds of beat. Bollywood Flashbacks contains mostly the old numbers of the famous music director, R.D. Burman. Sagu had all the numbers re-sung and remixed to Western rhythms with patches of rap. Sony Entertainment Channel, which brought out the CD, paid for the copyright. The album has been played on the radio stations in Britain and the United States as well as in Australia. In fact, it was the first Hindi CD to hit the charts in the United Kingdom. Since then, a vast number of Bollywood hit songs have been remixed. Mostly HMV brings out these remixed numbers, since until recently it had a near-monopoly over the Indian music market and owned the copyright for these songs. The original voice remains the same, but is put to different music (adding more bass lines, for instance) and a different drum pattern. This offers young Indians dance music which negotiates heritages successfully, and is also widely available on music video. The CDs of DJ Akash remain, however, largely a local affair, with rights limited to the Australasian market.
Sydney has a number of karaoke singers. They sing to pre-recorded Hindi film music. Amongst Sydney Indo-Fijians, it is quite common to employ karaoke singers for small weekend parties. For the singers, this offers exposure and also a source of income. Indian karaoke singers restrict themselves to Bollywood hit numbers and no improvisation is expected.
Several Fiji Indian magazines are published by the Fiji Indian community of Sydney. The majority of these are dedicated largely to Bollywood film culture, like the Fiji Times, Fiji India Sun and, most recently, Starblitz. The Fiji Times, with a circulation of 7000 after free distribution and relying on advertising revenue from community businesses, has set a trend: now almost all the Indian magazines are distributed free of cost. Others, like The Indian Observer (also run by a Fiji Indian journalist), are more political in orientation, though they too have a regular section dedicated to Bollywood and its cultural expressions in Sydney. Interestingly, the Fiji Times is circulated only in Sydney. This is perhaps an indication of the little interest Indian commercial establishments have outside Sydney. (This does not mean that Indian diasporas have no presence in other cities of Australia. What is does indicate is Sydney’s disproportionately large concentration of Fiji Indians—the main clientele of Indian commercial houses in Australia.)
Brisbane’s Bollywood cultural life, very much like that of Sydney, is mostly a Fijian Indian affair. It has one regular band, Sargam, but relies on Sydney bands for major occasions. There are no nightclubs and no established tradition of karaoke. Public performances, far fewer in number than in Sydney, are hosted in rented auditoriums. Like other Indian communities, for the Fiji Indians the relation to Bollywood is mostly restricted to renting Hindi videos, though as a community they are undoubtedly the highest consumers. (According to different Indian video shops in Brisbane, especially those in the south and southeast parts of the city where most of the community live, about 70 per cent of those who hire videos on a regular basis are Fiji Indians.)
The reason for Brisbane’s lack of a public face for Bollywood culture is partly due to the composition of the Indian community with a preponderance of those from the professional class. Primarily, however, it is a question of size. With a population of less than 10 000, the Fiji Indian community does not have the resources to support an ongoing Bollywood cultural economy and, with migration having dwindled to barely a few hundred every year, there is no sign that the Fiji Indian presence in Brisbane will increase substantially. The absence of a public culture of Bollywood impacts on the identity politics of second-generation Fiji Indians. In general, the young Fiji Indians of Brisbane prefer to portray themselves as much less “outgoing” vis-à-vis their Sydney counterparts, less experimental about Bollywood (“interested in the professional part of singing and not merely remixes”), less hyped and much more rooted in the values of Indian culture. As a young woman active in Brisbane’s Fiji Indian cultural world puts it:
We are more Indians. In the way we mix with people, our morals and culture, the way we dress—in every way, we are truer to our Indian ways. For Sydney, India is a commodity to be bought and sold; for us, India is a way of life.
No matter how Brisbane youth likes to project its difference vis-à-vis Sydney, however, Brisbane Fiji Indians do bid to reproduce Sydney’s Bollywood culture, albeit with limited success. For instance, Brisbane experimented with a Sydney-style nightclub called “Must Must” (taken from a hit Bollywood score of 1990), but it only lasted four months due to lack of patronage. Very much like Sydney, Brisbane has a number of Bollywood orchestras. The more prominent of these, Indiana Orchestra, staged around ten programs between 1995 and 1998, mostly with local talent, though they do borrow artists from Sydney on a regular basis. Usually, orchestras from Sydney perform in Brisbane, as they do in other parts of Australia. Of late, however, the relation has been balanced to some extent with the rise of the “Melody Queen of Queensland”, Aiysha.
Aiysha’s career in Indian music is worthy of some attention. She migrated to Australia when she was only one year old. She grew up in Gatton, where there were no other families of Indian origin. She spoke English at home and had no Hindi until she started watching Hindi film videos brought home by her parents from either Brisbane or Sydney. She was trained in English music at school, where she sang for the school choir. She started taking an interest in Hindi film music, “just as a hobby”, around the age of twelve. When she moved to Brisbane a couple of years later, what had been a “hobby” became for her a “passion”. She took her first formal training in film music and ghazals during a year’s visit to Sydney. By the time she was twenty, she brought out her first CD of Hindi film music, the first person from Brisbane to achieve this feat. She has performed with her troupe twice in Sydney, in 1997 and 1998, to packed houses. In the arena of cultural performance, recognition in Sydney is of supreme importance in Australia. It was only after her success in Sydney that Aiysha could bring out her CD of Hindi film songs and ghazals (Aiysha, 1998).
One of the expressions of the overwhelming influence of Bollywood in Sydney is the community’s attempts to make video films in Hindi. The process started in 1994 and, to 1998, four such films have been produced and two were in the process of being produced. Starblitz calls it “Bollywood Down Under” and has a regular column devoted to it. These are locally financed, low-budget, somewhat experimental Hindi films (on one occasion, the director has tried Fiji Hindi). These films are sold through Indian video shops and on public occasions screened by overhead video projector. Interestingly, these films are usually closer to Hollywood than Bollywood in narrative and moral scheme. One film, Achanak (meaning a contingent event), is loosely based on Basic Instinct, while another, Biswas (Faith), is based on the Rocky films. These films are less convoluted in their narrative strategies than the average Bollywood product, with very few songs. The appeal of such films is restricted so far to the younger generation, who have no illusion that the films will travel beyond Australia or in any way infringe on Bollywood’s market. Rather, these films are more an expression of the deep involvement with the culture of cinema amongst young Fiji Indians and a desire to capture the new diasporic locale and the specificities of the migrant experience. Another example, Kayalat (meaning the desire to be somebody else), narrates the story of a Fiji Indian girl who is trapped in her marriage with a Fiji Indian man. The husband does not try to appreciate the changes in her self-perception that a diasporic situation has brought to her life. Interestingly enough, she does not solve her dilemma by embracing Western culture, but tries to find an identity which is her own. Towards the end of the film, she is found involved with a Fiji Indian man of working-class background. At a deeper level, these films reflect at once the attachment to Bollywood culture and a measure of unease of Fiji Indian youth regarding Bollywood’s continued reliance on “traditional Indian mores and morals”, notwithstanding the vast changes these have undergone in recent years.
Intercommunal Discord and Cultural Assertion
The ethnic, caste and class differences between mainland Indians and Fiji Indians have given rise to intracommunal tensions and rivalries which are neither new nor restricted only to Australia (see Buchignani, 1980). Many mainland Indians exhibit deeply entrenched casteist attitudes and view the indentured past of the Fiji Indians as a non-negotiable barrier.4 On the other side, Fiji Indians often characterise mainland Indians with the same kind of negative attributes that they were wont to use for ethnic Fijians. Both realise the need for a united front to deal with Australian racism, but both view each other as an obstacle to better acceptance by the “white nation”. Mainland Indians now constitute an other for this community, just as the ethnic Fijians did back in Fiji.
What have the implications been for the media and cultural economy from intercommunal discord? There have been acrimonious exchanges across the communities using aligned newspapers as a platform, culminating in inflammatory articles and letters on both sides in the mainland mouthpiece, Indian Post, in March and April 1997 and in the Fiji Indian Fiji Times in April and May 1997. (A less partisan view was offered in the April and June 1997 issues of another Fiji Indian tabloid published from Sydney, the Indian Observer.) Fiji Times editor Nick Kumar demanded an apology from the Indian Post and virtually threatened that if the editor of the Indian Post did not oblige, business establishments that advertised in the Indian Post in future would be boycotted by Fiji Indians (Kumar, 1997). This softened the attitude of Indian Post considerably and, over some months, a compromise was effected since the main clientele of Indian business in Australia are the Fiji Indians.
However, the rivalry between the two communities continues and often is focused on media and film culture. At the time of the controversy, Sanjay Dello, the editor of the Indian Post, argued that while the Fiji Indians are “good Hindus” and “they are the people who spend”, their “westernised ways” and “excessive attachment to filmy culture” bring disrepute to the Indian community as a whole (Dello, 1997). However, if sharing of the advertising cake was one of the issues of contention between these two magazines (the April 1997 editorial of the Fiji Times argues such: ‘Is it a desperate bid by a publisher to regain the readership and advertising base that has been severely eroded by the expanding Fiji India media?’), the Indian Post was a clear victor; in terms of circulation, the magazine’s gains were considerable (Kumar, 1998). This suggests that the controversy made the Indian Post more popular amongst a section of Indian readers.
Such rivalry between the two communities has seen the reassertion of culture and ethnicity by Fiji Indians. This involves a positive mobilisation of indenture history and an emphasis on a Hindu way of life in a Western context that bears similarities to Gillespie’s (1995) account of self-construction of identity through the positive assertion of ethnicity (1995: 8–11). The dominant racism of white Australia, the ostracism by mainland Indians, the need of the older generation for a platform to socialise and to reflect (which will also function as a moral regime for younger people) have together fed into a resurgence of religion and revival of folk traditions, neglected in today’s urban Fiji.
Jayawardena (1980) notes that, in urban Fiji, European culture is the medium within which members of different ethnic sections interact with one another (1980: 441–42). The impact of Western institutions has been more profound than in India since, unlike mainland Indians, Fiji Indians have been subject to a uniform civil code. However, this uniform civil code in Fiji operates in a power matrix where Fiji Indians were in a distinctly disadvantageous position, initially with regard to the white indenture regime and then vis-à-vis ethnic Fijians. The result of a process of “uniformity in the context of inequality” has been that, as a community, Fiji Indians retain their own cultural identity while their public life moves freely in and out of the European, Fijian and Indian cultural spheres. This heritage has contributed to Fiji Indians adapting rapidly to an advanced Western lifestyle in their diasporic contexts.
One of the most creative methods of adaptation is the assertive construction of a cultural community around Ramayan Katha and bhajan mandalis (small gatherings for devotional songs), which paved the way for Bollywood’s popularity. For the last couple of decades, these traditions were mostly on the decline in urban Fiji. Once in Australia, these have regained their popularity as a platform to unite the community and act as a moral regime for young people.
The Ramayan narrates the story of the victory of the Aryans over the Dravidians of South India. Understandably, it enjoys little popularity in South India. One of the reasons why the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) has not been able to make inroads in the South is its close identification with the cultural tradition of the Ramayan. However, in the displaced context of indenture, South Indians as latecomers made Ram Katha part of their own cultural tradition. In Sydney, the same tradition continues; in fact, in many cases the initiative and leadership of such occasions come from the South Indians. The situation is made complex by the fact that, along with being patrons of the Ramayan, the South Indian Fiji Indians of Sydney have started taking a renewed interest in Sangam, the Tamil cultural organisation that had its origin in Fiji but now operates worldwide from Hawaii.
Such hybridity—at once progressive in its refusal to be bound by millennial caste and regional boundary-marking and traditional in its recovery of deep religious roots—is also evident among the two other important groups of Fiji Indians—the Gujaratis and Muslims. The Gujaratis, as I have mentioned, were always keen on retaining a measure of their ethnic identity due to their different history in Fiji. As primarily a trading community, it is understandable that, of all the communities of Indian origin, they show the most interest in developing transterritorial networks. Consequently, once in Australia, the split between their two identities—namely as Fiji Indian and as member of an ethnic community of a certain professional trait—is enhanced.
The case of Fiji Indian Muslims is similar. In terms of ethnicity, they are part of the Fiji Indian community. But as members of a religious group, life in Australia has meant for them more interaction with Muslims from other parts of the world: both ethnicity and religion are strong but disparate identities for Fiji Indian Muslims. During the indenture period, Muslims had little opportunity for religious and cultural expression of their own; they used to regularly take part in Hindu festivities and folk cultural gatherings. However, with the visit of several Imams from India, attempts were made to reconstitute their identity in religious lines. However, the tradition of attending Hindu celebrations like bhajan mandalis and Ram Katha never ceased throughout their history in Fiji. As a result of developing new axes of socialisation on religious lines in the new diasporic context, this tradition is much less visible. Mosques now play more significant roles in their lives and there is a marked emphasis on learning Arabic, the language with which Muslims identify globally. The world of Bollywood culture (where their presence is considerable) now provides one of the cultural main links with other members of the Fiji Indian community.
The cultural divide between the Arya Samaj and Sanatani Dharma is taking interesting shape too in the new diasporic location. Traditionally, the Sanatanis were concerned with different rituals of Hindu religion while the Arya Samaj placed more emphasis on education and spiritual enlightenment. The difference was of cultural priorities and rarely one of overt antagonism. In Australia, the two groups have come much closer and they both participate in the same cultural activities. However, since the members of the Arya Samaj are traditionally more educated than the Sanatanis, as a group they belong to a higher class. This has its own cultural ramifications, one of which is that, though Arya Samajis participate in Bollywood-centred cultural activities, their involvement is on a much less active level than that of the Sanatanis.
We need to remember that the domains of the Ram Katha cultural traditions and Bollywood are rarely separate. We have noted the impact of the Ramayan on Hindi films; Ram Katha too borrows episodes from the mass media (Lutgendorf, 1995). Marked by endless digressions and presented in highly colloquial style, Ram Katha follows no one particular tradition of the Ramayan. Rather, the epic functions as a “cultural meta-text” for individual and collective expression and reflection, where new episodes are often invented, while some others are forgotten.
Significantly enough, in the Hindu religious traditions, devotion and erotica are rarely separate departments of life and one very often evokes the other. This is particularly so with the bhakti tradition from which Tulsi Das’s Ramcharitmanas emanates. In the bhakti taxonomy, shringar is the highest form of devotion—the erotic bond between the devotee (a woman) and the deity (a man). In one of the forms of shringar, the female denies herself, her family, all bonds and social constrictions and pursues the love of Krishna. Radha is the epitome of this love and devotion. The trope of Radha and Krishna puts together social transgression, erotica and devotion. As the supreme expression of desire and pathos, it has for centuries provided inspiration for bhajans (i.e. devotional songs). It has also served Bollywood as a source of much of its music, narrative and allegory. This means that cultural and religious assertion of tradition has not been in opposition to Bollywood; in fact, in a Western diasporic context, it provides young Fiji Indians with the cultural capital to really appreciate Bollywood.
The recent media boom in India has contributed to this process in significant ways. Partly as a legacy of the phenomenal success of the television serials, Ramayan and Mahabharata, and partly as a market response to the rise of Hindu nationalism, there has of late been a flood of mythological and devotional serials available on video in all the major Indian diasporic centres. Producers have responded to demand by importing the latest technology for special effects, resulting in a hi-tech devotional glut: Mahabharat Katha, Ek Aur Mahabharat, Om Namah Shivay, Jai Ganesha, Daya Sagar (on the life of Christ), Jai Hanuman, Shiv Mahapuram are a few examples (Jain, 1997: 70–73).
Linked with this—and perhaps more profound in effect—is the recent rise of devotional music. Technological reproduction has played a pivotal role in India from early this century to popularise bhakti music. For instance, the Mira bhajans of M.S. Subhalakshmi in the 1940s were a major hit all over India. However, the availability of cheap audio players and cassettes from around the mid-1980s has provided a new dimension to this process. Going by industry figures, the market for pre-recorded Indian cassettes was 505 million units in 1996, of which the devotional music market was 5 per cent. In terms of gross number, this represents a steep hike for devotional music. Front-runner in this trend is the music company called T-Series which brings out 150 to 200 devotional titles every year at a relatively cheap price. The logic for privileging devotional music is its very low production cost (almost one-fifteenth of a pop album) and relatively longer shelf life. The primary market for this music is Indian small towns; next on the list are the Indian diasporas. Along with the expanding market has been a spread of its repertoire—from the standard Ramayan and Bhagabat Gita to Rath Yatra and Satyanarayan Katha (Chopra and Joshi, 1997: 46–47).
The Fiji Indians, with a long tradition of attachment to bhajan and other devotional songs, have been influenced by this boom in the devotional music market in India. Coming into contact with mainland Indians has not only meant digging up casteist and indenture memories; it has, more positively, opened new possibilities for creative expressions by exposing the community to the wider world of Indian music and dance. There are many more Indian dance and music (especially, classical) schools in Sydney than was the case in Fiji. The result has been quick to materialise: from receivers of Indian cultural artefacts, the community has become a producer. In the field of devotional music, however, this exposure is impacting the community in a significant way. For more than a century, Fiji Indians were used to singing the Bhojpuri (from the district in Bihar called Bhojpur) style of bhajan called tambura bhajan. Now this is giving way (at least for a section of the community) to the more classically-oriented bhajan of Anup Jalota, Hari Om Sharan, Anuradha Paudwal and others through audiocassettes produced in India. The CDs of some of the bhajan singers of the Sydney community are clear proof of this trend. In terms of the dialectics of “great” and “little” traditions, this may be regarded as a case of a “little” tradition being dissolved in the “great” tradition that McKim Marriot calls “universalisation”.
Fiji Indian Youth Culture and Post-Zee Bollywood
The most dynamic aspect of Fiji Indian youth culture centres on the use of Bollywood to negotiate a kind of parallel cultural platform to the dominant Western pop culture. This can be understood through grasping the enormous changes that Bollywood itself has undergone in recent years, especially since the advent of Zee TV. Zee programming has branded itself as a halfway house between the Star TV brand and traditional Hindi film, creating a hybrid genre that refers strongly to Western-style music and dance. Such types of dance and music are now also the mainstay of Bollywood, especially of the new genre of “teenage romance” that has come into being in the liberalising India of the 1990s. The Bollywood of tear-jerker melodramatic plots and folksy music with the male and female protagonists dancing in the luxuriant Himalayan foothills or the vast, empty stretches of a beach has not disappeared, but contemporary Bollywood is increasingly driven by contemporary music culture, and in large part by hugely extravagant song-music sequences with ever more tenuous links to the plot.
The satellite television revolution of the 1990s impacted on Bollywood in several ways. On the one hand, it caused huge investment in choreography and spectacle as part of the attempt to bring spectators lost to television back to the auditorium. On the other hand, such song-dance routines not only provide regular fodder for the plethora of song and dance programs on television (in 1997, about 65 programs interspersed over the rapidly expanding multichannel packages were song-based); because of the popularity of these programs, it is these sequences which determine a movie’s fate, both at the box-office and in the exploding music market. There is also the radical transformation in the character of this music. From being mostly a combination of Indian folk music, light classical Indian music and the standard Western popular music, Bollywood now freely mixes rap, Latin American and Black music with traditional Indian music. As part of the same process of the “MTV-isation” of Indian popular entertainment, there has emerged an extra-cinematic realm of Hindi pop-music and pop-stars, like Remo Fernandes, Alisha Chenoy, Sharon Prabhakar, Parvati Khan and “rap” artists like Baba Sehgal. DJ Akash explains the implication of such music for young diasporic Indians in the following terms:
Ten years back, a young Indian would listen to his music in a very low volume. He would consider his music to be very “tacky” and would have felt awkward to play it publicly in a Western context. The contemporary Bollywood music, by blending Indian melody with Western beats, has changed all this. Today, if you go down the streets of Sydney, very often you will hear Indian music blasting. Young people no longer consider the Bollywood songs to be “curry music”. This music no longer sounds strange to the average Westerner.
Arguably because of this hybridisation of Bollywood music, it manages to signify something special to the diasporic young Indians. Asked about the continued influence of Bollywood music, a young Fiji Indian performed this analysis:
Bollywood has got the potential. It has got feeling. When you are happy you have something to sing, in love you sing, when you are sad you sing. You can relate to it. Consider the recent hit, “Dil To Pagaal Hai” (my heart has gone wild). It is about love and affection with which a young person can immediately identify. All those who are in love would buy the CD for their girl friends; they would send requests to the radio channel for the song to be played. We relate to it in two ways: i) visual part—i.e. what the main guy and main girl did in the movie, and ii) the meaning of the lyric. Compared to this, Hollywood music hardly has any message that we can relate to. Take Men in Black for instance. We could barely identify with the hit score. The messages of Bollywood with which we are brought up hardly get conveyed to us there. There is nothing of our own in such music.
Fiji Indian young people use a wholly hybridised genre like the remixes to fashion a discourse of authenticity. On the one hand, they will deploy the remixes as part of syncretic metropolitan culture and thus break out of the cartography that views their culture as ethnic. On the other hand, they perceive these remixes (for them, an essentially diasporic phenomenon) as part of their attempt to promote Indian popular music by making it contemporary; this they will compare to the Indian nightclub crowd which, according to them, is hooked on unadulterated Western hard rock and heavy metal. A Fiji Indian enthusiast of “Indi-pop” describes her experience in terms that converge as being “Western” and being “Indian”: as a Westerner, she prefers Indi-pop to traditional Indian popular music (which for her is “a bit too romantic and at times unacceptably melodramatic”); she is also “far more of an eastern person” vis-à-vis her Mumbai counterpart:
When I went to India, I found that kids are not thrilled with remixes. To be honest, I got the impression that they are quite wary of this kind of experiment; they think that it is corrupting the original music scores. On the other hand, I found night clubs in Bombay [sic.] are more influenced by Hollywood than Bollywood. I was shocked to find many Indian girls dancing to heavy metal and hard rock. This is pretty aggressive by Indian standards. I haven’t seen any girl of Indian origin doing that sort of dance in Sydney . . . Kids in Bombay go to nightclubs to become western. Here we go to assert our eastern identity. The basic difference lies there.
Apart from remixes of popular scores, bhangra as a dance beat serves an important role in the deployment of Indian popular music for the purpose of being “agreeably different” in a Western context. Originated in rural Punjab as a harvest dance, bhangra’s potential to provide the right kind of beat for clubbing was first explored by the Punjabis of Southall (Haq, 1997). Fiji Indians were not exposed to bhangra in Fiji. But in the last ten years, it has gained great popularity amongst the young Fiji Indians of Australia. In recent years, on every Wednesday night, Sydney community radio 2SER plays bhangra-pop. Bhangra did not come to Australia from India; rather, it came from London. In fact, it can be argued that the recent popularity of bhangra-pop in India with the rise of such stars as Daler Mehendi is very much a case of the diaspora reworking the homeland.
Diasporising Bollywood
Contemporary Bollywood is unabashedly urban and increasingly global in its settings. Less than 5 per cent of films now have rural stories as opposed to 15–20 per cent ten years back (Chopra, 1997: 54–55). Western locales are being juxtaposed with rural and urban India—for example, in Pardes, a north Indian village seamlessly gives way to Los Angeles in the middle of the plot; or, in a reverse pattern, the diasporic protagonists of the highly successful Dilwale Dulhaniya Le Jayenge travel through the continent to reach the bountiful villages of Punjab of their ancestors where the main action will take place. The urban market now accounts for more than 60 per cent of a film’s earnings, compared with 45 per cent ten years ago; the overseas market, too—now a substantial 20–25 per cent—is increasing with every passing year. Many Bollywood films both promote and reflect the diasporic imaginaire that has squarely set in for the post-liberalisation new urban middle class. For Thomas Hansen (1996: 603), the cultural significance of globalisation for a postcolonial nation like India lies in the crucial ambivalence between its promises of recognition of nations and cultures, and its simultaneous threat of subversion of political sovereignty and cultural particularity. In these days of a global cultural economy, where more than half of the world’s economy revolves around communication and lifestyle industries, the distinction between the cultural-spiritual and the technological-economic is difficult to maintain. And if that is so, it is all the more imperative that differences are imagined all over again.
Bollywood has not only coped with the challenges of globalisation, but taken advantage of the new situation by enlarging its terrain. This it has achieved by creating a spectatorship aware of the specific requirements of the diasporas, as well as those living in India. A globalising world of communication and capital flow, instead of imposing a hegemonic cultural world order, has triggered a politics of space whereby the diasporas of a particular community dispersed worldwide are networked to the homeland culture to such an extent that the traditional divide of outside/inside loses much its analytical purchase. In contemporary Bollywood, it is interesting to see how the inscription of the citizen consumer, its ideal contemporary spectator, has offered spaces for assertion of identity for Bollywood’s diasporic clientele vis-à-vis the host culture and, in the case of Fiji Indians, with the mainland Indian communities as well.
Perceived as vulgar and prolific, at once strangely irrational and easily masterable, Bollywood until recently managed to generate very little scholarly interest: for Western film academia, it was a matter of regular indifference, while for Indian film criticism, it was a target of unequivocal condemnation. The reasons were: a tendency to stasis at the level of narrative and character development; an emphasis on externality, whether of action or character representation; melodramatic sentimentality; crude or naive plot mechanisms such as coincidence; narrative dispersion through arbitrary performance sequences; and unrestrained and over-emotive acting styles (Vasudevan, 1993: 57). What such shock reactions to this cinema’s “lack of realism, restraint and psychological feasibility” conveniently overlook, however, is its enormous innovation in fashioning itself as the most reliable archive of popular hopes and disillusionment, and the ability to locate itself in the locus of influential and contesting definitions of “Indianness”.
It can be argued that, following the emergence of the super-genre of the “social” in the 1960s, Bollywood underwent its next major change in the late 1980s–early 1990s, coping with the tides of globalisation. As part of this change, the diasporic Indian (popularly known as the Non-Resident Indian (NRI)) is now very much part of its address. This was necessary not only to embrace Bollywood’s diasporic clientele, but also to secure its popularity at home since the one self has to see its reflection in the other for its globalising ideal self-definition. In the new troping of the home and the world, those who are brought up outside India have India inside them very much as the West is inscribed in the heart of India. This enmeshing of identities has enabled Bollywood to address the moral and cultural alienation that diasporic youth feel with Hindi films made on “standard formula”, while it also offers them the difference they want vis-à-vis Hollywood.
Earlier Bollywood was not governed by consideration of community “out there”; community was securely at home. Hence representations of abroad could only take the form of the travelogue. For instance, towards the later part of the super-hit Sangam (1964), the couple go on an exotic tourist album honeymoon trip to the West. Bollywood in its new incarnation not only very often physically locates itself in the West; the central roles in the narrative too are reserved increasingly for the figure of diasporic youth. Blockbusters such as Dilwale Dulhaniya Le Jayenge and Pardes are only two examples of a host of such films that include Lamhe, Virasat and Aur Pyar Ho Gaya.
With consumption acquiring a different inscription, recent Bollywood has offered for its diasporic youth clientele a trajectory of “Western-style” glamour, wealth and liberty, but on its own terms. Bollywood manages the ensuing alienation with the mass audience of India by the sheer strength of its vast repertoire, which even now has a large space for films of earlier eras. For the new Bollywood, too, it is not as if though it merely mimics Hollywood. Rather, the semiotics of exchange with Hollywood has in recent years taken an interesting turn. The biggest hit in recent years, Kuch Kuch Hota Hai (1998), for instance, completes this India/West circuit by not venturing to go abroad at all; instead, it creates a virtual “West” within the bounds of India. In fact, in terms of mise-en-scene, the film has internalised the West into India to the extent that it does not even have to announce that it is the West. Thematically, once the tomboy character of the heroine (played by the mega-star, Kajol) is established, the rest of the narrative concentrates on bringing her femininity to the fore. The framing of the woman as powerless, and above all a wife and a mother, while at the same time allowing her a certain space, a freedom for the pleasure of her subsequent disciplining, has been the general narrative-ethical guideline since the early days of the “social” in the 1950s. Kuch Kuch Hota Hai does not alter the terms of what we might call this “Sita” trope, but pushes it to accommodate a decisively urbanised, globalised (basketball-playing, baseball cap-wearing) female prototype; neither is her subsequent realisation of a more feminised, “Indian” self jarring to her earlier posturing. In fact, such realisation will only act to make her a more holistic woman. In a similar vein, the other female protagonist of the film, the Oxford-returned, guitar-strumming girl (played by Rani Mukherjee), who can also quickly switch on to singing Hindu religious hymns—and to whom the hero gets married but who dies at childbirth—is not a “vamp from the West” (as earlier films of similar narrative would almost certainly portray her to be) but a nice, pleasant woman who happens to wear Westernised clothes in a sexualised sense. This, then, would be internalised in the Indian imaginary as not someone who represents the West (since “West” is very much in India), but simply as someone who has lived in the West.
Bollywood representation establishes the “Indian” community as a national but global community. To ritually assert—as Bollywood characters often do—that one is part of such an ideal community, it is important that one knows what one is part of. This involves returning to India and seeking sanctions from the original patriarchal order. Dilwale Dulhaniya Le Jayenge is a remarkable instance of such reworking of traditional patriarchal moral scheme. The film begins with the memorable montage of the heroine’s father (acted by Amresh Puri): as a Punjabi farmer, he is straddling past the mustard fields of Punjab; then through a dissolve, he is seen journeying past Big Ben and Westminster (wearing his Punjabi ajkan), and finally feeding grain to the pigeons in the city square of London and remembering ancestral Punjab in a voice deeply laden with nostalgia. In the film, Puri is the epitome of a darsanic figure, bestowing sanction within the orbit of his darshan. The narrative then moves from the domestic space of the heroine in London to the continent with the couple and finally reaches rural Punjab, where the heroine (acted by Kajol) is supposed to have an arranged marriage with a local boy. Once the couple reaches rural Punjab, the film changes gear and becomes unusually slow. The gaze is fixed on the nitty gritty of the marriage rituals, staged in a static, ornate fashion. The point of view is of the hero, who witnesses the preparations but from a remove. It is important that the occasion is not contested, since the pleasure lies in its staging. The spectatorship at this point is clearly diasporic.
The action takes place at the very end of the film, when the heroine’s father throws the hero out of his house and the proposed son-in-law starts beating the hero in a typical vendetta fashion. The hero does nothing to defend himself but significantly, once his father is hit by one of the men of the heroine’s father, he plunges into action and manifests aggression to defend his father. It is at this point that heroine’s father gives sanction to the hero: defending the father means, by logic of mirroring, defending the future father-in-law—or, in a broader sense, the father principle, the originating source of authority. It is interesting for the elaborate carnival of identity where there is a kind of secret strategy to hold it at bay until one can actualise it on one’s own terms, on terms of that freedom that the West has given but which needs to be ratified in the ancestral home. As a form, it has been clearly invented by contemporary Bollywood and has of late been repeatedly deployed as a major device to bring the West and the East to one place. It is also a ploy to reinscribe the narrative space firmly within the darsanic orbit and, very much like in old Bollywood, climax comes in the form of defending the darsanic object.
Conclusion
London dekha, Paris dekha, aur dekha Japan
Michael dekha, Elvis dekha, Doosara nahin Hindustan
Eh duniya hai dulhan, dulhan ke maathey ki bindia
I love my India
(Seen London, seen Paris, and also Japan
Seen Michael, seen Elvis, no place like Hindustan [India]
The world is my bride, my bride has bindia [dot] on her forehead
I love my India.)
The “cheepy” celebration of motherland by a diasporic character on return to India in the film Pardes provided the Bollywood superstars, Shah Rukh Khan and Juhi Chawla, a perfect note on which to conclude their dance and music shows during their tour of Australia and New Zealand in 1998. Such celebration of India is by no means new to Bollywood. In fact, the legendary Raj Kapur stole the hearts of millions more than four decades back with a similar song (in Shree 420, 1955): “Mera joota hai Japani/Ye patloon Englistani/Sar pe lal topi Roosi/Phir bhi dil hai Hindustani” (My shoes are “Japani”/ This pantaloon “Englistani”/ The red cap on head “Roosi” [Russian]/ Yet the heart is “Hindustani”).
In spite of their apparent thematic similarity, the two songs register radically different points of view. For Raj Kapur, the aim is to realise a cosmopolitan Indian self in the very soils of India (in keeping with the reigning Nehruvian ideals of that time). The song in Pardes is clearly a song of the Indian diaspora, of reconstructing “India” outside India. That the song would hit the pop charts in India almost instantaneously on its release testifies to the globalisation of “India” across these four decades.
Speaking of the hybrid nature of Bollywood, the influential cultural critic Ashis Nandy argues:
Mass culture and popular do not fully overlap. Elements of mass culture, disembodied from their global context, can become popular (e.g. denims and cold drinks). But that by itself means little; for these elements have to be processed through the local popular culture which provides, exactly for that purpose, an indigenously forged cultural sieve. The Indian cinema not only does this processing on behalf of a vulnerable section of the Indian population, it also has an in-built plurality that tends to subvert mass culture even when seemingly adapting to it passively. This has another implication. If Indian popular cinema has to be seen as a struggle against the massified, it must also be seen as a battle over categories—between those that represent the global and the fully marketized, in tune with India’s now almost fully institutionalized official ideology of the state, and those who by default represent the culturally self-confident but low-brow multiculturalism in which the country has invested an important part of its genius during the last hundred years or so, both as a means of survival in our times and as a technology of self-creation with an extended range of options. (Nandy, 1998, quoted in Das, 1998: 7)
My previous analysis tries to show how Bollywood in its contemporary manifestation promotes more than ever the category of “the global and the fully marketised” but manages to stop short of allowing it an over-determining role vis-à-vis what Nandy calls “the culturally self-confident but low-brow multi-culturalism” of Indian cinema. Bollywood’s ability to negotiate Hollywood on its own terms has been widely discussed: Rajadhyaksha (1998: 173) persuasively demonstrates the error of viewing Bollywood as “insufficiently Hollywood” and advocates a space for this cinema in its own right within the terrain of film theory. Richard Dyer (1986) has argued that Hollywood associates the factor of glamour with aristocratic privilege and regularly pits it against the “openness” of Western liberal democracy where talent and perseverance are always duly rewarded. As a contrast to this, the world that Bollywood constitutes is one of “heteropia” (Foucault, 1986: 24) where the real world outside the auditorium is simultaneously represented, simplified, inflated, contested and inverted. Very often, the basic narrative line is repeated as if the same language game is played time and again; along with it is repeated (as I have discussed in the section entitled “From Ramayan to Bollywood”) the whole cultural ecology of Bollywood.
The viewing subject of Bollywood is not so much the individual of Western film theory but primarily a member of a “narrative community”. Indian political theorist Sudipta Kaviraj elaborates the concept of narrative community in the context of postcolonial democracy in the following way:
The telling of a story brings into immediate play some strong conventions invoking a narrative community . . . To some extent, all such communities, from the stable to the emergent, use narrative as a technique of staying together, redrawing their boundaries or reinforcing them. (Kaviraj, 1992: 33)
The source of Bollywood’s phenomenal success as a commercial medium seems to lie in its ability to bring within its narrative fold the diverse narrative communities not only of South Asian origin but even wider—of large parts of the so-called Third World. In other words, inscribed in its address is the postcolonial predicament of an audience which, in the case of the Fiji Indians, has been twice displaced.
I have sought to show how negotiation with the “culture of motherland” became for the Fiji Indian community part of a much broader question of negotiation with (post)indenture definition of the self. Needless to mention, this negotiation could not remain the same from the early days of “extraction” and the physically arduous schedule of indenture through a post-indenture life of subsistence agriculture, diversification of occupation, and differentiation of the community to entry into a Western context of late modern times with the option of “multiplicity of forms of life and conscious adoption of lifestyles” (Dean, 1996: 213). The situation has been made more complex by the recent changes in the Western landscape of the “social”. Here I go by the definition of the social provided by Nicholas Rose: a large abstract terrain of collective experience, the sum of bonds and relations between individuals and events within a more or less bounded territory governed by its own laws. Rose argues that, ever since global capital attained prominence, the social in the West has been undergoing a transmutation in favour of the community—not one but a series of communities with different aims and constituencies but nonetheless basically constituted of self-monitoring, self-governing subjects (Rose, 1996). The norms of such particularised communities of the contemporary West can have grafted on to them the religio-civilisational norms of the “narrative community” in ways that support the notion of public “sphericules” as advanced in Chapter 1. Hence, for Fiji Indians, the move from post-indenture Fiji to advanced, capitalist, Christian/secular Australia is primarily a move between different regimes of ethical comportment: a stable ethnic identity being attracted to new forms of association and intimacy along with a sense of imagined nationhood kept alive by continuously transforming and reconstructing its constitutive myths. Bollywood, as it caters to the changing market patterns of home and abroad, serves this dual purpose extraordinarily well.
Compare the Fiji Indians with Hamid Naficy’s Iranians in The Making of Exile Cultures (1993). The Fiji Indians who came to Australia just before or after the coup are not an exilic group, even though they were dislodged from their country. This is because of their attitude to Fiji (“home but not mother”) and the fact that they harbour no hope or determining desire to return, either to Fiji or to India. Hence they made no investment in the kind of exile media that Naficy’s Iranians did to form their cultural identity. Rather, they have invested their energies in the continuation of cultural practices they were engaged with in Fiji which, as I have shown, contain within them dynamic hybridising tendencies easily sufficient to withstand the community’s displacement into a Western culture. Unlike Naficy’s (1993) instance, where the hermeticism of exilic television is forced to negotiate with American mainstream media after a point of time, Bollywood’s own momentum will take this platform ahead. The tension of the young Fiji Indians is the tension between Bollywood’s representation of change and real-life experiences. This is reflected—though in a very minor way—in the remarkable films that they make, which I have discussed earlier. Hence, by all accounts, life for Fiji Indians in their new diasporic location is not a cultivation of indeterminacy—a “slipzone” of indeterminacy and shifting positionalities (Bhabha, 1994).
The literature of transnationality has seldom shown interest in investigating the different histories of postcolonial dynamics “back home” as they manifest in the “new imaginings and politics of community”. Rather, its main concern is to write diaspora as an enigmatic excess and privilege the aleatory nature of diasporic temporalities: the true people are the liminal people. It may be argued that what Bhabha does is to route the experience of the South Asian intellectual-in-exile through the discourse of black counter-hegemonic culture. This intellectual-in-exile syndrome, however, occupies only a minor part in the South Asian diaspora, which is made of either professionals or the working class who have left their homeland in search of a better living. This is not to say that they escape the problem of “othering” in the West, nor it is to suggest that they would like to give up their own identities and become “assimilated” in the dominant cultural order without a trace of difference. Rather, it is to bring home the point that the discourse of liminality offers little help to understand the South Asian diaspora’s ability to recreate its cultures in diverse locations.
This chapter has privileged the Ramayan and folk traditions of India as well as Bollywood as some of the most significant discourses that have framed the cultural life of Fiji Indians and continue to do so. The attempt has been to investigate the historical formation of a cultural community and not to posit any singular determination. A detailed account of how socialisation has been constructed around these cultural artefacts—the historical forms they took, the rationalities they deployed, the various registers, practices and institutions through which they were disseminated—is beyond the scope of this chapter, but could form part of a thorough historical anthropology. Finally, the continuing significance of popular cultural formations in quickening diasporic life is brought into sharp relief in this examination of a small but vibrant community.
1 Keya Ganguli has used a similar set of terms (postcolonial and postcolonial), though the meanings I attribute to them are not the same. For Ganguli, postcolonial refers to the “ ‘extraction’ of . . . people from an ex-colonial territory to what might be called a neo-colonial one” while postcolonial refers to the much broader process of “the exploitative dynamic central to the production of colonial subjectivity” (Ganguly, 1992: 28).
2 The terms “great” and “little” traditions were introduced and elaborated in the 1950s by Chicago anthropologist Robert Redfield (1956). McKim Marriott (1955) further expanded their scope by applying them to the north Indian village tradition where he saw a two-way process: i) local practices being promoted over a period of time to the Sanskrit canon (universalisation); and ii) ideas and practices contained in canonical texts being adopted locally (parochialisation). I have adapted and somewhat skewed the concepts to update them for a media context.
3 Piracy of Indian popular movies is a cultural technology in its own right. From semi-professional telecine to making video copies in the theatres with hand-held cameras, almost all possible means of pirating are evident. A good percentage of rental films in Indian video parlours in Australia (which are mostly spice shops) are pirated copies—their price is around one-fifth of the legal ones. The quality of such tapes is usually extremely poor. They are rented out very cheaply (in Sydney, there are shops that rent out cassettes for as little as 50 cents a week) and mostly the popularity of a video does not depend on its reproduction quality. There have been attempts to rent better quality videos at a higher price. The experiment did not work. A remark common amongst Indian video parlour owners is that, though Australia has very strict piracy laws, it is seldom that any effort is made to implement them with ‘ethnic’ videos. Also, since piracy is a civil—and not a criminal—offence in Australia, the video-rights owner or someone deputed by them needs to be personally present in court. Given the size of the Australasia market, Bollywood has not so far taken such an initiative.
Many video parlour owners make the point that the same customer who shows a great deal of alertness about quality of “English” videos, is much more tolerant when it comes to Hindi videos. In the curt words of an owner, “They do not watch Bollywood, they consume. It is a daily ritual.” DVDs of Bollywood superhits (both the old and recent ones) are reaching the Australian market and the catalogue is increasing rapidly. The clientele, however, comprises not so much the avid consumers of Hindi films but is restricted to the professional middle class which takes a more “cultivated” interest in Hindi films.
4 The attempt to reassert such values as part of Hindutva—the cultural and political ideology especially of recently reframed Hindu nationalism—in a diasporic setting is indeed ironic. It has been argued that Hindutva for diasporic Indians is on the increase, with the rise of Hindu nationalism in India since the mid-1980s. But there is a significant difference between diasporic practice of Hindutva and the politics of the currently ruling Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). In its attempt to imagine the nation in terms of Hindutva, BJP has inadvertently put the ideology of the upper castes under the greatest challenge that they have ever experienced from inside—namely, the political need to expand their ranks and thus give up their claim to monolithic superiority. Diasporic Hindutva, generally, suffers from no such “crisis” or obligations. In this way, BJP is realising its idealised self outside its actual political terrain.