ABSTRACT
Studies combining audience data or political history and textual discourse find clear patterns within, and connections between, film discourses and discourses circulating in viewing communities. While refusing to quantify the ‘effects’ or the direction of causality as being unidirectional (from films to life) they also suggest links between political environments, social events and fictional narratives (Mankekar 2000; Banaji 2006; Dudrah 2006; Gopinath 2005). Further, there are also those who suggest, as Jigna Desai (2006: 116) does, that Hindi films abroad act to ‘produce and articulate transnational cosmopolitan subjects.’ With regard to the audiences of Hindi films in Europe, several key debates have arisen over the years. It has been suggested, of course, that Hindi films, which are generally regarded as significant participants in mundane consciousness back ‘home,’ are equally significant for South Asians in Europe, Australia or North America; the question about what kind of interventions they embody, in the ‘contested’ terrain that constitutes this particular diaspora has also been hotly debated. Do they, for instance, represent a clearly identifiable Indian diaspora to itself and to those back in the homeland by harping on both traumas of separation and the pride of essential ethnic characteristics? Do they celebrate hybridity and cultivate retrograde nostalgia at the same time? Or is viewing more about the audience than the film, with the films simply slotting into a role designed for them by recalcitrant desis desperate for a taste of India? In an attempt to historicize and relate current hypotheses around the appeal of Hindi cinema in Europe, section two looks back at the reception of Indian films among non-diasporic audiences from the 1950s onwards.
