...in recent years has caught the attention of Western viewers and film scholars. Part of this explosion of popularity is due to new venues and technologies for exhibition, such as film festivals, DVDs, and internet piracy, as well as cultural changes such as the acceptance of Indian fashions in Western societies and the adoption of American and European styles in Indian popular culture. However, perhaps the most important reason for the global proliferation of Indian cinema is that South Asians, especially middle to upper class, high-skilled workers, are immigrating to all continents. Generally speaking, this demographic has no desire to cut off its ties with its original culture and thus Bollywood producers and distributors have actively sought to attract this diasporic audience.

Compared to its domestic audience, the diasporic market is relatively small, but because of high ticket prices, the profits from a single admission in the United States or Great Britain can equal that of ten tickets in India, so therefore investors are open to breaking the Bollywood narrative tradition of celebrating Indian citizenship to produce works that uphold traditional Indian values in an international, pan-Indian sense (Dwyer and Pate 1216-217). The question of "Indian" identity as represented in new Bollywood films is thus increasingly transnational in outlook, with the meaning of the Non-Resident Indian (NRI) shifting from the villain who needs to be saved from Western corruption to the new Indian aristocrat. Scholars of Indian cinema have already begun to explore how this new conception of the NRI contributes to shifting understandings of Indian nationhood from the point of view of the dominant strain of Bollywood history.

However, in this article, I want to consider how Bollywood's NRI films are understood by NRIs themselves, and how the films construct and contradict diasporic understandings of Indian identity. Diasporic spectatorship of Bollywood films set in cities like New York and London suggests an interesting paradox: on one hand these films are clearly India's perception of NRIs and thus do not represent any apparent diasporic "reality;" on the other hand they are the only mainstream audio-visual representations of South Asian immigrants available in the mainstream. As a result, these films engage with their overseas consumers as something of a distorted mirror. This article will explore these distortions as well as the special flexibility of Bollywood genre conventions to make such distortions.

First I will give an overview of the South Asian film audience in the United States to identify the context of diasporic spectatorship. Then I will briefly survey some ways Bollywood traditions easily accommodate the important new NRI audience. Finally, the bulk of my paper will be a textual analysis of the film Kal Ho Naa Ho (Nikhil Advani, 2003) from the specific point of view of the diasporic audience. My analysis of the film will reveal how the song and dance numbers can be read radically by a diasporic spectator aware of the traditions of musical numbers in Bollywood cinema and Hollywood musicals. I understand that a comparison of these two musical traditions is problematic since the term "musical" refers to the dominant mode of Indian cinema rather than a genre in the Hollywood sense, however my goal is not to equate the two but suggest that the narrative, musical, and visual traditions of both inform the diasporic audience, which as a group with a very special relationship to both India and the United States, is equipped with cultural capital that transcends its race or geography.

Since many of them immigrated to the United States as high-skilled labor, the middle to upper class South Asian communities that settled in places like New York in the last 30 years have had the monetary ability and cultural interest to import Bollywood cinema and maintain theaters and video rental stores in their neighborhoods. Indian cinema scholar Manjunath Pendakur writes, "In the colonial period, when Indian workers migrated to the West or to Africa, they seldom kept in touch with India. ... A great many of the South Asians who came to North America after 1962, however, had better education and technical skills to attain a higher class position, which enabled them to travel back and forth and stay in touch with India" (Pendakur 42).

Constant contact with the homeland is an important force in keeping interest in Indian cultures alive. In addition, consumption of that culture, be that food, clothing, groceries, television, or cinema, keeps the South Asian American audience informed of what is going on in India, and fills a cultural void due to immigration. Prominent scholar Vijay Mishra notes, "In the Indian diaspora video is one of the key markers of leisure activity. ... It is also a not uncommon...

NOTE: All illustrations and photos have been removed from this article.



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