Diasporic space and identity in contemporary hindi movies: Namaste london and patiala house

Contemporary Hindi cinema plays an important role in the negotiation of national identity. For decades, the expatriate Indian served as a counter-example for acceptable behavior, a living testimony of inappropriateness. In the mid-1990s, the Non Resident Indian (NRI) in Hindi cinema became the epitome of Indianness and embodied at once capitalist and consumerist modernity. NRI-centric films are openly utilizing the Diasporic characters as a safer experimental platform to negotiate the complex issues of identity. The film's multiple subplots, tackling a wide range of issues among the Diaspora, offer an engaging explanation of India's portrayal of its expatriates as a socially liberal, and hybridized ethnic population within their host societies. There is a visible deviation of Hindi cinema from a dominantly Indian industry to the sphere of transnational cinema through images of the NRI. The well paid market of Indian Diaspora and an uneasy transition period made the Globalized Bollywood do this. The first generation's nostalgia arises from watching Bollywood movies, and, for their children, who have never seen India before; Bollywood movies enable them to romanticize their homeland. Diasporic communities look at their homelands to visualize their identities. The paper explores the influence of Bollywood movies in the Indian Diaspora's identity construction.