Since 9/11, South Asian racialization in the United States has taken place through curious and contradictory processes. Even as the “indefinite detentions” and deportations of Arabs, Muslims, and South Asians continued unabated, the last three years saw an explosion of interest in Bollywood cinema among non-South Asian audiences.1 In March and April 2004 alone, major stories about Bollywood’s moment of “arrival” in the West appeared in quick succession in Time Out, the New York Times, and the Los Angeles Times, to name just a few of the most visible instances of media coverage.2 How can we account for this heightened visibility and “discovery” of Bollywood cinema at precisely the moment when South Asian communities in the United States are being more intensely surveilled, policed, and terrorized by the state than ever before? The stark contradiction between representational excess and material violence became particularly apparent to me during the 2004 Republican National Convention, as I found myself flipping through television channels hoping for some coverage of the massive protests in New York City. I came across the incongruous sight of protesters confronting a rather befuddled group of North Carolina delegates as they emerged from the latest Broadway show, none other than Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Bollywood extravaganza, Bombay Dreams. The show was apparently a hot ticket among the RNC delegates, and its tag line–“Somewhere You’ve Never Been Before”–provided a colorful backdrop as the camera captured delegates admonishing protesters for preventing the police from doing their job of “keeping America safe.” It seemed particularly ironic to me that the delegates occupied themselves inside Madison Square Garden with xenophobic calls for a never-ending “war on terror” while they diverted themselves outside the Garden with a brief foray into Bollywood glamour. The juxtaposition of nationalist spectacle and Bollywood spectacle may initially appear unremarkable, in the sense that Bombay Dreams can be seen as simply another safely multicultural, “ethnic” musical aimed at middle American consumers. One of the show’s producers, in fact, stated that she “views the show as a descendant of Fiddler on the Roof or The King and I, musicals with an ethnic milieu that have universal appeal.”3 Yet I would argue that the ubiquity and popularity of Bollywood at this particular moment of U.S. imperialist aggression and global hegemony bears closer scrutiny, as it reveals a great deal about the complex interrelation of multiple nationalisms and diasporic formations in the context of globalization.
