In this episode, we sit down with Rini Bhattacharya Mehta and look at how Bollywood, and Indian Cinema as a whole, has shaped and been shaped by the Indian identities portrayed in film. The cultural output of Indian cinema produced in Mumbai was itself a unifying force for a nation that was otherwise split into various linguistic and cultural regions. The movies produced in Mumbai were watched on screens across the country and so Mumbai had an influential stake in shaping the messages that would contribute to a shared Indian identity. This identity has changed over time along with India’s position in the global context: from colonial subject, to an East-West binary during the Cold War, to now a nation intimately involved with globalisation. All of these narratives extended onto the portrayal of the Indian diaspora abroad, which had a special and contested status in narratives of the Indian homeland.

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